Italy, if you wish to go a part of the way by land from the East to
London or from London to the East. And as many people prefer travelling
forty-eight hours across the Continent to rounding Gibraltar, one hears
often of Brindisi, and pictures it as a shipping port of the importance
of Liverpool or Marseilles. Instead of which it is as desolate as a
summer resort in midwinter, and is like that throughout the year. There
was a long, broad stone wharf, and tall stucco houses behind, and banks
of coal which suggested the rear approach to Long Island City, and the
soft blue Italian skies of which we had read were steely blue, and most
of us wore overcoats. We lay bound fast to the wharf, with a plank
thrown from the boat's side to the quay, for the day, and we had free
permission to learn to walk on streets again for full twenty-four hours;
but after facing the wind, and dodging guides who had nothing to show,
we came back by preference to the clean deck and the steamer-chair.
Desperate-looking Italian soldiers with feathers in their hats, and
custom-house officers, and gendarmes paraded up and down the quay for
our delectation, and a wicked little boy stood on the pier-head and sang
"Ta-ra-ra-boom-chi-ay," pointedly varying this knowledge of our several
nationalities by crying: "I _say_, buy box matches. Get out." This show
of learning caused him to be regarded by his fellows with much envy, and
they watched us to see how far we were impressed.
[Illustration: PILLAR OF CAESAR AT BRINDISI]
There are two things which need no newspaper advertising and which
recognize no geographical lines; one is a pretty face and the other is a
good song. I have seen photographs for sale of Isabelle Irving and
Lillian Russell in as different localities as Santiago in Cuba, and
Rotterdam, and I saw a play-bill in San Antonio, Texas, upon which the
Countess Dudley and the Duchess of Leinster were reproduced under the
names of the Walsh Sisters. A good song will travel as far, changing its
name, too, perhaps, and its words, but keeping the same melody that has
pleased people in a different part of the world. When the moon came out
at Brindisi and hid the heaps of coal, and showed only the white houses
and the pillar of Caesar, a party of young men with guitars and
mandolins gathered under the bow and sang a song called "Oh, Caroline,"
which I had last heard Francis Wilson sing as a part of the score of
"The Lion-tamer," to very different words. As the scene of "The
Lion-tamer" is laid in Sicily, the song was more or less in place; but
the contrast between the dark-browed Italian and Mr. Wilson's genial
countenance which the song brought back was striking. And on the night
after we had left Brindisi, when the crew gave a concert, one of them
sang "Oh, promise me," and some one asked if the song had yet reached
America. I did not undeceive him, but said it had.
After Brindisi the hands of the clock go back a few thousand years, and
we see Cethdonia, where Ulysses owned much property, and Crete, from
whence St. Paul set sail, with its long range of mountains covered with
snow, and then we come back to the present near the island of Zante,
where the earthquake moved a month ago and swallowed up the homes of the
people.
The _Sutlej_ had been going out of her course all of the fourth day in
order to dodge possible islands thrown up by the earthquake, and she was
late. That night, as she steamed forward at her best speed, the level
oily sea fell back from her bows with a steady ripple as she cut it in
two and turned it back out of the way. A light on the horizon, like a
policeman's lantern, which changed to the burnt-out end of a match and
back again to a bull's-eye, told us that beyond the light lay the level
sands of Egypt, almost as far-reaching and monotonous as the sea that
touched its shore.
[Illustration: APPROACH TO ISMAILIA BY THE SUEZ CANAL]
The force of habit is very strong on many people, and if they approach
the land of the Pharaohs and of Cleopatra an hour after their usual
bedtime, they feel no inclination to diverge from their usual habits on
that account. When you consider how many hours there are for slumber,
and how many are given to dances, you would think one hour of sleep
might be spared out of a lifetime in order that you could see Port Said
at night. There was a long line of lamps on the shore, like a gigantic
row of footlights or a prairie fire along the horizon, and we passed
towards this through buoys with red and green lights, with a long
sea-wall reaching out on one side, and the natural reef of jagged rocks
rising black out of the sea in the path of the moon on the other. Then
black boats shot out from the shore and assailed us with strange cries,
and men in turbans and long robes, and negroes in what looked like
sacking, and which probably was sacking, but which could not hide the
suppleness and strength of their limbs, climbed up over the high sides.
