Part 6

I had pictured Cairo as an Oriental city of much color, with beautiful minarets piercing the sky-line, and with much richness of decoration on the outside of its palaces and mosques. Cairo is divided into two parts, that which is old and decaying and that which is European and modern; the prevailing colors of both are gray, a dull yellow, and white. The mosques are of gray stone, the houses of dirty white, and in the new part the palaces and residences remind one of white Italian villas. These are surrounded by tropical gardens, which alone save the city from one monotonous variation of sombre colors. It is not, therefore, the buildings, either new or old, which make Cairo one of the most picturesque and incongruous and entertaining of cities in the whole world; it is the people who live in it and who move about in it, and who are so constantly in the streets that from the Citadel above the city its roar comes to you like the roar of London. In that city it is the voice of traffic and steam and manufactures, but in Cairo it emanates from the people themselves, who talk and pray and shout and live their lives out-of-doors. These people are the natives, the European residents, the Army of Occupation, and, during the winter months, the tourists. When you say natives you include Egyptians, Arabians, Copts, Syrians, negroes from the Upper Nile, and about a hundred other subdivisions, which embrace every known nationality of the East.

Mixed with these are the residents, chiefly Greek and French and Turks, and the Army of Occupation, who, when they are not in beautiful uniforms, are in effective riding-clothes, and their wives and sisters in men's shirts and straw hats or Karkee riding-habits. The tourists, for their part, wear detective cameras and ready-made ties if they are Americans, and white helmets and pugarees floating over their necks and white umbrellas if they are English. This latter tropical outfit is spoiled somewhat by the fact that they are forced to wear overcoats the greater part of the time; but as they always take the overcoats off when they are being photographed at the base of the pyramids, their envious friends at home imagine they are in a warm climate.

The longer you remain in Cairo the more satisfying it becomes, as you find how uninterruptedly the old, old life of the people is going on about you, and as you discover for yourself bazars and mosques and tiny workshops and open cafes of which the guide-books say nothing, and to which there are no guides. You can see all the show-places in Cairo of which you have read in a week, and yet at the end of the week you feel as though what you had seen was not really the city, but just the goods in the shop-window. So keep away from show-places. Lose yourself in the streets, or sit idly on the terrace of your hotel and watch the show move by, feeling that the best of it, after all, lies in the fact that nothing you see is done for show; that it is all natural to the people or the place; that if they make pictures of themselves, they do so unconsciously; and that no one is posing except the tourist in his pith helmet.

The bazars in Cairo cover much ground, and run in cliques according to the nature of the goods they expose for sale. From a narrow avenue of red and yellow leather shoes you come to another lane of rugs and curtains and cloth, and through this to an alley of brass--brass lamps and brass pots and brass table-tops--and so on into groups of bookbinders, and of armorers, and sellers of perfumes. These lanes are unpaved, and only wide enough at places for two men to push past at one time; at the widest an open carriage can just make its way slowly, and only at the risk of the driver's falling off his box in a paroxysm of rage. The houses and shops that overhang these filthy streets are as primitive and old as the mud in which you tramp, but they are fantastically and unceasingly beautiful. On the level of the street is the bazar--a little box with a show-case at one side, and at the back an oven, or a forge, or a loom, according to the nature of the thing which is being made before your eyes. Goldsmiths beat and blow on the raw metal as you stand at their elbow; bakers knead their bread; laundrymen squirt water over the soiled linen; armorers hammer on a spear-head, which is afterwards to be dug up and sold as an assegai from the Soudan; and the bookbinders to the Khedive paste and tool the leather boxes for his Highness with the dust from the street covering them and their work, with two dogs fighting for garbage at their feet, and the uproar of thousands of people ringing in their ears. The Oriental cannot express himself in the street without shouting. Everybody shouts--donkey-boys and drivers, venders of a hundred trifles, police and storekeepers, auctioneers and beggars. They do not shout occasionally, but continually. They have to shout, or they will either trample on some one or some one will as certainly trample on them. Camels and donkeys and open carriages and mounted police move through the torrent of pedestrians as though they were figures of the imagination, and had no feelings or feet. On the second story over each bazar is the home of its owner. The windows of this story are latticed, and bulge forward so that the women of the harem may look down without being themselves seen. Above these are square, heavy balconies of carved open wood-work, very old and very beautiful. Scattered through the labyrinth of the bazars are the mosques, with wide, dirty steps covered with the red and yellow shoes of the worshippers within, and with high minarets, and facades carved in relief with sentences from the Koran, or with the name of the Sultan to whom the temple is dedicated.

