Shortly the Pyramids emerge on the eastern sky-line, and over the thickening house-tops rises the splendid relief of the Makattam Hills, with the stately citadel perched on the fringe, looking down on the City under its soaring minarets.
You had formed plans for the economy of the day; they are all dissipated when you step from the train and realise yourself within a mile of the bazaars. Their call is irresistible. The Pyramids, the mosques, the museum—all can wait, to be visited if there is time for it. You enter a gharry and alight at the mouth of the Mooski. It is palpably a mouth to that seething network, as plainly defined (as you gaze up Mooski Street from the Square) as the entrance to an industrial exhibition.
There is a crowd of men in the early stages of Mooski Street, whose business, day and night, is to conduct. They lurk privily for the innocent, like the wicked men in the Book of Psalms. The guides have come so much into disrepute that they mostly hasten to tell you they are not guides. "What are you, then?"—"I am student, sair"; or "I am agent, sair"; or "I am your friend; I do not wish for money." You'll meet such self-abnegation nowhere on earth as in the Mooski. Those who do own to being guides will never name a price. "How much do you want?"—"I leave that to you, sair. If you are pleased, you give me what you think." ... This is all very subtle: the man who is agent will get his commission and tender for baksheesh for having put you in the way of purchase (whereas he is in league with the rogue who fleeces you in the sale). The student shows no sort of ideal scholastic contempt for lucre; it's of degrees of gullibility that he's chiefly a student—and an astute one, gathering where he has not strawed. The man who is your friend and wouldn't think of money turns out a mere liar, downright—who does care, greatly. These are the subtlest ways of approaching you and broaching the subject of a tour. The rascal may simply fall into step and ask the time of day and proceed to talk of the weather—merely glad of your company—and abruptly close the half-mile walk with a demand for cash, like any guide requisitioned. In short, it's to be doubted whether in any city men live on their wits more artfully and unscrupulously than in the Cairene bazaars.
As a practice, it's wise to decline all offers to accompany—as a practice; but first time through it's wise to accept. No one can hope to unravel the tangle of the Mooski geography unaided or by chance. The labyrinth of overshadowed alleys is as confusing as the network of saps near the firing-line. Take a guide at your first going. If he does no more than show "the bright points" in an experience of the bazaars, he has earned his exorbitant fee. After that, refuse him, which you will never do without harsh discourtesy. A mere "No, thank you," is as nothing. "Yallah minhenna"—or its equivalent—uttered in your most quarrelsome manner, is the least of which he will begin to take notice.
The best beginning is through the narrow doorway off Mooski Street into the spice bazaar. Of so unpretentious a doorway you never would suspect the purpose without a guide, and that's the first argument for tolerating him. Can such a needle's-eye lead to anything worth entering? You arrive in an area where the air is voluptuous with the scent of all the spices of the East—something more delicious than even the scent bazaar, and less enervating. All the purchasers are women, moving round behind their yashmaks. They boil and beat the spices to grow fat, and to be fat is a national feminine aspiration. The boys are pounding the wares in large stone mortars, crushing out the sweetness, which pervades like an incense.
Appropriately enough, it is but a step into the scent bazaar proper, and many of the purchasers there are (inappropriately) men. That the men should wear and hanker after perfumes to this degree is one phase of Egyptian degeneracy. The vendors squat in their narrow cubicles lined with shelf upon shelf of gaily-coloured phials. They invite you to sit down. Coffee is called for, and whilst that is preparing you must taste the sweets of their wares on your tunic-sleeve. Bottle by bottle comes down; he shakes them and rubs the stopper across your forearm: attar of roses, jasmine, violet, orange-blossom, banana, and the rest of them, until you are fairly stupid with the medley of sweet fumes. You saunter off rubbing your sleeve upon your breeches, and wondering what your comrades in arms will say if they catch you wearing the odours of the lord of the harem. You have a tiny flask of attar of roses upon you to send home to its appropriate wearer.
You move on to the tarbush bazaar; Tunis bazaar, where the fine Tunisian scarves of the guides are sold; slipper bazaar, showing piles of the red canoe-shoe of the Soudanese hotel-waiter, and of the yellow heelless slipper of the lounging Egyptian; blue bazaar, where the women buy their dress-stuffs—their gaudy prints and silks, all the rough material for their garments. No Australian flapper can hold a candle to them in their excited keenness of selection; and there is the added excitement of bargaining. The feminine vanities of adornment are deep and confirmed in Cairo. To see the Cairene aristocrats purchasing dress-material, go to Stein's or Roberts's, Hughes's or Philips's or Senouadi's, or to any of the other big houses, in the middle afternoon. It's there, and not at any vulgar promenading (for they all drive), that you see the fine women of Cairo. Mostly French they are, and beautiful indeed, dressed as aptly and with as much artistry as in Alexandria; and that is saying the last word. There you will see a galaxy of beauty—not in any facetious or popular sense, but actually. It's a privilege to stand an hour in any such house and watch the procession: a privilege that does you good. The Frenchwomen of Cairo perform very naturally and capably the duty of matching their beauty. They have an unerring æsthetic sense, and evidently realise well enough that to dress well and harmoniously is a form of art almost as pure as the painting of pictures.
But we were in the Mooski, where the art is not so purely practised. The Egyptian women do not dress beautifully nor harmoniously. They dress with extreme ugliness; their colours outrage the sense at every turn. Only the extreme beauty of their features and clarity of complexion save them from repulsiveness. The glaring fabrics of the blue bazaar express well the Egyptian feminine taste in colour.
The book bazaar leads up towards the Mosque al Azhar. The books are all hand-made. Here is the paradise of the librarian who wails for the elimination of machine-made rubbish of the modern Press. At any such work the Egyptian mechanic excels in patience and thoroughness. Making books by hand is, in fact, an ideal form of labour for him, as is hand-weaving, which still prevails, and the designing and chiselling of the silver and brass work. Al Koran is here in all stages of production; and with propriety there is a lecture-hall in the midst of the book bazaar, which is, so to speak, "within" the Al Azhar University close by. A lecture is being delivered. The speaker squats on a tall stool and delivers himself with vigour to the audience seated on the mat-strewn floor. Well dressed and well featured they are, jotting notes rather more industriously than in most Colonial halls of learning, or listening with an intensity that is almost pained.
The Moslem University in the Mosque al Azhar has a fine old front designed with a grace and finished in a mellowness of colour that any Oxonian College might respect. You show a proper respect—whether you will or no—by donning the capacious slippers over your boots, as in visiting any other mosque, and enter the outer court, filled with the junior students. The hum and clatter rises to a mild roar. All are seated in circular groups, usually about a loud and gesticulating teacher; and where there is no teacher the students are swaying gently in a rhythmic accompaniment to the drone with which Al Koran is being got by heart. There is no concerted recitation or repetition: every man for himself. That, perhaps, helps to visualise the swaying mass of students and to conceive the babel of sound. There is no roof above that tarbushed throng. This is the preparatory school. The University proper, beyond the partition, containing the adult students, alone is roofed. Here they are all conning in the winter sunshine. Little attention is given to visitors; most students are droning with closed eyes, presumably to avert distraction. Few are aware of your presence. That consciousness is betrayed chiefly by a furtively whispered "Baksheesh!"—the national watchword of Egypt—uttered with a strange incongruity in a temple of learning—a temple literally.