How different the Khan looked, lighted up as it then was by hundreds of lamps in and around the shops! In places brilliantly coloured tent-cloths stretched across the lanes, and on every mastaba the store-keeper was entertaining his friends. The dark intervals were the shops kept by Christians or Jews, which were carefully shuttered up for the night.
The silk merchant, Mustâpha, and his opposite neighbour Seleem were both here, and I was not sorry to accept the former’s kindly invitation to sit down. Being unused to smoking the nargeeleh or the almost obsolete shibook which were offered me, he procured some cigarettes and clapped his hands to summon the boy from the coffee-stall. He regretted that the mooled of the Hasaneyn was not now as in former days, when hardly a shop in the whole Khan was not lighted up like as his and Seleem’s. ‘Jews, Nazarenes, Parsees, and what not else, were invading the stalls held by the faithful,’ he said, pointing to the shutters of those unenlightened people.
‘Allahu! Allahu!’ from the street outside was clearly heard during the pauses in the conversation.
‘Was it possible now for a Nazarene to enter the mosque and see the tomb where Hoseyn’s head lay buried?’ I asked, and also showed him the ticket I had, allowing me to paint in the mosques of Cairo. He read the instructions, and pointed out a line which made an exception for that particular shrine as well as for two others. The talk then drifted to an instance when one of my countrymen, disguised as a Moslem, was accidentally discovered near the tomb while the mooled was being held; of how he was nearly killed by the infuriated mob and saved by the intervention of the princess Zohra.
The story is so full of dramatic interest that, instead of giving the garbled versions which obtain in the bazaars, I will try to tell it as Max Eyth tells it in ‘Hinter Pflug und Schraubstock.’ Eyth was in Egypt during the lifetime of the princess and heard all the details from a former member of her household.
Zohra was the youngest living daughter of Mohammed Ali, Egypt’s first viceroy. She was the idol of her father and partook of his character more than did any of her numerous brothers and sisters. Her childhood was spent in the same hareem as that of her nephew Abbas, who was the same age as herself. Self-willed children as they both were, quarrels were of frequent occurrence. When Abbas would taunt her that she was only a little girl, she would remind him that she was the great Ali’s daughter, whereas he was only the son of her brother Tussûn. Words ending in blows one day, Abbas was packed off to a school and a governess was found for the young princess.
Wishing to have her taught both English and French, they engaged the services of a young Irish lady, a Miss O’Donald, who had been brought up in Paris and spoke French as well as her own language.
Western ladies had hitherto been little seen in Egyptian hareems; the Mohammedan ladies disapproved of the greater liberty enjoyed by the newcomer and soon grew jealous of the great influence the governess held over her pupil.
As Zohra grew older, Miss O’Donald became more of a companion than a teacher, and she remained in the viceroy’s service for eight years. Abbas had in the meantime left his school and had a hareem of his own in his grandfather’s palace. He never forgave Zohra for having been the cause of his banishment, and awaited his time to wreak his vengeance.
Mohammed Ali had not yet found a husband for his daughter; he aspired to marrying her to a Sultan or to a son of the Khalif himself. It therefore happened that at the age of sixteen Zohra still remained single.