ALL Egyptians are born with a natural desire to please.
The rich Egyptian in the intervals of putting on a
swagger which he imagines to be English, and the frothing
Nationalist, when he is not Benjamin-Franklin-ing to
audiences of students, are as anxious to please as a spaniel,
while the poor, whether in the villages of Upper Egypt or in
the Arab city at Cairo, show the smiling good-nature of the
Orient. I thought the unspoiled Egyptian poor delightful
people; they are Nature's gentlemen, kind, adorably simple,
with natural good manners. Even the Egyptian is not
specially untruthful when it involves an automatic loss of
bakshish. The life of the poor in the Arab city still preserves
the grace of the Middle Ages. The men wear turbans and
the long blue gowns called galabeahs; the women, whose faces
are shrouded by the burka, wear a sort of black bridal veil,
which makes them look as if they walked about with a bag
over them, coming nearly down to their feet, bare, except
for the heavy anclets, which give them a biblical finish.
The black muffled women of the city look like walking
mysteries as they shuffle along the street. You lose nothing
by their being veiled; when you see them unveil, which is
a matter of no consequence and frequent occurence, you
see a fat round face, pointed at chin and forehead, with the

features and expression of the sun on Old Moore's almanack—that
is to say, with hardly any expression, or the expression
of an unconsidered female drudge. The country women,
on the other hand, especially where they have a strong
admixture of bedawin blood, are often charmingly pretty,
and seldom wear the face-veil, though they sometimes draw
their head-veil closer if you want to photograph them, till
they understand that they will get a penny for being immortalised
by the camera. The children of the city are
made hideous by their parents' pride in adorning them with
European slops. I daresay they would be quite pretty if
they walked about in blue cotton nightgowns like their
fathers.

At Cairo one often sighs for the mediaeval grace and
colour imparted to Tunis by her rich Arabs wearing their
native dress, made with the costliest materials, the most
delicate colours, and the most elegant draperies. The rich
Tunisian, when it is warm enough, dresses like a courtier
of the Alhambra. The Cairo effendi wears English clothes
made by Greeks, kept in countenance by a tarbùsh if he is
particular about showing that he is not an infidel.

But to return to the mediaeval poor of Cairo. The water-seller
stands in the van. Sometimes he is resplendent in the
old national dress and carrying brass cups, that shine like
beaten gold, made in the shape of sacramental chalices,
into which he drops aniseed from the curled and tapering
spout of a shining brazen urn. But usually, in the fine old
crusted parts of the city, he looks like a dirty beggar. His
body is in rags, his legs are nearly black and nearly bare
(which last is not surprising, as he walks right into the Nile
to get his water), and he carries his water in a black skin
slung round his body or a huge earthenware pitcher in a
net upon his back. He sells his water in a cheap black
earthenware saucer. He is the type of charity, for, though
he is desperately poor, he often gives his water away to
those who cannot afford to pay. He is wonderfully adroit
at pouring his water out with a bend of his back: the clear,
cool spurt leaps over his shoulder into the saucer without

spilling a drop. He is quite a picturesque object when he
is walking about with his water-skin, a swollen amorphous
mass with its legs tied, hanging round him like a hurdy-gurdy;
but he is at his best when standing waist-deep in
the river letting his skins expand and sink in the shallow
water. The sign of his presence is the clinking together
of brazen saucers; they give a note as clear as a bell,
especially when they are made of fine thick brass. There
are always one or two of the sort that look like beggars
hanging about the Bab-es-Zuweyla; their richer brothers
haunt the Ataba-el-Khadra in company with the lemonadesellers.

It is the lemonade-seller who is most reminiscent of the days of the
good Harun-ar-Raschid. He is inconceivably
resplendent. His lemonade urn is sometimes six feet high,
with its huge glass globes surmounted by domes of beaten brass,
which make it look like a doll's mosque. His brass
cups look like the golden goblets of a king, though his
European customers generally prefer tumblers. He has
slung round his waist a wonderful brass tray about six inches
deep, with a frame like the fiddles of a ship for its top, to
hold bottles and glasses. And he dresses like the sais of a
Khedivial princess, with a blue silk tassel like the tail of a
horse trailing from the jaunty little fez stuck on the side of
his head, a gold embroidered waistcoat, open, to show his
fine linen, wide breeches stiff with braiding, and stockings
as well as shoes. He is the pride of the street, or at all
events looks proud enough to be—to his other finery he sometimes
adds a scarlet apron.

The sherbet sellers are much humbler people; they have
rather peculiar pitchers and goblets. Most sherbets look
like muddy water; their essential feature is sugar, and they
contain some fruit juice. The sherbet shops always look as
if they were being got ready for an illumination, for their
fronts are hung all round with little brass buckets shaped
like the pitchers of the Pignatelli Pope. Their rivals are
the cheap restaurants, which have two enormous brass jugs
of the shape of Arab coffee-pots sitting up like a pair of

Phoenixes in the ashes of the humble fire. They have quite
gigantic beaks. They are used, I believe, for hot water, but
I never saw any human being using them. They are the
most imposing pieces of brass you see in Egypt, the land of
brass in more senses than one.

Two very mediaeval people are the cotton carder and the
man who turns the little pegs used in making meshrebiya
screens. The turner does his turning with a bow like the
pigmies use for shooting poisoned arrows, and when you see
the carders sitting on the mastabas outside the mattress-maker's
shop, you imagine that you have a row of lovers
who cannot get any sound out of their lutes. The instruments
they use for flicking out the cotton look much more capable
of evolving a sane melody than most musical instruments of
the twanging Orient.

I often went into the Armourers' Sûk, in the hopes of
seeing its apprentices doing up a Crusader's suit for a stray
survivor of the Mamelukes, but I generally found them
sharpening carving-knives; their principal business nowadays
is in table-knives labelled Sheffield. One or two of them
have pieces of armour in glass cases, and if the bedawin
wants his own preposterous guns, with barrels like fishingrods
and stocks inlaid with bone almonds, he must come
here for them.

The weaver, on the whole, is most faithful to the Middle
Ages, as he sits, with his legs through the floor, in front of
a loom which looks like the inside of a superannuated piano,
throwing his shuttle across the warp threads and pressing
each line of weaving down with a comb. The workers in
precious metals are mediaeval everywhere, till they condescend
to the mechanical multiplication of watches and
silver-backed hair-brushes for shop-girls. In Egypt they
crouch on the floor over a dish of grey ash, with a lump of
live charcoal smouldering in its midst, till it is fanned into
white fury by a blow-pipe. In this the gold or silver is
heated till it looks almost transparent, while it is decorated
with delicate filagrees and rosettes; or you see a tiny
hammer doing its work on a toy anvil.

A DONKEY-BOYS' RESTAURANT. The customers are sitting about the pavement eating their lunch.

FORAGE CAMEL Near the picturesque fountain given by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in the square in front of the Governorat at Cairo.

The coppersmith, the brass-worker, and the weavers of
matting and baskets have time-honoured ways; the basket-maker
and the basin-maker alike hold what they are making
with their toes, so as to have both hands free. With baskets
this does not seem so unnatural: a monkey might be taught
to make a basket; but to hold a brass vessel with your toes,
while you hammer it into curves like a mosque's dome, and
chisel it into arabesques, is a work of art in itself.

It is barbaric rather than mediaeval, I suppose, to iron
the washing with your feet, using such a very large iron
and to stand under the thing you are sawing, drawing the
saw towards you.

The primitive crafts, which make photography so extravagant
at the Market of the Afternoon and the two country
markets near the Pyramids, must be described in their own
setting. So much for trades.

There is nothing in which mediævalism dies so hard
as in religion, and the law is mixed up with the prophets
among Arab populations … It adds greatly to the picturesqueness
of the streets when an earnest Mohammedan says
his prayers in them. But Mohammedans who are strict in
this matter are becoming rare in Cairo.

The whole life in the mosques is romantically mediaeval.
The people you see there praying or reading the Scriptures,
with their shoes and their water-bottle beside them, look as
if they might have been there for a thousand years. When
you have looked at them you feel that this is none other
than the House of God.

In the chief mosque of El-Azhar, which is the central
University of all Islam, the teaching has changed little in
its thousand years of existence; it is still the Koran and
what is necessary for the teaching and understanding of
the Koran. No attempt has been made to bring it into
line with modern institutions. And I understand that the
administration of the law1 in the Kadi's courts and the

administration of the profits of ecclesiastical property in
Cairo interfere with our notions of civilisation. But these, I
suppose, are the most important elements in preserving a
perfect mediaeval city for us in Cairo.

I was never tired of watching the life of the really poor,
whether I was rambling in the Arab city at Cairo or in
the villages of Upper Egypt. In Asia and Africa the poor
are as natural as animals.

I have heard many tourists complain of Cairo being too
European, as I have heard them making the same complaint
against Yokohama. Round the chief hotels the charge of
course is true; but you need not go more than a mile in
either city to find yourself in the undiluted Orient, where
clothing is one thickness of cotton, and shopping is done
with sub-divisions of pence.

In Cairo there are several Arab quarters: Old Cairo is
one of the best for seeing the humours of poverty, but not
so good as the bazars for seeing the colour of Cairo.

CAIRO is a kodaker's paradise not quite so elastic as
Omdurman. For in hot countries people are apt to
carry on their occupations in the shade, and in Omdurman
there is no shade, as the Khalifa would not allow any one
to have a two-story house but himself.

Fortunately, Cairo is full of wide sunny spaces, and the
Arab always makes a shop of the street, so there is an
immense amount of street life in full sunshine.

There is one great advantage in staying at the Continental
Hotel for the two or three months of the Cairo season:
you can see, without dressing to go out, the most roaring
farce ever presented off the stage. The great hotel has a
nice sunny terrace with a balustrade which looks out on
the Street of the Camel—the Regent Street of Cairo—and
the Eskebiya Gardens and a regular museum of touts.

It is doubtful which could be satirised more successfully
as a human Zoological Gardens, the people who sit on the
terrace behind the railings, Americans chiefly, with a strong
dash of Jews, Turks, and Infidels, which last name the
Mohammedan applies to the Levantine with singular felicity—or
the extraordinary collection of parasites in the street
below.

Those of the parasites, who are not dragomans have
something to sell, generally something that no sane person
would want to buy.

The street Arab who walks about with a stuffed crocodile

on his head must by this time be convinced of its
unsaleability. He exhorts you ‘to buy it, but so soon
afterwards, without a real bargainer's delay—invites you to
take his photograph with it for a shilling. His price for
being photographed comes down to a small piastre if you
are obdurate.

I have seen stuffed crocodiles offered often, and once at least
a live boa-constrictor put up in a glass-fronted box like honeycomb,
and a live leopard—not a very old one—in a cage.
Pigs in cages are comparatively common, and, as weight
presents no difficulty to the Egyptian educated as a porter,
men carry round all sorts of furniture for sale. I have
seen men with quite large tables and cabinets on their
backs patiently waiting for purchasers. I once saw a man
with a palm-tree fourteen feet high on his head. I photographed
him; less adult trees and shrubs are common.

Strawberry sellers are insistent in February, in spite of
the fact that every foreigner knows or believes that their
Egyptian vendors moisten the strawberries in their mouths
whenever they look dusty. There are many sellers of dates
and figs, though dates are things which I should not like
to buy from an Egyptian in the street—he might have
bought damaged ones. It is the custom of the various
parasites to stand in rows in front of the terrace of the Continental,
pushing their wares through the balustrade as ladies
poke their parasols into monkey-cages at the Zoo. The monkeys
in this cage are fairly safe from the attention of postcard-sellers,
newspaper-boys and dragomans, and, without moving
from their exalted position, they may examine and buy Syrian
picture-frames, ostrich feathers, bead necklaces, fly-switches,
hippopotamus-hide sticks and whips, lace, braces, beans,
pastry, suspenders, tarbushes, air-balloons, birds in cages,
roses, narcissi, carnations, hyacinths, coat-stretchers, Indian
boxes, and, when they are on the market, leopards and boa-constrictors. …

If you want to encounter the postcard- and paper-boys
you must go down into the street, first refusing the services
of two or three dozen dragomans who wish to take you

that very instant to the Siwa Oasis or the Peninsula of
Sinai, both of which mean journeys for weeks on camels.
Of course you do not wish to come to a decision of such
magnitude while you are only on your way to buy a news-paper,
so you mutter some feeble excuse about going
to-morrow perhaps, or something like that, and pass on to
the pavement. There is an instant rush of boys for you,
all waving papers at you. “You buy Egypt, Egyptian
Gasette, Egyptian Standard, Spinkiss, good paper for Cairo—nice
one? Daily Mail comes from London—yes, nice. Paris
New York Herald, Mr. American?” You buy a paper—papers
are cheap in Egypt, a halfpenny one only costs a penny
farthing—and having one in your hand secures you the right
to breathe for a minute or two before the postcard-sellers
have organised their campaign. The Cairo postcards are
fascinating. But the same postcards cost you anything
from three piastres to six piastres a dozen, according to
your ignorance. I never saw more charming coloured postcards;
there is one of the tombs of the Caliphs which
makes you believe that the Caliphs are still going, and that
all the talk about the Khedive and the British Occupation
is mere moonshine. The Egyptian sunset is introduced into
nearly all of them with the very best effect. Most people
suffer from postcard fever badly for about a week. I never
got over it.

Every postcard-dealer tries to thrust a collection into
your hands. He wants to know how many dozen you'll take,
offering them at twice the price he means to accept. If you
could have one dealer at once in a quiet corner you might
enjoy the inspection, but you are the victim of trade rivalries,
in which there is one advantage—that the rivals are
perfectly shameless about cutting down each other's prices.

You begin to think that the dragomans, clean, handsome
men, with charming manners and robes of silk, or spotless
white with fine black cloaks, are very nice, though they do
want to hurry you to the uttermost ends of Egypt.

The boys who attack you with “I say matchess” are very
persistent. They consider that every foreigner ought to be

smoking. While I was expostulating with one I felt my
hand taken in a confiding way in cool, soft fingers. I looked
round to see who my friend was, and found that it was a
huge dog-faced baboon, with grey chinchilla-like fur, the
exact counterpart of the baboon which plays such a prominent
part in the Judgment of Osiris, and is among the
mischievous monsters of the under-world combated by Osiris
in his passage. There is a row of them painted in one of
the tombs of the Pharaohs, all using their tails as the third
leg of a tripod seat. The Arabs speak of it familiarly as
the “seenosefarl”—I am spelling phonetically. He was an
appalling-looking beast; he looked like a bad-tempered
gorilla. But his master indicated that I ought not to be
frightened. He said: “ Good monkey—shake hand—like to say
good-bye to you.” It is rather the Nubian's habit to say
good-bye when he means how-do-you-do? I ought to have
felt flattered: this was a very grand monkey, with a little
Sardinian donkey to ride and various weapons and accoutrements
for taking soldier-parts in his performances. The
discouraging part of it was that nobody ever wanted to see
him perform, though they paid piastres to photograph him
as he rode along the street in the little red flannel trousers
which a well-meaning American missionary of the female
sex had given him. This garment certainly does make a
“seenosefarl” look more presentable, and is tolerably true
to Nature. For one thing I was grateful to that baboon;
he established the accuracy of the artists of the Pharaohs,
who always represent him balanced on his tail in the attitude
of a living chair. When he was not on his donkey, and had
nothing particular to do, he always sat on the rim of his
tambourine in the correct Pharaonic attitude.

I took two or three kodaks of him, and he showed a far
greater objection to having his photograph taken than the lax
Egyptian-Mohammedan shows. He was a sulky performer
at best, who took no such interest in his work as that shown
by the lemur monkey which rode about the streets on a
goat.

The snake-charmers were very jealous of the master of the

THE CYNOCEPHAL, The performing dog-faced baboon in the trousers made for him by the American lady missionary. This is the animal which occurs in all the pictures of the Judgment of Osiris. It is standing in the Street of the Camel.

WOMAN CARRYING A HUGE IRON CAULDRON ON HER HEAD In the Sharia Camel, the principal street of Cairo, just outside the Hôtel Continental.

“seenosefarl”; they did not see why their serpents—cobras
about seven feet long—had not as good a right to perform
on the pavement of the principal streets as his baboon. But
this was one thing which the police would not allow, though
they had no objection to a turkey-herd driving four or five
turkeys along the pavement as the easiest way to take them
for some hotel's dinner, or a man walking about carrying two
armchairs for sale.

The street tumblers, in the approved acrobat's dress of
skin-coloured tights, with a red velvet join between the
legs and the body, were far more insistive, because nobody
wanted them. That they should turn cart-wheels in front
of people, who merely wanted to get along quickly to Cook's,
and were compelled to pass Shepheard's Hotel, seemed to
give no one any pleasure.

The actual hawkers are chiefly Egyptians or Nubians.
The people of third-class nations in the Turkish Empire
and the Balkans, or of no particular nationality, are too
proud to be seen hawking—their profession is swindling.
But some of them are good for the street from the kodaker's
point of view. Albanians and Montenegrins, for instance,
are inclined to high boots and an armoury in their waist-belts.
If you stood on the steps of the Continental you
might see specimens of fifty different nations in a morning,
including many citizens of our Indian Empire intent on
selling you sandal-wood boxes and the embroideries of the
universe.

Later in the year, when the season in Upper Egypt is over,
a fresh crowd of entertainers arrive—the people who have
been selling pillaged and fabricated antiquities to the tourists
on Cook's Nile steamers. They are at once more original
and more picturesque; they vary from dragomans as immaculate
in their dress as Members of Parliament, to Arabs
in the fellahin station of life from the villages round Der-el-Bahari.
All antiquities, which pretend to Pharaonic antiquity,
are supposed to come from Der-el-Bahari, which is
devoted to tombs and renowned for the richness of its treasure-troves.
Feeling that it could not supply the world for ever

with the mere accumulations of the past, eager and industrious
Der-el-Bahari has started manufactories for producing the
same kind of objets But as there is a prejudice against
modern scarabs and mummy-beads, these manufactories are
kept as private as unlicensed whiskey-stills in Ireland. There
is, however, no exciseman to confiscate these privately produced
antiquities; so they are sold openly at Der-el-Bahari
itself, and Luxor, and anywhere else where the tourist can
be induced to take any interest in beads and beetles.

