Part 20

The day was well along when we reached Cairo and, after the usual battle with the Ishmaelites, drove to Shepheard's Hotel. As there is only one Egypt, so there is only one Shepheard's Hotel. There are other hotels as large and as lavish, with as fair gardens, perhaps, but I believe there is no other hotel on the planet where you can sit on a vast balmy terrace and look down on such a panorama of the nations--American, European, Asiatic, African--such a universal congress of pleasure as each winter assembles here. It would take a more riotous pen than mine to achieve a description of that mixture. If the reader can imagine a World's Fair Midway of every nationality and every costume and every language and mode of locomotion under the sun, and can see mingled with it all the dark-faced sellers of shawls and scarabs, and beads and relics, the picture will serve, and we will let it go at that.

And perhaps I may as well say here that Cairo is the wildest, freest place in Christendom. The confluence of Upper and Lower Egypt--the Delta and the Nile--here on the edge of the desert, it is the veritable jumping-off place where all conventions melt away. It is the neutral ground where East and West meet--each to adopt the special privilege and license of the other--madly to compete in lavishness of dress and the reckless joy of living. In the language of the Reprobates, "One gets his money's worth in Cairo, if he makes his headquarters at Shepheard's and sits in the game." But he will require a certain capital to make good his ante. If I hadn't found that pocket-book at Alexandria I should have taken my meals with the Arabs in the back basement.

The Arab, by-the-way, is the general servitor in the Egyptian hotel. You ring three times when you want him, and he is as picturesque and gentle a Bedouin as ever held up a camel train or slew a Christian to glorify his faith. He is naive and noiseless, and whatever you ask him for he says "Yes," and if you ask him if he understands he says "Yes," and you will never know whether he does or not until you see what he brings. It does not help matters to talk loudly to the Arab. Volume of sound does not increase his lingual gifts, and spelling the article is likewise wasted effort. Ladies sometimes try that method. The trunk of one of our party had not reached her room--and she needed it.

"My trunk," she said to the Arab. "_You_ know, trunk--t-r-u-n-k, trunk--yes, trunk, with my name on it--_you_ know--n-a-m-e--my initials, I mean, _you_ know--T. D.--T. D. on both ends."

The Arab did know "trunk"; the rest was mere embroidery.

XXXVII

THE SMILE OF THE SPHINX

There was not much left of the afternoon when we reached Cairo, but some of us wandered off here and there to get the habit of the place, as it were. Laura and I came to a trolley-line presently, and found that it ran out to the Pyramids and Sphinx. We were rather shocked at the thought, but recovered and decided to steal a march on the others by slipping out there and having those old wonders all to ourselves, at sunset.

It is a long way. You pass through streets of many kinds and by houses of many sorts, and you cross the Nile and glide down an avenue of palms where there are glimpses of water--the infinite desert stretching away into the evening. Long before we reached them we saw the outlines of the three pyramids against the sky, and then we made out the Sphinx--that old group which is perhaps the most familiar picture that children know.

Yet, somehow, it could not be true that this was the reality of the pictures we had seen. The likeness was very great, certainly, but those pictures had represented something in a realm of books and romance--the unattainable land--while these were here; we were actually going to them, and in a trolley-car! It required all the spell of Egypt then--the palms, the desert, and the evening sky--to fit the reality into its old place in the hall of dreams.

We had thought to have a quiet view, but this was a miscalculation. There is no such thing as a quiet view of the Pyramids. At any hour of the day or night you are immediately beset by beggars and fortune-tellers and would-be guides, and you are pulled and dragged and distracted by their importunities until you have lost all interest in your original purpose in a general desire to start a plague or a massacre that will wipe out the whole pestiferous crew. There is no hope, except in the employment of one or two of the guides--the strongest-looking ones, who will in a certain measure keep off the others--and you will have to engage donkeys, and perhaps have your fortune told. Otherwise these creatures will follow you and surround you, insisting that they want no money; that they only love you; that it makes them happy even to be near you; that they love all Americans; that, in short, for a shilling, just a shilling, and a baksheesh (a piastre), one little baksheesh, they will become your guide, your slave, the dirt under your feet--"Ah, mister--ze Sphinkis, ze Pyramid, aevry-zing!" It is a disgrace to Egypt, and to England who is in charge here now, that such persecution is permitted in the shadow of one of the world's most revered and imposing ruins.

We engaged donkeys, at last, after there had been several fights over us, and set out up the road to the Great Pyramid, assailed every little way by bandits lying in wait. The Great Pyramid does not improve with close acquaintance. It has been too much damaged by time and criminal assault. It loses its clean-cut outlines as you come near and becomes little more than a stupendous heap of stones. I think we were a trifle disappointed with a close inspection, to tell the truth, for even the largest pictures do not give one quite the impression of the reality. It was as if we had been gazing at some marvellous painting, and then had walked up very near to see how the work was done.

