Oh, how hot it is in Cairo! It never rains here; sometimes clouds are to be seen on the horizon, but over the town the sky is permanently of azure blue. In the daytime we are bothered by a swarm of flies, and are devoured at night by greedy mosquitoes—a veritable Egyptian plague!
Our apartment is next to the Hollands, our new American friends, who travelled with us on board the “Tzar,” from Piræus to Alexandria. Mrs. Holland is a charming lady, but rather despotic; she could twist her husband round her little finger. He was very mild and fond of peace.
Mr. Koyander, the Russian consul, placed himself at our disposal and gave us a great deal of interesting information. It is now the “Ramadan,” one of the biggest Mussulman feasts, and the Arab quarter of the town is especially animated. We drove with Mr. Koyander through narrow and dirty streets and arrived at a great open place. I was extremely interested by the panorama of the East which passed before our eyes. We met the most varied types: magnificent Arabs; Syrians in red mantles; Copts—Christians of the Greek faith—wearing black turbans; blue-clad figures of Fellahs in a garb that recalled the ill-omened coat of Joseph; and other specimens of the brown children of the Nile. The Egyptian women have painted chins and a ring stuck through their noses. The eyes of their babies were stuck round with flies, the poor mites being too apathetic to drive them away. This oriental throng, in turbans, stared at us unbenevolently, except a young negress, carrying a naked baby astride on her shoulder, who offered me a piece of sugar-cane, smiling and showing beautiful, glittering white teeth. We passed with some difficulty through the crowd and manœuvred between the tables, laid out with refreshments, set in the middle of the streets, and entered an Arab café to see the dances of the “bayadères,” or Egyptian dancing-girls. At the entry hung a dark curtain, covering the open doorway, which was lifted for us to pass, and we found ourselves in a small hall where three “bayadères” sat upon a raised platform; they were covered with gauze, with reddened lips and palms, wearing massive golden ear-rings, their hair twisted into innumerable thin ringlets at the end of which hung golden coins, with silver bracelets jingling on their bare ankles and their arms. We waited for their dances in vain, these daughters of the East absolutely refused to exhibit themselves before “Giaours” (Christians), and passed their time in throwing alluring glances at a group of good-looking young “hadjis” (men who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca or Medina), sitting in the first row.
The next day we visited the mosque of “Amrou.” Before entering it, we were told to tie on straw slippers upon our shoes. In the shadow of the mosque it was nice and cool. A palm had grown in the second court near a cistern where pilgrims performed their ablutions. The mosque is a large square building containing a whole forest of miraculous columns—“Proof Columns,” as they are called—standing very near each other, and giving passage to the “Just” and keeping back the “Perverted.” The proof can’t be precisely right, for according to it, it is only slim individuals who are ascertained to be the “Just,” while those inclined to be fat, always appear to be “Perverse.” A “muezzin” was chanting the Koran, in the middle of the mosque, to a throng of pilgrims prostrating themselves in prayer before the tomb of Caliph Amrou, who was buried on the spot where he had been killed during a great slaughter, which took place in the altar during the fight of the Arabs and the Mamelukes.
We mounted on the citadel that same afternoon. Before reaching the old fortress built on the spur of the Mokattam hills, we passed threatening British cannon, which kept watch over the town of Cairo, and passed through the iron-clamped gates to the wide courtyard where stands the mosque of Mohammed-Ali, now converted into barracks. When we returned to the hotel our way was barred by a funeral procession, escorted by a group of dervishes bearing ragged banners and chanting the Koran to the accompaniment of drums, and hired women-mourners, who beat their breasts and scratched their faces wailing lamentably all the time. Behind them the favourite donkey of the deceased was led. Some steps further we were brought to a stand-still by a wedding procession. A rich palankeen, bearing the newly married couple appeared, placed on two shafts, to which two splendid dromedaries were harnessed, one behind and one in the front, covered with bright scarlet nets and decorated with tufts of white ostrich feathers and little silver bells. Camels heavily laden with the wedding gifts brought up the rear.