It gave me genuine pleasure when I was having tea
one afternoon in April, on the terrace of the Continental,
to see so many old swindlers of my acquaintance from
Upper Egypt. To do them justice, most of them recognised
me. They did not ask me to buy their wares as genuine;
they only said in an unobtrusive way, “Do you want any?”
meaning did I want to buy any as imitations or ornaments.

And here I think that people make a great mistake. Many
of these scarabs and mummy-beads and blue saucers and
little gods, which make no pretence of being genuine except
to the “mug” class of tourists, are objects of great beauty
and distinctly desirable as ornaments. Furthermore, if you
only pay their market value as imitations, they are preposterously
cheap. I bought a lot of them, intending to give them
away to people with a savage taste for bright ornaments
about their persons, when I got home. But, when I did
get home, I kept nearly all of them. A bright blue scarab
is much more ornamental to hang on the end of a blind-cord
than a nutmeg of turned boxwood.

Some of these deceivers, of course, had not met me on the
plain of Thebes, or the causeway to Sakkara, and started
trying to deceive me in the Street of the Camel at Cairo.
The first offered me a scarab for £2. I confess that I am
unable to detect a well-forged scarab. Some of the most
valuable scarabs in the Cairo Museum look like clumsy and
garish forgeries. But I knew that if he offered it to me
for only £2 it must be a forgery, so I offered him two piastres
for it. He said, “Don't pay me now. Take it to the
Museum, and if they say it is a forgery I will give you £10.”

This man had not got £10, and had never had £10, and
never would have £10, and he knew that if I took it to
the Museum the director would sweep it away in instant
contempt. But he thought that if he “bluffed” me like
this, I might try to buy it from him for some smaller price,
a pound, or ten shillings, or even two shillings. But I said,
“For an imitation one piastre is enough. But this is a very
cleverly made imitation, so I will give you two for it. Do
not bother me any more until you wish to take two piastres.”
Of course he picked me up farther down the street and let
me have it for two piastres; he was making a hundred per
cent on it, or more, and probably had a pocketful.

I may have readers so unfamiliar with Egypt as to have
to ask what scarabs are. Scarabs are the little beetles made
of glazed earthenware, or stones like cornelian and amethyst,
which in the case of the former always bear the cartouche
or oval name-hieroglyphic of the person for whom they
were made. All are singularly faithful copies of a real beetle
still to be found in Egypt.

The tiny statues of the gods—only an inch or two long
many of them—are much easier to convict if they are chipped,
for the colour which a chip assumes after twenty or thirty
centuries is totally different from an artificially coloured
chip; and the glaze itself, even when buried in the dry
sand of Egypt, goes a bit grey in that immense period of
time. These little gods are absolutely fascinating. They
are mostly blue or green, and the animal heads, of ape or
ibis or hippopotamus or what not, make them the quaintest
little things. In museums you find them of bronze or,
occasionally, gold; but even the bronze seldom pass into
the hands of the humbler curio-dealers. There are plenty
of genuine earthenware gods in the Cairo shops, but the
street hawkers do not offer them much even in imitations.
They incline more to rather ingenious forgeries, made, in
a coarse, effective style, of clay, about six inches long, of
which the real value is a small piastre, a penny farthing,
each, but which the guileless American sometimes purchases
at two hundred and forty times the proper price. They

are also much addicted to excellent imitations of the little
wooden images of slaves and scribes which were buried with
the dead. It is only their perfectness and the fact that they
are not in museums which make you suspect them. Gay
pieces of mummy-cases, and small mummies like hawks or
cats, are also popular temptations for these street antiquaries
to produce from their bosoms.

Some of the antiquity-sellers I had known at Thebes had
the good grace to bring out pocket handkerchiefs full of
genuine antiquities (they carry their whole stock-in-trade
in pocket handkerchiefs) and offer them to me at the prices
we had established in many bargains. I am not ashamed
to confess that I bought many forgeries that afternoon as
ornaments, because, when I had come down from Luxor I
regretted that I had not done this.

It was rather droll to see the paraphernalia of mummy
hawks, and mummy arms, and little plaques of rough clay
a few inches long, with religious emblems on them, and blue
saucers, and bits of mummy cases and mummy linen, and
beads and ushapti images and wooden archers and barques
of the dead, spread out on the pavement round the corner
from Shepheard's Hotel. But the Berberine from Assuan
was more daringly human in his designs on the guileless
tourist, for he encumbered the entrance to the leading photographer's
with rows of battle-axes and maces and assegais
and stray bits of armour which were supposed to have come
from Abyssinia, and by others supposed to have been manufactured
in Birmingham. You could have selected a set of
railings for a respectable-sized garden out of his collection,
which would have made the finest park railings decorated
with the fasces of a Roman lictor look tame.

The Berberine bead-boys buzz round worse than ever
now, though there are always a sufficiency of them on Cairo
pavements. They wear every species of preposterous and
un-African-looking glass beads. The odd thing is that, though
these beads are of English and German manufacture, the
inhabitants of Nubia adore them and decorate their persons
with them whenever they can afford them, so that if you

dared to buy them you would be the possessor of an African's
fancy if not of his handiwork.

When the blue-gowned agriculturists from Thebes, who
claim to have dug up all their wares their own hands,
while they were cultivating the soil of Der-el-Bahari—certainly
the only kind of cultivating they were likely to
do was robbing tombs—when these Upper Egyptians, I say,
began to infest the pavement in front of the Continental,
this favourite promenade of the lounger of the Cairo season
no longer swarmed with Americans in expensive flannels—which
offered no suggestion of participation in active sport—and
super-dressed Americanesses. Their couriers had told
them that it was time for all self-respecting tourists to be
out of Egypt. The pavement had quite a deserted appearance,
for though there were plenty of “the best English
people” in Cairo on their way back from the Equator and
the bahr-el-Ghazal and other winter resorts which they
affect, they do not favour the promenade in front of the
Continental—they hardly ever pass it except when they are
on the way to Cook's, the universal banker of travellers in
Egypt.

To tourists who insist on the company of other tourists
Cairo grows dull as April grows old, but there are others
who rejoice to see the city return to its normal condition.
It is interesting for a little while to see this part of the city
looking as if it was arranged for the stage of the Gaiety.
Then if you are easily bored you get tired of the army of
performing parrots and the vulgarians for whom they cater,
and the noise and the bustle and the garishness and the
banality.

But I am not easily bored with the human comedy, and
I could go on being amused by the buffooneries of the
“Continental” pavement, just as I was never tired of watching
the poor playing at being back in the Middle Ages in the
Arab city.

THE Esbekiya, which lends its name to doubtful proceedings,
is believed to be a garden. It certainly has
railings, which are among the accepted features of a garden,
and you pay to go into it, the penny-farthing small piastre.
Also there are some trees, some grass, and some birds—crows
and others. Here the resemblance ends except that nursemaids
use it.

Why it is not a garden in a land where anything will
grow with a little water (which they have on the spot)
Heaven knows—perhaps if Cairo had a municipality1 its
public gardens would have flowers. But the Law of Capitulations,
or the religious law of the Mohammedans, or
something, stands in the way of there being a Municipality,
so the Esbekiya instead of being a glorious tangle of
tropical vegetation, like the gardens at the Delta Barrage, is
like the dullest bit of Hyde Park—railings and all. The
railings are the most popular part of it, as will be seen
hereafter.

Not so many years ago it was a birket, which means
that it was a pool of stagnant water, whenever the Nile was
high enough to soak into it. At other times it was a sort
of common, where they held popular festivals like the Birthday
of the Prophet. Traces of its birket days remain in
a meandering ditch, which serves to collect mosquitoes, and to
show that it is not the water difficulty which prevents the

WOMAN CARRYING A HUGE VASE ON HER HEAD NEAR THE ESBEKIYA GARDENS AT CAIRO.

A TRAVELLING DONKEY-BOYS' RESTAURANT ON THE PAVEMENT OUTSIDE THE ESBEKIYA GARDENS.

desert from flowering as a rose. Once a week an Egyptian
regimental band plays in the Esbekiya. An Egyptian
regimental band is like a very bad German band, who have
forgotten the rules of the European music which they play.
But more nursemaids pay their penny-farthings when the
band is there; and Greek tradesmen take their wives to it,
and expand like dusty frogs in front of the bandstand,
where Pharaoh's Guards play The Geisha in Koran time.

The Esbekiya has its inspired moments, in the very early
morning, when only nice natural natives as simple as wild
animals are about, and the big falcons sail over it with
their musical twitter of prée-o-lo, prée-o-lo, and the Egyptian
doves coo in the tops of the palm-trees.

But I love the Esbekiya—the outside of it; its pavement
and its park railings, as exhibitions of native life rank
next to the bazars. The primitive native employed in the
European city loves them. He can do all his little foolings
and shoppings there, except on the side which faces the
Continental Hotel. For some reason that is almost deserted.
His favourite piece faces the street called in Cairo Directories
the Sharia el-Genaina. You could write a whole book
about the sights of this two hundred yards of pavement if
you had rooms opposite, as we once had.

It begins with a donkey-boys' stand opposite the American
Mission depôt. Perhaps the donkeys consent to stand there,
so that their masters, when they don't need them, may step
across and study English. Donkey-boys always go to the
American Mission school, where, I fancy, they must be
taught free. They do it without any view of improving
their future state. Most of them remain unbaptised. There
is little traffic in the street, or it would be seriously incommoded.
The donkey-boys treat it as their own. The
forage camels dump huge stacks of green berseem on to the
road for the asses' dinners; the asses lie about the road and
the pavement; or stand with two feet on the curbstone
and two in the gutter, showing their contempt for any one
who might be inclined to hire them; and the people who
subsist on the patronage of donkey-boys, such as peripatetic

restaurateurs and peripatetic dealers in turquoises, take up
any of the pavement that the donkeys are not using. Every
self-respecting donkey-boy wears a turquoise ring with a
turquoise the size of a plum-stone, for luck, and offers to
sell it to every foreigner who looks at it. As the price, if
the setting is silver, is about three shillings, it follows that
turquoises and jewellers' labour are cheap. The inexperienced
may give him double this price. In any case, he is
always selling rings, and therefore always buying them.
The turquoise-seller has a flat case, which would do equally
well for selling sweets except for its glass lid, and the stones
he sells are generally dome-shaped, soft, low-grade stones of a
delightful Cambridge blue. Sometimes they are set in silver
rings of charming workmanship, for which three shillings
seems a ridiculously low price. Sometimes they remain in
the gilt brass rings in which they came from Arabia. Agate
and cornelian are almost too cheap to sell.

The pavement restaurant is one of the most fascinating
bits of native life. The man who keeps it has a circular
tray a yard and a half across, with rings of bread stuck on
nails all round the rim, and little blue-and-white china
bowls filled with various kinds of sauces and pickles taking
up most of the area, the rest being devoted to unpromising
parts of meat hushed up in batter. Donkey-boys eat very
nicely. It is quite a pretty sight to see them squatting
like birds round this tray, dipping their bread in the sauces.
They often bring their own bread, looking like puffed-up
muffins, and buy pieces of pickle or fry and put them inside
the bread as if it was a bag. If there is a bottle standing
on the tray at all, it will contain vinegar. The donkey-boy
does not drink with his meals. He waits till he passes
a fountain where he can get a drink of water for nothing.
I used to wonder that the restaurateur had not moved
nearer to the pump or the suck-tap. The suck-tap is a great
institution in Egypt. It does away with the necessity for
a fountain and saucer, which might be stolen. You put your
lips, that is to say, the Egyptian pauper puts his lips, to a
sort of brass teat let into a wall. The poor Egyptian is not

troubled with sanitary forebodings. I have seen one take his
child to have a drink of green water out of a ditch at Marg.

The donkey-boys invite custom for the moment, and, for
the entire period of his stay in Cairo, from every foreigner
who passes. But I never saw a foreigner hire one. A
donkey costs a foreigner as much as a cab and a pair of
horses. You can take this carriage and pair a short distance
for sevenpence-halfpenny, and any distance in the town for
a shilling and a half-penny. The donkey-boys are not
discouraged. If you will not ride their donkey they ask
you to photograph it, which implies a small piastre. You
feel inclined to photograph every donkey you see in Cairo;
they are dear white beasts, clipped as close as a horse, and
beautifully kept. Their saddles are of red brocade, and they
usually have a silver necklace with blue beads. The donkey-boy
seems unnecessary; the donkey looks wise enough to
hire himself out and take the money. I wonder they don't
have donkeys which start off when you put a piastre in the
slot, and stop of their own accord when the time is up.

Just beyond the donkey-vous is one of the chief ornaments
of the Esbekiya—the row of postcard-sellers who make shops
of the railings. Here they hang up side by side the most
incongruous pictures—olegraphs of Levantine saints surrounded
by indecent postcards, and postcards of Cairo
in every variety, plain and coloured; oleographs of the
Massacre of the Mamelukes and incidents in the Greek
War of Independence vie with those of the Madonna and
St. Catherine. The real business is done in questionable
postcards.

Then succeed a variety of trades, noticeable among them
man the who combines the business of rag-picker and sugar-candy
seller. The tray of sugar-candy stands on a sort of
cage, in which he puts the treasures he collects from dust-heaps.
It is not a nice combination, but he has plenty of
rivals in the sweet trade, all at popular prices; the Arab
has a sweet tooth. One man brings a huge cheese of nougat;
many have trays of Turkish delight and caramels resting
on the coping; and occasionally the man comes who has a

stick of Edinburgh rock several feet high, striped like a
barber's pole. But he prefers the rond-pont in the Musky,
or the Market of the Afternoon.

Early in the season there were Nubians squatting on the
pavement with mandarin oranges piled like cannon-balls on
the pavement in front of them, ten for a penny farthing.
The nut and dried-bean sellers had to have costermongers'
trucks: their wares were so numerous. The chestnut roasters
pleased me very much. The Esbekiya is surrounded by
young trees, which have circular spaces about a yard wide
cut in the pavement to receive them. To guard their roots,
these spaces are covered with gratings except for a few
inches round the trunk. The chestnut-seller lights his fire
in this hole, which is as good as a stove; no one interferes
with him or sees any harm in it. The trees don't seem to
mind it either: perhaps they are glad of the warmth in the
winter. At night the coffee-sellers and the men who sell
cups of hot sago bring their steaming wares here; but they
have proper stoves and do not use the gratings.

The whipmakers, who congregate on the G.P.O. side,
prefer a tree with palings to tie their lashes to while they
are being plaited, and to hang them on for sale. This is a
great place for cabs, and the Arab cabman uses his whip
the whole time. Whenever he breaks it he drives furiously
up to a whipmaker, who hands him a new one, as a groom
hands a fresh club to a polo player in the middle of a
chukker. No money passes, just as no money passes when
the cabman dashes up to the candle-seller at lighting-up
time; but I am sure that the humble vendor only keeps
his books in his head.

The Arab shops in the street more than most people. The
Esbekiya railings are a rent-free shop in a busy thorough-fare;
uncommonly handy for displaying a two-penny-half-penny
stock-in-trade. Everything the unsophisticated native
requires is here. The barber sits on the railings while his
patients stand patiently in front of him to have their heads
shaved. The tailor sometimes hangs his temptations on the
railings, but more often keeps them folded on his shoulders.

A PAVEMENT STALL OUTSIDE THE ESBEKIYA GARDENS.

THREE ARAB EFFENDIS SITTING DOWN TO REST ON THE PAVEMENT OUTSIDE THE ESBEKIYA GARDENS.

The poor Arab tries his coat on in the street, and would
doubtless try his trousers on if he ever wore them. It would
not signify; he would be sure to wear his other rig underneath.
He likes his coats dark and thick and thoroughly
unsuitable to the climate. The tarbûsh-seller pleased me
much more. He had an engaging habit of fitting fifty or a
hundred tarbûshes, one inside the other, forming a column
several feet high, which he carried in front of him balanced
like a Highlander balancing his caber for tossing. You live
in a pleasing expectation of his throwing them over his
head to see how far they will go, like his Caledonian prototype
He might just as well, for all the custom he seems to
get. But perhaps he is only an advertisement.

None of the professions of the Esbekiya interested me more
than that of the fortune-tellers. Sometimes they were men.
More often they were Nubian females of uncertain age, whose
faces were closely veiled, though their hunched-up, skinny
legs were bare to the knee. They sat in the attitude of
stage witches. Sometimes they told fortunes with cards, but
more often with desert sand spread on a cloth. Perhaps it
was only street sand, but I prefered to think that it came
from the desert. Fortune-telling itself was not interesting to
those who did not understand it. The witch made cabalistic
marks in the dust with her claw of a finger till it looked as
if poultry had been walking on it. Then she shook it up
or smoothed it with her palms and began again, clawing,
muttering calculations, and staring at her handiwork in rapt
contemplation. She asked few questions, and her prophecies
were terse. If the believer, who was consulting her, was someone
as poor as herself it looked all right, but if he happened
to be an effendi in handsome Arab robes or a prosperous
Cairo tradesman in a frock-coat and black trousers, yellow
boots, and a tarbûsh, who wished to consult the oracle before
he embarked on an important business-deal, he tempted the
humorist as he squatted like a frog on the pavement, much
in the way of bedawins in cloaks of sacking and gorgeous
head-dresses flying past with a desert stride; or fat-tailed
lambs for the passover, or other incidents of Cairo traffic.

I have often photographed such a party without being
noticed.

But if a poor and primitive native was consulting the
soothsayer, and the darkness had fallen, and the traffic had
ceased, the sight was truly impressive, especially in contrast
to the cafés opposite. The Sharia el-Genaina has a row of
cafés for Arabs and mean whites, because they can hear the
music coming round the corner from the cross street, the
most blatant in Cairo. These cafés were not interesting;
people really went to them for refreshment; most of them
only bought their drinks from the café and their doubtful
delicacies from the peripatetic restaurateurs. There was one
rather amazing café along here: it was kept by a retired
British sergeant, who had married a Greek woman, and was
the favourite resort of Tommy Atkins. We had rooms over
that café once, so I am in a position to give it a character.
The Tommies who frequented it never made any particular
noise except with their sing-songs; the women who served
them were good enough for Grundy, and the place had a
reputation for decent liquor. The most striking feature was
the number of Tommies who could play the accompaniment
to the latest music-hall and comic-opera songs, and play with
verve. It was a sort of concert by the audience. It gave me
a great idea of Tommy Atkins.