The bazars are very much as one imagines they should be, the fact that impresses you most about them being, I think, that such beautiful things should come from such queer little holes of dirt and poverty, and that you should stand ankle-deep in mud while you are handling turquoises and gold filigree-work as delicate as that of Regent Street or Broadway. At the bazars to which the dragomen take tourists you will be invited to sit down on a cushion and to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, but you will pay, if you purchase anything, about a pound for each cup of coffee you take. The best bazars for bargains are those in Old Cairo, to which you should go alone. In either place it is the rule to offer one-third of what you are asked--as I found it was not the rule to do in Tangier--and it is not always safe to offer a third unless you want the article very much, as you will certainly get it at that price. You feel much more at home in the bazars and the cafes and in all of the out-of-door life of Cairo than in that of Tangier, owing to the good-nature of the Egyptian. The Moor resents your presence, and though that in itself is attractive, the absolute courtesy of the Egyptian, when it is not, as it seldom is, servility, has also its advantage. If you raised your stick to a Moorish donkey-boy, for instance, you would undoubtedly have as much rough-and-tumble fighting as you could attend to at one time; but you have to beat an Egyptian donkey-boy, or strike at him, or a dozen of him, if you want peace, and every time you hit him he comes up smiling, and with renewed assurances that the Flying Dutchman is a very good donkey, and that all the other donkeys are "velly sick." There is nothing so inspiring as the sight of a carefully bred American girl, who would feel remorse if she scolded her maid, beating eight or nine donkey-boys with her umbrella, until she breaks it, and so rides off breathless but triumphant. This shows that necessity knows no laws of social behavior.

When you are weary of fighting your way through the noise and movement of the bazars, you can find equal entertainment on the terrace of your hotel. There are several hotels in Cairo. There is one to which you should certainly go if you like to see your name encompassed by those of countesses and princes, and of Americans who spell Smith with a "y" and put a hyphen between their second and third names. There are, as I say, a great many hotels in Cairo, but Shepheard's is so historical, and its terrace has been made the scene of so many novels, that all sorts of amusing people go there, from Sultans to the last man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo, and its terrace is like a private box at a mask ball. About the best way to see Cairo is in a wicker chair here under waving palms, something to smoke, and with a warm sun on your back, and the whole world passing by in front of you. Broadway, I have no doubt, is an interesting thoroughfare to those who do not know it. I should judge from the view one has of the soles of numerous boots planted against the windows of hotels along its course that Broadway to the visiting stranger is an infinite source of entertainment. But there are no camels on Broadway, and there are no sais.

A camel by itself is one of the most interesting animals that has ever been created, but when it blocks the way of a dog-cart, and a smart English groom endeavors to drive around it, the incongruity of the situation appeals to you as nothing on Broadway can ever do. Mr. Laurence Hutton, who was in Cairo before I reached it, has pointed out that the camel is the real aristocrat of Egypt. The camel belongs to one of the very first families; he was there when Mena ruled, and he is there now. It does not matter to him whether it is a Pharaoh or a Mameluke or a Napoleon or a Mixed Tribunal that is in power, his gods are unchanged, and he and the palm-tree have preserved their ancient individuality through centuries. He shows that he knows this in the proud way in which he holds his head, and in his disdainful manner of waving and unwinding his neck, and in the rudeness with which he impedes traffic and selfishly considers his own comfort. These are the signs of ancient lineage all the world over. He is not the shaggy, moth-eaten object we see in the circus tent at home. He is nicely shaven, like a French poodle, and covered with fine trappings, and he bends and struts with the dignity of a peacock. He possesses also that uncertainty of conduct that is the privilege of a royal mind; fellahin and Arabs pretend they are his masters, and lead him about with a rope, but that never disturbs him nor breaks his spirit. When he wants to lie down he lies down, whether he is in the desert or in the Ezbekiyeh Road; and when he decides to get up he leaves you in doubt for some feverish seconds as to which part of him will get up first. To properly appreciate the camel you should ride him and experience his getting up and his sitting down. He never does either of these things the same way twice. Sometimes he breaks one leg in two or three places where it had never broken before, and sinks or rises in a northeasterly direction, and then suddenly changes his course and lurches up from the rear, and you grasp his neck wildly, only to find that he is sinking rapidly to one side, and rising, with a jump equal to that of a horse taking a fence, in the front. He can disjoint himself in more different places, than explorers have found sources for the river Nile, and there is no keener pleasure than that which he affords you in watching the countenance of a friend who is being elevated on his back for the first time. He and the palm-tree can make any landscape striking, and he and the sais are the most picturesque features of Cairo.

