been created, but when it blocks the way of a dog-cart, and a smart
English groom endeavors to drive around it, the incongruity of the
situation appeals to you as nothing on Broadway can ever do. Mr.
Laurence Hutton, who was in Cairo before I reached it, has pointed out
that the camel is the real aristocrat of Egypt. The camel belongs to one
of the very first families; he was there when Mena ruled, and he is
there now. It does not matter to him whether it is a Pharaoh or a
Mameluke or a Napoleon or a Mixed Tribunal that is in power, his gods
are unchanged, and he and the palm-tree have preserved their ancient
individuality through centuries. He shows that he knows this in the
proud way in which he holds his head, and in his disdainful manner of
waving and unwinding his neck, and in the rudeness with which he impedes
traffic and selfishly considers his own comfort. These are the signs of
ancient lineage all the world over. He is not the shaggy, moth-eaten
object we see in the circus tent at home. He is nicely shaven, like a
French poodle, and covered with fine trappings, and he bends and struts
with the dignity of a peacock. He possesses also that uncertainty of
conduct that is the privilege of a royal mind; fellahin and Arabs
pretend they are his masters, and lead him about with a rope, but that
never disturbs him nor breaks his spirit. When he wants to lie down he
lies down, whether he is in the desert or in the Ezbekiyeh Road; and
when he decides to get up he leaves you in doubt for some feverish
seconds as to which part of him will get up first. To properly
appreciate the camel you should ride him and experience his getting up
and his sitting down. He never does either of these things the same way
twice. Sometimes he breaks one leg in two or three places where it had
never broken before, and sinks or rises in a northeasterly direction,
and then suddenly changes his course and lurches up from the rear, and
you grasp his neck wildly, only to find that he is sinking rapidly to
one side, and rising, with a jump equal to that of a horse taking a
fence, in the front. He can disjoint himself in more different places,
than explorers have found sources for the river Nile, and there is no
keener pleasure than that which he affords you in watching the
countenance of a friend who is being elevated on his back for the first
time. He and the palm-tree can make any landscape striking, and he and
the sais are the most picturesque features of Cairo.
The sais is a runner who keeps in front of a carriage and warns common
people out of the way, and who beats them with a stick if they do not
hurry up about it. He is a relic of the days when the traffic in all of
the streets was so congested that he was an absolute necessity; now he
makes it possible for a carriage to move forward at a trot, which
without his aid it could not do. It is obvious that to do this he must
run swiftly. Most men when they run bend their bodies forward and keep
their mouths closed in order to save their wind. The sais runs with his
shoulders thrown back and trumpeting like an enraged elephant. He holds
his long wand at his side like a musket, and not trailing in his hand
like a walking-stick, and he wears a soft shirt of white stuff, and a
sleeveless coat buried in gold lace. His breeches are white, and as
voluminous as a woman's skirts; they fall to a few inches above his
knee; the rest of his brown leg is bare, and rigid with muscle. On his
head he has a fez with a long black tassel, and a magnificent silk scarf
of many colors is bound tightly around his waist. He is a perfect ideal
of color and movement, and as he runs he bellows like a bull, or roars
as you have heard a lion roar at feeding-time in a menagerie. It is not
a human cry at all, and you never hear it, even to the last day of your
stay in Cairo, without a start, as though it were a cry of "help!" at
night, or the quick-clanging bell of a fire-engine. There is nothing
else in Cairo which is so satisfying. There are sometimes two sais
running abreast, dressed exactly alike, and with the upper part of their
bodies as rigid as the wand pressed against their side, and with the
ends of their scarf and the long tassel streaming out behind. As they
yell and bellow, donkeys and carriages and people scramble out of their
way until the carriage they precede has rolled rapidly by. Only
princesses of the royal harem, and consuls-general, and the heads of the
Army of Occupation and the Egyptian army are permitted two sais; other
people may have one. They appealed to me as much more autocratic
appendages than a troop of lifeguards. The rastaquouere who first
introduces them in Paris will make his name known in a day, and a Lord
Mayor's show or a box-seat on a four-in-hand will be a modest and
middle-class distinction in comparison.
