The original colouring of the gateway seems to have worn itself down to making a quiet and harmonious background to this sparkling mass of metal work.
I am soon recognised by the owner of one of the stalls, from whose shop I had also painted a part of this bazaar, and am again invited to sit down to coffee and a cigarette. As some seven or eight seasons had passed since my last visit to Cairo, and considering the thousands of foreigners who must have passed through these bazaars during that time, it is astonishing that he should have remembered my face. There is, however, no time now to accept of the good man’s hospitality, but ‘In-sháalláh,’ I shall return before many days.
Each turning gives us a fresh scheme of colour and the interest of another handicraft. The carpet bazaar leads out of that of the metal workers. The small cupboard-shaped shop is here replaced by one or two important show-rooms, and here and there a beautiful old Persian rug makes one regret the crude colouring of the aniline-dyed modern ones which are replacing them. Be the colours ever so glaring, the subdued warm light which passes through the awnings makes them part of one harmonious whole.
A mass of red and yellow is what catches our eyes as we look down the slipper market, at a right angle from the carpet bazaar. Festoons of slippers hang from shop to shop, they are piled in stacks on the counters, and large skins, both red and yellow, are being cut up and hammered about as if the supply was not yet equal to the demand.
We have them on our right, and pass through a double row of stalls where we are pestered to buy strings of beads, amber mouthpieces, cut and uncut stones, ‘Nice bangles for your lady,’ besides many other things we are equally not in want of. Here we take our leave of the Khan Khalil, and I also of the imaginary reader whom I have attempted to conduct through it.
I am fortunate enough to find an arabeyeh, the Cairene cab, and can ponder over my morning while returning to the hotel.
Yes, Cairo is good enough for a second visit, and, please God, a good many more. My second impressions were perhaps pleasanter than my first ones, for I had not now that bewildering sense of how I should set to work, and also if it were possible to give anything like a pictorial presentment of these scenes. The physical inconveniences of working in crowded streets and amongst a strange people appalled me; but I did not then realise, as I do now, how much a tactful guide can do to make this work a possibility.
CHAPTER II
RENEWAL OF MY ACQUAINTANCE WITH MOHAMMED BROWN AND SOME REFLECTIONS ON MATRIMONY
NOW the first thing to do was to look up my former servant, Mohammed el-Asmar, now a dragoman known as Mohammed Brown, the surname being the English interpretation of Asmar. I have described him fully in Below the Cataracts, a previous book I have written when Egypt was much newer to me than at present.