When my ticket ran out on the morning of the fourth day, I did not apply at once for another. The evening before, the Greek proprietor of a famous cigarette factory had promised me a position, had even explained to me my probable duties as general porter in the establishment. But when I had inveigled my way into the inner sanctum for the second time, it was only to learn that a compatriot of the proprietor had applied earlier in the morning, and was already at work. Not to be outdone by his fellow-faranchees, the Greek offered me—a letter of introduction.
The hour of public audiences at the rectory was passed. The day, moreover, was Saturday, a half-holiday among contractors. In the hope of earning a night’s lodging by some errand, I joined the howling mob of guides, interpreters, street-hawkers, and fakirs, before Shepherd’s Hotel. I was the sole Frank in the gathering. Die Kameraden, whatever their nationality, would have been transfixed with horror had they seen one of their own patrician class competing with “niggers” for employment. As a last resort, had “the business” been utterly outrooted in Cairo, the members of “the union” might have consented to busy themselves with some genteel occupation; but had gaunt starvation squatted on his haunches in their path, they would never have stooped to the work of natives.
My presence was soon noised through all the screaming multitude, and I was cleverly “pocketed” by a dozen snake swallowers and sword jugglers, and gradually forced towards the outskirts of the crowd. When I resorted to force and beat my way to the front rank, I was little better off than before. For two hours I watched the natives about me selling, begging, running errands, or marching away to guide a tourist party through the city; without once seeing a beckoning finger in answer to my own offers of service. At frequent intervals, a lady appeared on the hotel piazza, ran her eyes slowly over the front ranks, stared at me a moment, and, summoning some one-eyed rascal beside me, sent him across the city with a perfumed note. The ladies, certainly, were not to be blamed. It was so much more romantic; there was so much more local color in one’s doings, don’t you know, if one’s errands were run by a Cairene in flowing robes, rather than by a tramp such as one could see at home any day in St. Charles or Madison Square! What if one paid an exorbitant price for such services? It was to a picturesque figure, don’t you know, whose English was excruciatingly funny.
It is half disgusting, half pathetic, this ebb and flow of the population of Egypt at the crook of a tourist finger. From the door, on which every eye was fixed, emerged the blatant figure of a pompous pork-packer, or the half-baked offspring of a self-made ancestry. With a wild howl the mob rose en masse and surged forward, threatening to break my ribs against the foot of the piazza. If the pork packer scowled, the throng fell back like a receding tide. If the half-baked offspring raised an eyebrow, the multitude swept on, tossing me far up the steps into the arms of “buttons,” on guard against the besiegers below.
He was a coarse-grained cockney, this “buttons,” and, in carrying out his orders to repel boarders, he was neither a respecter of persons nor of his mother tongue. A score of times I was pushed down the steps I had not chosen to ascend, with a violence and profanity out of all keeping with racial brotherhood.
An abandoned mosque outside the walls of Cairo, and a caravan off for Suez across the desert
But every dog has his day. A sallow youth issued from the hotel and called for a man to carry a letter. “Buttons” was already raising a hand to point out a pock-marked Arab who had departed on four commissions since my arrival, when the tidal wave of humanity set me on the piazza. I shouted to the sallow youth just as “buttons” fell upon me. The youth nodded. It was a long-sought opportunity. I reversed rôles with the cockney and landed him in a picturesque spread-eagle on the heads of the backsheesh-seeking multitude. Had he not been wont to use his influence in favor of a very limited number of the throng, he would have been more immaculate in appearance, when he was dug out by his pock-marked confederate and restored to his coign of vantage. Meanwhile I had received the letter and a five piastre piece in payment, and had departed on my errand.
The coin paid my evening meal and a lodging for two nights in “the union,” and left me coppers enough for a native breakfast. Sunday was no time either to “forage,” or to visit rectors of the church of England. In company with Pia, who would under no circumstances use his inventive pen on the Sabbath, I visited those few corners of Cairo to which my search had not yet led me; the Mohammedan University of El Azkar, the citadel, and the ruined mosques beyond the walls.
When all other resources fail him, the Anglo-Saxon wanderer has one unfailing friend in the East—Tommy Atkins. However penniless and forlorn he may be, the glimpse of a red jacket and a monkey cap on a lithe, erect figure, hurrying through the foreign throng, is certain to give him new heart. Thomas has become a familiar sight in Cairo since the days of the Arabi rebellion. Down by the Kasr-el-Nil bridge, out in the shadows of the pencil-like minarets of Mohammed Ali’s mosque, in parade grounds scattered through the city, he may be found any afternoon perspiringly chasing a football or setting up his wickets in the screaming sunlight, to the astonishment and delight of a never-failing audience of apathetic natives. He doesn’t pose as a philanthropist—simple T. Atkins—nor as a man of iron-bound morality—rather prides himself, in fact, on his incorrigible wickedness. But the case has yet to be recorded in which he has not given up his last shilling more whole heartedly than the smug tourist would part with his cigar band.