[Illustration: A BRITISH SQUARE FORMED IN FRONT OF THE PYRAMIDS]
These camels and sais are but two of the things you see from your wicker
chair on the marble terrace at Shepheard's. The others are hundreds of
donkey-boys in blue night-gowns slit open at the throat and showing
their bare breasts, and with them as many long-eared donkeys, rendered
even more absurd than they are in a state of nature by fantastic
clippings of their coats and strings of jangling brass and blue beads
around their necks.
There are also the women of Cairo, the enslaved half of Egypt, who have
been brought, through generations of training and tradition, to look
upon any man save their husband as their enemy, as a thing to be
shunned. This has become instinct with them, as it is instinctive with
women of Northern countries to turn to men for sympathy or support, as
being in some ways stronger than themselves. But these women of Cairo,
who look like an army of nuns, are virtually shut off from mankind, with
the exception of one man, as are nuns, and they have not the one great
consolation allowed the nun--they have no souls to be saved, nor
religion, nor a belief in a future life.
There was a young girl married while I was in Cairo. The streets around
the palace of her father were hung with flags for a week; the garden
about his house was enclosed with a tent which was worth in money twenty
thousand dollars, and which was as beautiful to the eye as the interior
of a mosque; for a week the sheiks who rented the estates of the high
contracting parties were fed at their expense; for a week men sang and
bands played and the whole neighborhood feasted; and on the last night
everybody went to the wedding and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and
listened to a young man singing Arabian love-songs. I naturally did not
see the bride. The women who did see her described her as very
beautiful, barely sixteen years old, and covered with pearls and
diamonds. She was weeping bitterly; her mother, it appeared, had
arranged the match. I did not see her, but I saw the bridegroom. He was
fat and stupid, and over sixty, and he had white hair and a white beard.
A priest recited the Koran before him at the door of the house, and a
band played, and the people cheered the Khedive three times, and then
the crowd parted, and the bridegroom was marched to the door which led
to the stairs, at the top of which the girl awaited him. Two grinning
eunuchs crouched on this dark staircase, with lamps held high above
their heads, and closed the door behind him. His sixteen-year-old bride
has him to herself now--him and his eunuchs--until he or she dies. We
could show similitudes between this wedding and some others in civilized
lands, but it is much too serious a matter to be cynical about.
The women of Egypt are as much slaves as ever were the negroes of our
South. They are petted and fattened and given a home, but they must look
at life through barriers--barriers across their boxes at the opera, and
barriers across the windows of their broughams when they drive abroad,
and barriers across their very faces. As long as one-half of the
Egyptian people are enslaved and held in bondage and classed as animals
without souls, so long will an Army of Occupation ride over the land,
and insult by its presence the khedival power. No country in these days
can be truly great in which the women have no voice, no influence, and
no respect. There are worse things in Egypt than bad irrigation, and the
harem is the worst of them. If the Egyptians want to be free themselves,
they should first free their daughters and their mothers. The educated
Egyptian is ashamed of his national costume; but let him feel shame for
some of his national customs. A frock-coat and a harem will not go
together.
The English, who have done so many fine things for Egypt's good, and who
keep an army there to emphasize the fact, have arranged that any slave
who comes to the office of the Consul-General and claims his protection
can have it; but these slaves of the married men are not granted even
this chance of escape.
And so they live like birds in a cage. They eat and dress and undress,
and expose their youth and beauty, and hide their age and ugliness,
until they die. The cry along the Nile a few years ago was, "Egypt for
the Egyptians," and a very good cry it was, although the wrong man first
started it. But there was another cry raised in the land of Egypt many
hundreds of years before of "Let my people go," and the woman who can
raise that again to-day, and who can set free her sisters of the East,
will be doing a greater work than any woman is doing at the present time
or has ever done.