The charm came back as we rode off a little and turned to view it now and again in the evening light. The irregularities disappeared; the outlines became clean against the sky; I was no longer disappointed in that giant of architecture whose shadow (it lay now just at our feet) began marking time at a period when the world had no recorded history.

Yet in one or two respects the reality differed from the dream. Usually stone grows gray with age and takes on moss and lichen--the mould of time. The Pyramids are entirely bare, and they are not gray. The stones might have been laid up yesterday so far as any vegetable increment is concerned, and their color is a tawny gold--luminous gold in the sunset, like the barren hills beyond. The daily sandblast of the desert will level these monuments in time, no doubt, but the last fragment in that remote age will still be bare and in color unchanged.

As with the Pyramids, our first impression of the Sphinx was one of disappointment. It seemed small to us. It is small compared with a pyramid, while the photographs give one another idea. The photographs are made with the Sphinkis (Sphinx, I mean--one falls so easily into the native speech) in the foreground, looking fully as big as the second-size pyramid and quite able to have the third-size pyramid for breakfast. Figures mean nothing in the face of a picture like that; you comprehend them, but you do not realize them--visualize them, perhaps I ought to say.

So the Sphinx seemed small to us as we approached, and even when we were on the immediate brink of sand, gazing down upon it, its sixty-five feet of stature seemed reduced from the image in our minds.

But the Sphinx grows on one. As the light faded and the shadows softened its scarred features there came also a dignity and with it a feeling of immensity, of grandeur, a vast indifference to all puny things. And then--perhaps it was the light, perhaps it was because I stood at a particular angle, but certainly--standing just there, at that moment, I saw, or fancied I saw, about its serene lips the suggestion or beginning of a smile. The more I looked, the more certain of it I became, and when I spoke of it to Laura, she saw it, too. Yes, undoubtedly we had caught the Sphinx smiling--not outwardly, at least not openly, but quietly, quizzically--smiling inside as one might say. I could not understand it then, but later it came to me.

* * * * *

Back at the hotel, to-night, I thought it out. I remembered that the Sphinx had been there a long time; nobody knows how long, but _a very long time indeed_. I remembered that it had seen a number of things--_a very great number of things_. I remembered that it had seen one very curious thing, to wit:

A long time ago, when a certain Pharaoh--we can only guess which Pharaoh--ruled over Egypt, it saw a young man who had been sold into bondage from Syria rise in the king's favor through certain dreams and become his chief counsellor, even "ruler over all the land of Egypt." It saw him in the height of his power and glory bring his family, who were Syrian shepherds, down from their barren hills and establish them in the favor of the Egyptian king. The Sphinx was old--a thousand years old, at least, even then--and, being wise, heard with certain curiosity their claim that they were a "chosen people," and thoughtfully watched them multiply through a few brief centuries into a band of servitors who, because of this tradition, held themselves a race apart, repeating tales of a land of promise which they would some day inherit. Then at last, during a period of visitation, the Sphinx saw them escape, taking what they could lay their hands on, straggling away, with their families and their flocks, toward the Red Sea. The Sphinx heard nothing more of that tribe for about three thousand years.

Then an amazing thing happened. Among those who came to wonder at the Sphinx's age and mystery were some who repeated tales of that runaway band--tales magnified and embroidered almost beyond recognition--and, what was more curious, accepted them--not as such tales are usually accepted, with a heavy basis of discount--but as gospel; inspired truth; the foundation of a mighty religion; the word of God.

Nor was that all. The Sphinx realized presently that not only were those old stories accepted as gospel by the descendants of the race themselves, but by a considerable number of the human race at large--accepted and debated in a most serious manner, even to the point of bloodshed.

Some details of this inspired chronology were wholly new to the Sphinx. It was interesting, for example, to hear that there had been three million of those people, and that before they started there had been a time when the Nile had been turned to blood--twice, in fact: once by the grace of God and once by magicians. The Sphinx did not remember a time when the Nile had turned to blood. In the five thousand years and more of its existence it had never heard of a magician who could produce that result. It was interesting, too, to learn that the Red Sea had opened a way for those people to cross, and that the hosts of Egypt, trying to follow them, had been swallowed up and drowned. This was wholly new. The Sphinx had been there and seen all that had happened, but she had somehow missed those things.

