By-ways on Service: Notes from an Australian Journal

by Hector Dinning

Here in the Mooski is the micro-Cairo—Cairo bodied forth in little, except for the intruding official set and the unrestrained quarter of the brothels. But less truthfully might you set out to picture the real Cairo with the former than without the latter. Any account which passes without note the incessant trade—in the high-noon as under the garish night-lights—driven by the women of Cairo will altogether misrepresent the city. It is with a hideous propriety that she should stand partly on the site of Old Babylon. She is a city which, in perhaps her most representative quarter, lives in and for lasciviousness. The details of that trade in its thoroughgoing haunts are no more to be described than looked upon. There is no shame; sexual transactions are conducted as openly and on as regular and well-established a footing of bargaining and market values as the sale of food and drink. Meat and drink, indeed, they must furnish to much of the population, and its alimentary properties are to be seen at every corner and in every gutter in hideousness of feature and disease unutterable. Not Paris, nor Constantinople, approaches in shamelessness the conduct of venereal industry in Cairo. All the pollution of the East would seem to drain into their foul pool. That which is nameless is not viewless. I speak that I do know and testify that I have seen. The phrase, the act, every imagination of the heart of man (and of woman), is impregnated with the filth of hell.

The official set you will see disporting itself on the piazza at Shepheard's or the Continental every afternoon. The official set is also the fashionable set, and it or its sojourning friends—or both—make up the monied set. I had no opportunity of going to a race-meeting at Gezireh; but it should come near to holding its own in "tone" with the great race-day at Caulfield.

Shepheard's is an habitual rendezvous of British officers at any time. The officers of the permanent army at Cairo assemble there, and the general orders are posted in the entrance-hall as regularly as at the Kasr-el-Nil Barracks. It is at Shepheard's that officers most do congregate. According to a sort of tacit agreement—extended later into an inescapable routine order—none lower in rank than a Subaltern enters there.

Otherwise, everywhere is the soldier; there is nothing he does not see. Everything is so utterly new that a day in Cairo is a continual voyage of discovery; and if he does no more than perambulate without an objective, it is doubtful if he has not the best of it. Fools and blind there are who look on everything from a gharry, fast-trotting. God help them! How can such a visitor hope to know the full charm of manner and voice and attire of the vendor of sherbet or sweet Nile-water if he move behind a pair of fast-trotting greys? How may he hope to know the inner beauties of a thoroughgoing bargaining-bout between two Arabs, when he catches only a fragment of dialogue and gesture in whisking past? What does he know of the beggars at the city gate in the old wall?—except how to evade them. Little he sees of the delicate tracery of the mosque; no time to wander over ancient Arab houses with their deserted harems, floor and walls in choice mosaic, rich stained windows, with all the symbolism of the manner of living disposed about the apartment. It is denied to him to poke about the native bakeries, to converse with salesmen, to look in on the Schools chanting Al Koran, to watch the manual weavers, tent-makers, and artificers of garments and ornaments. One cannot too much insist that it is a sad waste of opportunity to go otherwise than slowly and afoot, and innocent of "programmes," "schemes," agenda—even of set routes.

The alleged romance of Cairo is alleged only. Cairo is intensely matter-of-fact. In Carlyle's study of Mahomet you read: "This night the watchman on the streets of Cairo, when he cries 'Who goes?' will hear from the passenger, along with his answer, 'There is no God but God.'—'Allah akbar, Islam,' sounds through the souls, and whole daily existence, of these dusky millions."

This is romance read into Cairo by Carlyle. The watchman gets far other rejoinders to his cry this night—answers the more hideous for Carlyle's other-worldly supposition. Romance is gone out of Cairo, except in a distorted mental construction of the city. Cairo is not romantic; it is picturesque, and picturesque beyond description.

Alfresco cafés are ubiquitous. Their frequency and pleasantness suggest that the heat of Australia would justify their establishment there in very large numbers. Chairs and tables extend on to the footpaths. The people of all nations lounge there in their fez caps, drinking much, talking more, gambling most of all. Young men from the University abound; much resemble, in their speech and manner, the young men of any other University. They deal in witty criticism of the passengers, but show a readiness in repartee with them of which only an Arab undergraduate is capable.

The gambling of the cafés is merely symbolic of the spirit of gambling which pervades the city. It is incipient in the Arab salesman's love of bargaining for its own sake. The commercial dealings of Egypt, wholesale and retail alike, are said to want fixity in a marked degree. Downright British merchants go so far as to call it by harder names than the "spirit of gambling." The guides are willing to bet you anything on the smallest provocation. Lottery tickets are hawked about the streets like sweetmeats; there are stalls which sell nothing but lottery tickets, and thrive upon the sale.

You will see much, sitting in these cafés at your ease. Absinthe and coffee are the drinks. Coffee prevails, served black in tiny china cups, with a glass of cold water. It is a delicious beverage: the coffee fiend is not uncommon. Cigarettes are the habitual smoke in the streets. At the cafés you call for a hubble-bubble. They stand by the score in long racks. The more genteel (and hygienic) customers carry their own mouth-pieces, but it is not reckoned a sporting practice.

You cannot sit five minutes before the vendors beset you with edibles, curios, prawns, oranges, sheep's trotters, cakes, and post-cards. The boys who would polish your boots are the most noisome. The military camps in the dusty desert have created an industry amongst them. A dozen will follow you a mile through the streets. If you stop, your leg is pulled in all directions, and nothing but the half-playful exercise of your cane upon the sea of ragged backs saves you from falling in.