The women who pass before you in the procession at the foot of the
terrace are of two classes only. There is no middle class in Egypt. The
poor are huddled up in a black bag that hides their bodies from the
crown of the head to the feet. What looks like the upper end of a black
silk stocking falls over the face from the bridge of the nose and
fastens behind the ears, and a brass tube about the size of a spool is
tied between the eyes. You see in consequence nothing but their eyes,
and as these are perhaps their best feature, they do not all suffer from
their enforced disguise. The only women whose bare faces you can see,
and from whom you may judge of the beauty of the rest, are the good
women of the Coptic village, who form a sort of sisterhood, and the
dancing-girls, who are not so good. Some of these have the straight
nose, the narrow eyes, and the perfect figure of Cleopatra, as we
picture her; but the faces of the majority are formless, with broad, fat
noses, full lips, and their figures are without waists or hips, and
their ankles are as round as a man's upper arm. When they are pretty
they are very pretty, but those that are so are so few and are so
covered with gold that one suspects they are very much the exception. Of
the women of the upper class you see only a glimpse as they are swept by
in their broughams, with the sais in front and a eunuch on the box and
the curtains half lowered.
[Illustration: SHADOW OF THE PYRAMID OF CHEOPS
(From a Photograph taken on the top of the Pyramid just before sunset)]
Besides these, much passes that is intended for your especial
entertainment. Sellers of turquoises, which they dig out from various
creases in their robes; venders of stuffed crocodiles and live monkeys;
strange men from the desert with a jackal, which they throw, bound by
all four legs, and snarling and snapping, on the marble at your feet;
little girls who sing songs, and play accompaniments to them on their
throats with the tips of their fingers; women conjurers, who draw
strings of needles and burning flax from their mouths, and who swallow
nasty little wriggling snakes, and hatch pretty fluffy little chickens
out of the slabs of the terrace. Or else there is a troop of blue and
white Egyptian soldiers marching by, or gorgeous young officers on polo
ponies, or red-coated Tommies on donkeys, with their toes trailing in
the dust and the ribbons of their Scotch caps floating out behind; and
consuls-general with gorgeous guards in gold lace, and with
wicked-looking curved silver swords; or the young Khedive himself, who
comes with a great clatter of hoofs and bellowing sais before, and
another galloping troop of cavalry in the rear, at the sound of which
the people run to the curb and touch the fez, as he raises his hand to
his, and rolls by in a cloud of dust.
There are very good things to see, and with a companion on one side to
explain them, and another on the other side to whom you can impart this
information as though you had been born knowing it, you cannot spend a
more entertaining afternoon. There is only one drawback, and that is a
lurking doubt that you should be up and about seeing the show-places.
Friday, in consequence, is the best day in Cairo, as all the things you
ought to see are then closed, and you can sit still on the terrace with
a clear conscience. Among the mosques and the tombs and the palaces and
museums to which all good tourists go, and of which there are excellent
descriptions, giving their various dimensions and other particulars, in
the guide-books, there are the Citadel and the Mosque of Mehemet Ali.
The Citadel is the fortress built on the hill above the city, but which,
with the Oriental incompleteness of that time, was reared upon high but
not upon the highest ground. The sequel to this naturally was that when
Mehemet Ali wanted the city of Cairo he sought out the highest ground,
and dropped cannon-balls into the fortress until it capitulated. He
afterwards asked all the Mamelukes to dinner at the Citadel, and then
had them treacherously killed--all but one, who rode his horse down the
side of the Citadel and escaped. If you can imagine the reservoir at
Forty-second Street placed upon the top of Madison Square Garden, and a
man riding down the side of it, you can understand what a very difficult
and dangerous thing this was to do. There is no doubt that he did it,
for I saw a picture of him in the very act in a book of history when I
was at school, and I also have seen the marks of his horse's hoofs in
the stone parapet of the Citadel, and they are just as fresh as they
were three years ago, when they were on the other side.
