Richard Francis Burton spotlights a curious interplay of nature and one Egyptian city’s architecture, in a footnote in the 1892 edition of his book Personal narrative of a pilgrimage to al-Madinah & Meccah:
The glare of Alexandria has become a matter of fable in the East. The stucco employed in overlaying its walls, erected by Zulkarnayn, was so exquisitely tempered and so beautifully polished, that the inhabitants, in order to protect themselves from blindness, were constrained to wear masks.