Shopping in this native quarter and in the great Muski bazar that adjoins it is a constant source of amusement to the foreign woman who has a fondness for bargaining. These Arabs and Egyptians never expect one to give more than half what is demanded, except in the case of a few large shops in which the price is marked. If one of the silver shawls made at Assiut attracts a lady's attention and the polite shopkeeper demands five pounds sterling, she may safely offer him two pounds, and then, after haggling for a half hour, she will probably become the possessor of the shawl for two pounds ten shillings. Of one thing the traveler may be sure: he will never get any article from an Egyptian on which the shopkeeper cannot make a small profit.
The Muski bazar is about a mile long and, although many European shops line it, the street still retains its Oriental attractiveness. Branching off from it are many narrow streets crowded with shops on both sides. Here may be seen the real life of Old Cairo, unhampered by any foreign innovations. The street is not more than twelve feet wide and above the first floor of the houses projecting latticed windows and open balconies reduce this width to three or four feet. Looking up one sees only a narrow slit of blue sky, against which are outlined several tiers of latticed windows. From these the harem women look down upon the street life in which they can have no real part. Peeping over the balconies may be seen black eyes that gleam above the yashmak or Oriental veil worn by the poorer classes. This veil covers the face almost to the eyes and it is held in place by a curious bit of bamboo that comes down over the forehead to the nose. The women of the better class do not wear this ugly yashmak, but content themselves with a white silk veil that is stretched across the lower part of the face, leaving the eyes and a part of the nose uncovered.
No visit to Cairo is complete without a sight of Old Cairo, with its bazars. This is a quarter of the city that remains as it was in the days of the Caliphs. It is inhabited mainly by Copts and among the mean houses, built of sun-dried bricks, may be traced part of the old Roman wall that encircled this suburb, then known as Babylon. The houses are mainly of two or three stories, but the streets are so narrow that two people on opposite sides may easily join hands by leaning out of their windows. Many or the antique doors of oak, studded with great wrought-iron nails, still remain. Here is the old church of St. Sergius, which is said to antedate the Moslem conquest. In the ancient crypt the Virgin Mary and the Child are said to have sought shelter after their flight into Egypt.
Near by is the island of Roda, which is noteworthy for the legend that here the infant Moses was found by Pharaoh's daughter. The visitor crosses a narrow arm of the Nile by a crude ferry and then walks through a quaint old garden to a wall that overlooks the Nile and the Pyramids. This wall marks the spot, according to local tradition, where Moses was taken from the bulrushes. The bulrushes are no more because they have been dredged out, but the place has the look of extreme age and the garden contains many curious trees.
Among the Ruins of Luxor and Karnak
Luxor, the ancient city of Upper Egypt, which may be reached by a night train ride from Cairo, is the center of the most interesting ruins on the Nile. The city itself has been built around the splendid temple of Luxor, founded by Amenophis III, but altered and extensively rebuilt by Rameses II. From the Nile the colonnade of this temple is a beautiful spectacle, as the huge columns are in perfect preservation. Big tourist hotels make up most of the other buildings. The town boasts a good water front, which is generally lined in the winter season with tourist steamers. The view across the Nile is fine, as it includes the lofty Libyan range of mountains, in whose flanks were cut the tombs of the Pharaohs. Here, in two or three days, one may study the ruins of Luxor, Karnak and Thebes—names that the historian still conjures with.
All the Egyptian temples were built on one general plan, like the mosques of North India, and Luxor does not differ from the others, except that it surpasses them all in the beauty of its colonnaded pillars. Seven double columns, about fifty-two feet high, with lotus capitals, support a massive architrave, while beyond them are double columns on three sides of a great court. This temple of Luxor was originally built by Amenophis III of the eighteenth dynasty in honor of Ammon, the greatest of Egyptian gods, his wife and their son, the moon-god Khons. The successor of this monarch erased the name of Ammon and made other changes, but Seti I restored Ammon's name, and then came Rameses II, the builder who never wearied in rearing huge temples and in carving colossal figures of himself.
Rameses added a colonnaded court in front of the temple, built an enormous pylon, with obelisks and colossal statues that celebrate his own greatness, and erased the cartouches of the original builder, substituting his own and thus claiming credit for the erection of the whole temple. Were the spirit of the great Rameses allowed to return to earth and reanimate the mummy that now forms the most interesting exhibit in the Cairo Museum, how great would be his humiliation to know that his ingenious devices to appropriate the credit of other men's work have been exposed? In nearly all the remains of Upper Egypt, Rameses figures as the sole builder, but the cunning of modern archaeologists has stripped him of this credit and has revealed him as the greatest of royal charlatans.