Pastor, People’s Church, Minneapolis, Minn.
Allah be praised! Here I am in Alexandria, the city founded by Alexander
the Great. Yet Alex. could never conquer this part of the world today—the
smells would put him to rout. This polyglot port is in “Lower” Egypt,
and its dives are among the lowest found anywhere. The Rue des Soeurs is
a street where crooked people go straight to perdition. Gambling hells
are overflowing. Sailors and soldiers from the four corners of the globe
crowd the cafes, where guitars twang, pianos jangle, drunks bawl, booze
flows, choruses cheer and women leer. Fleshy Fatimas, overpainted and
underclothed prowl about the street seeking whom they may devour. From
lighted windows come droning nasal songs—
“Ya benat Iskendereeyeh,” etc.
“O ye damsels of Alexandria!
Your walk over the furniture is alluring:
Ye wear the Kashmeer shawl with embroidered work,
And your lips are sweet as sugar.”
All aboard for Cairo, city of the Caliphs, and I felt like taking a board
and spanking the exposed anatomy of the Arab youths who posed along the
railroad tracks to shock and mock the passengers.
Leaving the black sheep tourists at “Shepherds” Hotel, I visited the
mosques which are as numerous in Cairo as mosquitoes in New Jersey. There
may be a thousand; I visited five hundred, more or less. Sometimes I
took off my slippers at the outer door, and at others I wore a kind of
moccasin over my tourist shoes and shuffled and slid over the old floors,
wondering how in the name of everything sacred I could profane anything
with a good “sole” like mine. In my fling about the city I visited the
Whirling Dervishes who whirled and dervished for me to my heart’s content
with a poetry of motion a Sitka Indian could never attain. My head
grows dizzy and my stomach faint when I think of them and their musical
accompaniment of tambourines and flutes which were a cross between an
ungreased saw and the breathing of an overdriven horse. I left before
these human tops stopped spinning, and I carried away the memory of their
tomato-can hats, bell-shaped robes, half-closed eyes, drooping heads and
extended arms. I still see the uplifted right palm catching a blessing
from Allah, the left hand turned down to bestow it.
Cairo’s amusements are varied: you may attend the opera house and listen
to Italian music or see a French farce; take a turn at the hippodrome
and have a circus; or stop at an open air play on the Esbekeeyah; or, if
religiously inclined, take in the convent with its dancing dervishes and
barbarous music; watch snake-charmers, glass-eaters, sword-swallowers,
long-haired fakirs, chibook-smokers and munchers of scorpions; sip cafe
noir (that looks and tastes like sweetened Nile mud) in a little shop
where the waiters and loungers are as thick as the drink; or see Arabs
gamble with dice and cards, much as they do in America; go to a kind
of vaudeville, where a stringed band of lady-performers try to beguile
travelers, with American airs and Persian dances, into buying drinks
for them at the rate of one or two dollars a bottle, and poor stuff
at that; or meander through the Fish Market at midnight where streets
are filled with citizens and sight-seers, sidewalks with roystering
soldiers, bazaars with shrewd traders, dens with drunken natives, and
miles of houses with women outcasts from all quarters of the globe,
leering, lurking and lustful, caged like wild beasts behind iron-barred
gratings which are necessary to keep them from murderous assault on the
morals, money and lives of the passersby. I was held up in an alleyway
by a beautiful Ghawazee girl who said, with outstretched hand, “Me
backsheesh to give God.” She would need a bank-roll to get full pardon
for her multitudinous mistakes. The resorts where naked women invite you
to see the “Danse du Ventre,” a Terpsichorean exercise not noted for
its modesty, and the mahsheshehs, or hang-outs where hasheesh smokers
stimulate themselves into idiotic talk and laughter and stupefy their
brains into a narcotic nepenthe of poverty, hunger and dirt, may seem
quite unethical to the Occidental tenderfoot, but they are Christian
places of entertainment compared with those infamous joints in the Fish
Market where men, dressed up like women, carry on. These bordels had
their prototype of old in the Egyptian temples of Isis.
I entered a Cafe Chantant where, before an entranced audience, two
daughters of the desert, with incandescent kohl-stained eyes and
sin-stained souls, were going through the sinuous undulations of the
“hooche-cooche.” They moved their necks to and fro like cobras before a
snake-charmer, and the motion of hip, breast and abdomen thrilled the
spectators. These Egyptian dancers show a laxity of muscles and morals,
and dance in a way that makes it unnecessary to attend a gymnasium. The
dishes served were delicate, but the songs were indelicate, to say the
least. There was a very pathetic one which I translate:
“O damsel! thy silk shirt is worn out, and thine arms have become
visible,
And I fear for thee, on account of the blackness of thine eyes.
I desire to intoxicate myself, and kiss thy cheeks,
And do deeds that ’Antar did not.”
The Oriental orchestra was made up of a darabooka drum, made of a
wooden cylinder over which is stretched a parchment; the tar, a sort
of tambourine; the kemengeh, a viol of two strings with a cocoanut
sounding-body; the kanoon, a stringed instrument held on the knees and
played with the fingers; the ’ood, a guitar with seven double strings;
and the nay, a reed flute blown at the end. The music produced is most
unspeakably unspiritual and nasally noisome. It outranks the obligato
serenade of a love-sick tom-cat. The melody is old as the Libyan hills.
Is this what Mark Antony heard when he fell for Cleopatra? If so, what a
fall there was, my countrymen!
Here I bade adieu to the country which has all that was, is and ever
will be. Good-bye, Egypt! Land of faro-banks and Pharaoh mummies—of
backsheesh, bad smells, sphinx and blase globe-trotters! Paradise of palm
trees, pyramids and postcard-venders! Desert domain of donkeys, dirt and
dervishes—of tombs, temples, turbaned thieves and veiled vampires! Home
of camel, crocodile, can-can and Cleopatra! Farewell, till we meet again!
* * * * *
Even cultivated girls sometimes grow wild.
_Pasture Pot Pourri_