The street behind the Sharia el-Genaina, the Sharia
Wagh-el-Birket, and the cross street which joined them, are
the most unblushing in Cairo, except the parades of the
Fishmarket. But the Sharia Wagh-el-Birket is picturesque
in its way, for one side of it is taken up by arcades with
compromising cafés under them, and the other has its
upper floors tenanted by gay women who aspire to the
better-class. Every floor has its balcony, and every balcony
has its fantastically robed Juliet leaning over. As the
street, in spite of its glare, is not well-lighted, you cannot
see how displeasing they are; you get a mere impression
of light draperies trailing from lofty balconies under the
lustrous night blue of Egypt, while from the rooms behind
lamps with rose-coloured shades diffuse invitations.

In this street is the famous café with the female band who
are said to be white slaves; perhaps they are; they would
not please any one but an Egyptian. The Arabs like
drinking their beer there; possibly on the same principle
as it is the chief ambition of the negroes of the United States
to have a white servant.

Not far from the Clot Bey end of the Sharia Wagh-el-Birket
lies the Fishmarket, the worst of the purlieus of the
Esbekiya, the gay quarter of Cairo, to which I have refered
elsewhere. I have never seen such a repulsive place; the
houses are squalid; the women are most of them appalling;
they positively flame with crimson paint and brass jewellery
and have eyes flashing with every kind of mineral decoration
and stimulant, and far too much flesh. If you walk through
the Fishmarket when they are prowling for victims, your
clothes are nearly torn off in the agonised attempts to
secure your attention. There are the usual accompaniments
of drink and mechanical music, and police.

How different to the Yoshiwaras of Japan, with their
quiet, and their perfect orderliness, and the fairy-like beauty
of their surroundings. I know nothing so like fairyland
as a street in the Yoshiwara overhanging the bay of
Tokyo, with its fantastic architecture, its exquisite gardens,
and its human butterflies. There you are never solicited;
you are welcome to enjoy the artistic beauties of the scene,
and go, if you do not wish for more.

Business claims part of the Esbekiya, which has a couple
of well-known hotels, the Eden and the Bristol, and a
couple of pensions, the Suisse and the Anglaise, overlooking
it. The shops are mostly like an Edgware Road bazar,
with articles of cheap value and often of cheap price. But
there is one notable exception in the corner occupied by
Walker & Meimarachi, the Harrods of Egypt. And further
on is the Post Office with a fresh crop of street idiosyncrasies.

The buildings here are new and un-Egyptian, but the
illiteracy of the land dashes in the local colour. Facing
the Post Office are a row of seal-makers and scribes. To

the man who cannot write a seal is a signature, and ninety
per cent of the population of Egypt cannot write. The
opening for scribes is obvious, and in their train come a fresh
row of small dealers in stationery—people who sell abominable
paper at a few pence a packet and half-penny pencils
for a penny. But they have an interesting assortment of
cheap notebooks, a matter of moment to one who was never
without a notebook in his pocket in a country like Egypt.
The modernity of Egypt is represented by the wet rollers
hanging up outside the Post Office for people who are
against licking stamps. I doubt if either London or Paris
has got so far on the road to civilisation in this particular
detail.

Here there is a big Arab café of the kind where they never
seem to be doing anything; where the waiters might be dead,
and the customers seem to be asleep, or at all events not
taking anything but a newspaper. It is really quite a
popular institution; it is so good for watching funerals.
It commands one of the great avenues of Cairo—that which
leads up from the Opera House, which also is on the Esbekiya,
to the Citadel—from the purely European Ismailiya quarter
to the mediaeval Arab city. This is a great street for
processions. I saw all sorts, the strangest being a bedawin
village on the march, with men and their wives and all
their belongings, including enormous carpets, piled up on
camels. The women sat on the top of the luggage and
looked as if they were going to fall off; the men had their
camels to themselves; and the whole of them rode past
the Continental Hotel and the Opera House, in the middle
of motors and furiously driven arabeahs, as if they were
out in the desert with not another human being in sight.
It was really rather majestic.

I forgot the entertainments of the Esbekiya Garden.
There is a kind of open-air theatre, half café, where they
have some sort of melancholy performance occasionally.
Once in a way there is a sort of fair. But the only time
that Cairo Society ever enters this lackadaisical garden is
when the General Commanding the Army of Occupation

orders all the regimental bands to go and play there for
the benefit of some charity. The regimental officers go
with them, that is, they think it is the correct thing to be
present, and Cairo Society follows in their train. As it is
always at night, when the electric light lends a glamour,
the forlorn Esbekiya looks, with its smart soldiers and well-dressed
women, like the Champs Elysées. In many ways
Cairo is a spasmodic imitation of Paris.

NOTE.—The types described in this and the following chapter are
depicted inimitably by Mr. Lance Thackeray in his The People of Egypt,
just published by A. & C. Black.

WHEN the kodaker goes to the Ataba-el-Khadra he
finds a fresh lot of subjects. All Egypt seems to
be eating sugar-cane, while there is any, and nowhere is
one more conscious of this than in the Ataba-el-Khadra,
where any Egyptian pauper, who isn't munching it, is
selling it.

The Ataba-el-Khadra is the epitome of the unmediaeval
and unlovely native life. Here, instead of spending their
lives in doing next to nothing for next to nothing in a
dignified and picturesque way, every one is hurrying or touting.
There are a few immense shops kept by German Jews,
which tempt the native issuing from the Musky with
resplendent European hosiery; a jostle of nearly all the trams
in Cairo—this being their chief starting-point; a crowd of
arabeahs and donkeys; and an ever-changing crowd of
natives trying to sell European articles to each other, or to
clean each other's boots.

Here the real native life begins. Women in black,
showing hardly anything of themselves except their ankleted
legs, are getting in and out of absurd native omnibuses; here
the pedlars are more numerous than the pedlars in front
of the Continental, but they cater for a different class.
Stuffed crocodiles would be no use to Egyptian paupers
with only small piastres in their pockets. Here they are
more practical. You see a man looking like a human
hedgehog, with bristles of brushes and combs and hat-racks

NEWSPAPER-BOY SELLING SEDITIOUS PERIODICALS TO THE PEOPLE IN THE TRAMS IN THE ATABA-EL-KHADRA.

THE CORNER OF THE ATABA-EL-KHADRA AND THE MUSKY. In the foreground are the boy shoeblacks—the original street Arabs. To the right is a peripatetic draper.

and sponges and button-hooks and braces and bootlaces
and blue glasses and anything in the turnery department.
Walking-sticks are very popular here, too, but the dealers
in them would not do much business in hippopotamus-hide
sticks and riding-switches. Here they are very particular;
they want dressy-looking canes. Every Arab who is above
the rank of a porter carries a cane; it is as much a
badge of respectability as wearing shoes.

The two leading industries are selling pastry and selling
Nationalist newspapers. Arabs make delicious pastry and
sell it like hot cakes.

The shoeblack is quite a feature of Cairo, and especially
of the Ataba-el-Khadra. The Arabs seem to go to the
big café at the corner of the Musky not to order things
from the establishment but to have their ridiculous boots
cleaned. They are generally brown, somewhere, even if
their tops are sky-blue. The little shoe-browns who clean
them might have been the origin of our term street Arabs—they
are noisy, mischievous, cussed, independent, and
inefficient. While their patrons are waiting for them to
begin, they are turning the whole pavement into a scrambling
and gambling hell, making dives for each other at the risk
of torpedoing short-sighted foot-passengers, and every other
person in Egypt is short of sight in some way. He may
only be in need of powerful spectacles, or he may be minus
an eye altogether, having lost it in defending himself from
having to defend his country. When they do at length
clean their patron's boots they stain them with a brown
fluid and are satisfied at seeing the boot change its colour.
They only use their brushes to throw at each other.

This café at the corner is full, at any hour of the day,
of Arabs patronising it in their own way. As I have
said elsewhere, when the Arab goes to a café he does
anything rather than order coffee—he generally does nothing,
or reads a paper, or plays dominoes—the only thing he
is likely to do for the good of the house is to hire a pipe.
The Arab's pipe is so inconveniently large that he has to
hire one or hire a man to carry his own if he smokes a pipe

out of doors, for he cannot carry the hose and the water
jar about himself.

This café is at the point where the Musky debouches,
the artery up which the natives come when their business
takes them to the European city, and down which the
Europeans go when they invade the bazar. Here, as soon
as the weather grows hot, the ranks of the hawkers are
swelled by an army of ice-cream sellers, lemonade-sellers,
water-sellers, and sponge and loofah sellers. The clang of
the trams and the water-sellers never ceases; the fly-whisk
sellers are incessant.

The Ataba-el-Khadra is a wonderfully busy place; there
is a never-ending stream of tramways and native buses
and native funerals, and people hurrying to the trams, and
forage camels, and porters carrying enough for a camel.
The forage camels and the stone carts knock against
everything; they have really good opportunities, for the
tramways start from haphazard places, so every one is
staring at the tram-boards. To see this sport at its best
you must choose a day when it has rained several hours.
Cairo can be quite a rainy city; has not Pierre Loti
written that the barrages are ruining its climate? and an
Irish M.P. said, “The Assuan dam is making a damn mess
of its climate”? Egyptian mud is worse than Egyptian
darkness. The dust in which Egypt is so prolific readily
makes a fine paste, which may be spread over the footpath
as well as the road to the depth of several inches.
While you are wading through this hasty-pudding to catch
a tram which only goes once in half an hour, and shows
signs of wanting to go without you, and another tram is
bearing down upon you on each side, you are nearly
knocked down every minute by carts laden with building
materials driven by men almost blind with ophthalmia,
camels with stacks of green forage on their backs, flocks
of passover sheep, galloping cabs, and reckless motors.
Then you learn the full capabilities of forage camels. All
the cabmen and donkey-boys lunch their animals on green
forage, and camels with stacks on their backs slouch in

over the Nile bridge all the day long to supply them.
They come nicely into a kodak, but they are not nice for
anything else.

In the Ataba-el-Khadra every one who is not trying to
catch a tram or fly across it in an arabeah, is standing
about, whether he is porter on the edge of the market
waiting for a job, with a knot of rope over his shoulder and
a blue gown down to his ancles, or a bedawin sheikh.
The firemen of the big fire-station on the Ataba generally
go to sleep on the pavement. The occupation of Egypt, as
Sir Eldon Gorst said, is going to sleep in unsuitable places.
No place can be too unsuitable. The poor Egyptian will go
to sleep in any place at any time. He will even sleep in
the road in Cairo, trusting to the traffic's avoiding him. The
gutter is a very favourite place; it is as dry as anywhere
else, and the sleeper cannot roll off it as he might off the
railings of the Esbekiya. But he uses the pavement most.
It was sometimes quite difficult to get along on account
of the number of men lying about with their faces covered
like corpses, sleeping as soundly as the dead. It would
have reminded me of Messina if I had gone to Egypt after
the earthquake. And the Egyptian takes his siesta in the
morning as well as the afternoon.

The Egyptian adapts himself to circumstances. I saw an
Egyptian adapting himself to circumstances in the Ataba-el-Khadra,
which is the most public place in the town, by
taking off his trousers because it was raining. He was
afraid of spoiling them.

It is only in really native streets that your way is blocked
up with fat-tailed sheep except at the Greek Passover.
The Arab loves to keep a fat-tailed sheep tied up outside
his shop. Why, I never could learn, but the dragomans
thought it was to eat the garbage like a pig. In any case
the fat-tailed sheep is a disgusting object even when it is
painted in stripes and wears a silver necklace with a child's
shoe tied to it. Its tail is like a bladderful of melted lard.

If the Ataba is a tangle of trams, buses, carriages,
donkeys, camels, firemen, soldiers, police, pedlars, sugarcane-sellers

and bedawin, it has at any rate a certain
spaciousness which is denied to the Musky.

The kodaker will have plenty of time to photograph the
humours of the Musky even if he is driving, for the traffic
is never untangled. The Musky of Cairo is a familiar name
to many who have never, and will never set foot in the
city. It was once, in the days before the flood—of tourists,
the principal shopping street of Cairo; it is still the chief
avenue leading down to the native city, and not so many
years ago was full of picturesque native houses.

Now it is as shoddy as it is squashy. Where it debouches
into the Ataba it has shops like the hosiers' and jewellers'
in the Strand would be if they were kept by Levantines.
But as it approaches the bazars it gets lower and lower in
the scale of commerce. What scanty remains there are of
the old mansions are faced with shallow shops of the toy,
button, and baby-ribbon type; shops where German socks
with undeveloped heels and music-hall umbrellas are flanked
with scarlet cotton handkerchiefs and shoes on strings; shops
of slop-tailors and chemists who live by the sale of noxious
drugs and other less reputable commodities, for chemists
cannot live by drugs alone in the Musky. Tarbûsh-sellers
of course there are: that stamps a cheap street.

There are almost as many stalls as there are shops, though
there is no room in the street at all; the most popular are
the spectacle stalls—spectacles are almost as much part of the
costume as watches and chains in Egypt. Stalls for nougat,
Turkish delight, Arab sugar, small cucumbers and oranges,
lemonade, boots and shoes, idiotic cutlery, coffee cups and
glasses, turquoises and mousetraps are their nearest rivals.

The street is absolutely packed with Arabs flowing from
their city to goodness knows where. They are all of them
incapable of getting out of your way, and the worst are the
women, whether they are Egyptians with veiled faces and
rather unveiled legs, or the pretty Arish women, who have
skirts like trousers coming right over their feet but leave
their faces uncovered except for jewellery. The Egyptian
woman is content to adorn her face with the little gilt

cylinder which joins her veils. But the Arish woman is not
content unless she has a silver head-band with a row of
little chains falling down on each side, half-concealing her
face, or a necklace of two or three strings of huge gold
and coral beads, and another string tied round her forehead.
She is addicted to fine bracelets also, and her bare
face is often very pretty.

Alternating with the women are porters carrying anything
from a piano downwards, lemonade-sellers, men with ladders,
forage camels, sheikhs on donkeys, and friends walking
two or three abreast, only concerned with their conversation.
Not only the pavement but the whole street is full of them
and looks as if it would congeal if it were not for the
arabeah drivers, who charge them like snow-ploughs, crying,
“Owar riglak!” In the midst of all the shoddy shops and
stalls, here and there a noble Mameluke gateway, which once
had a mansion behind it, rears its head. But the whole effect
is one of cheap shops kept by Greeks, to which the European
goes for certain odds and ends, and the native for cheap
splendour in his apparel. Where a Mameluke house still
survives it has generally been hopelessly transformed.

Until he gets close down to the bazar there is nothing
to make the tourist put his hand in his pocket. At first the
shops have fairly good stocks. Mingled with jewellers' are
shops where boots and hosiery, fly-whisks and footballs, dispute
priority. The traffic of carriages, carts, porters, native
women, lemonade-sellers, and sheep is inconceivable. You
would never get through it unless your coachman with a yell
of “Owar riglak,” which means “mind your legs,” charged the
crowd with his game little Arab horses. The effect is much
heightened if you get a shower of rain, which turns any street
in Cairo into a lake of mud in a quarter of an hour. But rain
is rare; on twenty-nine days out of thirty you can reckon on
enough sunshine to photograph any good subject like an
Arish woman, that is, a woman from the Eastern Desert, in
trousers and fine bracelets, and the odds are, with her face
uncovered. Very pretty they are sometimes, with lithe,
majestic figures.

Soon you pass into the cheaper belt of shops, where they
sell toys, buttons and ribbons, shoddy hosiery, umbrellas
and spectacles, mingled with small drug stores and the
abodes of slop-tailors; in the midst of all which is the
entrance to Hatoun's—one of the principal shops in Cairo
where Europeans buy native wares. There are stalls impeding
the traffic all the way, in case you want to buy sticky sweets,
or small cucumbers, or cheap china. Finally, when you have
passed the rond-pont where cabs and donkey-boys wait to
be fetched from the bazar, you strike a belt of very cheap
shops which seem to do most of their trade in shoes hung on
strings across their fronts, and pocket handkerchiefs violently
coloured, while near the entrance of the bazar you see native
cottons and silks hung up to attract tourists.

It is the life, not the shops, at which the tourist looks in
the Musky. The Arabs are a nomad race—they migrate in
droves about cities as they do in little tribes about the desert.
There are such swarms of them passing up and down the
Musky that carriages can hardly get along. Not only will
the tourist see multitudes of men carrying the implements
of their trade or going to their café, but numbers of women
with considerable variation in costume. The Cairo woman
of the lower class may forget her veil, but she never forgets
her anclets, which are made of silver and often very heavy.
Perhaps she never takes them off; it is certain that she often
wears them inside her stockings with a disastrous effect.
The principal variety of her costume lies in the veil, for she
is fairly certain to be dressed in black of some kind, cotton
or crêpe or satin, according to her condition. The Egyptian
woman's veil is a sort of banner of black stuff, three feet
long by nine inches wide, suspended from a little gilt cylinder
with three rings round it, which hangs from the forehead
to the point of the nose, and is said to be intended to
keep the veil away from the nose and make an air-funnel
for the mouth.

The Turkish-Egyptian woman has no nose-pipe and
wears a white veil, which becomes more and more transparent
as she becomes more and more emancipated. You see

plenty in veils so transparent that they only differ from
those of foreigners by the fact that they leave the eyes
uncovered. This veil is a legal fiction: the rich Egyptian-Turkish
ladies go so far as to wear one of these ridiculous
veils with a foreign hat when they are going on board the
steamer at Alexandria to proceed to Europe. The veil is of
course discarded the moment they are out of sight of Egypt,
and never resumed till they return.

The most interesting veils are those of the country women,
especially the bedawins who take the trouble to veil, for they
hang all sorts of mysterious things round their veils. Sometimes
they incline to ropes of big gold and coral beads,
sometimes to festoons of gold coins, sometimes to a row of
little chains hung vertically down the face.

