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ON LEAVE IN CAIRO

It is not so long ago as to render it untrue now that Dean Stanley said, looking down from the Citadel: "Cairo is not the ghost of the dead Egyptian Empire, nor anything like it."

The interval elapsed since that reflection was uttered has, indeed, only deepened its truth. Cairo is becoming more modern every season. The "booming" of Cairo as a winter resort for Europeans was begun at the opening of the Canal by the Khedive Ismail. His ambition was the transforming of Cairo into a kind of Paris of Africa. The effort has not died with him. It has persisted with the official-set and their visitors. The result now is that in half an hour's ride you may pass from those monuments of antiquity, the Sphinx and the Pyramid of Cheops, in a modern tram-car, along a route which is neither ancient nor modern, into a city which blends in a most amazing fashion Europe of to-day with Egypt of a very long time past. There are wheels within wheels: at the foot of the Great Pyramid are crowded shanties and taverns such as you might enter in a poorer Melbourne Street or on a new-found gold-field; and the intensity of the contradiction in Cairo itself baffles description.

Cairo has been so accurately portrayed in every aspect with the pen that it seems presumptuous to attempt to reproduce even impressions, much less relate facts. One prefers, of course, if he does attempt to do either, to give impressions rather than facts. Any guide-book will give you facts. And the reader who demands a sort of Foster-Frazer tabulation of facts is analogous to those unhappy readers of romance who rank incident above characterisation.

What one feels he must say, chiefly, is that it is the living rather than the dead in Cairo that attract most strongly. You go to the Museum or stand beside the sarcophagus of the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid once, and again; not because it is conventionally fitting, but because that conventional appropriateness rests upon a broad and deep psychology: these places have their hold upon you. But incomparably stronger is that which draws you times without number to the bazaars. "Fool!" says Teufelsdröckh. "Why journeyest thou wearisomely, in thy antiquarian fervour, to gaze on the stone Pyramids of Geeza, or the clay ones of Sacchara? These stand there, as I can tell thee, idle and inert, looking over the desert, foolishly enough, for the last three thousand years...."

A half-day in the bazaars I would not exchange for a whole wilderness of Sphinxes. You may go twice and thrice before the Sphinx, but there comes a time when there is no place for you but the ebb and flow of the human tide in the narrow streets; when you spend all your leave there, and are content to commend the venerable dead and their mausolea to the Keeper of Personality for ever.

I dare not enter on the multiplicity of the charm of the bazaars: more accurately, I cannot. The dazzling incongruity of vendors and of wares under the over-meeting structures multiplies multiplicity. They move and cry up and down classified bazaars. A vociferous Arab hawks a cow for sale through the boot-bazaar; the delicious Arabian perfumes of the picturesque scent bazaar are fouled by a crier of insanitary food; Jews, French, Italians, Tunisians, Greeks, and Spaniards jostle each other through the alleys of the tent bazaar, braziers' bazaar, bazaar of the weavers, book bazaar—bazaar of any commodity or industry you care to name; and the proprietors and artificers squat on their tiny floors, maybe four feet square. In the busy forenoon, looking up the Mooski, it is as though the wizard had been there: almost you look for the djin to materialise. Rich colour is splashed over the stalls and the throng; there is music in the jingle of wares and the hum of voices; and the sober and graceful mosque, its rich colour gently mellowed by centuries of exposure, lifts a minaret above the animation. If this is the complexity of the broad view, what contrasts are thrust at you from the detail of men and things, as you saunter through!