The mighty Pyramids seem to stand quite near to Cairo, and still it takes an hour and a half to drive to them by a long avenue of great trees with meeting branches, stately leafy veterans, whose thick tops, forming a cool vault, prevented the sun from scorching us when we drove on the Ismail Road that leads from Cairo to the Pyramids. We crossed an iron bridge over the Nile, which, though at its fullest now, is not very deep; a drove of buffaloes were crossing it easily. We passed through the mud-built village of Sakhara, a small encampment with a cluster of nomad tents, and saw a circle of Arab-Bedouins, cloaked and white hooded forms, belonging to a nomad tribe, crouching over a fire and cooking their dinner in the plain, under the scanty shade of palm-trees. Their Sheikh, a very tall and dignified Arab, offered us a camel and a donkey to go and see the Sphinx. Sergy mounted the camel and I had to condescend to the donkey. We were followed by a band of Bedouins who offered us their services as guides to the Pyramids. Our escort increased as we went on; half-naked children ran after us begging baksheesh. Directly after leaving the village we were in the Sahara, with no tree or habitation, only the naked desert with rippling sandbanks. The landscape fatigued the eye by its sand uniformly yellow and its sky uniformly blue. The Pyramids, the greatest of all human monuments, bewildered us by their size when we drove up to them, especially the Pyramid of Cheops, which took a hundred thousand masons twenty-five years to build. The Pyramids are of extreme antiquity, a thousand years before the Christian era. At the time when Abraham undertook his journey to Egypt, the Pyramids had already existed for several centuries back. As soon as a Pharaoh began to reign, in the first place he had his mausoleum built in the form of a Pyramid. Inside, rooms with alabaster walls are shown, and long high galleries containing the huge granite sarcophaguses. We made the tour of the great Pyramid of Cheops. Its blocks consist of a series of steep stone steps. To go up these steps is like walking up a wall. The hard African sun was shining fiercely and it was too hot to undertake the ascent of the Pyramid; we were contented to contemplate its wonders from the base. A young Bedouin proposed to show us a wonderful feat—his ascent and descent of the Pyramid in nineteen minutes, but we refused to witness that acrobatic performance and rode over the hot yellow sand of the desert to the Sphinx. All around us the great plain extended to the horizon. I was oppressed by the immense solitude. In the desert, in the midst of the sand-ocean, the monstrous Sphinx, the colossus of the past ages, keeps watch on the sands from nearly four thousand years before the birth of Christ, sleeping his eternal and enigmatic sleep. How many centuries have past, and this giant continues contemplating, with a mysterious and condescending smile, the nothingness and instability of the world. Hundreds of years after I am dead the Sphinx would be probably as it is now—silent, grave, crouching there under the scorching sun, its eyes of stone gazing beyond the world of men, and seeming for ever to be smiling ironically on the folly of human vanities and aspirations. I looked at the wonderful beast that lay gazing westward, with mocking, calm and fathomless eyes of everlasting mystery, and was conscious of a sudden sense of smallness. If it hadn’t been so hot I should have meditated on the fragility of human greatness. A legend says that Mary, Joseph, and the Holy Child halted here on their long journey, when they fled to the land of Egypt to escape the fury of King Herod, and that the Virgin laid the tired Christ between the paws of the Sphinx to sleep. We had brought a small kodak with us, and Mahmoud immortalised me installed on the back of my peaceable courser, and my husband perched on his high quadruped, both of us surrounded by a multitude of dusky sons of the Sahara. When we got to our carriage we amply recompensed the services of our Bedouin followers, who continued to run after our carriage demanding more tips and shouting “Baksheesh, Sahib, baksheesh!” Mahmoud put out of himself by their effrontery, rose in his seat looking remarkably ferocious, and began to throw stones at them, at which the whole crowd took to their heels. We had to return full speed to Cairo, before the drawbridge was raised for the ships to pass; we tore through the bridge which is a mile long, scattering the foot-passengers who happened to be in our way to right and left.
The next day we went on donkeys to see the “whirling dervishes,” an extraordinary and rather terrific sight. We entered a mosque consisting of a square hall, with sheep-skins laid down in the middle, on which a score of dervishes, in long white skirts, were ranged in a wide half-circle. Their Sheikh, an old man with a long white beard, stood between them holding the Prophet’s banner. The dervishes, their long hair falling to their shoulders, swayed their bodies from side to side, uttering ominous sounds like that of angry lions. I glanced around with an involuntary shiver, and went and sat at the back of the hall, near a group of officers of the Egyptian army, feeling a sense of security in their proximity. Suddenly the Sheikh gave vent to an odd sort of growl which I didn’t like at all, it made me think of wolves. The dervishes tried to imitate him and so horribly that I turned cold and measured the distance to the door, wanting frantically to get away. At each howl the dervishes’ heads went backward and forward and then from right to left, to the sound of cymbals and blow-pipes, their long hair covering their faces, falling gradually into frantic convulsions, their eyes out of their sockets. One of them entered into such a frenzy that he continued for more than five minutes wagging his head, not being able to stop it by inert force. The long human chain holding each other by the hand, began bending to the ground to the increasing shouts of “Allah, Allah!” At last they fell on the floor inanimate, with foam on their lips. Having gone through all this programme, the dervishes, quietening down, came up to their Sheikh and kissed him.
When we went out of the mosque we had to pass before a sacred goat, a very wicked one, who tried to butt all the passers-by with his horns. We remounted our donkeys and our little cavalcade started off on the long white road. My frisky, little ass trotted swiftly, moving gaily his long ears, and Sergy had great difficulty to keep up to me, being obliged to struggle with his stubborn donkey which was vicious and kicked frantically all the time. We came up to a little desolate village inhabited by Copts, native Christians belonging to the Orthodox faith, and visited in the first place the Coptic church, built on the place where the Virgin Mary, Joseph and the Holy Child are said to have stayed when they fled to Egypt. We stood on the very spot where the Holy Family had rested. The water stood inches deep upon the floor from the overflowing of the Nile. When we went out of the church we saw on the perch a crowd of Coptic beggars who whined in English, “A penny for the love of Christ!”
On our way back we met a carriage preceded by musicians, and thought that it was a wedding, but instead of a newly-married couple we saw a little boy sitting between two natives, and were told that it was the circumcision of the little Egyptian which was being celebrated, by driving him in triumph around the streets of the quarter of the town where his parents lived.