In the course of half an hour you plough your way through
the migrating Arabs and the street hawkers and donkey-boys
to the corner of the Khordagiya. There is no difficulty
in knowing when you are there. There are beautiful old
mosques on both sides of the street—the gates of the City
of the Caliphs—and there is a sort of banner hung across
the street, like those which assured King Edward of the
continued loyalty of his subjects when he was going to be
crowned, only this one merely welcomes the tourist to the
entrance of the Khan-el-Khalil and Cohen's shop.

He receives a personal welcome also; for the touts who are
the skirmishers of the bazars spring upon his carriage from
all sides offering their services as guides.

“Sir, I do not want any money.”

“What do you want, then?”

“Well, you can give me anything you like.”

And so you enter the bazars.

FEW of the brainless rich who go to Cairo for the
hotel and club life, and hardly realise that they
are in Egypt, fail to visit the bazars. They talk a good
deal about the bazars, but they only see one little bit of
them, and that so demoralised by foreigners that if it were
not for the old-world gateways of the khan put up by Ismail
Pasha, you might think that you were not in the bazars
at Cairo but at a Cairene bazar at the Earl's Court Exhibition.
The Khan-el-Khalil is only one corner of the bazars,
and the most interesting parts of the bazars to the kodaker
and student of native life are right at the other end, near
the Bab-es-Zuweyla.

The best way to approach the gloriously Oriental bazars
of Cairo is from the Sharia Mohammed Ali. Go by the
tramway which passes the Continental Hotel, or drive, to the
corner of the Sharia Serugiya, which will be described in
the chapter on native streets. You are surrounded by really
native shops immediately, and pass mosques, hammams
(baths), and Dervish tekkiyas in swift procession, until the
two sides of the street almost meeting overhead warn you
that you have reached the Tentmakers' Bazar, through
lovely lines of mosques and minarets and old palaces with
meshrebiya'd oriels. It is always cool and dark and
picturesque in the Tentmakers' Bazar, just the right environment
for the gay awnings and saddle-cloths and leather
work that are made in its tiny shops. One of the great

THE FIGURE ON THE RIGHT AND THE FIGURE NEXT BUT ONE TO HIM ARE LEMONADE-SELLERS ON THE ATABA-EL-KHADRA

A WOMAN'S BURDEN. The man sitting at his ease, beside her is one of the porters who carry such immense weights. The scene is close to the Esbekiya Gardens.

mediaeval mansions, to be described in the chapter on Arab
houses, opens out of this bazar; it is known as the Beit-el-Khalil.
There are a good many leather-workers at the
beginning of the bazar, who make the gay saddle-bags and
pouches and purses that the foreigners love to buy. The
tentmakers are the most hopelessly vulgarised of all the
denizens of the bazar; elsewhere I have inveighed against
them for prostituting their art by substituting coarse caricatures
of the ancient Egyptian tomb paintings for the beautiful
texts and arabesques which are on the awnings and tent
linings they make for Arabs. They talk incessantly to every
foreigner who passes:

“Look here, sir, you want to buy very nice. Come in—no
sharge for examine”—and so on.

The Tentmakers' Bazar carries you up to the Bab-es-Zuweyla—one
of the old gates of Cairo. Most of the
bazars lie just inside it.

There are ten leading bazars at Cairo: the Tentmakers'
Bazar, the Silk Bazar, the Cotton Bazar, the Tunisian and
Algerian Bazar, the Scentmakers' Bazar, the Silversmiths
and Goldsmiths' Bazar, the Sudanese Bazar, the Brass Bazar,
the Shoemakers' Bazar; and the Turkish Bazar or Khan-el-Khalil.
But the Sukkariya, which means Sugar Bazar,
though you do not see a single sugar shop in it, and the
Sharia el-Akkadin, which succeeds it, constitute practically
the bazar of cheap hosiery.

For the kodaker, the Tunis Bazar and the Scentmakers'
Bazar and the Silk Bazar are the best. They, at any rate, are
as Oriental as the bazars of Tunis. Here the shops are
mere cupboards, and the owner squats on his counter and
fills the entire front There are benches for customers
running along the outside of the shops like a curbstone
covered with carpets. The Tunis Bazar is roofed over
like the bazars at Tunis, and is a blaze of colour, with
its festoons of red and yellow shoes, gaily striped blankets,
white shawls, embroidered saddle-bags and tasselled praying-carpets.
The shops themselves are lined with shelves
divided into squares. A fine note of colour is struck

by the auctioneers, who walk about with strings of the bright
yellow shoes of Tunis hung all over them like necklaces;
and the carpet-covered dikkas or benches outside the shops
have gay Arab figures reposing on them, or sitting up with
their hands clasped round their knees.

The Silk Bazar and the Sûk-el-Attarin, or Scentmakers'
Bazar are the most truly Oriental of all, and their shops are
the smallest and most cupboard-like; their proprietors the
most addicted to sitting on the counter and filling up the
whole front. Dikkas and conversation are the features here;
shoes and blankets supply the colour.

Unless the tourist knows something of the value of scent
there is friction in the Sûk-el-Attarin, or Perfume Bazar—rather
a glorified name for the row of half-empty dark
cupboards which constitute it. In Tunis the shops of the
scentmakers are the handsomest in the bazars, with their
brass, and their glass, and their panelling, their gorgeous
phials, and their dandies descended from the nobles of
Granada. Here an ordinary shopkeeper sits in his dark
recess, with a few dirty bottles of gilt glass on the shelf
beside him, and a few cheap and gaudy gilt bottles of a
smaller size, and ivory balls with cavities for scent on the floor
in front of him. As you pass, the spider pulls the stopper
out of one of his scent-bottles and rubs it on your sleeve.
“There!” he says. “Smell it. Is it not beautiful? There
is no scent like it in the world. What will you have?
Otto of roses, jasmine, amber, or banana scent?” As
if anybody wanted to smell of eating bananas! He could
make a much better scent of orange-peel. The Portogallo
made by the monks of Santa Maria Novella from orange-peel
is as fine as eau-de-cologne.

The shop looks so humble that the tourist generally says
that she will buy some scent, probably jasmine, which is really
delicious. “How much?” says the man. “An ounce?”
An ounce bottle is a modest-looking affair, so she says, “Yes,”
and is requested to pay about a sovereign. She refuses.
The dragoman says, “You must buy it now, because he
has poured it out for you. Each drop costs so much, that

he will lose two or three shillings if you do not take it now.”
If it is a well-off Englishwoman she weakly consents from
a sense of noblesse oblige; if it is an American she says,
“Yes; I will buy it, but two shillings is plenty for that little
lot. Tell him I shall only pay two shillings for it.” The
shopkeeper blusters, and the dragoman flusters, but he does
not say too much, for he has learned that the proverb, “If
you scratch a Russian you find a Tartar,” applies with
special force to Americans who have risen from trade.
Perhaps, as a parting shot, she recommends the scentmaker
to put each kind of scent up in ounce bottles and label it
twenty shillings. I side with the Americans against the
scentmakers all along the line. The scentmakers' game, as
played in Cairo, is an organised conspiracy. Their bazar
is not worth visiting except for what you pass through on
the way to it; there is nothing beautifully Oriental about it
except the duplicity of its shopkeepers, and nothing beautiful
about their shops except the brown stains on scent-bottles
that are never washed.

For myself, I enjoyed looking at the scentmakers' shops;
the black den, the Arab spider, the dusty shelf with its row
of stained bottles from which the dusty gilt was wearing
off; the little affected foolery of pulling out the stopper and
stroking my sleeve with it formed a quiet bit of the life
of the East which gave me a subtle satisfaction. But as the
spider generally turns into a blustering swindler, and there
are no noticeable Oriental effects for the casual tourist, I have
said what I have said.

The beauty of the amber perfume, the scent merchant
informs you, is that you can use it for flavouring your coffee.
But what civilised being would wish his coffee to taste like
the smell of the inside of a four-wheeler? You can buy the
amber also in the form of paste for filling little ivory boxes
the size of the capsule in which you take phenacetin. These
are hung round the neck under the clothes in a way that
would be useful if they were febrifuges. It is to be hoped
that you will escape without being made to buy anything
from this child of the Serpent. The last time I was in the

Scent Bazar I was attracted to an Arab cabinet, a little
mahogany box about a foot long, with six little drawers and
decorated with ivory and bronze, altogether rather Japanese.
I asked the price, knowing that five shillings would be a
liberal offer for this battered old affair. “Two guineas,” he
said, true to his hereditary instincts. At that moment an old
woman with a face which evidently had been lovely passed
through the bazar singing to the accompaniment of a
tambourine. “She has been a beautiful woman once,” I said
to the scentmaker. “Yes, sir,” he said, “but she is a wreck
now.”

I gave a look at his box, and went on to the Silk Bazar,
which is always picturesque, with yarn-spinners using the
same primitive descending peg-top as the yarn-spinners of
Sicily use to this day, an inheritance from the Saracenic
lords who left the Isle not much short of a thousand years
ago.

Nothing pleased me more in the Silk Bazar than the
weavers, who sat with their legs buried under the floor,
working the treadles of the tiny looms which produced
such beautiful results. Here they make the women's veils;
here they have their silks put up in quires on book-shelves
as they do in Japan. There is so little difference between
the shops in an Arab bazar and a Japanese street. Both make
counters of their floors, and you sit on the dikka outside your
bazar-shop in Cairo as you sit on the edge of the floor of the
Japanese shop. Both are raised about a foot from the
ground.

In the same bazar they sell the Arab soap that is made in
spheres like Tennis balls, and is said to have merits which
certainly do not advertise themselves on the babies' skins.

The Sudanese Bazar is on the other side of the Sukkariya.
It is not worth going into for its wares, but it has some
picturesque houses, and it leads up to the great mosque of
El-Azhar, the University of the Moslem world.

The Sudanese, if they are Sudanese, though I have
never seen any there, sell little but mangy leopard skins
and the cheap painted boxes which you see in any Arab or

Turkish town, with a few Tunisian drums, tambourines, and
gourds.

But there was a worker in the inlaying of mother-of-pearl
here whom it was interesting to watch. I did not see him
cutting his disks of pearl, but I imagined that he did it with a
fret-saw . The dark wood-work of Cairo inlaid in this manner
is very effective.

I will not describe the effect of the great mosque here. I
will leave that to its own chapter; but the book market
beyond was worth a visit, though its merchants were so
fanatical. Once I saw a Koran there whose cover attracted
me. It was not antique, but it was very Oriental. I told
Ali, my interpreter, to ask how much it was. The shopkeeper
flatly refused to sell it to a Christian.

Not far from here is the back entrance to the Turkish
Bazar, passing the great modern mosque of Hoseyn, to which
no one but a Mussulman is supposed to gain admittance.
It is fortunately not worth seeing, being quite modern, with
Tottenham Court Road carpets, and “nothing to it” but an
uncorroborated assertion that it holds the skull of Hoseyn,
son of Ali, nephew and heir of the Prophet. The Turkish
Bazar is described in this chapter; it is the most vulgarised
and Europeanised of all.

But into the Silk and Scentmakers' Bazar I often went. I
liked those little dark cupboards, six feet high and six deep
and four feet wide, with the owners filling up their fronts like
idols in niches. The way the narrow lanes were boarded
over from the sky had something delightfully Oriental about
it. I liked the large brown bottles criss-crossed with gold in
which the scent-sellers kept their perfumes; I liked the rows
of foolish otto-of-roses bottles, cut and gilt, but with hardly
more inside than a clinical thermometer. Unsophisticated
Arabs used to come to these bazars with things to sell in
camel-bags and donkey-bags, and all the time the proprietors
squatted on their counters, with their legs crossed underneath
them, smoking cigarettes and never seeming to be doing
anything, whether they were pretending to be awake or
frankly asleep.

There were odd little restaurants in these bazars, with two
or three of the grand brass jugs, holding three or four gallons
each, which they use for hot water. These form a sort of
sign-manual of the bazar restaurant, and are about all you see,
except richly worked brass urn-stands. From time to time
their servants hurried past, carrying coffee in glasses with
enamelled knobs to some merchant who was doing a deal
with foreigners, and the sun filtered through the boards above.
This part of the bazars was always Oriental, always full of
subjects for the kodaker whose lenses were strong enough to
take things in the shade.

To go into the bazars at Cairo is as good as going to
Japan. They are topsy-turvy land; they are a paradise for
kodakers; they are as exciting to a woman as the summer
sales. The whole district between the Citadel and the dried-up
canal is called loosely the Bazars. This is the chief
commercial part of the Arab city; here are the best mosques
and baths and the most unspoiled old houses and streets.
This is the best place for seeing the natives at their trades
and for picking up bargains, and it is excellent for seeing
native life.

The travellers who divide their time between expensive
hotels and the Khedivial Sporting Club, and only go to the
bazars to buy the stereotyped curiosities, see little beyond
the Turkish Bazar and the Scentmakers' Bazar. These pay
the dragoman best; but they are among the least interesting,
for the scentmakers have nothing to show, and the others
are too cosmopolitan in their shops and their ways and their
wares.

You feel the glamour of the Orient when you only drive
down the Musky to the Turkish Bazar, in charge of the
hotel dragoman. There is nothing really Turkish about
it. Hardly any of the shopkeepers are Turks and hardly
any customers are Turks, and not many of the wares are
Turkish. But from the time that you enter the Musky
you are impeded by a crowd of Orientals so thick that
your carriage can hardly plough through them—blue-gowned
porters carrying prodigious burdens, and black-robed women

who muzzle their faces, and make a most unconcerned display
of ancles in silver fetters. And though the shops are only
Oriental in their customers there is a general glow of colour,
and a braying of Eastern voices.

When you turn into the Khordagiya just before you
enter the bazar, the scene is truly Oriental. There is a fine
old mosque at the corner which overhangs the street, and the
street itself is lined with the show-cases of the native goldsmiths,
who are working in the narrow lanes of their bazar.

These cases are full of the flimsy and barbaric workmanship
which the natives love—made of very pure metal—bracelets
and anclets of great weight and solidity, these
being forms of investment; and rings and earrings and
charms—natives love to wear charms.

Except the rings, there is little to attract a European in
these cases. But the black-robed ladies find them irresistible,
and spend hours in the Jewellers' Bazar, where the paths
are hardly a yard wide. Europeans generally lose as little
time as possible in pressing past the Shoemakers' Bazar
into the Turkish Bazar, which is quite demoralised in appearance;
its open stalls would look more in place at Earl's
Court, and their Levantine owners have many of them visited
Earl's Court.

But it is to these stalls and the shops behind them that
the dragoman conducts the tourist. For there are plenty
of baits to unloose her purse-strings: lace and embroideries,
rough turquoises, peridots, opals, brass- and silver-ware; neat
little silver-gilt parodies of jewels from the graves of the
Pharaohs; various articles supposed to have come from the
graves themselves; Persian pottery and enamels and lacquer;
carpets, and articles less likely to be immediately useful, like
old Korans and Crusaders' armour.

The dragoman prefers large shops like Andalaft's or
Cohen's to stalls—they are less inconveniently public; the
tourist has less chance of escaping without making a purchase.
But the tourist, unless her ideas are too high and mighty,
prefers stalls. She does not know what she wants till she
sees it; and it is better fun to pick out things with her own

eyes than to look at what the shopkeeper thinks she might
be induced to buy. Furthermore, the good shops have an
etiquette of fixed prices, round which they have been known
to wriggle when the tourist is going away without purchases;
while the stalls expect to do the bargaining for which the
Orient is distinguished. The dragoman reminds them that
in a shop they can take tea and coffee and Turkish delight
all the time they are shopping.

To me it was always discouraging to see a shopman giving
ladies relays of almond-stuffed, rose-scented Turkish delight
at three shillings a box, and relays of caravan tea—coffee
does not count. In a business conducted upon such principles
percentages must rule high.

I shall not describe here the rarities and bargains to be
looked for in the shops of the Turkish Bazar. This is a
chapter of impressions, and the impression I got of the
Turkish Bazar was one of a few shops and spiders' dens
with good things in them, and a long row of stalls where they
sell trinkets and more or less precious stones, terminating
in a cross-alley where elegant brass objects are sold at much
above their proper price. Beyond this are a number of
Persians selling amber necklaces and pipe-mouthpieces and
Persian lacquer-boxes. Their prices are fixed at double
what they ought to be, for Europeans.

The Turkish Bazar has only a veneer of the Orient; its
Turks are Jews, and other Levantines, in black frock-coats
and tarbûshes. But it is a good exhibition. As you pass
along it, with its saucers of glittering gems, its lumps of
turquoise, its Oriental and tourist's-Oriental jewellery, its
festoons of lace and embroidery, its flashing and densely
chased brass- and silver-ware, and its gaudy keepsakes of
Crusaders and Pharaohs—everything seems so theatrical that
you expect the young guardsman who is being bored by a
bargaining American millionairess to turn into Mr. Haydn
Coffin and sing “Queen of my Heart,” and keep looking for
Mr. Edmund Payne. There is a bit of the real Orient in the
middle of it all—a beautiful gateway from a palace of Ismail
Pasha.

When the typical tourist has spent all the money she
means to spend in the Turkish Bazar, the dragoman takes her
on to the Scentmakers' Bazar. This, if he would only let
them know it, is in a true Eastern bazar, where things have
hardly altered since the time of the Crusades, and the shopkeeper
sits in the cupboard where he keeps his goods and
takes up nearly all the room, and if he wants to do any work,
such as weaving, has a hole in the floor to accommodate his
legs.

But your dragoman cares for none of these things; he does
not think Arab life worth a glance; he wants the children
(he regards all tourists as children) to spend their money as
quickly as possible and get back to the hotel. He does not
take them to the bazars for fun; he takes them to earn
commissions on what they spend, as well as his six-shilling
fee. There are exceptions, of course, but only to the extent
of throwing in a mosque or two.