Here in the Mooski is the micro-Cairo—Cairo bodied forth in little, except for the intruding official set and the unrestrained quarter of the brothels. But less truthfully might you set out to picture the real Cairo with the former than without the latter. Any account which passes without note the incessant trade—in the high-noon as under the garish night-lights—driven by the women of Cairo will altogether misrepresent the city. It is with a hideous propriety that she should stand partly on the site of Old Babylon. She is a city which, in perhaps her most representative quarter, lives in and for lasciviousness. The details of that trade in its thoroughgoing haunts are no more to be described than looked upon. There is no shame; sexual transactions are conducted as openly and on as regular and well-established a footing of bargaining and market values as the sale of food and drink. Meat and drink, indeed, they must furnish to much of the population, and its alimentary properties are to be seen at every corner and in every gutter in hideousness of feature and disease unutterable. Not Paris, nor Constantinople, approaches in shamelessness the conduct of venereal industry in Cairo. All the pollution of the East would seem to drain into their foul pool. That which is nameless is not viewless. I speak that I do know and testify that I have seen. The phrase, the act, every imagination of the heart of man (and of woman), is impregnated with the filth of hell.

The official set you will see disporting itself on the piazza at Shepheard's or the Continental every afternoon. The official set is also the fashionable set, and it or its sojourning friends—or both—make up the monied set. I had no opportunity of going to a race-meeting at Gezireh; but it should come near to holding its own in "tone" with the great race-day at Caulfield.

Shepheard's is an habitual rendezvous of British officers at any time. The officers of the permanent army at Cairo assemble there, and the general orders are posted in the entrance-hall as regularly as at the Kasr-el-Nil Barracks. It is at Shepheard's that officers most do congregate. According to a sort of tacit agreement—extended later into an inescapable routine order—none lower in rank than a Subaltern enters there.

Otherwise, everywhere is the soldier; there is nothing he does not see. Everything is so utterly new that a day in Cairo is a continual voyage of discovery; and if he does no more than perambulate without an objective, it is doubtful if he has not the best of it. Fools and blind there are who look on everything from a gharry, fast-trotting. God help them! How can such a visitor hope to know the full charm of manner and voice and attire of the vendor of sherbet or sweet Nile-water if he move behind a pair of fast-trotting greys? How may he hope to know the inner beauties of a thoroughgoing bargaining-bout between two Arabs, when he catches only a fragment of dialogue and gesture in whisking past? What does he know of the beggars at the city gate in the old wall?—except how to evade them. Little he sees of the delicate tracery of the mosque; no time to wander over ancient Arab houses with their deserted harems, floor and walls in choice mosaic, rich stained windows, with all the symbolism of the manner of living disposed about the apartment. It is denied to him to poke about the native bakeries, to converse with salesmen, to look in on the Schools chanting Al Koran, to watch the manual weavers, tent-makers, and artificers of garments and ornaments. One cannot too much insist that it is a sad waste of opportunity to go otherwise than slowly and afoot, and innocent of "programmes," "schemes," agenda—even of set routes.

The alleged romance of Cairo is alleged only. Cairo is intensely matter-of-fact. In Carlyle's study of Mahomet you read: "This night the watchman on the streets of Cairo, when he cries 'Who goes?' will hear from the passenger, along with his answer, 'There is no God but God.'—'Allah akbar, Islam,' sounds through the souls, and whole daily existence, of these dusky millions."

This is romance read into Cairo by Carlyle. The watchman gets far other rejoinders to his cry this night—answers the more hideous for Carlyle's other-worldly supposition. Romance is gone out of Cairo, except in a distorted mental construction of the city. Cairo is not romantic; it is picturesque, and picturesque beyond description.

Alfresco cafés are ubiquitous. Their frequency and pleasantness suggest that the heat of Australia would justify their establishment there in very large numbers. Chairs and tables extend on to the footpaths. The people of all nations lounge there in their fez caps, drinking much, talking more, gambling most of all. Young men from the University abound; much resemble, in their speech and manner, the young men of any other University. They deal in witty criticism of the passengers, but show a readiness in repartee with them of which only an Arab undergraduate is capable.

