Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

Embraces the right shoulder of Africa which for centuries withstood the attempts of rulers and traders to establish their dominion over the continent

The tourist who passes through Cairo and stays at one of the big hotels is apt to think that the city is rapidly becoming a Christian one. As he drives over asphalt streets lined with the fine buildings of the European quarter, it seems altogether English and French. If he is acquainted with many foreigners he finds them living in beautiful villas, or in apartment houses like those of our own cities. He does his shopping in modern stores and comes to the conclusion that the Arab element is passing away.

This is not so. Cairo is a city of the Egyptians. Not one tenth of its inhabitants are Christians and it is the hundreds of thousands of natives who make up the life blood of this metropolis. They are people of a different world from ours, as we can see if we go down for a stroll through their quarters. They do business in different ways and trade much as they have been trading for generations. Their stores are crowded along narrow streets that wind this way and that until one may lose himself in them. Nearly every store is a factory, and most of the goods offered are made in the shop where they are sold.

Although the foreigner and his innovations are in evidence, native Cairo is much the same now in characters, customs, and dress as it was in the days of Haroun Al Raschid. Here the visionary Alnaschar squats in his narrow, cell-like store, with his basket of glass before him. He holds the tube of a long water pipe in his mouth and is musing on the profits he will make from peddling his glass, growing richer and richer, until his sovereign will be glad to offer him his daughter in marriage and he will spurn her as she kneels before him. We almost expect to see the glass turned over as it is in the story, and his castles in the air shattered with his kick. Next to him is a turbaned Mohammedan who reminds us of Sinbad the Sailor, and a little farther on is a Barmecide washing his hands with invisible soap in invisible water, and apparently inviting his friends to come and have a great feast with him. Here two long-gowned, gray-bearded men are sitting on a bench drinking coffee together; and there a straight, tall maiden, robed in a gown which falls from her head to her feet, with a long black veil covering all of her face but her eyes, looks over the wares of a handsome young Syrian, reminding us of how the houris shopped in the days of the “Thousand and One Nights.”

Oriental Cairo is a city of donkeys and camels. In the French quarter you may have a ride on an electric street car for a few cents, or you may hire an automobile to carry you over the asphalt. The streets of the native city are too narrow for such things, and again and again we are crowded to the wall for fear that the spongy feet of the great camels may tread upon us. We are grazed by loaded donkeys, carrying grain, bricks, or bags on their backs, and the donkey boy trotting behind an animal ridden by some rich Egyptian or his wife calls upon us to get out of the way.

The donkeys of Egypt are small, rugged animals. One sees them everywhere with all sorts of odd figures mounted on them. Here is an Egyptian woman sitting astride of one, her legs bent up like a spring and her black feet sticking out in the stirrups. She is dressed in black, in a gown which makes her look like a balloon. There is a long veil over her face with a slit at the eyes, where a brass spool separates it from the head-dress and you see nothing but strips of bare skin an inch wide above and below. Here is a sheik with a great turban and a long gown; his legs, ending in big yellow slippers, reach almost to the ground on each side of his donkey. He has no bridle, but guides the beast with a stick. A donkey-boy in bare feet, whose sole clothing consists of a blue cotton nightgown and a brown skullcap, runs behind poking up the donkey with a stick. Now he gives it a cut, and the donkey jerks its hinder part from one side to the other as it scallops the road in attempting to get out of the way of the rod. Here is a drove of donkeys laden with bags for the market. They are not harnessed, and the bags are balanced upon their backs without ropes or saddles.

The ordinary donkey of Egypt is very cheap indeed, but the country has some of the finest asses and mules I have ever seen, and there are royal white jackasses ridden by wealthy Mohammedans which are worth from five hundred to a thousand dollars per beast. The best of these come from Mecca. They are pacers, fourteen hands high, and very swift. The pedigrees of some of them are nearly as long as those of Arabian horses. It is said that the Arabs who raise them will never sell a female of this breed.

But to return to the characters of the bazaar. They are of the oddest, and one must have an educated eye to know who they are. Take that man in a green turban, who is looked up to by his fellows. The dragoman tells us that he has a sure passport to Heaven, and that the green turban is a sign that he has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and thus earned the right to the colours of the Prophet. Behind him comes a fine-featured, yellow-faced man in a blue gown wearing a turban of blue. We ask our guide who he may be and are told, with a sneer, that he is a Copt. He is one of the Christians of modern Egypt, descended from the fanatical band described by Charles Kingsley in his novel “Hypatia.” Like all his class he is intelligent, and like most of them well dressed. The Copts are among the shrewdest of the business Egyptians, and with prosperity they have grown in wealth. They are money lenders and land speculators. Many of them have offices under the government, and not a few have amassed fortunes. Some of them are very religious and some can recite the Bible by heart. They differ from their neighbours in that they believe in having only one wife.

The crowd in these streets is by no means all men, however. There are women scattered through it, and such women! We look at them, and as their large soulful eyes, fringed with dark lashes, smile back at us, we wish that the veils would drop from their faces. The complexions which can be seen in the slit in the veils are of all colours from black to brunette, and from brown to the creamy white of the fairest Circassian. We are not particularly pleased with their costume, but our dragoman tells us that they dress better at home. The better classes wear black bombazine garments made so full that they hide every outline of the figure. Some of them have their cloaks tied in at the waist so that they look like black bed ticks on legs. Here, as one raises her skirt, we see that she wears bloomers falling to her ankles, which make us think of the fourteen-yard breeches worn by the girls of Algiers. The poorer women wear gowns of blue cotton, a single garment and the veil making up a whole costume. Astride their shoulders or their hips some of them carry babies, many of whom are as naked as when they were born.