One of his happy hunting-grounds is the Tentmakers' Bazar,
which might have been designed for tourists. Its shops, in a
sort of arcade which has a College behind it, are larger and
opener, and there is enough colour here for the whole of Cairo.
Most of its shops have their owners hard at work embroidering
till a victim passes; the floors are covered with embroidery
in the making, the walls with canvases appliqued with texts
from the Koran and caricatures of the tomb-paintings of the
Pharaohs. If you want colour you buy texts; red, white,
and blue blended are the quietest tints used for texts; they
may have yellow added, and a violent violet and a gaseous
green are also very popular. The colours of some of the
new texts intended for purchase by tourists are crude enough
for a factory-girl's summer hat. But the faded texts which
have done duty for mosque or marriage for many years
are exquisite. Their colouring was probably flowerlike in its
beauty when they were fresh; they have faded into tints like
nature's own.

The parodies of the pictures of the Pharaohs are soberer
in their colouring; the black of hair and the Venetian red
of naked bodies play such a large part in these compositions.

They are odiously vulgar, because their faces and attitudes
are caricatured to make the tourist like them as much
as Mr. Lance Thackeray's satirical postcards of Germans on
donkeys and spinsters on camels. They are always in
shocking taste and bear hardly any resemblance to their
originals. The tourists buy them as greedily as they buy
the smoked sky-blue and scarlet statuettes of European
exhibitions.

The attractions of the Tentmakers' Bazar for the Philistine
of Philistia do not end here. When they are tired of
bargaining for tent-linings and are no longer to be attracted
by the broiderer's blandishments of “No sharge for lookin,”
there are saddlers to be encountered, not like the irresistible
saddlers of the sûk at Tunis, whose sabre-taches, and school
children's satchels, and purses and mirror-bags are so fascinating
that you buy them for all your relations and end by
keeping them all for yourself, or the barbaric leather-workers
of Omdurman. The saddlers of Cairo are saddlers who
devote themselves to the production of donkey-saddles of
red brocade and camel-trappings adorned with cowries and
little bits of looking-glass. There is not much that any
reasonable Philistine can buy from them except embroidered
canvas saddle-bags, which make good antimacassars for
suburban homes; the little leather cases, which look as if
they contained opera glasses but really hold passages from
the Koran, which are considered good for binding on the
arm when you have a headache; Greek purses, or a stray
paper case which costs you about two shillings, and looks as
if it had cost twenty, and makes a delightful blotter with
its quaint arabesquings.

This is all of the bazars which the dragoman allows the
tame tourist to see; and even that goes a long way, because
you cannot pass from the Turkish Bazar to the scentmakers'
and tentmakers' without passing some of the unspoiled bazars
like the silkmakers', and you are surrounded by picturesque
native life.

But that is not the way in which I love to do the bazars.
I generally approach them from the other side, going down

the broad Sharia Mohammed Ali till I come to the Sharia
Serugiya a little below the Kesun mosque. This is an unspoiled
native street, natural enough for Japan. Its shops
are not old buildings, but they are low and the street is broad,
so you have good opportunities for kodaking. The shops
are quite uninteresting; they cater for humble native wants.
But if there is nothing for the European to buy in the shops
there is plenty for him to photograph among the shoppers,
and the street is rich in picturesque small mosques, and
zawiyas, tekkiyas or colleges of Dervishes, ancient baths,
vistas of old rows of dwellings, and a stranded city gate.
The Serugiya changes into the Sharia el-Magharbalin, and
the Sharia el-Magharbalin changes into the Sharia Kasabet
Radowan, which admits to the Tentmakers' Bazar. Only
the name is changed. As you draw near the bazar, the
street makes lovely lines of little old mosques with Mameluke
domes and ancient dwelling-houses with arabesqued
façades.

Here you enter one of the great old palaces of Cairo, the
Beit-el-Khalil. You can see how vast it was, though there is
little left now except the great gateway and the mak'ad, the
hall with an open front, whose majestic arches rise as high as
the roof. Here the beauty of these old streets culminates in
an unbroken succession of mosques and minarets and old
palaces, with meshrebiya oriels, which nearly meet across the
road.

We must not linger here; we must hurry through the
Tentmakers' Bazar, which is always cool and dark and
picturesque, just the right environment for the gay awnings
and saddle-cloths and leatherwork that are made in its shops,
though the enjoyment of it is spoiled by the incessant “No
sharge to look,” “Sir, you want to buy—very nice,” “Look
here, sir,” “Come in,” and so on. It ends between two
perishing mosques, sentimentally beautiful in their decay, at
the Bab-es-Zuweyla, the old city gate, the heart of that Cairo of
which I have written that it is still an Arab city of the Middle
Ages.

And here at the Bab-es-Zuweyla you will do well to remind

mind yourself that the bazars afford not merely infinitely
picturesque specimens of Oriental shops and shopkeepers;
they constitute the most characteristic part of the native
city, where you must go to look for your glimpses of the poor
living in the atmosphere and with the methods and customs
of the City of the “Arabian Nights.”

A PILGRIM'S HOUSE, WITH THE SUPPOSED ADVENTURES OF HIS PILGRIMAGE TO MECCA PAINTED ON ITS EXTERIOR.

A STREET SCENE IN THE SERUGIYA. The figure looking like an old woman is a Bedawin Sheikh. The three other men are in the blue gown called a galabeach, and the white turban folded round a crimson tarbúsh, which is the ordinary costume of the poor Cairo Arab.

The first time I ever visited the bazars of Cairo we
were in the Tentmakers' Sûk with the Major, who
was buying a pair of Arab slippers. The Major is a very
big man and takes a very large shoe. The shoemaker drew
attention to his infirmity and wished to charge him double
for it. Suddenly an unfamiliar and guttural voice said, as we
thought, “These very large shoes made for the Irish.” As the
Major was an Irishman, the remark seemed appropriate; but
we knew afterwards that Ali meant the Arish—or Bedawin
of the Eastern Desert, who enliven the streets of Cairo.

The voice belonged to a tall, strange Arab, with a face
like the hawk-headed Horus. He was dressed in a neat
turban and a fine blue cloth galabeah, but no socks, only
very pointed scarlet shoes. This was Ali.

As he made the cobbler charge the Major a single fare
for his shoes, we allowed him to accompany us. He said
that he wanted no money. But I knew that it was only
Arab duplicity to represent that the pleasure of our company
was sufficient reward for the morning's work, so I said that
I would give him a shilling at the end of the morning, and
that if this was not satisfactory to him, it would be more
satisfactory to us for him to leave us at once. He said:
“I come; money no matter.” He may have expected
money off commissions, or he may have had nothing
particular to do, and been interested in our caravan, which
included two well-dressed women. Arabs are very susceptible
to feminine smartness.

He proved to know a good deal of English and possessed
the valuable quality of saying, when he was asked a question
which puzzled him: “I not know; I ask somebody.” This
meant that he would ask everybody round us till he elicited
the information we required, which was generally the name
of some ancient and adorable building that had escaped the
mesh of the guide-books.

When we parted, Ali took his shilling with an air of
politeness and content, and said that he was always to be
found between the Bab-es-Zuweyla and the Tentmakers'
Bazar.

We saw nothing more of him till we returned many weeks
later from our trip to Khartûm.

Then, one day as we were issuing from the Tentmakers'
Bazar, a voice saluted us: “Hallo; I not seen you lately.”

We did not need him, but he told us the story of the giant,
seven or six metres high, who had hung the clubs half-way up
the towers of the Bab-es-Zuweyla with such an air of conviction
that we thought it would be our loss if we did not
engage him to babble to us at the same modest fee of a
shilling for the morning. After that he always accompanied
us when we passed the Bab-es-Zuweyla, and we used to take
that route to the bazars on purpose. It did not cost us anything,
for he saved more than his own fee in preventing us from
being overcharged by others. He forfeited his commissions
at shops by the resolute way in which he beat down prices
for us. If the shopkeeper refused to be equitable, he said:
“Come away; that man no good,” or, “I know cheaper place.”
When I insisted on paying the man's price, because I wanted
that particular thing, I used to say: “Now, Ali, go back
to that shop afterwards and make him give you commission
for taking us there,” and he used to answer, “If you not mind,
I try.”

He was the most honest Arab I ever struck: he never once
tried to get the better of us, and he had another useful
quality. He was, as I have said, a big, strong man, and he

was very courageous. More than once when my ardour in
sight-seeing had carried me to places in the Arab city where
it was not really safe for English people to go, and the Arab
hooligans began to hustle, they found they had a lion to
deal with in Ali. One could go anywhere with him.

One day I could not find him. Next day he told me
that he had been in prison, waiting to be tried. He
had had to fight a man while he was out with a foreign
gentleman. “This morning tried,” he said. “The man have
to go to prison for two months. I have to pay a hundred
piastres for constructing a disturbance.” I offered to pay his
fine, but he said, “English gentleman I with paid it.” When
I told the Commissioner of Police about this afterwards, he
made a note of it in Ali's favour, though Ali had to go
to prison for it. It is the Commissioner of Police who issues
dragomans' licences.

Ali was delightfully devout and sentimental. Sometimes
when we went into a mosque—the mosque of the Sultan
Shab'an for one—he said: “This very holy person's place; I
say my prayers here.” Once as we were coming back from
the Tombs of the Caliphs he stopped beside a little enclosure
of graves and wept. “All I have in the world here,” he said
simply. “I all alone now.”

Sometimes when I asked him for a place like the Mosque
of Abu-Bekr, which is not near any other, he said: “I think
no such place; but you know.” I told him the directions
they had given me for finding this mosque at the Wakfs
(where they had recommended me not to miss it), and it
was marked in a vague way on one of the maps, printed
right across a nest of small streets. I took my bearings
as well as I could and steered for it. Ali asked every
one we met, but nobody knew it by that name, though
gradually Ali began to receive hints that there was a very
old and beautiful mosque in the district, and this mosque
we eventually ran to earth. Then we discovered that it had
a name about a yard long, with the words Abu-Bekr coming
in the middle! Europeans had not selected the significant
words—that was all.

Ali was delighted. After this he would never give up
looking for a building I asked for.

He always accompanied me in my street-to-street visitations
of the Arab city. I did my best to visit every old
street in Cairo. I used to stalk down the middle of the street,
note-book in hand, with my camera slung round my waist.
Ali carried my stick, which gave him great pleasure, as
dragomans do not bring their own sticks when they are
engaged: they must have their hands free for carrying things.
I went into every mosque that was open, and wherever I saw
a house that looked old I sent Ali into its court to see if it
had any old architecture, and if there was anything to prevent
me going in. I was seldom refused: the permission was
generally given cordially. The Cairenes are naturally obliging
and polite: they know that it is quite safe to leave their
houses open under the British rule; and they have few
Mohammedan prejudices, except the artificially fostered idea,
which the Mohammedans of Asia do not share—that it is
wrong to live in any country not ruled by Mohammedans.
Ali used to dart out again like a rabbit, and say “Come on”;
and somebody would smile a permission as I entered, or
very often the courtyard was left to take care of itself. The
facades of the house round the courtyard are generally its
oldest and best preserved parts. We were often invited to
look at the selamlik and the mak'ad, the hall with the open
front, and once in a while, if the master of the house were in,
he would send his women out of the way and show us any
fine rooms there were in his harem.

Ali took me into various interesting old baths, which may
form the subject of a chapter; various khans once the caravanserais
of merchants, now used as warehouses; various
schools, some of them in beautiful mediaeval buildings; oil
mills and mosques.

The oil mills were very curious. They were almost
invariably in very old buildings with arched chambers; and
the mills were driven, like sakiyas, by oxen walking round
and round. The oil was made from cotton-seed, and the
presses used were something like the old wooden presses of

the seventeenth century, still used in out-of-the-way parts of
Italy for making wine.

Many small mosques are always kept shut, and even the
persistent Ali, who questioned every one in the street, could
not always discover where the key was kept. And they did
not always have overshoes to go over your boots, which
implied taking off your boots. And they were not invariably
interesting when you had succeeded, with much loss of time,
in getting them open. But there is generally something
ancient or beautiful in every mosque-interior in Cairo; and
the smaller mosques sometimes do not follow the accepted
pattern, but break out in their own way, like that mosque of
Abu-Bekr. They are apt to have very beautiful meshrebiya
work, and sometimes you come across a fine old pulpit or a
delightful courtyard.

We used to have the same fun at most of them over
our mosque-tickets. Admission to mosques for ordinary
Christians is by little brown tickets, which you buy at Cook's
or any of the large hotels for fivepence—two piastres each.
But as an author with proper introductions and writing a
book about Egypt, I had received from the head of the
Wakfs, who look after the Mohammedan monuments, a
printed letter admitting me to all their mosques and monuments
free, with permission to photograph or sketch. The
difficulty was that, even at quite large mosques, the attendants
at the gate could seldom read; so we had to wait while some
one who could read, and whom the attendants could trust,
was found. They did not like foregoing the little brown
tickets, which meant fivepences for the mosque treasury. So
badly educated were the attendants that I had been going
to all sorts of mosques—including El-Azhar itself—for two or
three months before it was discovered that the clerk who filled
in my pass had dated it from November 1907 to May 1907,
which, of course, made it invalid from the first of December.

Ali was very useful over this question of tickets. He
always told the incredulous attendants a long list of mosques,
from El-Azhar downwards, where the pass had been accepted,
and forced them to send for some one who could read.

When we left the mosque Ali caused them fresh annoyance
by informing us that the regulation fee for the use of overshoes
was a small piastre—a penny farthing a pair. Inexperienced
Americans are often deceived into giving a
shilling. I much prefered to give the proper fee for the
shoes, and to give the shilling to the attendant who had shown
us round, if he had been intelligent and obliging. But if he
had been sulky and hostile, as is sometimes the case, I gave
him nothing. As a class, mosque attendants are the surliest
Arabs you meet, which may be due to fanaticism.

I think that Ali enjoyed himself most when I was shopping.
He admired my experienced bargaining. One learns a thing
or two in the course of twenty years of curio-hunting in the
East and South. When a shopkeeper with whom one had
not dealt before asked an outrageous price for anything, Ali
would say, “Not a tourist, this my gentleman”; and explain
that I was too old a bird to be caught with chaff; also that
I did not waste time with men who would not proceed to
business at once, but always went to another shop. This
generally did away with the preliminary stages of the bargain.
If the man was incredulous, we went on. If it was a secondhand
thing—say an old piece of brass, or Persian embroidery,
or jewellery—I used to tell Ali the price he could offer for it
as we passed. While he was making the offer—even that
takes many words in the Orient—I wandered on, looking for
fresh treasure-troves.

Sometimes as a variant I held up a piece of money and
pointed to a thing as I passed. It was in this way that I
bought some of my Persian embroideries, and the beautiful
Persian bowl that always stands on our sideboard filled with
lemons, because we like the contrast of the pale lemon and
the deep-gold brass.

It is an antique brass bowl, the size of an ordinary pipkin,
richly stamped and chased with Persian hunting scenes, and
used to stand in the back part of the shop kept by an old
Turk from Assuan, who, contrary to the habit of Turks,
loved to bargain over his goods. He lived at the end of the
Tentmakers' Bazar, and always brought out chairs into the

street for us when we commenced looking at things in his
window, which had no glass. He kept his change and his
spectacles and his snuff-box in that bowl, so my attention
was constantly drawn to it. One day as I passed I held up
an Egyptian two-shilling piece and pointed to that bowl.
He had evidently bought it cheap, so he emptied out its
contents with grave politeness and handed it to me. He saw
by my eye that I was not going to buy any rings or daggers
or Ethiopian necklaces that day. These were his specialities.

So the bowl was handed to Ali, and we pursued our march
through the bazars. When we got to the Turkish Bazar,
where the brass-shops are, all the shopkeepers asked Ali how
much I had given for it; he told them this, but he would not
tell them where I had bought it, lest he should spoil my
future bargaining with the old Turk. They at once began
to bid for it, and one man offered me as high as ten shillings
for the bowl I had just bought for two.

Another time I bought from the old female fiend in the
brass market, the brass milk-dipper which is now in my
Moorish room—an embossed and very solid sort of pint-pot,
with an upright handle about eighteen inches long. We
were walking about the old Arab streets for a couple of hours
after this. Every restaurant keeper we passed asked Ali
how much I had given for this, and when he learned that I
had only paid fifteen piastres offered me an advance. One
man had a thing I wanted more, but only worth about half
as much—an old solid brass coffee-saucepan of rather an elegant
shape. I offered to exchange. He wanted me to give
him twenty-five piastres as well as my milk-dipper. I knew
better, and the next day bought just such a saucepan in the
Market of the Afternoon for a shilling. Next time we passed
the crafty restaurateur he offered to make the exchange for
nothing. Ali was magnificent. “Your saucepan was only
worth a shilling. My gentleman bought one like it, only
better, for a shilling.” The restaurateur grew very heated
over the bargain he had missed, and told Ali never to enter
his shop again. The pugnacious Ali made some withering
retort about the class of his business.

Ali was very useful at the Market of the Afternoon. He
could tell me about the games people were playing. But he
prefered the Brass-market second-hand stalls. We never
passed them without stopping for a few minutes. He was
amused at the tantrums of the fat old Moslem who kept the
chief stall—a great character. She was old, awful, and closely
veiled, and sat in a recumbent position, stretching out towards
the customers her solid but shapely bare ancles in a pair of
very heavy gold anclets. They may have been gilt brass,
but they were at any rate very handsome. Her bracelets, of
which she wore many, were certainly gilt brass. What you
noticed most were the extraordinary, expressive eyes between
her face-veil and head-veil. She was generally smoking,
almost always contemptuous, and flew into fierce passions on
small provocations. Sometimes she did not want to have anything
to do with a dog of a Christian who dared to dispute the
extravagant prices she would put on. She would yell at me
and almost throw things at me if I attempted to bargain with
her. At other times she would let me put my own prices on
anything in the extensive stock she spread on the ground.
And she had covetable things—such as a fine assortment of
the elegant brass ewers called ibreek, which the Arabs use
for pouring water over the hands with the tisht—the quaint
basins and water-strainers which go with them—fine old
brass coffee-pots, coffee-saucepans, coffee-trays, coffee-cups,
coffee-mills, fine brass-work for the Narghileh pipe, chased
brass lantern-ends, brass open-work toilet-boxes, incense-burners,
inkpots, scales, tall candlesticks for standing on the
ground—all of good old patterns and workmanship. It was
from her that I bought my delightful little chased brass
box pierced like the plâtre ajouré of mosque windows. On
these occasions she would smile and jest quite flirtatiously
behind her rigorous face-veil. You could see it by her eyes,
which were generally so furious. This did not seem to please
Ali so much as when she was playing the spit-fire. I could
hardly get him away then.