The sais is a runner who keeps in front of a carriage and warns common people out of the way, and who beats them with a stick if they do not hurry up about it. He is a relic of the days when the traffic in all of the streets was so congested that he was an absolute necessity; now he makes it possible for a carriage to move forward at a trot, which without his aid it could not do. It is obvious that to do this he must run swiftly. Most men when they run bend their bodies forward and keep their mouths closed in order to save their wind. The sais runs with his shoulders thrown back and trumpeting like an enraged elephant. He holds his long wand at his side like a musket, and not trailing in his hand like a walking-stick, and he wears a soft shirt of white stuff, and a sleeveless coat buried in gold lace. His breeches are white, and as voluminous as a woman's skirts; they fall to a few inches above his knee; the rest of his brown leg is bare, and rigid with muscle. On his head he has a fez with a long black tassel, and a magnificent silk scarf of many colors is bound tightly around his waist. He is a perfect ideal of color and movement, and as he runs he bellows like a bull, or roars as you have heard a lion roar at feeding-time in a menagerie. It is not a human cry at all, and you never hear it, even to the last day of your stay in Cairo, without a start, as though it were a cry of "help!" at night, or the quick-clanging bell of a fire-engine. There is nothing else in Cairo which is so satisfying. There are sometimes two sais running abreast, dressed exactly alike, and with the upper part of their bodies as rigid as the wand pressed against their side, and with the ends of their scarf and the long tassel streaming out behind. As they yell and bellow, donkeys and carriages and people scramble out of their way until the carriage they precede has rolled rapidly by. Only princesses of the royal harem, and consuls-general, and the heads of the Army of Occupation and the Egyptian army are permitted two sais; other people may have one. They appealed to me as much more autocratic appendages than a troop of lifeguards. The rastaquouere who first introduces them in Paris will make his name known in a day, and a Lord Mayor's show or a box-seat on a four-in-hand will be a modest and middle-class distinction in comparison.

These camels and sais are but two of the things you see from your wicker chair on the marble terrace at Shepheard's. The others are hundreds of donkey-boys in blue night-gowns slit open at the throat and showing their bare breasts, and with them as many long-eared donkeys, rendered even more absurd than they are in a state of nature by fantastic clippings of their coats and strings of jangling brass and blue beads around their necks.

There are also the women of Cairo, the enslaved half of Egypt, who have been brought, through generations of training and tradition, to look upon any man save their husband as their enemy, as a thing to be shunned. This has become instinct with them, as it is instinctive with women of Northern countries to turn to men for sympathy or support, as being in some ways stronger than themselves. But these women of Cairo, who look like an army of nuns, are virtually shut off from mankind, with the exception of one man, as are nuns, and they have not the one great consolation allowed the nun--they have no souls to be saved, nor religion, nor a belief in a future life.

There was a young girl married while I was in Cairo. The streets around the palace of her father were hung with flags for a week; the garden about his house was enclosed with a tent which was worth in money twenty thousand dollars, and which was as beautiful to the eye as the interior of a mosque; for a week the sheiks who rented the estates of the high contracting parties were fed at their expense; for a week men sang and bands played and the whole neighborhood feasted; and on the last night everybody went to the wedding and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and listened to a young man singing Arabian love-songs. I naturally did not see the bride. The women who did see her described her as very beautiful, barely sixteen years old, and covered with pearls and diamonds. She was weeping bitterly; her mother, it appeared, had arranged the match. I did not see her, but I saw the bridegroom. He was fat and stupid, and over sixty, and he had white hair and a white beard. A priest recited the Koran before him at the door of the house, and a band played, and the people cheered the Khedive three times, and then the crowd parted, and the bridegroom was marched to the door which led to the stairs, at the top of which the girl awaited him. Two grinning eunuchs crouched on this dark staircase, with lamps held high above their heads, and closed the door behind him. His sixteen-year-old bride has him to herself now--him and his eunuchs--until he or she dies. We could show similitudes between this wedding and some others in civilized lands, but it is much too serious a matter to be cynical about.

The women of Egypt are as much slaves as ever were the negroes of our South. They are petted and fattened and given a home, but they must look at life through barriers--barriers across their boxes at the opera, and barriers across the windows of their broughams when they drive abroad, and barriers across their very faces. As long as one-half of the Egyptian people are enslaved and held in bondage and classed as animals without souls, so long will an Army of Occupation ride over the land, and insult by its presence the khedival power. No country in these days can be truly great in which the women have no voice, no influence, and no respect. There are worse things in Egypt than bad irrigation, and the harem is the worst of them. If the Egyptians want to be free themselves, they should first free their daughters and their mothers. The educated Egyptian is ashamed of his national costume; but let him feel shame for some of his national customs. A frock-coat and a harem will not go together.

