THE "Wakalah," as the Caravanserai or Khan is called in Egypt, combines
the offices of hotel, lodging-house, and store. It is at Cairo, as at
Constantinople, a massive pile of buildings surrounding a quadrangular
"Hosh" or court-yard. On the ground-floor are rooms like caverns for
merchandise, and shops of different kinds-tailors, cobblers, bakers,
tobacconists, fruiterers, and others. A roofless gallery or a covered
verandah, into which all the apartments open, runs round the first and
sometimes the second story: the latter, however, is usually exposed to
the sun and wind. The accommodations consist of sets of two or three
rooms, generally an inner one and an outer; the latter contains a
hearth for cooking, a bathing-place, and similar necessaries. The
staircases are high, narrow, and exceedingly dirty; dark at night, and
often in bad repair; a goat or donkey is tethered upon the different
landings; here and there a fresh skin is stretched in process of
tanning, and the smell reminds the veteran traveller of those closets
in the old French
[p.42]inns where cat used to be prepared for playing the part of jugged
hare. The interior is unfurnished; even the pegs upon which clothes are
hung have been pulled down for fire-wood: the walls are bare but for
stains, thick cobwebs depend in festoons from the blackened rafters of
the ceiling, and the stone floor would disgrace a civilised prison: the
windows are huge apertures carefully barred with wood or iron, and in
rare places show remains of glass or paper pasted over the framework.
In the court-yard the poorer sort of travellers consort with tethered
beasts of burden, beggars howl, and slaves lie basking and scratching
themselves upon mountainous heaps of cotton bales and other merchandise.
This is not a tempting picture, yet is the Wakalah a most amusing
place, presenting a succession of scenes which would delight lovers of
the Dutch school-a rich exemplification of the grotesque, and what is
called by artists the "dirty picturesque."
I could find no room in the Wakalah Khan Khalil, the Long's, or
Meurice's of native Cairo; I was therefore obliged to put up with the
Jamaliyah, a Greek quarter, swarming with drunken Christians, and
therefore about as fashionable as Oxford Street or Covent Garden. Even
for this I had to wait a week. The pilgrims were flocking to Cairo, and
to none other would the prudent hotel keepers open their doors, for the
following sufficient reasons. When you enter a Wakalah, the first thing
you have to do is to pay a small sum, varying from two to five
shillings, for the Miftah (the key). This is generally equivalent to a
month's rent; so the sooner you leave the house the better for it. I
was obliged to call myself a Turkish pilgrim in order to get possession
of two most comfortless rooms, which I afterwards learned were
celebrated for making travellers ill; and I had to pay eighteen
piastres for the key and eighteen ditto per mensem for
[p.43]rent, besides five piastres to the man who swept and washed the
place. So that for this month my house-hire amounted to nearly four
pence a day.
But I was fortunate enough in choosing the Jamaliyah Wakalah, for I
found a friend there. On board the steamer a fellow-voyager, seeing me
sitting alone and therefore as he conceived in discomfort, placed
himself by my side and opened a hot fire of kind inquiries. He was a
man about forty-five, of middle size, with a large round head closely
shaven, a bull-neck, limbs sturdy as a Saxon's, a thin red beard, and
handsome features beaming with benevolence. A curious dry humour he
had, delighting in "quizzing," but in so quiet, solemn, and quaint a
way that before you knew him you could scarcely divine his drift.
"Thank Allah, we carry a doctor!" said my friend more than once, with
apparent fervour of gratitude, after he had discovered my profession. I
was fairly taken in by the pious ejaculation, and some days elapsed
before the drift of his remark became apparent.
"You doctors," he explained, when we were more intimate, "what do you
do? A man goes to you for ophthalmia: it is a purge, a blister, and a
drop in the eye! Is it for fever? well! a purge and kinakina (quinine).
For dysentery? a purge and extract of opium. Wa'llahi! I am as good a
physician as the best of you," he would add with a broad grin, "if I
only knew the Dirham-birhams,[FN#1]-drams and drachms,-and a few
break-jaw Arabic names of diseases."