He had a friend at the next stall—a poor old man with a
humble stock that was often quite interesting, for besides brass

ware he sold second-hand the jewellery worn by the poor Arabs
and Sudanese, brass and copper and glass bangles, base-metal
anclets of various patterns, well-worn rings, sometimes exceedingly
interesting and sometimes highly elegant, Mohammedan
and Jewish charms and lucky-bags, and various clasps,
and so on, but not many brooches or necklaces. Ali told me
what to give him for any article that took my fancy, and it
was always impossibly cheap. His prices were far below the
old woman's. For though she sat on the ground under a
temporary awning, and her goods were spread out on the
ground, she regarded herself as a shop-keeper, not a stall-keeper,
because she was always there. Higher up, in front
of the beautiful five-arched arcade of the Beit-el-Kadi itself,
the stalls degenerated into selling bottles and bits of old
metal.

One thing I never succeeded in doing—visiting a Mohammedan
festival with Ali. He was going to take me to the Ashura, to the
Molid-en-Nebi, to the return of the Holy
Carpet, and I don't know what else. But when the day
came he did not come—I suppose he had a prejudice against
going with a Christian, and was too polite to say so.

TWO friends may assure you with equal truthfulness
that Cairo is a good or a bad place for shopping in.
Either is true according to your object in shopping. Of
one quality or another you may buy almost anything in
Cairo. And if it is an article you can buy from a Levantine's
shop it will not be very dear, but if it is something that
you can only find at the special shops kept by Europeans,
who come to Cairo to make a fortune quickly, it may be
very costly. There are, for instance, what the regular shopkeepers
scornfully call “butterfly shops”—i.e. the shops in
the neighbourhood of the Savoy Hotel, which are open only in
the season and are kept by dressmakers, milliners, and what
not from Paris. They are like the Riviera shops—they often
have lovely things in the very latest fashions, but their
prices are naturally enormous. In this chapter I shall not
deal with necessaries. One can buy any necessary in Cairo.
I shall confine myself to the kind of things that people
take back for their collections, or as mementoes of Egypt—such
as gems, curios, silver-ware, embroideries, photographs
and postcards.

I will not pretend to say which is the best of the curio
shops that cater for the very wealthy. A shop where the
plausible young man talks in pounds instead of piastres is
no place for me. Such shops often ask more pounds than I
would pay piastres for some little bit from the tombs of Der-el-Bahari.
They have lovely objects in their windows, objects
that would be a grace even if they were not a prize to a

museum. There are a couple of them opposite the Savoy,
and another kept by a superior American opposite Shepheard's,
which has for its chief objet one of the glorious old mosque
lamps of enamelled glass made towards the end of the Middle
Ages, the collection of which is the pride of the Arab
Museum at Cairo. He asked £1,200 for this: what he
would take did not transpire. It is to shops such as these
that one would go for the jewellery worn by princesses in the
days of the Pharaohs, which is so curiously modern in its
effects. For example, one might take a gold bangle with
its circle as stiff and true as if it had been made yesterday
with a band of enamels in various colours running round
it—all unchipped—and half a dozen little enamelled discs
hanging from it by fine chains an inch and a half long.
This looks just as modern and perfect as the copies sold
for about £20 a piece in the Musky or in the shops kept
by Orientals on the front near the Continental Hotel. The
imitation (in eighteen-carat gold, mark you) is so like the
original, if original it be, that it is much safer to buy the
imitation.

The extremely modern appearance of so many Egyptian
ornaments, whether jewels or scarabs, constitutes one of the
great difficulties in the way of buying them. It is almost
impossible for any one but an expert to detect an imitation
if it is made in genuine materials. The makers of imitations
are wise enough to imitate the ancient goldsmiths' work
in fine gold, and to employ the best workmen to execute
it. The intrinsic value of the imitations is often very
considerable. The forger risks this amount of capital on
the chance of bringing off a coup. Two copies made by
the same forger, if he has no shop of his own with plate-glass
windows in the right quarter, but works to the order
of wealthy shopkeepers, may one of them be sold as modern
jewellery in the antique style for £20, and the other for
£200 as having come from the wrist of the mummy of
Queen Nefertari or Princess Bint-Anat. Such is life; and
such is luck.

The leading curio-shopkeepers, however, give guarantees of

the genuineness of their goods, and if an article were proved
to be a forgery would at once refund the money rather
than destroy the reputation of a well-founded business. There
is always a risk in buying an expensive piece from a man
who might not be found if you had come down on him
for his guarantee; you have to take as much care in the
choice of a man to buy valuable antiques from as you
have in the choice of a trustee.

At the same time, you have far more chance of buying
a bargain from a stray individual than from a large dealer:
the former may not know the value of what he is selling. The
dealer would be sure to know. Twenty pounds down to such a
man might mean more than the chance of eventually getting
£2,000 if he kept his prize for several years. And he is
hampered by the unwillingness of people to buy an expensive
article without the guarantee of a well-known dealer. I am
speaking of a purchaser who has not sufficient expert
knowledge to be able to appraise the genuineness and value
of the article for himself. If he is an expert he will be
on the look-out for the opportunities of buying from unlikely
people. As I have often pointed out, there are two
golden rules in curio-buying: (1) If you know when a
thing is genuine and know its real value, buy it at the
wrong shop; (2) If you don't know the value of a thing
only pay what you think it worth as an ornament to your
house or your person; don't give one penny for any special
value that may be supposed to attach to it.

By buying it at the wrong shop I mean buying it from
some one who does not know the value of its materials or
workmanship. A rag-dealer has no respect for mediaeval
fabrics or embroideries.

For curio-buying at moderate prices you will have to
depend on the bazars and the markets, and I will tell you
how to do your bargaining when the time comes.

If you are not expert, it is best to buy your mummies, your
mummy-cases, superb with gilt and hieroglyphic paintings,
your wooden models of soldiers and workers in the field, your
little clay soul-houses, your alabaster canopic jars, as well as

A BEDAWIN TRIBE ON THE MARCH THROUGH CAIRO. The entire community with all its goods and animals follows behind.

AN AVENUE IN CAIRO.

your ancient Egyptian jewels, from the Museum, if it has what
you require in its sale-room, or from the great European curio-shops.
Never forget that the Museum has a salle de vente,
where the prices are much more moderate than they are at
shops, and where nothing is sold that is not undoubtedly
genuine, found by the excavators in the employ of the
Director.

Down in the bazars there are at any rate two great shops
whose guarantee can be respected, Andalaft's and Joseph
Cohen's. But they do not deal so much in ancient Egyptian
jewels and curios as in choice Oriental things of the last two
or three centuries, mixed, of course, with showy modern things,
sold at a good but not inordinate profit, to tourists too ignorant
to appreciate choice pieces. Of Hatoun's, a shop in the
Musky which sells the same sort of things and has an
enormous stock, I cannot speak from personal knowledge.

To show how necessary it is to take care, I will tell what
happened to Belsize at the most swaggering shop in Cairo.
He bought a Bokhara carpet which the proprietor guaranteed
“perfect” and “absolutely unique.” When it had been down
a few weeks it showed a big split which had been skilfully
repaired, and Belsize went to demand his money back from
the proprietor. “No, no, Mr. Belsize; I cannot do that. But
I tell you vot I vill do. I have plenty more exactly like it,
and you shall have vhichever you like.”

Joseph Cohen, who has the largest shop in the bazars,
has a reputation for fair dealing. He has fixed prices, and
the prices he fixes for the brass boxes and bowls inlaid
with silver, the spangled Assiut shawls, the harem embroideries,
and the cloisonne umbrella-handles, in which the
untrained tourist delights, are as moderate as any one's in
Cairo. His firm is of international repute, and has large
dealings with museums. Fine rugs and carpets rising in
value to a thousand pounds are his speciality. But he also
has splendid old Persian embroideries and enamels and
various Arab antiques of great value from the old Mameluke
houses. Cohen's is a good place for the inexpert tourist
to go to who means to spend large sums of money on

buying Oriental trophies for his home, because Cohen has
fixed prices and believes in the motto of a famous London
caterer, “Give your customer good value and he'll come
again.”

Andalaft has a smaller shop than Cohen. He has only
a small stock of tourists' brass and embroideries: he affects
enamels, and earthenware, old illuminated Korans, mediaeval
armour, and beautiful jewellery, chiefly Persian, which last is
not very expensive as such things go. Mr. Andalaft is a man
of remarkably good taste, indeed fine taste is the characteristic
of his shop. The old Persian arm amulets which he has
collected—flat, heart-shaped gold and silver boxes set with
large turquoises for containing a verse of the Koran, make
delightful ornaments. These and other jewels fill the locked
cases in the front part of his shop. But it is when he takes
you to the back, and commences fingering lovingly old
Persian lustre-ware that you see how different he is from
the other traders in the noisy Khan-el-Khalil. For he is
an enthusiast, and while he shows you his old illuminated
Korans, he stops to point out and translate the passages
which were borrowed from a Christian saint. You ask if a
suit of antique armour is Crusader's armour that has been
hoarded in the Sudan. “Alas, no,” he says, and tells you
the points to look out for in armour that has been in Egypt
since St. Louis and all his chivalry surrendered to the
Saracens, where the great city of Mansura stands to-day.
But his heart is chiefly with the old enamels and lustre of
Persia; and his old Persian pictures, and his Persian boxes
— painted with the portraits of famous beauties of Ispahan
and Shiraz, which glow like the lustres and enamel—and his
jade. Mr. Andalaft always strikes one as the artist rather
than the trader; and he speaks such good English that he
is a valuable aid to a collector. When you have bought
all you care about in his own stock, it is worth while asking
him to step across to Irani's with you. Irani is a good man,
but he speaks no English, and if left to himself opens his
mouth very wide to foreigners.

There are plenty of shops in the Khan-el-Khalil which

have fine or charming pieces, suited to pockets of varying
depths, especially in the direction of old brass-ware, embroideries
and lace, enamels and pottery. The trouble is
that without interminable bargaining you will be outrageously
swindled. Few of these traders have fixed prices like
Andalaft and Cohen, and nearly all of them fix their prices,
not according to the value of the article, but according to the
value of the purchaser. They gauge how rich or otherwise he
is, how shrewd or foolish, how eager or unwilling, and the price
moves accordingly. With most of them you have the feeling
all the time that you are dealing with a dirty, chuckling
Oriental spider.

When you come upon genuine Persians they are not so
bad. They are dignified, and often, like the Turk, have fixed
prices; but they have one price fixed for the tourist and
another for the native, so if you are wise you do not buy from
them at all, since they are certain to be asking you far above
the value of the article, and will not budge from their price.
Amber is the speciality of the Turks; lacquered boxes and
turquoises are the specialities of the Persians. You often
see fine pieces of amber among the beads and pipe-mouth-pieces;
but they are not comparable in beauty with the
old amber, which has gone opaque and golden, or clear
and sherry-coloured, to be found in the necklaces of odd
beads, which descend from generation to generation in the
Sudan.

The number of Persians in the bazars seemed to me really
extraordinary. Mr. Andalaft told me that it was not hard
to explain. “Persia,” he said, “is a very difficult country
to get to for tourists, so the Persians have to look about for
a market outside of their own country, where the duties are
low, and there is a good Government like the English, that
does not allow people to have their money taken away from
them, and where many tourists come. Egypt is the tourist's
market of Persia.”

Here was another testimony to the value of the British
Occupation.

One of the great bargainings in the bazars at Cairo is

over precious stones, above all, turquoises, though there is a
determined effort to make people buy peridots, which are a
monopoly taken over from the Khedive, and various cheap
stones, such as rose-crystals, chrysoprases, and poor amethysts.
A good deal of this trade is in the hands of Persians and
what Belsize called “our Indian fellow-subjects.”

The Indians are the easier to bargain with; they know
the trading of the West as well as the East, and are aware
of the value of a quick turnover. But they are by way of
having fixed prices. Ladies get over this difficulty if the
dealers have named a price far above what it would pay
them handsomely to take, by picking out something of
sufficient value, and saying that they will buy the first article
if they receive the second article as bakshish. But this is
of no use if you have a dragoman or guide with you to
see the trader's weakness and get his bakshish. That word
bakshish is unusually potent in the bazars. It covers the
heavy commission demanded by any native who is taking
you about, on every article which you purchase. He demands
this as his reward for bringing you to the shop. If the
merchant does not give it, the guide does all he can to
prevent any foreigners, whom he may be accompanying in
the future, from going into that shop. Knowing the prejudices
of the English, he says that the man who keeps the shop
has many imitations among his goods, and that he is a
liar. This last is a beautiful trick, for of course the guide
himself is a liar. He glories in it. He is telling a lie over
this very thing, and he exults in deceiving you.

And now as to the quality of turquoises—the best, the
hard, well-polished, deep blue stones, which have no flaw and
are of a beautiful, regular shape, you can buy only in the
jeweller's shops, of which there are some in the bazar as
well as near the big hotels. But there are many fascinating
stones of lower grades which the Indians and Persians sell.
To begin with, there are large stones not so hard, not quite
free from flaws, not so well polished, not of the most esteemed
turquoise blue, which are even more beautiful than the best
turquoises. They are of a colour which is never sold in

London, a beautiful deep Cambridge blue, quite distinct
from the sky-blue of the best turquoises, and the very pale
blue of the low-priced turquoises from Australia which the
Italians use in making their cheap turquoise jewellery. I know
of no more exquisite blue. You will find extremely
beautiful effects also among matrix-stones flecked over with
black or brown. If you place one alongside of the dull blue
matrix-turquoises which are sold in London, you will never
want to buy the latter again.

These you can buy from the Indians in the bazar at a very
moderate price, if you are a good bargainer; and they are not
outrageously dear things to buy if you pay three times the
proper price for them. Their fault is that they are apt to go
green or pale.

From the Indians also you can buy matrix-turquoises,
from the good Persian mines, hard stones, of a beautiful
bright blue which does not change its colour, and some
of them with very few flaws, and not very dear. These
“Persian” matrix-stones are most covetable. Very covetable
also are the matrix-stones of a dark bright blue, darker than
cornflowers. I do not know where they come from, but,
when they are beautiful, they are the dearest of all the matrix-stones
to buy from these Indians.

Below them come the common turquoises, mostly set in
large brass rings, and some of them quite green, but really
rather pretty. They are found in Egyptian territory, and I
have bought large ones for as little as sixpence each.

There remain the very soft turquoises, badly cut, badly
polished, but without flaws, and often of a beautiful turquoise
blue, shaped almost like a beehive, which the Arabs are so
fond of wearing in their large silver rings: these are almost
as cheap as the last, but they sometimes go green and dull
directly, and hardly ever keep their beauty. Buy these
rings from the donkey-boys and hawkers you see wearing
them. Three shillings each is a good price for them, and
the settings are often old and beautifully worked by Sudanese
silversmiths. You can easily have another stone set in
them.

The first thing to do when you go into a bazar is to
saunter through it, and ask the price of everything you
like, saying that you don't mean to buy anything until you
have seen everything. The Oriental is perfectly agreeable
to this: he is polite as well as wily; it is to his interest for
his stock to be examined. In the Tentmakers' Bazar the
shopkeepers call out: “No sharge for looking,” as you pass.
The moment when you have said that you are not going
o buy anything is rather a good time to buy. They put
the prices down very low to tempt you. They don't mind
if you do break your word—in this way. Price the same
sort of thing at different stalls which are a long way from
each other. It helps to give the real price and to show
which stall is cheapest. Do not be afraid of giving
trouble. Orientals do not mind how much trouble they take
for a prospective customer, or how much trouble they give
by asking three times what they mean to take. Leave
your dragoman behind when you really mean to do your
buying. Then they will do extra bargaining to the extent
that his commission would come to. The ordinary dragoman
expects commissions on all sales when he accompanies the
tourist. In bargaining there are certain other conditions to
remember besides leaving the dragoman behind. Upon new
brooches and trinkets and photograph-frames they will not
come down much, because they will have been afraid to put
too much profit on an article which has a fairly regular
price. But for second-hand lace and turquoises they may
ask ten times the proper price, and are pretty certain to
ask three times. It is on objects for which they ask,
not the value, but whatever they think you will give, that
you can beat them down most. They will often come
down one half and nearly always one third on such things,
if you are firm with them.

But to return to bakshish. If no native is with you to
demand his commission, and you know that the merchant
is making you pay too much, demand a bakshish. If the
merchant demurs, say: “If I had brought a dragoman with
me you would have had to pay him bakshish.” Thus

adjured, the merchant generally gives in. He does not
of course return you a commission in money, but offers
you some worthless article among the goods which you
have been examining. Say right out: “No; I don't want
that—it is not worth anything.” Choose a thing of about
the value which you consider you ought to get, and you
will generally get it. If you do, promise to come back again,
and the next time the prices he asks will be more moderate.
In dealing with the “fixed-price” Indian, the best plan
is first of all to make your choice of all the turquoises or
other articles that you require, then to make up your mind
as to the price at which you would consider them a
sufficiently tempting bargain, and offer it. He will at once
attempt to bargain with you. He will tell you that a lady
paid him for one piece, the exact counterpart of one of
the objects which you have selected, more money than you
offer him for all the pieces together. He will pick out
this and the other piece and tell you how specially good
it is—that the price is going up for this kind of thing,
that if you came back in a fortnight's time he could not
sell it for the same price as he could take now, etc. Let
him talk himself out and use up as many of his arguments
as he can before you commence talking again. It weakens
him in answering you back. Then say:

” I'm very sorry; but so much (naming the sum you
offered him before) is all that these things are worth to
me,” and get up to go.

If it gives him a moderate profit to take your price, he
will take it, saying, “You will come back again. You will
recommend me to your friends. But I cannot take the
same prices from them. I only take them from you because
you are very clever. Nothing escapes you. It is a pleasure
to deal with such a person,” etc., etc. “You are so different
from Americans.”

“How?” you ask.

“They are my best customers,” he replies, with a beautiful
Oriental smile. “But it is no pleasure to serve them,
though I take much money out of them, for they do not

know anything. They do not know a fine piece when they
see it—they are sure to like the wrong thing, if it is a
little—a little grand.”

