CHAPTER I
ON LEAVE IN CAIRO
It is not so long ago as to render it untrue now that Dean Stanley said, looking down from the Citadel: "Cairo is not the ghost of the dead Egyptian Empire, nor anything like it."
The interval elapsed since that reflection was uttered has, indeed, only deepened its truth. Cairo is becoming more modern every season. The "booming" of Cairo as a winter resort for Europeans was begun at the opening of the Canal by the Khedive Ismail. His ambition was the transforming of Cairo into a kind of Paris of Africa. The effort has not died with him. It has persisted with the official-set and their visitors. The result now is that in half an hour's ride you may pass from those monuments of antiquity, the Sphinx and the Pyramid of Cheops, in a modern tram-car, along a route which is neither ancient nor modern, into a city which blends in a most amazing fashion Europe of to-day with Egypt of a very long time past. There are wheels within wheels: at the foot of the Great Pyramid are crowded shanties and taverns such as you might enter in a poorer Melbourne Street or on a new-found gold-field; and the intensity of the contradiction in Cairo itself baffles description.
Cairo has been so accurately portrayed in every aspect with the pen that it seems presumptuous to attempt to reproduce even impressions, much less relate facts. One prefers, of course, if he does attempt to do either, to give impressions rather than facts. Any guide-book will give you facts. And the reader who demands a sort of Foster-Frazer tabulation of facts is analogous to those unhappy readers of romance who rank incident above characterisation.
What one feels he must say, chiefly, is that it is the living rather than the dead in Cairo that attract most strongly. You go to the Museum or stand beside the sarcophagus of the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid once, and again; not because it is conventionally fitting, but because that conventional appropriateness rests upon a broad and deep psychology: these places have their hold upon you. But incomparably stronger is that which draws you times without number to the bazaars. "Fool!" says Teufelsdröckh. "Why journeyest thou wearisomely, in thy antiquarian fervour, to gaze on the stone Pyramids of Geeza, or the clay ones of Sacchara? These stand there, as I can tell thee, idle and inert, looking over the desert, foolishly enough, for the last three thousand years...."
A half-day in the bazaars I would not exchange for a whole wilderness of Sphinxes. You may go twice and thrice before the Sphinx, but there comes a time when there is no place for you but the ebb and flow of the human tide in the narrow streets; when you spend all your leave there, and are content to commend the venerable dead and their mausolea to the Keeper of Personality for ever.
I dare not enter on the multiplicity of the charm of the bazaars: more accurately, I cannot. The dazzling incongruity of vendors and of wares under the over-meeting structures multiplies multiplicity. They move and cry up and down classified bazaars. A vociferous Arab hawks a cow for sale through the boot-bazaar; the delicious Arabian perfumes of the picturesque scent bazaar are fouled by a crier of insanitary food; Jews, French, Italians, Tunisians, Greeks, and Spaniards jostle each other through the alleys of the tent bazaar, braziers' bazaar, bazaar of the weavers, book bazaar—bazaar of any commodity or industry you care to name; and the proprietors and artificers squat on their tiny floors, maybe four feet square. In the busy forenoon, looking up the Mooski, it is as though the wizard had been there: almost you look for the djin to materialise. Rich colour is splashed over the stalls and the throng; there is music in the jingle of wares and the hum of voices; and the sober and graceful mosque, its rich colour gently mellowed by centuries of exposure, lifts a minaret above the animation. If this is the complexity of the broad view, what contrasts are thrust at you from the detail of men and things, as you saunter through!