These were the coal-trimmers making way for the black islands, filled
with black coal and blacker men, who made fast to the side and began
feeding the vessel through a blazing hole like an open fireplace in her
iron side. Four braziers filled with soft coal burnt with a fierce red
flame from the corners of the barges, and in this light from out of
the depths half-naked negroes ran shrieking and crying with baskets of
coal on their shoulders to the top of an inclined plank, and stood there
for a second in the full glare of the opening until one could see the
whites of their eyes and the sweat glistening on the black faces. Then
they pitched the coal forward into the lighted opening, as though they
were feeding a fire, and disappeared with a jump downward into the pit
of blackness. The coal dust rose in great curtains of mist, through
which the figures of the men and the red light showed dimly and with
wavering outline, like shadows in an iron-mill, and through it all came
their cries and shouts, and the roar of the coal blocks as they rattled
down into the hold.
Port Said occupies the same position to the waters of the world as Dodge
City once did to the Western States of America--it is the meeting-place
of vessels from every land over every water, just as Dodge City was the
meeting-place of the great trails across the prairies. When a cowboy
reached Dodge City after six months of constant riding by day and of
sleeping under the stars by night, and with wild steers for company, he
wanted wickedness in its worst form--such being the perversity of man.
And you are told that Port Said offers to travellers and crew the same
attractive features after a month or weeks of rough voyaging that Dodge
City once offered to the trailsmen. In _The Light that Failed_ we are
told that Port Said is the wickedest place on earth, that it is a sink
of iniquity and a hole of vice, and a wild night in Port Said is
described there with pitiless detail. Almost every young man who leaves
home for the East is instructed by his friends to reproduce that night,
or never return to civilization. And every sea-captain or traveller or
ex-member of the Army of Occupation in Egypt that I met on this visit to
the East either smiled darkly when he spoke of Port Said or raised his
eyes in horror. They all agreed on two things--that it was the home of
the most beautiful woman on earth, which is saying a good deal, and that
it was the wickedest, wildest, and most vicious place that man had
created and God forgotten. One would naturally buy pocket-knives at
Sheffield, and ginger ale in Belfast, and would not lay in a stock of
cigars if going to Havana; and so when guides in Continental cities and
in the East have invited me to see and to buy strange things which
caused me to doubt the morals of those who had gone before, I have
always put them off, because I knew that some day I should visit Port
Said. I did not want second-best and imitation wickedness, but the most
awful wickedness of the entire world sounded as though it might prove
most amusing. I expected a place blazing with lights, and with
gambling-houses and _cafes chantants_ open to the air, and sailors
fighting with bare knives, and guides who cheated and robbed you, or led
you to dives where you could be drugged and robbed by others.
[Illustration: STEAM-DREDGE AT WORK IN THE SUEZ CANAL]
So I went on shore and gathered the guides together, and told them for
the time being to sink their rivalry and to join with loyal local pride
in showing me the worst Port Said could do. They consulted for some
time, and then said that they were sorry, but the only gambling-house in
the place closed at twelve, and so did the only _cafe chantant_; and as
it was now nearly half-past twelve, every one was properly in bed. I
expressed myself fully, and they were hurt, and said that Egypt was a
great country, and that after I had seen Cairo I would say so. So I told
them I had not meant to offend their pride of country, and that I was
going to Cairo in order to see things almost as old as wickedness, and
much more worth while, and that all I asked of Port Said was that it
should live up to its name. I told them to hire a house, and wake the
people in Port Said up, and show me the very worst, lowest, wickedest,
and most vicious sights of which their city boasted; that I would give
them four hours in which to do it, and what money they needed. I should
like to print what, after long consultation, the five guides of Port
Said--which is a place a half-mile across, and with which they were
naturally acquainted--offered me as the acme of riotous dissipation. I
do not do so, not because it would bring the blush to the cheek of the
reader, but to the inhabitants of Port Said, who have enjoyed a
notoriety they do not deserve, and who are like those desperadoes in the
West who would rather be considered "bad" than the nonentities that
they are. I bought photographs, a box of cigarettes, and a cup of black
coffee at Port Said. That cannot be considered a night of wild
dissipation. Port Said may have been a sink of iniquity when Mr. Kipling
was last there, but when I visited it it was a coaling station. I would
hate to be called a coaling station if I were Port Said, even by me.
