The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-09-08


 and by the way, he was for four years professor of languages at Harvard, and could easily read the hleroglyphics on any of the ancient Egyptian mounds one day gave@us a talk on Homer and the Odessy. He spoke very humorously of Homer's character, which caused me after the lecture to say to him that the impression his lecture had left with me was whether our Homerisr was more of 'humorist' than our 'hu- morist was a 'Homerist.' He took it very nicely, and we had a good laugh over it together.
 ''Strombolli Aetna, Messina. which was destroyed. as you know, by earth quake in 1908 when 80000 peoplA perished, and 6,000,O00 pounds ster- ling were lost,'' said MT. Ezekiel, were all on our list, finally arriving in Ma ples, where we spent week before going to Alexandria and Cairo to take the Nile trip. Cairo Is wonderfully cosmopolitan place. People from all over the world assemble at Shep- heard's hotel to see the conglomeration of the worlds rabble and I can say truly that the representations we have of the Streets of Cairo at the different expositions and shows in this country are very good imitation of the real thing, from the snake charmers to the street fakirs Before speaking of the Nile country, let me tell you what the result of British rule and work in the country means. The Nile river is 1000 miles long. which is longer than our Mississippi river and our Missouri rivcr put together and there are no tribu taries. The soil shows in the Nile country three different kinds of strata the first is limestone. the second sand stone and the third as you approach Assuan, where the great dams of 1S0 gates or sluiceS, Is granite-the hardest rock imaginable. The reservoir dams up S65, 900 gallons of water at this place. The population of this country Is wonderful, when we think that there are about 1000 people to the square mile, while the state of New York claims only ri. The natives are called
 fellahs,' and the working class mostly converted Christians are known as 'copts The Bedouins are Turks
 Tn observing the museum at Cairo" MT. Ezekiel continued, what struck mo as most remarkable was that the always while the Greek sculpture which of course. is of much later period, is always in action. Al Cairo We did the conventional tourist stunts you might say, visited the pyramids the sphinx, and 1 stopped long enough to have my picture taken as a Snriner in regulation sheik's robe and fez.
 odd thing about the hotels in Cairo is that when YOU go in to dinner. table de'hote dinner at Shepheards $ hotel. for instance--if you are not there to begin the meal. whatever course is being served when you take your seat at the table, you start with You can't go back to the soup. It's a case, I called 1t, of losing your iden- Itity. You've got to be there for the first call for dinner.
 No part of my whole trip was more interesting than the Holy Land MT Ezekiel told me. Going through Port Said we recahed Joppa and the land- ing there is one of the most remark able things l ever saw. The ship an- chored far out in the bay and the boat men take the passengers through the narrowest possible passage way, a veritable Scylla and Charybdis-from the ship to the landing. We passed through the Valley of sharon, going from Jopa to Jerusalem over the old est known road in the world. historic in the fact that it is said to be the one over which Joseph passed when he went into Egypt,
 Now. there's one thing that will in terest you newspaper people, Mr. Eze- kie1 said laughingly. "There are no daily papers in Jerusalem A little sheet printed Tn lteDfeW, Wn1cn, now ever, contains no telegraphic news. is all they have. The leading hotels pub fish bulletins once q day The Mount of Olives the Garden of Gethsemane and other notable places would take days to describe. Palestine is the par adise of beggars. It appeared to me as if the millionaires of England Ger many and Russia were trying to out vie each other in pauperizing this country, for two-thirds of the people there live on charity.
 "Of course, before leaving Palestine to go to Syria we visited all of the biblically historic places. like the River Nazareth. Just as Wadi Half. the sec ond cataract of the Nile, was the most distant point south in the trip, being l1,000 miles from home, so Damascus was the most eastern point in the trip about 5000 miles from home. You know. Damascus is the oldest city in the world, with continual known his- toric history of over 5000 years. From
 Damascus we went to Constantinople, which is three cities in one-Constan- tinople, Stamboul and Scutari. From l there we went into Turkey and Greece
 and. my impression of the Greeks was
 vastly changed for there found them
 to be splendid nation, scholarly as well as energetic. We went back to
 Naples and began my trip through Eu-
 rope, Of course that is too well known | to go over the ground again-Paris,
 London. Vienna. Berlin and the rest" But the war--didnt you experience any discomfort from that fact?" asked. Ia war was going on.'' said Mir Eze- kiel until the morning papers were | sold on the vaterlard the day we ar 1 rived in New York. There we read the accounts of Servia and Austria and | their strife. That was on the 18th day