The Mosque of Mehemet Ali surmounts the Citadel, and its twin minarets
are the distinguishing mark of Cairo; they are as conspicuous for miles
above the city as is the dome of St. Paul's over London, and they are as
light and graceful as it is impressive and heavy. The men on guard tie
big yellow shoes on your feet before they allow you to enter this
mosque, the outer court-yard of which is floored with alabaster, over
which you slide as though you were on a mirror or a sheet of ice. It is
very beautiful, and one is as unwilling to walk on it as to tramp in
muddy boots over a satin train. The floor of the mosque is covered with
the most magnificent rugs, as wide-spreading as a sheet and as heavy as
so much gold; alabaster pillars reach to the top of the square, empty
building, and from these rise five domes, colored blue and red, and
lightened with gilded letters. It is very rich-looking, gloomy, silent,
and impressive. It is the best of the mosques. From the outside, on the
ramparts, you can see Cairo stretching out below for miles in a level
gray jumble of flat roofs and rounded domes and slender minarets, with
the high walls of a palace here and the thick green of a park there to
break the monotony; beyond it lies the Nile, a twisting ribbon of
silver; and beyond that rich green fields and canals and bunches of
palm-trees; and seven miles away, where the green ceases and the desert
begins, are three monuments of gray stone, looking, at that distance,
disappointingly small and familiarly commonplace. It is not, I think,
until you have seen them several times, and have climbed to their top
and gazed up at them from below, that you appreciate the pyramids as you
had expected to appreciate them; but after they have laid their charm
upon you, you will find yourself twisting your neck to take another
look, or going out of your way to see them again before the sun has said
good-night to them, as it has done ever since it first climbed over the
edge of the world and found them waiting there.
There is a mosque on the outside of the city which people visit on
certain days to see the howling dervishes go through their peculiar form
of worship. This mosque consists of four square walls with a dome. It is
whitewashed within, and bare and rude and old. The sunlight enters it
through square holes cut in the dome, and beats upon thirty or forty men
who stand in a semicircle facing the East. They are of all sorts, from
Arabs of the desert with long hair and wild eyes, to fat,
pleased-looking merchants from the bazars, and the beggars and
water-carriers of the streets. Around them on chairs are the tourists
and the residents, like the spectators at a play rather than the guests
of a religious sect watching a religious ceremony. Most of the men wear
their hats, and some of the women take careful notes and make sketches.
They reminded me of medical students at a clinic when a man is being cut
up. An archdeacon from one of our Western cities wore his hat, to show,
probably, that he disapproved of the whole thing; but as he used to eat
with his knife while on board the _Fulda_, his conduct in any place was
not to be considered. The priest recites something from the Koran, and
the men repeat it, moving their bodies back and forward as they do so
with gradually increasing rapidity. What they may be saying is quite
unintelligible, and the chorus they make resembles that of no human
sound, but rather the gasping or panting of an animal. It is to the
visitor absolutely without any religious significance; all that is
impressive about it is its horrible earnestness and its at times
repulsive results. As the voice of the priest grows more accentuated the
bodies of the men swing farther and lower, until their hair sweeps the
floor, and their eyes, when they throw their bodies back, are on a
level with those of the spectators. A drum beats in quickening time to
the voice of the priest and to the gasps of the dervishes, and a flute
playing a weird accompaniment seems to mock at their fierce grunts and
breathings. It was one of the most unpleasant exhibitions I ever
witnessed, and affected one's nerves to such a degree that several of
the women had to leave. The eyes of the men rolled in their sockets, and
their lips parted, and through their clinched teeth came fiercer and
louder gasps, until the chorus of sound reached you like the quick
panting of an engine as it draws out of a station. The sweat ran from
them like water from a sponge, and the veins stood out on their faces,
showing in congested knots beneath the skin. Some of them groaned, and
others shrieked and cried out, "Allah! Allah!" This acted like the
strokes of a whip on the others, who rocked more and more violently, and
swung themselves almost off their feet. Then, as the music grew fainter
the motion of the bending bodies grew less vigorous and finally ceased,
and the men stood rigid, some apparently unmoved and unconcerned, and
others turning and reeling in a fit.
While this was going forward, and you felt as though you were assisting
at a heathen rite in which self-punishment was being inflicted as a bid
for God's indulgence, two interesting things happened. An officer in the
English Army of Occupation turned to his dragoman and cried at the top
of his voice, angrily: "Do you call this worth ten piasters? Well, I
don't. Now if you've got anything to show me, take me to see it. This
isn't worth coming to see. You're a rank impostor."
