Allah be praised! Here I am in Alexandria, the city founded by Alexander the Great. Yet Alex. could never conquer this part of the world today—the smells would put him to rout. This polyglot port is in “Lower” Egypt, and its dives are among the lowest found anywhere. The Rue des Soeurs is a street where crooked people go straight to perdition. Gambling hells are overflowing. Sailors and soldiers from the four corners of the globe crowd the cafes, where guitars twang, pianos jangle, drunks bawl, booze flows, choruses cheer and women leer. Fleshy Fatimas, overpainted and underclothed prowl about the street seeking whom they may devour. From lighted windows come droning nasal songs—
“Ya benat Iskendereeyeh,” etc.
“O ye damsels of Alexandria!
Your walk over the furniture is alluring:
Ye wear the Kashmeer shawl with embroidered work,
And your lips are sweet as sugar.”
All aboard for Cairo, city of the Caliphs, and I felt like taking a board and spanking the exposed anatomy of the Arab youths who posed along the railroad tracks to shock and mock the passengers.
Leaving the black sheep tourists at “Shepherds” Hotel, I visited the mosques which are as numerous in Cairo as mosquitoes in New Jersey. There may be a thousand; I visited five hundred, more or less. Sometimes I took off my slippers at the outer door, and at others I wore a kind of moccasin over my tourist shoes and shuffled and slid over the old floors, wondering how in the name of everything sacred I could profane anything with a good “sole” like mine. In my fling about the city I visited the Whirling Dervishes who whirled and dervished for me to my heart’s content with a poetry of motion a Sitka Indian could never attain. My head grows dizzy and my stomach faint when I think of them and their musical accompaniment of tambourines and flutes which were a cross between an ungreased saw and the breathing of an overdriven horse. I left before these human tops stopped spinning, and I carried away the memory of their tomato-can hats, bell-shaped robes, half-closed eyes, drooping heads and extended arms. I still see the uplifted right palm catching a blessing from Allah, the left hand turned down to bestow it.