When I awoke after my night of riot at Port Said the _Sutlej_ was
steaming slowly down the Suez Canal, and its waters rippled against its
sandy banks and sent up strange odors of fish and mud. On either side
stretched long levels of yellow sand dotted with bunches of dark green
grass, like tufts on a quilt, over which stalked an occasional camel,
bending and rocking, and scorning the rival ship at its side. You have
heard so much of the Suez Canal as an engineering feat that you rather
expect, in your ignorance, to find the banks upheld by walls of masonry,
and to pass through intricate locks from one level to another, or at
least to see a well-beaten towpath at its side. But with the exception
of dikes here and there, you pass between slipping sandy banks, which
show less of the hand of man than does a mill-dam at home, and you begin
to think that Ferdinand de Lesseps drew his walking-stick through the
sand from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, and twenty thousand negroes
followed him and dug a ditch. On either side of this ditch you see
reproduced in real life the big colored prints which hung on the walls
of the Sunday-School. There are the buffaloes drawing the ploughs of
wood, and the wells of raw sun-baked clay, and the ditches and
water-works of two cog-wheels and clay pots for irrigating the land, and
the strings of camels, and the veiled women carrying earthen jars on the
left shoulder. And beyond these stretches the yellow sand, not white and
heavy, like our own, but dun-colored and fine, like dust, and over it
amethyst skies bare of clouds, and tall palms. And then the boat stops
again at Ismailia to let you off for Cairo, and the brave captains
returning from leave, and the braver young women who are going out to
work in hospitals, and the young wives with babies whom their
fathers have not seen, and the commissioners returning to rule and
bully a native prince, pass on to India, and you are assaulted
by donkey-boys who want you to ride "Mark Twain," or "Lady Dunlo," or
"Two-Pair-of-Black-Eyes-Oh-What-a-Surprise-Grand-Ole-Man." A jerky,
rumbling train carries you from Ismailia past Tel-el-Kebir station,
where the British army surprised the enemy by a night march and took a
train back to Cairo in three hours. And then, after a five hours' ride,
you stop at Cairo, and this chapter ends.
IV
CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE
As a rule, when you visit the capital of a country for the first time it
is sufficient that you should have studied the history of that
particular country in order that you may properly appreciate the
monuments and the show-places of its chief cities; it is not necessary
that you should be an authority on the history of Norway and Sweden to
understand Paris or New York. For a full appreciation of most of the
great cities of the world one finds a single red-bound volume of
Baedeker to be all-sufficient; but when you go to Cairo, in order that
you may understand all that lies spread out for your pleasure, you
should first have mastered the Old and the New Testament, a complete
history of the world, several of Shakespeare's plays, and the files of
the London _Times_ for the past ten years. Almost every man who was
great, not only in the annals of his own country, but in the history of
the world, has left his mark on this oldest country of Egypt, as
tourists to the Colosseum have scratched their initials on its stones,
and so hope for immortality. You are shown in Cairo the monuments of
great monarchs and of a great people, who were not known beyond the
limits of their own country in contemporaneous history only because
there was no contemporaneous history, and of those who came thousands of
years later. The isle of Rodda, between the two banks of the Nile at
Cairo, marks where Moses was found in the bulrushes; a church covers the
stones upon which Mary and Joseph rested; in the city of Alexandria is
the spot where Alexander the Great scratched his name upon the sands of
Egypt; the mouldering walls of Old Cairo are the souvenirs of Caesar, as
are the monuments upon which the Egyptians carved his name with
"Autocrator" after it. At Actium and Alexandria you think of Antony and
of the two women, so widely opposed and so differently beautiful, whom
Sarah Bernhardt and Julia Neilson re-embody to-day in Paris and in
London, and to whom Shakespeare and Kingsley have paid tribute.
Mansoorah marks the capture of Saint-Louis of France, and the crescent
and star which is floating over Cairo at this minute speak of Osman
Sultan Selim I., with whom began the dependence of Egypt as a part of
the Ottoman Empire. From there you see the windmills and bake-ovens of
Napoleon, which latter, stretching for miles across the desert, mark the
march of his army. Abukir speaks of Nelson and the battle of the Nile;
and after him come the less momentous names Tel-el-Kebir and "England's
Only General," Wolseley, and the fall of Khartoom and the loss of
Gordon. The history of Egypt is the history of the Old World.
