Eça de Queirós, perhaps the greatest novelist of the Portuguese XIX, traveled to Egypt in 1869 to write a series of chronicles about the inauguration of the Suez Canal, the greatest engineering work of his time, that would captivate the Imagination of the whole West.
In what will be for him an initiatory journey, a cultural clash with the real and the ideal of the East, he will discover the exotic but also the miserable, traits that he fuses in his literary descriptions of marked Flavian influence, full of insight and ingenuity. The Alexandria that saw Cleopatra walk in his eyes turns into a sordid place, with a dirty and poor Egyptian neighborhood, and a European neighborhood of provincial airs. Cairo, on the other hand, is fascinating for its picturesque filth. A few years later, Eça de Queirós will return to the area to detail the destruction of Alexandria in the six memorable pieces that constitute "The English in Egypt", also included in this volume.