The gambling of the cafés is merely symbolic of the spirit of gambling which pervades the city. It is incipient in the Arab salesman's love of bargaining for its own sake. The commercial dealings of Egypt, wholesale and retail alike, are said to want fixity in a marked degree. Downright British merchants go so far as to call it by harder names than the "spirit of gambling." The guides are willing to bet you anything on the smallest provocation. Lottery tickets are hawked about the streets like sweetmeats; there are stalls which sell nothing but lottery tickets, and thrive upon the sale.

You will see much, sitting in these cafés at your ease. Absinthe and coffee are the drinks. Coffee prevails, served black in tiny china cups, with a glass of cold water. It is a delicious beverage: the coffee fiend is not uncommon. Cigarettes are the habitual smoke in the streets. At the cafés you call for a hubble-bubble. They stand by the score in long racks. The more genteel (and hygienic) customers carry their own mouth-pieces, but it is not reckoned a sporting practice.

You cannot sit five minutes before the vendors beset you with edibles, curios, prawns, oranges, sheep's trotters, cakes, and post-cards. The boys who would polish your boots are the most noisome. The military camps in the dusty desert have created an industry amongst them. A dozen will follow you a mile through the streets. If you stop, your leg is pulled in all directions, and nothing but the half-playful exercise of your cane upon the sea of ragged backs saves you from falling in.

The streets swarm with guides, who apparently believe either that you are inevitably bound for the Pyramids or incapable of walking through the bazaars unpiloted. And a guide would spoil any bazaar, though at the Pyramids he may be useful. If you suggest you are your own guide, the dog suggests an assistant. They are subtle and hard to be rid of, and frequently abusive when you are frank. The hawkers and solicitors of the streets of Cairo have acquired English oaths, parrot-wise. The smallest boy has got this parasitic obscenity with a facility that beats any Australian newsboy in a canter.

There is a frequent electric tramway service in Cairo. It is very convenient and very dirty, and moderately slow, and most informally conducted. The spirit of bargaining has infected even the collector of fares. Journeying is informal in other ways; only in theory is it forbidden (in French, Arabic, Greek, and English) to ride on the footboard. You ride where you can. Many soldiers you will see squatting on the roofs. And if the regulations about riding on footboards were enforced the hawkers of meats and drinks and curios would not plague you with their constant solicitation. The boot-boys carry on their trade furtively between the seats: often they ride a mile, working hard at a half-dozen boots. The conductor objects only to the extent of a facetious cuff, which he is the last to expect to take effect. Both motorman and conductor raise the voice in song: an incongruous practice to the earnest-working Briton. But the Cairene Arab who takes life seriously is far to seek. There is nothing here of the struggling earnestness of spirit of the old Bedouin Arabs to whom Mahomet preached. The Cairene is a carnal creature, flippant and voluptuous, with more than a touch of the Parisian. You'll find him asleep at his shop-door at ten in the morning, and gambling earlier still. Well-defined articulation is unknown amongst the Arabs here, except in anger and in fight. They do not open their teeth either to speak or to sing. The sense of effort is everywhere wanting—in their slouching gait, their intonation; their very writing drags and trails itself along. But what are you due to expect in a country where the heat blisters most of the year; where change of temperature and of physical outlook are foreign—a country of perennially wrinkled skins, where a rousing thunder-storm is unknown, and where the physical outlook varies only between the limits of sand and rock? The call for comment would arise if physical inertia were other than the rule. And of the Anglo-Egyptian, what may you expect?...

One has not seen Cairo unless he has wandered both by day and by night. So, he knows at least two different worlds. To analyse the contrast would take long. It is hard to know which part of a day charms you the most. The afternoon is not as the morning; the night is far removed from either. Go deeper, and you may get more subtle divisions of twelve hours' wandering than these; with accuracy of discrimination you may even raise seven Dantean circles in your day's progress. The safe course, then, is to "make a day of it." Tramp it, after an early breakfast, over the desert to the car, and plod back past the guard after midnight. You'll turn in exhausted, but the richer in your experience (at the expense of a few piastres) by far more than any gold can buy.