Moses, Rameses II., Darius, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Mehemet Ali, and
Nelson--these are all good names; and yet what they failed to do is
apparently being done to-day by an Army of Occupation without force, but
with the show of it only: not by a single great military hero, but by a
lot of men in tweed suits who during business hours irrigate land and
add up columns of irritating figures, and in their leisure moments
solemnly play golf at the very base of the pyramids. The best of Cairo
lies, of course, in that which is old, and not in what has been imported
from the New World, and its most amusing features are the incongruities
which these importations make possible. I am speaking of Cairo now from
a tourist's point of view, and not from that of a political economist.
He would probably be interested in the improved sanitation and the Mixed
Tribunal.
[Illustration: BAZAR OF A WORKER IN BRASS]
I had pictured Cairo as an Oriental city of much color, with beautiful
minarets piercing the sky-line, and with much richness of decoration on
the outside of its palaces and mosques. Cairo is divided into two parts,
that which is old and decaying and that which is European and modern;
the prevailing colors of both are gray, a dull yellow, and white. The
mosques are of gray stone, the houses of dirty white, and in the new
part the palaces and residences remind one of white Italian villas.
These are surrounded by tropical gardens, which alone save the city from
one monotonous variation of sombre colors. It is not, therefore, the
buildings, either new or old, which make Cairo one of the most
picturesque and incongruous and entertaining of cities in the whole
world; it is the people who live in it and who move about in it, and who
are so constantly in the streets that from the Citadel above the city
its roar comes to you like the roar of London. In that city it is the
voice of traffic and steam and manufactures, but in Cairo it emanates
from the people themselves, who talk and pray and shout and live their
lives out-of-doors. These people are the natives, the European
residents, the Army of Occupation, and, during the winter months, the
tourists. When you say natives you include Egyptians, Arabians, Copts,
Syrians, negroes from the Upper Nile, and about a hundred other
subdivisions, which embrace every known nationality of the East.
Mixed with these are the residents, chiefly Greek and French and Turks,
and the Army of Occupation, who, when they are not in beautiful
uniforms, are in effective riding-clothes, and their wives and sisters
in men's shirts and straw hats or Karkee riding-habits. The tourists,
for their part, wear detective cameras and ready-made ties if they are
Americans, and white helmets and pugarees floating over their necks and
white umbrellas if they are English. This latter tropical outfit is
spoiled somewhat by the fact that they are forced to wear overcoats the
greater part of the time; but as they always take the overcoats off when
they are being photographed at the base of the pyramids, their envious
friends at home imagine they are in a warm climate.
The longer you remain in Cairo the more satisfying it becomes, as you
find how uninterruptedly the old, old life of the people is going on
about you, and as you discover for yourself bazars and mosques and tiny
workshops and open cafes of which the guide-books say nothing, and to
which there are no guides. You can see all the show-places in Cairo of
which you have read in a week, and yet at the end of the week you feel
as though what you had seen was not really the city, but just the goods
in the shop-window. So keep away from show-places. Lose yourself in the
streets, or sit idly on the terrace of your hotel and watch the show
move by, feeling that the best of it, after all, lies in the fact that
nothing you see is done for show; that it is all natural to the people
or the place; that if they make pictures of themselves, they do so
unconsciously; and that no one is posing except the tourist in his pith
helmet.
