The Rulers of the Mediterranean

by Richard Harding Davis

A BRITISH SQUARE FORMED IN FRONT OF THE PYRAMIDS

These camels and sais are but two of the things you see from your wicker chair on the marble terrace at Shepheard's. The others are hundreds of donkey-boys in blue night-gowns slit open at the throat and showing their bare breasts, and with them as many long-eared donkeys, rendered even more absurd than they are in a state of nature by fantastic clippings of their coats and strings of jangling brass and blue beads around their necks.

There are also the women of Cairo, the enslaved half of Egypt, who have been brought, through generations of training and tradition, to look upon any man save their husband as their enemy, as a thing to be shunned. This has become instinct with them, as it is instinctive with women of Northern countries to turn to men for sympathy or support, as being in some ways stronger than themselves. But these women of Cairo, who look like an army of nuns, are virtually shut off from mankind, with the exception of one man, as are nuns, and they have not the one great consolation allowed the nun—they have no souls to be saved, nor religion, nor a belief in a future life.

There was a young girl married while I was in Cairo. The streets around the palace of her father were hung with flags for a week; the garden about his house was enclosed with a tent which was worth in money twenty thousand dollars, and which was as beautiful to the eye as the interior of a mosque; for a week the sheiks who rented the estates of the high contracting parties were fed at their expense; for a week men sang and bands played and the whole neighborhood feasted; and on the last night everybody went to the wedding and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and listened to a young man singing Arabian love-songs. I naturally did not see the bride. The women who did see her described her as very beautiful, barely sixteen years old, and covered with pearls and diamonds. She was weeping bitterly; her mother, it appeared, had arranged the match. I did not see her, but I saw the bridegroom. He was fat and stupid, and over sixty, and he had white hair and a white beard. A priest recited the Koran before him at the door of the house, and a band played, and the people cheered the Khedive three times, and then the crowd parted, and the bridegroom was marched to the door which led to the stairs, at the top of which the girl awaited him. Two grinning eunuchs crouched on this dark staircase, with lamps held high above their heads, and closed the door behind him. His sixteen-year-old bride has him to herself now—him and his eunuchs—until he or she dies. We could show similitudes between this wedding and some others in civilized lands, but it is much too serious a matter to be cynical about.

The women of Egypt are as much slaves as ever were the negroes of our South. They are petted and fattened and given a home, but they must look at life through barriers—barriers across their boxes at the opera, and barriers across the windows of their broughams when they drive abroad, and barriers across their very faces. As long as one-half of the Egyptian people are enslaved and held in bondage and classed as animals without souls, so long will an Army of Occupation ride over the land, and insult by its presence the khedival power. No country in these days can be truly great in which the women have no voice, no influence, and no respect. There are worse things in Egypt than bad irrigation, and the harem is the worst of them. If the Egyptians want to be free themselves, they should first free their daughters and their mothers. The educated Egyptian is ashamed of his national costume; but let him feel shame for some of his national customs. A frock-coat and a harem will not go together.

The English, who have done so many fine things for Egypt's good, and who keep an army there to emphasize the fact, have arranged that any slave who comes to the office of the Consul-General and claims his protection can have it; but these slaves of the married men are not granted even this chance of escape.

And so they live like birds in a cage. They eat and dress and undress, and expose their youth and beauty, and hide their age and ugliness, until they die. The cry along the Nile a few years ago was, "Egypt for the Egyptians," and a very good cry it was, although the wrong man first started it. But there was another cry raised in the land of Egypt many hundreds of years before of "Let my people go," and the woman who can raise that again to-day, and who can set free her sisters of the East, will be doing a greater work than any woman is doing at the present time or has ever done.

The women who pass before you in the procession at the foot of the terrace are of two classes only. There is no middle class in Egypt. The poor are huddled up in a black bag that hides their bodies from the crown of the head to the feet. What looks like the upper end of a black silk stocking falls over the face from the bridge of the nose and fastens behind the ears, and a brass tube about the size of a spool is tied between the eyes. You see in consequence nothing but their eyes, and as these are perhaps their best feature, they do not all suffer from their enforced disguise. The only women whose bare faces you can see, and from whom you may judge of the beauty of the rest, are the good women of the Coptic village, who form a sort of sisterhood, and the dancing-girls, who are not so good. Some of these have the straight nose, the narrow eyes, and the perfect figure of Cleopatra, as we picture her; but the faces of the majority are formless, with broad, fat noses, full lips, and their figures are without waists or hips, and their ankles are as round as a man's upper arm. When they are pretty they are very pretty, but those that are so are so few and are so covered with gold that one suspects they are very much the exception. Of the women of the upper class you see only a glimpse as they are swept by in their broughams, with the sais in front and a eunuch on the box and the curtains half lowered.