Not that the Sphinx was surprised at these embroideries. She had seen several mythologies created, and knew the general scale of enlargement and glorification. It was only when she saw strong, cultured, and enlightened nations still accepting the old Hebrew poem--with all its stately figures and exaggerations--as gospel; heard them actually trying to prove that a multitude as big as the census of Australia had marched out with its chattels and its flocks; heard them vow that the Red Sea had parted long enough to let this population pass through; heard them maintain that this vast assembly had found shade and refreshment on the other side by twelve wells of water and under seventy palm-trees: heard them tell how the sea behind them had suddenly rushed together and swallowed up all the Egyptian army (including the king himself, some said)--it was only when the Sphinx heard learned men argue these things as facts that a smile--scarcely perceptible, yet still a smile--began to grow behind the stone lips.

That is the smile we saw to-night--a quiet smile, a gracious smile, a compassionate smile--and as it has grown so slowly, so it will not soon depart. For by-and-by, when these ages have passed, and with them their story and their gospels--when those old chronicles of the Jews have been relegated to the realm of mythology for a thousand years--there may come another band who will establish their traditions as God's holy word, and the Sphinx--still remaining, still observing, still looking across the encompassing sands to the sunrise--will smile, and dream old dreams.

XXXVIII

WAYS THAT ARE EGYPTIAN

I wonder why we are always taken first to the mosques, or why, when our time is pretty limited, we are taken to them at all. Mosques are well enough, but when you have seen a pretty exhaustive line of them in Turkey and Syria, Egypt cannot furnish any very startling attractions in this field. For mosques are modern (anything less than a thousand years old is modern to us now), and Egypt is not a land of modern things. Besides, here in Cairo there are such a number of fascinating out-of-the-way corners which we are dying to see--unholy side-streets, picturesquely hidden nooks, and mysterious, shut-in life; besides all the bazaars--

Never mind; the mosques did have a certain interest, especially the mosque of Al-Azhar, which is nine hundred years old and built about a great court--an old mosque when America was still undiscovered--and the mosque of Hassan, "whose prayer will nevair be accept," Abraham said (Abraham being our guide), "because when ze architec' have finish, ze Sultan Hassan have cut off hees han' so he cannot produce him again." Napoleon's first gun in Egypt hit a minaret of Hassan's mosque, it is said, and it has had bad luck generally, perhaps because of the cruel act of its royal builder. We were not even required to put on slippers to enter it, so it cannot be held in very great veneration. Then there is the mosque of Mohammed Ali, built within the last century and modern throughout, the only mosque in the world, I believe, to have electric lights!

It was Mohammed Ali who settled the Mameluke problem in the conclusive way which sultans adopt at times. The Mamelukes were the Janizaries of Egypt, though fewer in number. Still, there were enough of them to make trouble and keep matters stirred up, and Ali grew tired of them. So did the public, according to our guide:

"Ali, he say to some people, 'You like get rid of zose Mameluke?' an' all ze people say, 'Yez, of course.' So Ali he make big dinner, an' ze Mameluke come an' eat, an' have fine, big time."

It was on the 1st of March, 1811, that Ali issued his general invitation to the Mameluke leaders to attend a function at the Citadel; and, after entertaining them hospitably, invited them to march through a narrow passageway, which was suddenly closed at each end, while from above opened a musket-fire that presently concluded those Mamelukes--470 of them--with the exception of one man, who is said to have leaped his horse through a window down a hundred feet or so, where he "Jump from hees horse and run--run fas' to Jaffa!" which was natural enough.

There was only one trouble with that story. Abraham did not explain how this particular Mameluke came to have his horse at luncheon, and why, with or without horses, a number of those other Mamelukes did not follow him. Every Mameluke of my acquaintance would have gone through that window, mounted or otherwise, and without calculating the distance to the ground. However, Abraham showed us the passage and the place of the leap, and later the graves of the 470, all of which was certainly convincing. Following the removal of the leaders, a general burial of Mamelukes took place throughout Egypt, since which time members of that organization have been extremely hard to catch. It must have been Ali's neat solution of the Mameluke problem which fifteen years later was copied in Constantinople by Mahmoud II., when he disposed of the Janizaries.

It was at the tomb of a distinguished pasha--a fine, inviting place--that we saw a small green piece of the robe of Abraham. It was incorporated in a very sacred rug, one of the twelve which Cairo, Constantinople, and Damascus contribute to Mecca each year. We asked how Abraham's robe could hold out this way, and his namesake shrugged and smiled:

"Oh, zay take little piece of ze real robe an' roll him 'roun' an' 'roun' wiz many piece of goods, an' zay become _all_ ze robe of Abraham."

Thus does a thread leaven a whole wardrobe.

Laura and I escaped then. We did not care for any more tombs and mosques, and we did care a great deal for a street we had noticed where, squatted on the ground on both sides of it, their wares spread in the dust, were sellers of certain trinkets and jars which, though not of the past, had a fatal lure we could not all forget. Our driver was a black, scarred semi-Nubian who looked as if he had been through a fire, and had possibly five words of English. It does not matter--Menelek (so we named him) served us well, and will retain a place in my affections.

