on the Plaisance, above which you catch the minaret of another mosque, overlooking “A Street in Cairo.” Later on you discover that this barefooted Arab drives a camel along this tortuous thoroughfare.
Here again the quality of the picturesque is inseparably joined to the quality of the genuine. The street itself is a fair reproduction of the original, with its overhanging latticed windows, iron gratings and decorations; but the motley crowd that throngs through its crookedness is the native element itself. Camels with the dust of the desert ground into their scarred hides, every knot in the harness a guarantee of long service; donkeys and donkey boys; women closely veiled or wearing the burgi—a wooden spool bound over the nose, with a heavy fringe of black thread falling below the chin; rows of idlers in dirty garments sprawled along the edges of the houses hugging the shade; Nubians, black as ink, in white burnoose and long gowns; pedlers, street venders in odd Eastern costumes, and scattered throughout the curious throng the man from Maine and the gentleman from Texas.
Everywhere you find the same element of the picturesque, everywhere is evident the same quality of the genuine. To accomplish these results space and time seem to have been annihilated.
“It is I who went up into the Soudan country and brought out this family, come in and see,” says a dark, black-bearded man, who might have the blood of all the races of the East in his veins.
I thrust my head and shoulder through a narrow slit in the hut, shaped like an inverted teacup, and am confronted by a girl wearing a single garment of coarse cotton cloth, such as would cover a sack of salt. Behind her, squatting on the earth-floor, sit her husband and father, beating rude drums covered with skins. The girl instantly advances, lifts up her face and gazing into mine with half-closed eyes, gives herself up with slow movement of her feet to that peculiar spell which seems to possess all Eastern women when under the influence of the dance. The inmates are all uncleanly, unkempt, and, but for the earnest face and fawn-like eyes of the Soudanese girl-wife, forbidding and repulsive. Of one thing, however, you are sure: had you wandered into the heart of their country and entered any one of their huts, you would have found the exact counterpart of what is before you now.
So with the Algerians and Nubians, the Chinese and natives of Ceylon, Dahomey and the South Sea Islands, the Esquimaux even down to the glass-blowers from Murano: they are not a part of a show—they are the people themselves. How long this unconscious individuality will continue and what degrading effects our civilization will produce on these strangers is a question which cannot be settled until the Fair is over.
It is safe to say that never in the lives of the present generation will these things be repeated. Before the summer comes again the beautiful city will fade away like the frost-work of an early morning. This broad highway, teeming with life and color, will be but a neglected waste, while the lovely lagoons will once more yield themselves up to the ever-encroaching lake. Every square foot of the wide inclosure should be sacred to every American, as marking for them and for the intelligent world a point in civilization never before reached by any people; as marking the dawn of a new era in the progress of the Republic; a new light in architecture, in mural decoration and sculpture; in the weaving of exquisite stuffs, in the glazing of porcelains, the making of glass and perfecting of all the lesser arts that serve to beautify our homes and gladden our lives; and in the proving, by comparison with the best work of the other nations of earth, the high standard reached by our own artists, and the fixing forever of that position in the art of the world.