The bazars in Cairo cover much ground, and run in cliques according to
the nature of the goods they expose for sale. From a narrow avenue of
red and yellow leather shoes you come to another lane of rugs and
curtains and cloth, and through this to an alley of brass--brass lamps
and brass pots and brass table-tops--and so on into groups of
bookbinders, and of armorers, and sellers of perfumes. These lanes are
unpaved, and only wide enough at places for two men to push past at one
time; at the widest an open carriage can just make its way slowly, and
only at the risk of the driver's falling off his box in a paroxysm of
rage. The houses and shops that overhang these filthy streets are as
primitive and old as the mud in which you tramp, but they are
fantastically and unceasingly beautiful. On the level of the street is
the bazar--a little box with a show-case at one side, and at the back an
oven, or a forge, or a loom, according to the nature of the thing which
is being made before your eyes. Goldsmiths beat and blow on the raw
metal as you stand at their elbow; bakers knead their bread; laundrymen
squirt water over the soiled linen; armorers hammer on a spear-head,
which is afterwards to be dug up and sold as an assegai from the Soudan;
and the bookbinders to the Khedive paste and tool the leather boxes for
his Highness with the dust from the street covering them and their work,
with two dogs fighting for garbage at their feet, and the uproar of
thousands of people ringing in their ears. The Oriental cannot express
himself in the street without shouting. Everybody shouts--donkey-boys
and drivers, venders of a hundred trifles, police and storekeepers,
auctioneers and beggars. They do not shout occasionally, but
continually. They have to shout, or they will either trample on some one
or some one will as certainly trample on them. Camels and donkeys and
open carriages and mounted police move through the torrent of
pedestrians as though they were figures of the imagination, and had no
feelings or feet. On the second story over each bazar is the home of its
owner. The windows of this story are latticed, and bulge forward so that
the women of the harem may look down without being themselves seen.
Above these are square, heavy balconies of carved open wood-work, very
old and very beautiful. Scattered through the labyrinth of the bazars
are the mosques, with wide, dirty steps covered with the red and yellow
shoes of the worshippers within, and with high minarets, and facades
carved in relief with sentences from the Koran, or with the name of the
Sultan to whom the temple is dedicated.
[Illustration: GROUP OF NATIVES IN FRONT OF SHEPHEARD'S HOTEL]
The bazars are very much as one imagines they should be, the fact that
impresses you most about them being, I think, that such beautiful things
should come from such queer little holes of dirt and poverty, and that
you should stand ankle-deep in mud while you are handling turquoises and
gold filigree-work as delicate as that of Regent Street or Broadway. At
the bazars to which the dragomen take tourists you will be invited to
sit down on a cushion and to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, but you
will pay, if you purchase anything, about a pound for each cup of coffee
you take. The best bazars for bargains are those in Old Cairo, to which
you should go alone. In either place it is the rule to offer one-third
of what you are asked--as I found it was not the rule to do in
Tangier--and it is not always safe to offer a third unless you want the
article very much, as you will certainly get it at that price. You feel
much more at home in the bazars and the cafes and in all of the
out-of-door life of Cairo than in that of Tangier, owing to the
good-nature of the Egyptian. The Moor resents your presence, and though
that in itself is attractive, the absolute courtesy of the Egyptian,
when it is not, as it seldom is, servility, has also its advantage. If
you raised your stick to a Moorish donkey-boy, for instance, you would
undoubtedly have as much rough-and-tumble fighting as you could attend
to at one time; but you have to beat an Egyptian donkey-boy, or strike
at him, or a dozen of him, if you want peace, and every time you hit him
he comes up smiling, and with renewed assurances that the Flying
Dutchman is a very good donkey, and that all the other donkeys are
"velly sick." There is nothing so inspiring as the sight of a carefully
bred American girl, who would feel remorse if she scolded her maid,
beating eight or nine donkey-boys with her umbrella, until she breaks
it, and so rides off breathless but triumphant. This shows that
necessity knows no laws of social behavior.
When you are weary of fighting your way through the noise and movement
of the bazars, you can find equal entertainment on the terrace of your
hotel. There are several hotels in Cairo. There is one to which you
should certainly go if you like to see your name encompassed by those of
countesses and princes, and of Americans who spell Smith with a "y" and
put a hyphen between their second and third names. There are, as I say,
a great many hotels in Cairo, but Shepheard's is so historical, and its
terrace has been made the scene of so many novels, that all sorts of
amusing people go there, from Sultans to the last man who broke the bank
at Monte Carlo, and its terrace is like a private box at a mask ball.
About the best way to see Cairo is in a wicker chair here under waving
palms, something to smoke, and with a warm sun on your back, and the
whole world passing by in front of you. Broadway, I have no doubt, is an
interesting thoroughfare to those who do not know it. I should judge
from the view one has of the soles of numerous boots planted against the
windows of hotels along its course that Broadway to the visiting
stranger is an infinite source of entertainment. But there are no camels
on Broadway, and there are no sais.