He will, of course, be refering to the common, rich
Americans, who flood Egypt. When an American working
man becomes suddenly wealthy by a mining discovery or
keeping a shop in a mining township, which “strikes it rich,”
and launches out into travel, Egypt is unfortunately one
of the first countries he is likely to honour with a visit,
perhaps because it is mentioned in the Bible, the book he
knows best. The Americans who go to Egypt are, on
account of the expense, generally the best and the worst.
As a nation, all over the world, they lack discriminating taste
and let shopkeepers decide for them, though, when it comes
to prices, their native sagacity declares itself. They want
nothing worse than the best, and they mean to pay only
“bedrock” prices for it. But these common people have
no notion of what is good, or what is the proper price to
pay for it.

To return to the Indians in the bazars. If the price you
offer them does not pay them at all, they say, “I am very sorry,
sir, but it is not possible,” and begin to put all the things
back. Then get up and go. If it is possible, and they are
bluffing, they will call you back. If you have mentioned too
low a price, there are two courses open to you. Either to go
away and leave the things, which will gain you the respect of
the bazar as a man of your word or to say, “Well, what is
the lowest price you can do them for? I have told you all I
think they are worth to me, and if you increase the price much,
of course I cannot buy anything.” It may be that only a
very small percentage separates you. And you will be wise
to pay that. You were not allowing him enough margin.
To pay him the little extra for his profit won't spoil your
bargain with him next time.

But if you go away you stand to win in two ways. If
the man has been bluffing he will call you back, and accept
your offer—and if he is not, and you go away without buying
anything, you will have impressed him and all the neighbouring

A MARRIAGE PROCESSION, WITH THE HÔTEL CONTINENTAL IN THE BACKGROUND.

THE FAMILY OF A PILGRIM RETURNING FROM MECCA. Notice the elaborate Cashmere shawl spread over the back of the carriage.

shopkeepers with the idea that you are not a man to bluff
against.

I promised to give the recipe for bargaining with the
various Levantines who have shops and “bazars” in the
bazars. The Levantine is a tough nut to crack. He relies
on wearing down your patience. You have to wear down his.
He commences by asking twice or three times what he is
willing to take. You offer him what you consider the proper
price. He comes down a fraction. If you really covet the
article and mean to buy it before you leave the shop, so as
not to run any risk of its being gone before you can come
again, you go on bargaining inch by inch. Look at a
whole lot of other things, but keep up a steady fire of depreciation
about this, and go on refusing his gradually diminishing
prices for it. If it is only a thing which you want
mildly, the odds are that you will get it at your own price in
the end. Stick to your own price, and every time you pass
the shop ask: “Well, are you going to let me have that—for—piastres?
(naming your original price). One day, seeing
that you do not mean to weaken, he will say “Yes,” or tell
you the real amount at which it will pay him to sell the article.
And, as I have said above, paying him a small margin of
profit where you have named less than he gave for it, will not
lower your credit as a bargainer.

As these people are such sharks, so rapacious and mean,
you should avoid a frontal attack on the object you really
want to buy. Approach by traverses. Bargain earnestly and
eagerly over several things which you do not want; and when
he says that they are the best things in the shop, say, “Well,
what will you let me have cheap—this, or this, or this?” running
through about two dozen things, and ending up with the
thing you really want. Then prepare to leave the shop, and he
will say you can have the last thing cheap. “What do you call
cheap? Do you mean 5 piastres or 50 piastres?” (as the case
may be). “Yes; you can have it for that, and won't you have
that mummy-case (or whatever it was) too,” he asks, mentioning
the thing you priced first, for which he asked such a hideous
sum. You shake your head and retire, carrying off the

purchase you wanted for something like its proper price. I
suppose that if you lived in Cairo and they got to know you,
they might understand some day as Italians, who are also
great bargainers, get to understand very readily, that you
want to know the ultimo prezzo—the last price, i.e. the lowest.
But running straight is not natural to a Levantine.

The sûk of the second-hand clothes is a very interesting
place to go shopping in, for there, when you are lucky, you
pick up for mere songs the lovely old Persian shawls which are
hand-worked as close as if they were woven, and the gossamer
veils of silk coloured like the rainbow worn by dancing
women, and wonderful Arab dresses which have done duty
for bedawin sheikhs and will do duty for many fancy-dress
balls. Embroideries, too, can be bought here, the patient
embroideries of the harem, done before harem doyleys and
cushion-covers became a regular line with London drapers.
And nearly every day there are auctions, in which the
auctioneers carry their goods piled on their shoulders.

You cannot leave Cairo without visiting the Tentmakers'
Bazar, which leads from the Bab-es-Zuweyla to one of the
most beautiful and ancient streets, the Sharia Kasabet
Radowan.

It is here that they make the superb awnings used in the
huge pavilions in which the Khedive's Ministers and the
great dignitaries of Islam hold receptions at the Molid of
the Prophet, and on similar occasions. These awnings, like
the Satsuma jars and painted umbrellas of Japan, are made
by boys. Men and boys sit working at them all day long
in a hundred shops. You would think that all Egypt
abode in its tents, like the Israelites of the Bible; but
immense quantities of them are needed for the pavilions
of the Molid, and the decorations of a rich Arab's house, and
hotels like the Cataract at Assuan, where they know the
value of local colour and use hundreds of yards of them.

They are sometimes made of real tentmakers' canvas,
sometimes of silk. They are rather dear things to buy,
and the tentmakers are so accustomed to tourists that they
always ask twice the real value from a foreigner.

Except in large masses, or very high up, the new awnings
are often garish and unattractive; in purchasing them always
look out for fine old second-hand pieces. Specially hideous
and touristified are the awnings, hangings, portieres, etc., which
imitate in coloured cottons the paintings in the Tombs of the
Kings: they are coarse, and ill-coloured, and in execrable
taste; they bear no more resemblance to the originals than
a music-hall caricature would; they are hateful, and as
you drive or walk down the Tentmakers' Bazar the shopkeepers
call out to you incessantly to make you buy them.
Much the most effective designs are the texts from the
Koran.

CAIRO presents curious contrasts at night. Large portions
of it are plunged into outer darkness, with every
door locked and human beings as scarce as they are in the
city of London after business hours, while other streets are as
gay as the Yoshiwara quarters in Japan.

The native tradesman closes much earlier than the European;
the bazars are closed long before dinner time, and
with them most places of business in the native streets except
food shops. For the Arab loves to spend his time at cafés
and the Arab theatre. The foreign European residents also
love to spend their evenings at the Opera, and the English
are domesticated here as elsewhere; while the wealthier
tourists spend their time in dining out and dances at the
hotels.

If you are neither at the Opera nor at a hotel entertainment,
there is surprisingly little to do at Cairo in the evening; the
one outdoor amusement is to watch the fast life in the streets
at the back of the Esbekiya Gardens.

This, at any rate, is very interesting, if not very edifying;
in some places like the Haret-el-Roui it is simply appalling.
That is the quarter where the lowest houses of ill-fame are
situated. The women in them are mostly Jewesses, but
there are a certain number of Italians and many Levantines
among them. The Jewesses are mountains of flesh; the
Arabs admire obesity, but how they tolerate these creatures
I cannot understand. For they have cruel, bestial, ill-tempered
faces flaming with rouge, and their eyes blaze,

and their huge forms are arrayed in cheap and tawdry
finery and sham jewellery. They are everything that is
repulsive to an Englishman, and they live in the most
horrible little dens, some of which have cage fronts like
similar quarters in Japan.

Among the Levantines you see occasionally much more
attractive women, wild-eyed, lithe creatures—human leopards,
who sit on the ground outside their houses with their straight
strong legs, locked in heavy anclets, thrust out of their robes
without shoes or stockings.

They all solicit you, and pluck you by your clothes in
the most impudent way. Indeed it would be hardly safe to
go down these streets after nightfall without a dragoman,
for they are full of night-birds seeking whom they may
devour. They are the kind of creatures you see in the cafés
chantants, to which you are taken to witness the celebrated
danse à ventre, which is an intolerably tiresome performance.
The musicians tum-tum on native drums and drawl out
a monotonous sing-song, and the women stand in front of
the footlights and wriggle their bodies in the most ungainly
attitudes. It is difficult to imagine how they prove alluring
to any one.

The other notorious quarter in the Sharia Wagh-el-Birket
and the Sharia Bab-el-Bahri is far more entertaining, and
really pretty in its way. The former leads from the Hôtel
Bristol to the square by Cook's offices, and the latter
runs at right angles to it, connecting it with the Esbekiya
Gardens.

In the Sharia Bab-el-Bahri are the principal Arab theatre,
and other places of amusement, and there are always piano-organs
or bands playing the latest music-hall or comic-opera
airs. The whole street is a blaze of electric light. Its ends
are taken up with cafés, and its pavements are crowded with
vendors of tartlets, sweetmeats, meat on skewers, and sago in
teacups; while the cigarette-sellers have stalls that are works
of art.

The scarlet British uniforms of Tommy Atkins recall you
to a sense of reality. Tommy is for the most part behaving

very well, doing nothing worse than singing uproariously in
chorus, though occasionally he grows so “blind” that he has
to be taken home in a cab by his fellows. And an odd
sight it makes to see half a dozen or even a dozen Tommy
Atkinses, some “blind” and some leading the blind, crowded
into a Cairo arabeah with a tarbushed negro on the box
lashing a pair of white Arabs into a gallop. If Tommy
is too uproarious, sooner or later he will attract the attention
of the British military police riding majestically through
the city in pairs. His favourite haunt is a bar at the corner,
kept by a retired British sergeant with a Greek wife, which
has an excellent name with the authorities, and a piano
to accompany his choruses. It is surprising how well the
Tommies can play an accompaniment.

The Sharia Wagh-el-Birket is a more dissipated street,
though it is not so noisy or glary. For the whole of one side
of it is taken up with the apartments of the wealthier
courtesans, each with its balcony, over which its denizens hang
in negligés of virgin white. In the half-light the tall, Eastern-looking
houses, with their tiers of balconies with houris
hanging over them in all sorts of fantastic garments and
postures, loom up weird and romantic. Here you may see
an occasional “scene” or fracas, but it is the exception.

The opposite side of the street is arcaded—and under its
arcades are a succession of cafés, most of them filled with
Arabs consuming strong liquors indirectly forbidden by their
religion.

The Arab who wishes to break these ordinances without
defying them, assures himself that champagne is a mineral
water, and that spirits and ale and stout are not wines—perhaps
because they are under a separate heading on the
wine lists of restaurants. At these cafés he is generally
drinking bitter ale or stout, and sometimes eating little dishes
of meat or vegetables bought from the hawkers; if he is
not smoking. In some of the cafés there are noisy bands
of depraved-looking girls in comic-opera uniforms. The
most dazzling glare comes from the great open bars where
they sell cigarettes. The pavements are so crowded with

chairs that you can hardly pass along them; and the road
near the cafés, where the Arabs are sitting, is crowded with
their gay little white asses patiently waiting for them. All
sorts of street musicians wander about, many of them little
boys about ten years old, who pick out popular airs on
tinkling instruments. Sellers of foreign stamps are much in
evidence.

Were it not for the little white asses standing with their
forefeet on the pavement, or speeding down the street with
a pitter-patter of their tiny feet and a jingle and flash of
their silver neck-chains, and for the galloping white horses
of the arabeahs, the Arab-haunted cafés of Cairo would be
woefully inferior in picturesqueness to the cafés of Tunis;
the street is so confined compared to the broad Avenue Jules
Ferry, up which the Tunisian Arabs seem to float like
gorgeous butterflies in their light, bright, elegant robes. The
Cairo Arab does not dress elegantly—at his best, his clothes
are only clean and dignified. And one misses the trees.

There are other streets, like the Sharia Kamel, which have
long lines of brilliantly lit cafés; but the dullest kind of
people frequent them. The glittering bars of Cairo are not
really more interesting than other bars, though they are
florider, and are tended by very grand young ladies. The
Abbas theatre has its Covent Garden Balls. Here the British
subaltern, especially he of the Guards, is fancy-free; and he
is sometimes extremely funny when he is “ragging” to the
top of his bent.

When the moon hangs out her lantern, people make up
large parties to ride out on donkeys to the Pyramids or the
Tombs of the Caliphs. This is both picturesque and charming,
though it is a long ride for donkeys to the Pyramids. The
Tombs of the Caliphs look fairylike in the cool, white light
under the dazzling sapphire sky; and if you see it by
moonlight, you know the full pregnance of the saying, As
mysterious as the Sphinx.

The thing I enjoyed most in Cairo by moonlight was
to take an arabeah and drive to the deserted streets of
the Arab city. To sit in the Sharia el-Nahassin with not

one other human being in sight—or at the most two or
three figures from the “Arabian Nights” stealing silently
away in the shadows, has a simply magical effect. Never
do the hoary windows and minarets of the ancient Kalaun
Mosque look so like lace-work, threaded out of marble by
the hands of a Genie. Never does that procession, long
drawn-out, of mosque and palace and fountain, present to
the sky such a playful fancy of dome and minaret, balcony,
arch, and meshrebiya'd oriel. I felt as if they had fallen
asleep five hundred years ago, when Sultan Barkûk was
carried to his long rest here, and as if I were the magic
prince, privileged to look upon them for the last time before
they awoke to all the world. There is nothing more
romantic than a street purely mediaeval by the light of an
Egyptian moon.

From the Sharia el-Nahassin I used to drive up past the
fine soaring arches of the Beit-el-Kadi, once the palace
of the Fatimide Caliphs and under a mysterious archway to
the Gamaliya. There is no street in Cairo like the Gamaliya
at night. As you drive slowly down it to the old El-Nasr
Gate, you pass here a street full of overhanging harem
windows shuttered with meshrebiya centuries old; there a
mediaeval fountain with an arched Koran school above it,
and a little farther on a mosque of the great period of
Saracen building. Here you still find a gate to close the
end of the street, which leads down to the Palace of Sultan
Beibars; the tall khans of merchants, and the okelle of
the poor are black and silent in the night. But the charm
of the Gamaliya lies in this, that instead of being deserted
it is apt, where the bright lights are streaming from a
basement, to have a popular restaurant. On the night of
the Ashura it is to the Gamaliya that the actors in that
grim tragedy repair for supper, while the blood of their self-inflicted
wounds is still pouring from their scalps. Even the
Sharia el-Nahassin is hardly richer in old, forgotten buildings
of the fantastic Middle Ages.

The Molid-en-Nebbi is the celebration of the birthday
of the Prophet. We drove back to Abbasiya to a splendid

spectacle late that night, for the richly decorated tabernacles
which surrounded the vast square were a blaze of light, and
full of holy men reciting the Koran, and of dancing and
singing of religious natures, I supposed, the costumes being
very fine. I have never seen Ramadan in Egypt. In a
rich city like Cairo the Arabian nights of Ramadan must
be worth a book to themselves. About the most Arab and
the least Arab spectacle I ever went to was the Opera in
the Arab theatre. It was un-Arab, because it was all
so perfectly done. It might have been a chef d'oeuvre of
mimicking the Orient in a Paris theatre. It was so Arab
because its plot depended on a breach of Eastern etiquette.
The scene was laid in the Sheikh's house in Mecca, and the
actors all wore the dress of pure Arabs of Arabia. The
scenery was very simple, the costumes were very gorgeous.
Where the cloven foot of Christian civilisation showed was
in the sentimental sentiment of the love-songs and the importance
accorded to the women. The end would have
come so much sooner in real life.

IT is the Arab, not the Englishman, who takes his pleasures
sadly: his only regular amusement is hearing recitations
from the Koran. When Arab boys go out for a jolly walk
together, if they happen to start singing as boys will, they
sing bits of the Koran, not bits of comic operas; if you
pass down any of the Arab quarters by night and hear music,
it will be the Koran again. This is the chief kind of music,
which you hear in the street except when a marriage party
or a pilgrim from Mecca is being escorted home.

But the Arabs have charmingly written love-songs. The
love-songs of the fellahin women in Upper Egypt are known
to a few fortunate people from Mrs. Breasted's Translations.
They are delicious poetry, but the solemn Arab spoils their
effect by singing them in the same sort of voice, and with the
same sort of music, as he sings the Koran. You imagine that
he is limiting himself to hymns, when he is really indulging
in passionate serenades.

They have their singing women of great charm, and their
dancing women of no character, but you hear nothing of
them by chance and nothing of them by design unless you
take a good deal of trouble. The dancing women were all
supposed to have been banished to Esna—Esna of all places—by
a former Khedive. But you can see them in the Fishmarket
and the El Dorado cafés performing the danse à ventre
and other alluring exercises—the best of their kind.
Rod-el-Farag, the lower port of Cairo, has a row of cafés on
the banks of the Nile where dancing goes on, but here the

AN EFFENDI HAVING HIS FORTUNE TOLD OUTSIDE THE ESBEKIYA GARDENS.

ARAB SANGFROID. Effendis sitting down in the middle of the road to read a letter. In the background on the right is a human mat-shop.

performers are European, though the danse à ventre is
generally part of their programme.

As far as can be seen by the naked eye, the Arab does not
share the Jap's enthusiasm for the drama, though every Arab
was born an actor. There is ostensibly but one Arab theatre
in Cairo. Here they incline to a kind of operatic melodrama,
on the lines of our comic opera without the fun or the scenery
or the girls, but a similar mixture of music and dialogue.

I went there once with a Syrian friend and a rich young
Egyptian, a man-about-town, who was very musical. The
theatre was not much more substantial or costly in its fittings
than a Japanese theatre, which is little more than a shed
in the shape of a circus-tent, with matchwood partitions
between its boxes. Half the boxes here had harem-grills
like Sicilian nuns' churches. There were hardly any women
visible; only tarbûshes in front and turbans behind. They
were playing dear mad Oriental music when we went in. The
Syrian was apologetic. He said, “These people have no
music: it is all half tones.” The Egyptian took up the cudgels.
“What is music to you is not musical at all to them.
If an Arab goes to the Opera he asks, ‘What are they
shrieking at?’” The Syrian retorted with a story about the
Arab who went to the Opera at Paris, and did not care for
any of the music except the tuning up of the orchestra.
But they were the best of friends. The play began half an
hour late. The audience had spent that half-hour in clapping
for it. Its title pleased me very much. It was called
The Pardon that Killed.