We took the back track, and presently were in the street of small sellers, driving carefully, for there was barely room to pass between their displayed goods. Here and there we stooped to inspect, and we bought a water-jar for a piastre--an Egyptian piastre, which is really money and worth exactly five cents. Beyond the jars was a woman selling glass bracelets, such as the Arab women wear. I had wanted some of those from the beginning. I picked out a gay handful, and then discovered I had only a gold twenty-franc piece to pay with. The woman had never owned twenty francs, and no seller in the neighborhood could furnish the change. So I handed it to Menelek, who grinned and disappeared while we sat there in the carriage waiting.

I suppose he had to go miles in that neighborhood for as much change as that. I know we sat there in the sun and looked at all the curious things in all the assortments about us, over and over, and discussed them and wondered if Menelek would ever return. It became necessary at last that he should do so. No vehicle could pass us in that narrow thoroughfare, and in a string behind there was collecting as motley an assortment of curiosities as ever were gathered in a menagerie. There was a curious two-wheeled cart or dray, drawn by water-buffaloes, upon which a man had his collection of wives out for an airing; there was a camel loaded with huge water-jars until they projected out over the heads of the selling people; there was a load of hay drawn by a cow; there was a donkey train that reached back to the end of the street, and what lay beyond only Allah knew.

The East is patient, but even the East has its limits. Presently we began to be interviewed by dark men--camel-drivers and the like--who had a way of flinging up their hands, while from behind came a rising tide of what I assumed to be imprecation.

We were calm--that is, we assured each other that we were calm--and we told them quite pleasantly how matters stood. The result was not encouraging. One Bedouin grabbed the bridle, and I was at the point of slaying him with my water-jar when at the same moment appeared a member of the Cairo police--one of those with a tall red fez--also Menelek, our long-lost Menelek, with the change, out of which there was baksheesh for the discontented drivers. Everything was all right then. We headed the procession. Behind us came the buffalo-cart--the wives, sandwiched fore and aft and smiling--the camel with his distended load of jars; the heaped-up little hay-wagon; the string of donkeys all in blue beads, with heaven knows what else trailing down the distance. All the curses were removed; all the drivers singing; traffic congestion in the East was over.

One of the first things we had noticed in Egypt was the curious brass spool affair which Arab women wear, suspended perpendicularly across the forehead, from the head-gear to the top of their veil. It extends from the nose upward, and has sharp, saw-like ridges on it, which look as if they would cut in. When we asked about these things, we were told that they were worn to avert the evil eye, also as a handy means by which the husband may correct any little indiscretion on the part of one of his wives. He merely has to tap that brass spool with his cane or broomstick, or whatever is handy, and it cuts in and neatly reminds the wearer that she is a woman and had better behave. Family discipline has matured in this ancient land.

I explained to Menelek now, in some fashion, that I wanted one of those brass things; whereupon we entered the narrow and thronging thoroughfare of commerce--a gay place, with all sorts of showy wares lavishly displayed--and went weaving in and out among the crowd to find it. Every other moment Menelek would shout something that sounded exactly like, "Oh, I _mean_ it! Oh, I _mean_ it!" which made us wonder _what_ he meant in that emphatic way.

Then all at once he changed to, "Oh, I _schmell_ it! Oh, I _schmell_ it!"

"That's all right," we said; "so do we," for, though Cairo is cleaner than Constantinople, it was not over-sweet just there. But presently, when he changed again to, "Oh, I eat it! Oh, I eat it!" we drew the line. We said, "No, we do not go as far as that."

We have learned now that those calls are really "O-i-menuk, o-i-schmeluk," etc., and indicate that some one is to turn to the right or left, or simply get out of the way, as the case may be. We used them ourselves after that, which gave Menelek great joy.

XXXIX

WHERE HISTORY BEGAN

When I glanced casually over the little heap of hand-bags that would accompany our party up the Nile--we were then waiting on the terrace of Shepheard's for the carriages--I noticed that my own did not appear to be of the number. I mentioned this to the guides, to the head-porter, to the clerk, to casual Bedouins in the hotel uniform, without arousing any active interest. Finally, I went on a still hunt on my own account. I found the missing bag out in the back area-way, with a Bedouin whom I had not seen before sitting on it, smoking dreamily and murmuring a song about lotus and moonlight and the spell of his lady's charms. Growing familiar with the habits of the country, I dispossessed him with my foot and marched back through the vast corridors carrying my bag myself. Still, I am sorry now I didn't contribute the baksheesh he expected. He was probably the cousin or brother or brother-in-law of one of my room servitors. They all have a line of those relatives, and they must live, I suppose, though it is difficult to imagine why.