While my luckier companions started to visit the city, I settled myself on the veranda. It was the best place I could have chosen, for even leaving out the people on the Square, the veranda roof sheltered many curious characters. There were dragomans, most of them Greeks or Copts, wearing the fez and a short, braided jacket and full trousers; cavasses richly costumed in oriental fashion, scimetar on the hip, kandjar in the belt, and silver-topped cane in the hand; native servants in white drawers and blue or pink gowns; little negroes, bare-armed and bare-legged, dressed in short tunics striped with brilliant colours; dealers selling kuffîyehs, gandouras, and oriental stuffs manufactured in Lyons, photographic views of Egypt and of Cairo, or pictures of national types,—to say nothing of the travellers themselves, who, having come from all parts of the world, certainly deserved to be looked at.
Opposite the hotel, on the other side of the road, stood in the shade of the mimosas the carriages placed at the disposal of the invited guests by the splendid hospitality of the Khedive. An inspector, blind in one eye, with a turban rolled around his head and wearing a long blue caftan, called them up and gave the drivers the orders of the travellers. There also stood the battalion of donkey drivers with their long-eared steeds. I am told that there are no less than eighty thousand donkeys in Cairo. That number does not seem to be exaggerated. There are donkeys at every corner, around every mosque, and in the most deserted places there suddenly appear from behind a wall a donkey driver and a donkey that place themselves at your service. These asses are very pretty, spirited, and bright-tempered; they have not the piteous look and the air of melancholy resignation of the asses of our own country, which are ill fed, beaten, and contemned. You feel that they think as much of themselves as other animals do, and that they are not the whole day long a butt for stupid jokes. Perhaps they are aware that Homer compared Ajax to an ass, a comparison which is ridiculous in the West; and they also remember that one of their ancestors bore Miriam, the Virgin Mother of Issa, under the sycamore of Matarieh. Their coat varies from dark-brown to white, through all the shades of dun and gray. Some have white stars and fetlocks. The handsomest are clipped with ingenious coquetry so as to make around the legs patterns which make them look as if they were wearing open-worked stockings. When they are white, the end of the tail and the mane are dyed with henna. Of course this is only in the case of thorough-bred animals, of the aristocracy of the asinine race, and is not indulged in with the common herd.
Their harness consists of a headstall adorned with tresses, tufts of silk and wool, sometimes coral beads or copper plates, and of a morocco saddle, usually red, rising up in front to prevent falls, but without any cantle. The saddle is placed upon a piece of carpet or striped stuff, and is fastened by a broad girth which passes diagonally under the animal's tail like a crupper-strap; another girth fastens the saddle-cloth, and two short stirrups flap against the animal's sides. The harness is more or less rich according to the means of the donkey driver and the rank of his customers, but I am speaking merely of asses which stand for hire. No one in Cairo considers it undignified to ride an ass,—old men, grown men, dignitaries, townspeople, all use them. Women ride astride, a fashion which in no wise compromises their modesty, thanks to the enormous folds of their broad trousers which almost completely conceal their feet. They often carry before them, placed upon the saddle-bow, a small, half-nude, child which they steady with one hand while with the other they hold the bridle. It is usually women of importance who indulge in this luxury, for the poor fellahin women have no other means of locomotion than their little feet. These beauties, as we may suppose them to be, since they are masked more closely than society ladies at the Opera ball, wear over their garments a habbarah, a sort of black taffeta sack, which fills with air and swells in the most ungraceful fashion if the animal's pace is quickened.
In the East a rider, whether on horseback or on an ass, is always accompanied by two or three footmen. One runs on ahead with a wand in his hand to clear the way, the second holds the animal's bridle, and the third hangs on by its tail, or at least puts his hand on the crupper. Sometimes there is a fourth who flits about and stirs up the animal with a switch. Every minute Decamp's "Turkish Patrol," that startling painting which made such a sensation in the Exhibition of 1831, passed before me, amid a cloud of dust, and made me smile; but no one appeared to notice the comicality of the situation: a stout man dressed in white with a broad belt around his waist, perched on a little ass and followed by three or four poor devils, thin and tanned, with hungry mien, who through excess of zeal and in hope of backshish, seem to carry along the rider and his steed.
I must be forgiven all this information about the asses and their drivers, but these occupy so large a space in life at Cairo that they are entitled to the importance which they really possess.