[Illustration: A SECTION OF THE PYRAMID]
The other thing was the act of a native woman, who brought her child to
the door and handed it to a priest, who took it in his arms and passed
with it in front of the swinging, gasping, crazy semicircle of men. The
child was about three years old, and was dying, and the mother had
brought it there to be cured by the breath of the dervishes. As it
passed before them, the hair of some of the men swept its arm, and it
turned its frightened eyes up to those of the priest, who smiled gravely
down upon the baby and bore him outstretched in his arms three times in
front of the swinging crescent. The faith of the child's mother appealed
to some of us more than did the Englishman's desire to get his money's
worth. The incident is only of interest here as showing perhaps why the
Army of Occupation is not as popular as it might be. This officer was no
doubt an excellent soldier--the ribbons on his tunic showed that--and no
one would have thought of questioning his ability to handle raw recruits
or his knowledge of tactics. But in handling the Egyptian tactics do not
count for so much as tact.
There are several ways of reaching the pyramids, and it is eminently in
keeping with the other incongruities of the place and time that the most
popular way of visiting them is on a four-in-hand coach, with a guard in
a red coat and a bell-shaped white beaver tooting on his horn, and a
young gentleman with a boutonniere and an unhappy smile holding the
reins and working his way in and out between long strings of camels.
There is a very smart hotel about two hundred yards from the foot of the
pyramids, and you take a donkey there or a camel and ride up a sandy
road to the base of the Pyramid of Cheops. There are then several things
that you may do. You can either climb to the top of this first pyramid,
or crawl into its interior, or walk over to see the Sphinx, or make a
tour of subterranean tombs and passageways of alabaster and polished
stones, which are lighted for you by magnesium wire or stumps of
candles.
It seems absurd to say that the Sphinx is disappointing, but so many who
have seen it say so that I feel I am one of many, and not individually
lacking in reverence or imagination. In the first place, the approach to
it is bad; you come at the Sphinx not from the front, but from the rear,
where all you can see of it is a round ball of crumbling stone spreading
out from a neck of broken outline, much smaller and meaner than you had
imagined it would be. In the second place, instead of looking up at it,
or having it look down at you, you view it first from a semicircular
ridge of sand, at the bottom of which it reposes, and at such a near
view that whatever outline or character of countenance it once possessed
is lost. I have seen photographs of the Sphinx, taken while I was in
Cairo, much more impressive than the Sphinx itself. Lying in a hollow of
the sand hills as it does, the farther you move away from it in order to
get a better focus, the less you see of it, and as you draw nearer to it
it loses its meaning, as does the scenery of a theatre when you are on
the wrong side of the foot-lights. I know that that is an unpopular
thing to say, and that there are many who feel thrills when they first
look upon the face of the Sphinx, and who describe their emotions to you
at length, and who write down their impressions in their diaries when
they get back to the hotel. But they have come a long way expecting to
be thrilled, and they do not intend to be disappointed. Some of the
sphinxes in the museum of Gizeh, which you pass on your way to the
pyramids, impressed me more than did the one great Sphinx, though they
were indoors and surrounded by attendants and the cheap decoration of
the museum, once a palace for the harem. They were of green stone and of
huge proportions, and with "the curling lip and sneer of cold command";
and if you look at them long enough you feel uncomfortable shivers down
your back, and a perfectly irrational impulse to rush at them and beat
them in the face and force them to tell you what they know and what they
have kept back and have been keeping back for centuries and centuries.
Their faces show that they know all that we know and much besides that
we shall never know, and when the world at last comes to an end they
will stretch themselves and smile at one another and say: "Now _they_
know it, but we knew it all the while. We could have told had we liked,
but we have enjoyed watching them fretting and fuming and prying about
and tinkering at our faces with their little hammers, and blowing us up
with saltpetre only to try and put us back again with steam. We who have
kept our secret from Herodotus and Caesar, are we likely to give it up to
Ebers and Mark Twain?"