Album souvenir d'Alexandrie: Ruines, 1882

263 x 197 mm. A view taken from the Palais de Justice looking along the Great Square in a south-easterly direction showing the destruction wrought by the fires started in the European quarter by Arabi's retreating army and other looters. In the foreground there is fire fighting equipment and a few marines: 'They [a landing party of 200 men under Major Phillips] then entered what had been the great square; the equestrian statue of Mohammed Ali still stood in the centre, and behind it rose the Palais de Justice. The fountains still played in the centre of the garden. Along both sides and one end of the square the ruin was complete. Volumes of smoke still rose from behind the facades of the houses, bleached white by the intense heat to which they had been exposed; there were great gaps in the line of skeleton walls, where the whole face of the houses had fallen across the road.

A horrible smell of burning flesh from time to time assailed the nostrils of the party, and told of bodies of murdered Europeans upon whom the heated walls had fallen'. (Archer 1886, pp 285-6).

For further information on the bombardment see: Archer, Thomas (1886), The War in Egypt and the Soudan, Volume 1, London: Blackie and Son.

For a view of the same square, but looking north-west, see Y3041A/14.

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