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of the best of men, and when the gates thereof were shut, its people were in safety. And it was even as is said of it in the following verses:
‘Describe Alexandria, I pray,’ Quoth I to a comrade one day,
A man of glib speech and quick wit. ‘’Tis a fair frontier town,’[1] did he say.
Quoth I, ‘Is there living therein?’ And he, ‘If the wind blow that way.’
Or as saith one of the poets:
Alexandria’s a frontier seat;[1] The water of its lips is sweet.
How fair the coming to it is, So one therein no raven meet!
Noureddin walked about the city till he came to the merchants’ bazaar, whence he passed on to the bazaar of the money-changers and so on in turn to those of the confectioners and fruiterers and druggists, marvelling, as he went, at the city, for that its qualities accorded with its name.[2] As he walked in the druggists’ bazaar, an old man came down from his shop and saluting him, took him by the hand and carried him to a fair by-street, swept and sprinkled, whereon the zephyr blew and was pleasant and the leaves of the trees overshaded it. Therein stood three houses and at the upper end a mansion, whose foundations were stablished in the water and its roofs rose up to the confines of the sky. The space before it was paved with marble, swept and sprinkled, and those who approached it smelt the fragrance of flowers, borne on the zephyr, which breathed upon the place, as it were one of the gardens of Paradise.
The old man carried Noureddin into the house and set food before him, whereof he ate with him. When they had made an end of eating, the druggist said to him, ‘When camest thou hither from Cairo?’ And Noureddin answered, ‘This very night, O my father.’ Quoth the