ANCIENT EGYPT
The solemn title must not terrify the reader. M. Ernest Feydeau's book is, in spite of its title, most attractive reading. In his case science does not mean weariness, as happens too often. The author of "Funeral Customs and Sepulture among the Ancient Nations" desired to be understood of all, and everybody may profit by his long and careful researches. He has not sealed his work with seven seals, as if it were an apocalyptic volume, to be understood by adepts only; he has sought clearness, distinctness, colour, and he has given to archæology the plastic form which it almost always lacks. What is the use of heaping together materials in disorder, stones which are not made to form part of a building, colours which are not turned into pictures? What does the public, for whom, after all, books are meant, get out of so many obscure works, cryptic dissertations, deep researches, with which learned authors seem to mask entrances, as the ancient Egyptians—the comparison is a proper one here—masked the entrances to their tombs and their mummy pits so that no one might penetrate into them? What is the use of carving in darkness endless panels of hieroglyphs which no eye is to behold and the key to which one keeps for one's self? M. Ernest Feydeau is bold enough to desire to be an artist as well as a scholar; for picturesqueness in no wise detracts from accuracy, though erudites generally affect to believe the contrary. Did not Augustin Thierry draw his intensely living, animated, dramatic, and yet thoroughly true "Stories of the Merovingian Times" from the colourless, diffuse, ill-composed history of Gregory of Tours? Did not Sauval's unreadable work become "Notre-Dame de Paris" in Victor Hugo's hands? Did not Walter Scott, by his novels, Shakespeare by his dramas, render the greatest services to history by giving life to dead chronicles, by putting into flesh and blood heroes on whom forgetfulness had scattered its dust in the solitude of libraries? Does any one suppose that the chroniclers of the future will not consult Balzac to advantage, and look upon his work as a precious mine of documents? How great would be the interest excited by a similar account, domestic, intimate and familiar, by a Greek or a Roman author? We can have some idea of this from the fragments of Petronius and the Tales of Apuleius, which tell us more about life in the days of antiquity than the gravest writers, who often forget men while dwelling upon facts.
In an essay on the history of manners and customs which forms the introduction to his book, M. Ernest Feydeau has discussed this question of colour applied to science with much spirit, logic, and eloquence. He proves that it is possible, without falling into novel writing, without indulging in imaginativeness, and while preserving the gravity and the authority of history, to group around facts, by the intelligent reading of texts, by the study and the comparison of the monuments, the manners, the customs, the books of vanished races, to show man at a particular time, to put as a background to each event the landscape, the city, or the interior in which it occurred, and in the conqueror's hand the weapon which he really carried. Ideas have forms, events take place amid certain surroundings, individuals wear costumes which archæology, properly understood, can restore to them. That is its proper task. History draws the outline with a graver, archæology must fill it in with colour. Understood in this way, history makes the past present. The innovating archæologist, by an apparently paradoxical inspiration, has asked of death the secret of life; he has studied the tomb, which has yielded up to him not only the mysteries of destruction, but the customs and the national life of all the nations of antiquity. The sepulchre has faithfully preserved what the memory of man has forgotten and what has been lost in scattered libraries. The tomb alone, opening its sombre lips, has replied to the questions of to-day; it knows what historians do not know; it is impartial, and has no interest in lying, apart from the innocent imposture of the epitaph. Each generation, as it sinks forever under the ground, after having lived and moved for a few moments on its surface, inscribes upon the walls of its funeral dwelling the true expression of its acts, its beliefs, its customs, its arts, its luxuries, its individuality, all that was seen then and that shall never again be seen, and then the hand of man rolls boulders, the desert heaps up sand, the waters of the stream deposit mud upon the forgotten entrance to the necropolis. The pits are filled up, the subterranean passages are effaced, the tombs sink and disappear under the dust of empires. A thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand years pass by, and a lucky stroke of the pick reveals a whole nation within a coffin.
The ancients, differing in this respect from the moderns, spent their life in preparing their last dwelling. The history of their funerals contains, therefore, the germ of their whole history. But that history, full of intimate details, mysterious facts, and documents at times enigmatical, is not to be written like the other form of history which men are satisfied to repeat from age to age. It is amazing how many years the author had to spend in study and research in order to write his book, to bring together his materials, to analyse and to compare them.