My Winter on the Nile / Eighteenth Edition

by Charles Dudley Warner

We are in the Frank quarter called the Ezbekeëh, which was many years ago a pond during high water, then a garden with a canal round it, and is now built over with European houses and shops, except the square reserved for the public garden. From the old terrace in front of the hotel, where the traveler used to look on trees, he will see now only raw new houses and a street usually crowded with passers and rows of sleepy donkeys and their voluble drivers. The hotel is two stories only, built round a court, damp in rainy or cloudy weather (and it is learning how to rain as high up the Nile as Cairo), and lacking the comforts which invalids require in the winter. It is kept on an ingenious combination of the American and European plans; that is, the traveler pays a fixed sum per day and then gets a bill of particulars, besides, which gives him all the pleasures of the European system. We heard that one would be more Orientally surrounded and better cared for at the Hotel du Nil; and the Khedive, who tries his hand at everything, has set up a New Hotel on the public square; but, somehow, one enters Shepherd's as easy as he goes into a city gate.

They call the house entirely European. But there are pelicans walking about in the tropical garden; on one side is the wall of a harem, a house belonging to the Khedive's mother, a harem with closed shutters, but uninteresting, because there is no one in it, though ostriches are strutting in its paved court; in the rear of the house stretches a great grove of tall date-palms standing in a dusty, débris-strown field—a lazy wind is always singing through their tops, and a sakiya (a cow-impelled water-wheel) creaks there day and night; we never lock the doors of our rooms; long-gowned attendants are always watching in the passages, and, when we want one, in default of bells, we open the door and clap the hands. All this, with a juggler performing before the house; dragomans and servants and merchants in Oriental costume; the monotonous strumming of an Arab band in a neighboring cafe, bricklayers on the unfinished house opposite us, working in white night-gowns and turbans, who might be mistaken at a distance for female sleepwalkers; and from a minaret not far away, the tenor-voiced muezzins urging us in the most musical invitation ever extended to unbelievers, to come to prayer at daylight—this cannot be called European.

An end of the dinner-table, however, is occupied by a loud party of young Englishmen, a sprinkling of dukes and earls and those attendants and attentive listeners of the nobility who laugh inordinately when my lord says a good thing, and are encouraged when my lord laughs loudly at a sally of theirs and declares, “well, now, that's very good;” a party who seem to regard Cairo as beyond the line of civilization and its requirements. They talk loud, roar in laughing, stare at the ladies, and light their cigars before the latter have withdrawn. My comrade notices that they call for champagne before fish; we could overlook anything but that. Some travelers who are annoyed at their boisterousness speak to the landlord about them, without knowing their rank—supposing that one could always tell an earl by his superior manners. These young representatives of England have demanded that the Khedive shall send them on their hunting-tour in Africa, and he is to do so at considerable cost; and it is said that he pays their hotel bills in Cairo. The desire of the Khedive to stand well with all the European powers makes him an easy prey to any nobleman who does not like to travel in Egypt at his own expense. (It ought to be added that we encountered on the Nile an Englishman of high rank who had declined the Khedive's offer of a free trip).

Cairo is a city of vast distances, especially the new part which is laid out with broad streets, and built up with isolated houses having perhaps a garden or a green court; open squares are devoted to fountains and flower-beds. Into these broad avenues the sun pours, and through them the dust swirls in clouds; everything is covered with it; it imparts its grey tint to the town and sifts everywhere its impalpable powder. No doubt the health of Cairo is greatly improved and epidemics are lessened, by the destruction of the pestilent old houses and by running wide streets through the old quarters of twisting lanes and sunless alleys. But the wide streets are uninteresting, and the sojourner in the city likes to escape out of their glare and dust into the cool and shady recesses of the old town. And he has not far to go to do so. A few minutes walk from the Ezbekeëh brings one into a tangle like the crossing paths of an ants nest, into the very heart of the smell and color of the Orient, among people among shops, in the presence of manners, habits, costumes, occupations, centuries old, into a life in which the western man recognizes nothing familiar.

Cairo, between the Mokattam hill of limestone and the Nile, covers a great deal of ground—about three square miles—on which dwell somewhere from a third to a half of a million of people. The traveler cannot see its stock-sights in a fortnight, and though he should be there months he will find something novel in the street-life daily, even though he does not, as Mr. Lane has so admirably done, make a study of the people. And “life” goes on in the open streets, to an extent which always surprises us, however familiar we may be with Italian habits. People eat, smoke, pray, sleep, carry on all their trades in sight of the passers by—only into the recesses of the harem and the faces of the women one may not look. And this last mystery and reserve almost outweighs the openness of everything else. One feels as if he were in a masquerade; the part of the world which is really most important—womankind—appears to him only in shadow and flitting phantasm. What danger is he in from these wrapped and veiled figures which glide by, shooting him with a dark and perhaps wicked eye; what peril is he in as he slips through these narrow streets with their masked batteries of latticed windows! This Eastern life is all open to the sun; and yet how little of its secrets does the stranger fathom. I seem to feel, always, in an Eastern town, that there is a mask of duplicity and concealment behind which the Orientals live; that they habitually deceive the traveler in his “gropings after truth.”

