CHAPTER XIII
Through a labyrinth of narrow streets, echoing with native cries and Oriental traffic, a wonderful sight and sensation to strangers unfamiliar with Cairene commercial life, Margaret Lampton found her way to "the home of enchantment," as she afterwards called the Iretons' ancient mansion. It was a native house, typical and expressive of the most resplendent years of the Mameluke rule in Egypt.
A licensed guide, with a brass-lettered number on his arm, in a blue cotton jebba and a scarlet fez, had volunteered to show her the way; it would have been impossible for a stranger to find it alone. The Cairene licensed guides, although they are pests, have their uses.
As Margaret passed under the lintel of the outer door, which led into a quiet courtyard, of Hadassah Ireton's house, a Nubian servant rose from the stone mastaba—the guards' seat—upon which he had been lying half asleep; he conducted her with the silence of a shadow to the gate of the inner or women's courtyard. This courtyard was overlooked by the women's quarters of the house only.
Margaret rather timidly entered the second courtyard. She scarcely knew what to expect. She was certainly not prepared for the vision of beauty which she saw directly the door was opened. She had heard nothing at all of the fantastic beauty of the superb old Mameluke palaces in Cairo; she did not know that the Iretons lived in one.
A fat servant, also a Nubian, but more amply clad the guard at the outer door, rose from a wooden seat, grown grey with age. With the same silence and mystery he conducted Margaret across the courtyard.
Margaret could, of course, only glance at the bewildering beauty of her mediaeval surroundings as she followed the servant, but brief as her vision of it was, it left a never-to-be-forgotten picture in her mind. A vision of coolness and peace, of oriel windows—chamber-windows for unreal people, jealously screened with weather-bleached meshrahiyeh work—and one high balcony, the special feature of the courtyard, a dream of romantic beauty, shaded by the dark leaves of an ancient lebbek tree. It was a vision as dignified as it was touching. It was like a lost piece of a world which had passed away, a lonely cloud which had detached itself from a world of romance and had hidden itself in the heart of a seething city of ugliness and sin.
Surprise temporarily drove from Margaret's mind the object of her visit; it was not until she was seated in the spacious room which overlooked the courtyard, and whose front wall consisted of the meshrahiyeh balcony—it was now Hadassah Ireton's drawing-room—that she was brought face to face with the unusualness of her visit.
The room was beautifully cool, screened as it was by the delicate lace-work. Meshrabiyeh was invented to fill two wants—to screen the windows through which women could look out, without being seen themselves, and to admit fresh air while it excluded the sun. It is a substitute for glass in a warm climate.
Margaret would have liked to have sat for a little time longer to collect her thoughts and to take in the beauty of the room; but that was not to be; the door opened and her hostess entered.