Cairo’s amusements are varied: you may attend the opera house and listen to Italian music or see a French farce; take a turn at the hippodrome and have a circus; or stop at an open air play on the Esbekeeyah; or, if religiously inclined, take in the convent with its dancing dervishes and barbarous music; watch snake-charmers, glass-eaters, sword-swallowers, long-haired fakirs, chibook-smokers and munchers of scorpions; sip cafe noir (that looks and tastes like sweetened Nile mud) in a little shop where the waiters and loungers are as thick as the drink; or see Arabs gamble with dice and cards, much as they do in America; go to a kind of vaudeville, where a stringed band of lady-performers try to beguile travelers, with American airs and Persian dances, into buying drinks for them at the rate of one or two dollars a bottle, and poor stuff at that; or meander through the Fish Market at midnight where streets are filled with citizens and sight-seers, sidewalks with roystering soldiers, bazaars with shrewd traders, dens with drunken natives, and miles of houses with women outcasts from all quarters of the globe, leering, lurking and lustful, caged like wild beasts behind iron-barred gratings which are necessary to keep them from murderous assault on the morals, money and lives of the passersby. I was held up in an alleyway by a beautiful Ghawazee girl who said, with outstretched hand, “Me backsheesh to give God.” She would need a bank-roll to get full pardon for her multitudinous mistakes. The resorts where naked women invite you to see the “Danse du Ventre,” a Terpsichorean exercise not noted for its modesty, and the mahsheshehs, or hang-outs where hasheesh smokers stimulate themselves into idiotic talk and laughter and stupefy their brains into a narcotic nepenthe of poverty, hunger and dirt, may seem quite unethical to the Occidental tenderfoot, but they are Christian places of entertainment compared with those infamous joints in the Fish Market where men, dressed up like women, carry on. These bordels had their prototype of old in the Egyptian temples of Isis.
I entered a Cafe Chantant where, before an entranced audience, two daughters of the desert, with incandescent kohl-stained eyes and sin-stained souls, were going through the sinuous undulations of the “hooche-cooche.” They moved their necks to and fro like cobras before a snake-charmer, and the motion of hip, breast and abdomen thrilled the spectators. These Egyptian dancers show a laxity of muscles and morals, and dance in a way that makes it unnecessary to attend a gymnasium. The dishes served were delicate, but the songs were indelicate, to say the least. There was a very pathetic one which I translate:
“O damsel! thy silk shirt is worn out, and thine arms have become visible,
And I fear for thee, on account of the blackness of thine eyes.
I desire to intoxicate myself, and kiss thy cheeks,
And do deeds that ’Antar did not.”
The Oriental orchestra was made up of a darabooka drum, made of a wooden cylinder over which is stretched a parchment; the tar, a sort of tambourine; the kemengeh, a viol of two strings with a cocoanut sounding-body; the kanoon, a stringed instrument held on the knees and played with the fingers; the ’ood, a guitar with seven double strings; and the nay, a reed flute blown at the end. The music produced is most unspeakably unspiritual and nasally noisome. It outranks the obligato serenade of a love-sick tom-cat. The melody is old as the Libyan hills. Is this what Mark Antony heard when he fell for Cleopatra? If so, what a fall there was, my countrymen!
Here I bade adieu to the country which has all that was, is and ever will be. Good-bye, Egypt! Land of faro-banks and Pharaoh mummies—of backsheesh, bad smells, sphinx and blase globe-trotters! Paradise of palm trees, pyramids and postcard-venders! Desert domain of donkeys, dirt and dervishes—of tombs, temples, turbaned thieves and veiled vampires! Home of camel, crocodile, can-can and Cleopatra! Farewell, till we meet again!
* * *
Even cultivated girls sometimes grow wild.