The best way of getting about Cairo and its environs is on the donkey. It is cheap and exhilarating. The donkey is easily mounted and easily got off from; not seldom he will weaken in his hind legs and let his rider to the ground—a sinking operation which destroys your confidence in life itself. Sometimes he stumbles and sends the rider over his head. But the good donkey never does either. He is the best animal, of his size and appearance, living. He has the two qualities of our greatest general, patience and obstinacy. The good donkey is easy as a rocking-chair, sure-footed as a chamois; he can thread any crowd and stand patiently dozing in any noisy thoroughfare for hours. To ride him is only a slight compromise of one's independence in walking. One is so near the ground, and so absent-mindedly can he gaze at what is around him, that he forgets that there is anything under him. When the donkey, in the excitement of company on the open street and stimulated by the whacks and cries of his driver, breaks into the rush of a gallop, there is so much flying of legs and such a general flutter that the rider fancies he is getting over the ground at an awful rate, running a breakneck race; but it does not appear so to an observer. The rider has the feeling of the swift locomotion of the Arab steed without its danger or its expense. Besides, a long-legged man, with a cork hat and a flying linen “duster,” tearing madly along on an animal as big as a sheep, is an amusing spectacle.

The donkey is abused, whacked, beaten till he is raw, saddled so that all the straps gall him, hard-ridden, left for hours to be assailed by the flies in the street, and ridiculed by all men. I wish we could know what sort of an animal centuries of good treatment would have made of him. Something no doubt quite beyond human deserts; as it is, he is simply indispensable in Eastern life. And not seldom he is a pet; he wears jingling bells and silver ornaments around his neck; his hair is shaved in spots to give him a variegated appearance, and his mane and tail are dyed with henna; he has on an embroidered cloth bridle and a handsome saddle, under which is a scarlet cloth worked with gold. The length and silkiness of his ears are signs of his gentle breeding. I could never understand why he is loaded with such an enormous saddle; the pommel of it rising up in front of the rider as big as a half-bushel measure. Perhaps it is thought well to put this mass upon his back so that he will not notice or mind any additional weight.

The donkey's saving quality, in this exacting world, is inertia. And, yet, he is not without ambition. He dislikes to be passed on the road by a fellow; and if one attempts it, he is certain to sheer in ahead of him and shove him off the track. “Donkey jealous one anoder,” say the drivers.

Each donkey has his driver or attendant, without whose presence, behind or at the side, the animal ceases to go forward. These boys, and some of them are men in stature, are the quickest-witted, most importunate, good-natured vagabonds in this world. They make a study of human nature, and accurately measure every traveler the moment he appears. They are agile to do errands, some of them are better guides than the professionals, they can be entrusted with any purchases you may make, they run, carrying their slippers in their hand, all day beside the donkey, and get only a pittance of pay. They are however a jolly, larkish set, always skylarking with each other, and are not unlike the newspaper boys of New York; now and then one of them becomes a trader or a dragoman and makes his fortune.

If you prefer a carriage, good vehicles have become plenty of late years, since there are broad streets for driving; and some very handsome equipages are seen, especially towards evening on the Shoobra road, up and down which people ride and drive to be seen and to see, as they do in Central or Hyde parks. It is en règle to have a sais running before the carriage, and it is the “swell thing” to have two of them. The running sais before a rapidly driven carriage is the prettiest sight in Cairo. He is usually a slender handsome black fellow, probably a Nubian, brilliantly dressed, graceful in every motion, running with perfect ease and able to keep up his pace for hours without apparent fatigue. In the days of narrow streets his services were indispensable to clear the way; and even now he is useful in the frequented ways where every one walks in the middle of the street, and the chattering, chaffing throngs are as heedless of anything coming as they are of the day of judgment. In red tarboosh with long tassel, silk and gold embroidered vest and jacket, colored girdle with ends knotted and hanging at the side, short silk trousers and bare legs, and long staff, gold-tipped, in the hand, as graceful in running as Antinous, they are most elegant appendages to a fashionable turnout. If they could not be naturalized in Central Park, it might fill some of the requirements of luxury to train a patriot from the Green Isle to run before the horses, in knee-breeches, flourishing a shillalah. Faith, I think he would clear the way.