The English, who have done so many fine things for Egypt's good, and who keep an army there to emphasize the fact, have arranged that any slave who comes to the office of the Consul-General and claims his protection can have it; but these slaves of the married men are not granted even this chance of escape.

And so they live like birds in a cage. They eat and dress and undress, and expose their youth and beauty, and hide their age and ugliness, until they die. The cry along the Nile a few years ago was, "Egypt for the Egyptians," and a very good cry it was, although the wrong man first started it. But there was another cry raised in the land of Egypt many hundreds of years before of "Let my people go," and the woman who can raise that again to-day, and who can set free her sisters of the East, will be doing a greater work than any woman is doing at the present time or has ever done.

The women who pass before you in the procession at the foot of the terrace are of two classes only. There is no middle class in Egypt. The poor are huddled up in a black bag that hides their bodies from the crown of the head to the feet. What looks like the upper end of a black silk stocking falls over the face from the bridge of the nose and fastens behind the ears, and a brass tube about the size of a spool is tied between the eyes. You see in consequence nothing but their eyes, and as these are perhaps their best feature, they do not all suffer from their enforced disguise. The only women whose bare faces you can see, and from whom you may judge of the beauty of the rest, are the good women of the Coptic village, who form a sort of sisterhood, and the dancing-girls, who are not so good. Some of these have the straight nose, the narrow eyes, and the perfect figure of Cleopatra, as we picture her; but the faces of the majority are formless, with broad, fat noses, full lips, and their figures are without waists or hips, and their ankles are as round as a man's upper arm. When they are pretty they are very pretty, but those that are so are so few and are so covered with gold that one suspects they are very much the exception. Of the women of the upper class you see only a glimpse as they are swept by in their broughams, with the sais in front and a eunuch on the box and the curtains half lowered.

Besides these, much passes that is intended for your especial entertainment. Sellers of turquoises, which they dig out from various creases in their robes; venders of stuffed crocodiles and live monkeys; strange men from the desert with a jackal, which they throw, bound by all four legs, and snarling and snapping, on the marble at your feet; little girls who sing songs, and play accompaniments to them on their throats with the tips of their fingers; women conjurers, who draw strings of needles and burning flax from their mouths, and who swallow nasty little wriggling snakes, and hatch pretty fluffy little chickens out of the slabs of the terrace. Or else there is a troop of blue and white Egyptian soldiers marching by, or gorgeous young officers on polo ponies, or red-coated Tommies on donkeys, with their toes trailing in the dust and the ribbons of their Scotch caps floating out behind; and consuls-general with gorgeous guards in gold lace, and with wicked-looking curved silver swords; or the young Khedive himself, who comes with a great clatter of hoofs and bellowing sais before, and another galloping troop of cavalry in the rear, at the sound of which the people run to the curb and touch the fez, as he raises his hand to his, and rolls by in a cloud of dust.

There are very good things to see, and with a companion on one side to explain them, and another on the other side to whom you can impart this information as though you had been born knowing it, you cannot spend a more entertaining afternoon. There is only one drawback, and that is a lurking doubt that you should be up and about seeing the show-places. Friday, in consequence, is the best day in Cairo, as all the things you ought to see are then closed, and you can sit still on the terrace with a clear conscience. Among the mosques and the tombs and the palaces and museums to which all good tourists go, and of which there are excellent descriptions, giving their various dimensions and other particulars, in the guide-books, there are the Citadel and the Mosque of Mehemet Ali. The Citadel is the fortress built on the hill above the city, but which, with the Oriental incompleteness of that time, was reared upon high but not upon the highest ground. The sequel to this naturally was that when Mehemet Ali wanted the city of Cairo he sought out the highest ground, and dropped cannon-balls into the fortress until it capitulated. He afterwards asked all the Mamelukes to dinner at the Citadel, and then had them treacherously killed--all but one, who rode his horse down the side of the Citadel and escaped. If you can imagine the reservoir at Forty-second Street placed upon the top of Madison Square Garden, and a man riding down the side of it, you can understand what a very difficult and dangerous thing this was to do. There is no doubt that he did it, for I saw a picture of him in the very act in a book of history when I was at school, and I also have seen the marks of his horse's hoofs in the stone parapet of the Citadel, and they are just as fresh as they were three years ago, when they were on the other side.