When the play opened five men in the Arab costume (of
Arabia) were sitting on each side of the stage, with a black in
a red dress, and another Arab always putting his head out of
the door looking for something that was supposed to be
going on behind the stage. They were sitting quite naturally.
The King reclined on a sofa with a sham leopard's skin;
the others were sitting up. There was an old man, with a
long white beard, to show that he was the funny man; his
sallies were much appreciated—everybody always clapped
before they heard what he had to say. Then there was a

burst of Oriental music, and the King's wives came in. The
chief wife was distinguished by wearing a dressing-gown,
with a wide blue sash round her waist which had little red
ends. She was an Egyptian-Jewess; the King, I should
have said, wore a grand green satin dress under his red
burnouse. They had a prologue which lasted a long time.
In the first act you were given to understand that the King
was a good man, who protected all the villages round him.
His cousin, whose father had been killed by the King's father,
was plotting revenge. But he would be punished by the old
man with the white beard. I slept through the rest of that
act and only woke when they began to play Algerian music
between the acts. The music was very like the tum-tumming
you get in Japanese theatres, but it seemed appropriate. In
the second act there was a tree in the middle of the stage,
and the man who was believed to be killed came in dressed
all in white. The last thing I remember of that act was our
Syrian friend's protesting to the Egyptian that there is no
Oriental music, that there are only Oriental tunes. The
Egyptian's reply was so long that I went to sleep again.
Then came a harem scene with two slaves talking. They
went on and on. I slept for the rest of the play.

Yet I believe it was quite a good play for those who knew
enough Arabic to understand the dialogue. Unfortunately
for the ordinary tourist, there was very little action or scenery—it
was all talk. Some Arabic plays have almost as much
singing in them as a comic opera, and the singing is generally
excellent.

There is one very famous Arab actor in Cairo who seems
to be quite a Danjuro in the privileges he can give himself
with the public.

I have been told that there are quite a number of secret
theatrical performances, where the play always stops directly
a European enters. The dramas may of course be Nationalist
ebullitions of a kind which requires keeping secret. A
friend of mine had a Berberine servant who was devoted to
him. This Berberine was very fine and large about these
secret theatres, and was always making appointments to take

my friend there “to-morrow night,” but to-morrow night
invariably fell through on some pretext. “The chief performer
was ill,” or anything else that was necessary when the
actual time came to go. There cannot be anything about
them to make them more immoral than hashish dens, and
the love-shops of the Fishmarket, and the gambling hells
kept by Levantines. I don't know how much of a gambler
the Arab is. Cairo swarms with gambling dens kept by
Levantines, who change their nationality like a chameleon,
when they are raided, so as to involve proceedings in one
consular court after another. All sorts of swindling goes on,
the favourite games being baccarat and, save the mark! backgammon.
It seems clever to gamble over backgammon; it
must be so hard to get a run for your money.

Of still more concern to the police are the hashish dens
and houses of ill-fame. The use of hashish is prohibited
with savage earnestness, but it is not prevented if an
important personage is giving a dinner-party. The highest
compliment he can pay his guests is to take them to hashish
afterwards, instead of a theatre or music-hall, as he would in
England. And he can get served without difficulty. But
it is almost impossible for an Englishman, in the ordinary
way, to get served at a hashish den; he is at once suspected
of being in league with its suppressors. Much
caution is preserved with any customer. There are various
doors to pass, with little wickets in them, through which the
porter can survey the intruder. The keepers of hashish
dens are more often raided and change their nationality
oftener than any other servants of the devil, though there
was a famous member of the demi-monde, living opposite
Shepheard's Hotel, who almost established a record for the
number of nations to which she had belonged.

One is impelled to the conclusion that the Egyptian
seeks entertainment for his body rather than his mind. In the
evening, which he devotes to amusement, his ordinary
recreations are talk, drink, and vice. To do him justice, he is
mean about his vices. If he drinks the forbidden stimulants
of the foreigner, he does not spend much on them.

It is only his regularity at the cafe that makes him worth
considering as a customer, and he spends much more time
on talking to his men-friends than the female charmers of
the Fishmarket and the Sharia Wagh-el-Birket, popularly
known as the Esbekiya Street.

The Egyptian pays interminable calls upon his friends,
with nothing to enliven them but conversation, coffee, and
tobacco. It is indeed lucky for him that tobacco is cheap
in Egypt.

How the café-keeper lives in Egypt is a mystery to me,
unless the Egyptian subscribes to a café as he would to a club.
He never seems to be doing anything for the good of the
house, except hiring a pipe for some pitiful coin. He smokes,
reads the café's newspaper, plays dominoes, talks to his friends,
or ogles the foreign ladies. He seems to do anything rather
than order drinks—except in the Esbekiya Street, where
he sits and sips the beverages forbidden by the Koran,
with a dear little white donkey waiting for him in the
gutter.

When he is in a more licentious mood he goes to the
café in the Esbekiya Street, where a band of white female
slaves discourses the lowest class of music, or to see dancing
women whose dancing consists only of suggestive movements
of their bodies—an ineffably dull performance in any other
respect. The Fishmarket appeals more powerfully to him
than to a European. This is a quarter of Cairo infested by
the Ghawazee dancers and Jewish and Levantine and Italian
women of pleasure. Some of them are beautiful and fascinating
women. But most of them are monsters, with no
attraction but their great passionate eyes. The Arabs like
large women. I have said elsewhere what a horrible sight it
is to go through the Fishmarket when these women are
hanging about for patrons. It is bad enough to see the
Oriental Jewesses sitting on the pavement, with their handsome
bare legs heavily ancleted and stretched out to attract
attention, but it is worse to see a pretty Italian woman with
her slender, neatly stockinged legs confined in anclets to show
that she is Orientalised—a creature at the beck and call of

Egyptian debauchees. The Italian women of pleasure have
their names on brass plates outside their doors.

The Arab goes a good deal to the sort of open-air theatre
which is run during the summer at the Ghezira end of
the Nile Bridge with European performers, who do the
usual music-hall turns.

A café with plenty of electric light and a gramophone
or a piano-organ or, better than all, a female string band
is exciting enough for the Arab in the ordinary way. To
make up for this he has a passion for attending weddings
and the receptions of pilgrims from Mecca, who are always
welcomed like prodigal sons.

In either case you know that something is on foot, because
the street leading up to it hung, sometimes for half a mile,
with little red and white flags, of the Khedivial emblem and
the inevitable texts, mixed with large tin lanterns to attract
the attention of friends by night. There is no difficulty
about identifying the house at which the celebration is
taking place, because a sort of marquee will have been
erected outside it—a most picturesque affair—lined with
brilliantly coloured texts from the Koran and packed with
chairs. The entertainment which goes on in this tent is of
the most sombre gaiety—selections from the Koran, sedate
and dignified conversation and speeches. The speeches are
delivered with fluency, feeling, and graceful motions; the
Egyptian is a speechifier born.

An Arab procession, which is much the same, whether its
object is a pilgrim or a wedding, is a highly picturesque
affair. By day it consists of mirror-bearers, bands of barbaric
music mounted on camels in gorgeous scarlet trappings
decorated with cowrie shells and bits of looking-glass, bagpipe-players
and standard-bearers on foot, sumptuous palanquins
of old dark wood inlaid with ivory and silver and
mother-of-pearl slung between two camels, a swarm of
sheikhs on white asses, and a troupe of jesters and mountebanks
to amuse the crowd.

I always seized my kodak when I heard the bagpipes
and cymbals and tum-turm drums of Oriental thanksgiving

There are night processions too, but they are much simpler;
there is often not even a band—chanting taking its place.
The picturesque feature is the use of the mesh'al, a staff
with a cylindrical frame of iron at its top filled with flaming
wood; there can be any number up to five of these cressets
on one staff. The pilgrim from Mecca and the bridegroom
on his zeffeh are alike lighted by these mesh'als. There is a
still grander affair of a frame with four circular tiers of
small lamps—the top one revolving, which is used in a high-class
zeffeh to the accompaniment of hautboys and drums—the
favourite time being in the middle of the night. We used
to be awakened by them in Cairo itself at the back of the
Hotel Continental. And I shall have more to say about
them in the chapter on Arab domestic processions.

WE put off seeing the Barrage at the head of the Delta,
the Barrage par excellence, till the end of our visit
to Cairo, because we wished the vegetation to be as forward
as possible, and we had been told that the Shem-en-Nesim at
the Barrage was one of the sights of Egypt. Shem-en-Nesim
means “The Smelling of the Zephyr,” and it is a Christian
feast held on the Easter Monday of the Copts and Greeks;
but the Arabs all keep it, and every one goes out into the
country for a picnic on that day, because the Shem-en-Nesim
is supposed to mark the beginning of the season of the
Khamsin, the dreaded hot winds.

We had been promised a private launch for the trip, but
the launch behaved like a motor car when it is wanted, so we
went down in the ordinary steamer of the tramway company,
and would not have missed it for anything; it was so very
Levantine.

It was pleasant to go on the Nile again just before leaving
the country, for it brought back our old days in Upper Egypt
so vividly, the gyassas flying before the
stiff north wind, the usual woman doing her washing on the shore of the Nile,
with her silver anclets gleaming through the water, the
usual water-sellers filling their skins were there at the start as
the Levantines were crowding on board, bringing their lunch
in stay-boxes and cardboard hat-boxes.

When the boat had once started we were soon in an
atmosphere of palm-groves and sakiyas and buffaloes. The
white-winged gyassas were gay with the little scarlet flags

used for marriages and the return of pilgrims from
Mecca.

The villages here are debauched with foreign-looking villas;
they are almost suburban compared with the villages of the
Upper Nile, which look as if they had been put up by the
Pharaohs.

To make up for this we have on the one side the embattled
front of the Citadel, with the soaring dome and minarets of
the Mehemet Ali Mosque, and on the other the hot desert
with the two great Pyramids behind it purpling above the
acacia avenues. These hardly ever left us till we approached
the Barrage. It was all so like the Upper Nile; the great pied
kingfisher flew beside us; the buffalo was wallowing in the
water like a hippopotamus. But the sakiyas and shadufs all
had shelters of trees and boughs. What a windy place the
Nile always is!

Arabs are easy people to cater for on a steamer; they
require no seats, as they always squat on the ground, and
they don't mind how bad the accommodation is so long as it
is cheap. We sped down past low green banks and pink
deserts with the Citadel Mosque and the Pyramids growing
more fairy-like than ever in the distance which enchants, and
all of a sudden saw the Barrage rising up before us. It is
typically French, rather like the miniature Lourdes put up by
the pious French in the gardens of the Vatican as an apology
for their nation. It is an imposing castellated sort of affair,
with minarets in the centre and a campanile at each end,
and more minarets and more campanili in the woods. But it
was not of the slightest use as a barrage until an English
engineer, Sir Colin Scott-Moncrieff, made it practicable at a
cost of four hundred and fifty thousand pounds rather than
allow such a picturesque landmark to be taken down.

I believe that it does its work well now, and accept
common report as to that. I was much more occupied with
the exquisite gardens into which the fort built to guard the
Barrage has been converted. The bastions lined with
flowers had quite an Alma Tadema effect. The first thing
we saw on landing was the performing dog-faced baboon

GREEKS DANCING IN THE GARDENS AT THE DELTA BARRAGE ON THE BANK HOLIDAY OF CAIRO—THE SHEM-EN-NESIM.

BLIND SAINT AT THE DELTA BARRAGE.

with his master, and the marionette show, which looks like
a doll's house, that we had so often seen at the various festivals.

Over every hedge poured fragrant flowers like roses and
honeysuckle. I was curious to see how the Egyptians, Arabs
by religion but not by race, took their pleasures. A favourite
form of amusement for a Gyppy was to sit with his coat off,
singing and drumming with his heels. The Arab groups crowding
these lawns were nearly all men and boys. I thought at
first that half of them must be acrobats. For they brought
squares of carpet with them; but it appeared that they were
merely good Mohammedans who were going to say their
prayers at the usual times. The favourite actual game of
the Egyptians was playing at sideways-leapfrog.

The Greeks were decidedly more interesting to watch, for
they were dancing their national dances as they do on Easter
Monday in the temple of Zeus Olympius at Athens, which
has arrangements for such base uses. They danced very
well, and some of their young women were extremely beautiful.
These girls were in their national dress, in which a fine
lawn chemisette plays a great part; with their classic faces,
elegant figures, and spirited dancing they made a charming
contrast against the bamboo groves and trees tangled
over with bougainvilleas. The Greek men are good-looking
too, but unfortunately inclined to the shiny black clothes and
black wideawake hats dear to the hearts of plebeians all over
the world. The Greek men took their coats and waistcoats
off to dance, but they were distanced by the Levantines, who
some of them came dressed like gymnasium professionals,
while their women took their dresses off and sat in their
petticoats because they were hot. The effect of a Levantine
woman, usually adipose by the time that she is thirty, sitting
with her dress off in a public garden, letting off steam, is
simply paralysing, especially when she wears a white wreath
instead of a hat. There is no reason why any one should
feel thirsty in Egypt, for, whenever it is hot enough, there are
boys selling lemonade, boys selling oranges, boys with water
kullas balanced on their shoulders every few yards. I saw

one Levantine paying a pretty Biblical attention to a friend:
he was anointing his beard.

As the day grew hotter all the Arabs took off their coats
and hats and some their trousers as well. This does not
signify in an Arab, who wears such things over his national
costume. When they had shed their clothes they sat down
in rings under the trees. They did not put their clothes on
again when it was time to move, they simply carried them
away on their heads. A few Levantine women had come
in black satin dominoes; they did not take them off, though
they felt far too hot in them. The Arabs seemed to bring
anything they liked into the gardens with them, even a camel,
so long as they kept it muzzled to prevent it lunching off the
cascades of bougainvilleas and the heavy-scented white
blossoms which were hanging on the daturas like fairy lights.
I was sorry for this; I wished to know if a camel's stomach
could stand datura poison. In one place we came upon
quite a cotillon of Greeks dancing in rings to the music of a
base viol and two fiddles playing an Oriental tune. The viol-player
had a feather. When they had done dancing they
took off their boots and sat down under a cabbage tree.

The blaze of flowers here was simply wonderful. The
prickly pears were covered with blossoms which looked like
yellow sea-anemones; the roses were growing in thickets as
azaleas grow in Japan, and everywhere was the little mauve
flower like thrift, which takes the place of the daisy in Egypt.
The pools were gay with the ancient emblems of Lower and
Upper Egypt, the papyrus and the lotus. The Greek man
takes off his coat to play games, the Greek woman ties up
her head. Which is the most sensible?

I shall not readily forget that day at the Barrage. I have
seldom seen lovelier gardens, bordered as they are by the
broad blue waters of the Nile, and broken by little green
valleys containing clear streams and rich thickets of bamboo.
Every rise and depression is taken advantage of, and there
is hardly a level rood in the gardens. The trees are linked
together with flowering creepers and lianas, as the elms are
linked with vines in Lombardy.

One of the chief charms on the day of the Shem-en-Nesim
was the way in which every alley was filled with natives in
brilliant dresses and their stalls and their asses and beggars
and water-sellers. It was as if the Ataba-el-Khadra had
emptied itself into the Barrage gardens. We ate our lunch,
which Ramidge's precious Mustapha had been carrying
behind us, in an arbour of tropical lianas flaming with
blossom.

On the way back the boat was a pandemonium. The
reis, who takes the place of a captain on a Nile boat, kept
shouting the same thing down the tube to Mist’ Ibrahim
and Mohammed somebody. At intervals he blew a whistle
to attract their attention. I asked Ramidge, who had
acquired a remarkable familiarity with Low Arabic in the
Sudan, what the captain kept saying. One imagined that
it must be to tell them to make the boat go faster, as she
was only going about three miles an hour. But what he
really was saying was “May you be eaten by fleas!” which
was probably another way of telling them to get up more
steam. This was not the only thing he said, but the curses
were too picturesque to translate for publication in England.
To add to the noise, several steamers were returning to
Cairo side by side, and most of the Arabs on them, however
well-dressed, were enjoying themselves characteristically
by chanting the Koran with the drawn-out hoarseness of
a railway whistle. Even people in golf-collars were chanting
the Koran. But if collars were a qualification for Parliamentary
suffrage Egypt would be ready for it at once.

While this awful noise was going on, while the boats, were
so crowded with squatting Arabs that there was hardly room
to put your feet down for standing, I was saved from swearing
by hearing a sweet little girl about four say: “By the grace
of God what a number of people there are!” She said it
in Arabic—I give Ramidge's translation.

Many of the boats which flew past before the wind were
decorated with palm-leaves. It was very pleasant running
up before a strong north breeze, with sakiyas under green
mimosas reminding us of those unforgettable days when we

were going up the Nile to Khartûm; and with the horizon
on our left bounded by the aerial domes and flying
minarets of the great mosque on the brow of Saladin's
Citadel; and the horizon on our right bounded by the misty,
purple forms of the two great pyramids of Gizeh soaring above
the palm groves. The Pyramids and the Citadel! It was
pleasant to have an hour to gaze at them and meditate
about this wonderful half year of my life on this, our last
excursion in Egypt.

THE Cairo Zoo has many things to recommend it, and
the best of all is that you only have to pay a small
piastre—an Egyptian penny—to go in. This is because the
natives would not pay any more, and it is supposed to
exist for their education.

A more futile supposition there never was. The Egyptian
mind that is to say, the mind of the Egyptian masses, has
not got beyond the afrit stage. They do not go to see the
animals as zoological specimens, which have nearly all of
them the further interest of being found in their sovereign's
dominions; they look upon them as evil spirits whom the
Khedive has compelled to assume the form of animals and
shut up in cages. I was there one day with an Arab-speaking
friend when we came upon an Egyptian shaking
his fist at a crocodile, an innocent young thing of about
seven feet long. I asked my friend to interpret his remarks,
because I saw that he was cheeking the crocodile. “You
eat my brother,” he said, “and pretended that he was
drowned.” Now we have got you! Yah! Yah!