Noon in Cairo.
A silent old court-yard, half sun and half shadow in which quaintly
graceful, strangely curving columns seem to have taken from long
companionship with trees something of their inner life, while the palms,
their neighbors, from long in-door existence, look as if they had in turn
acquired household or animal instincts, if not human sympathies. And as
the younger the race the more it seeks for poets and orators to express
in thought what it only feels, so these dumb pillars and plants found
their poet and orator in the fountain which sang or spoke for them
strangely and sweetly all night and day, uttering for them not only their
waking thoughts, but their dreams. It gave a voice, too, to the ancient
Persian tiles and the Cufic inscriptions which had seen the caliphs, and
it told endless stories of Zobeide and Mesrour and Haroun al Raschid.
Beyond the door which, when opened, gave this sight was a dark ancient
archway twenty yards long, which opened on the glaring, dusty street,
where camels with their drivers and screaming _sais_, or carriage-runners
and donkey-boys and crying venders, kept up the wonted Oriental din. But
just within the archway, in its duskiest corner, there sat all day a
living picture, a dark and handsome woman, apparently thirty years old,
who was unveiled. She had before her a cloth and a few shells; sometimes
an Egyptian of the lower class stopped, and there would be a grave
consultation, and the shells would be thrown, and then further solemn
conference and a payment of money and a departure. And it was world-old
Egyptian, or Chaldean, as to custom, for the woman was a Rhagarin, or
gypsy, and she was one of the diviners who sit by the wayside, casting
shells for auspices, even as shells and arrows were cast of old, to be
cursed by Israel.
It is not remarkable that among the myriad _manteias_ of olden days there
should have been one by shells. The sound of the sea as heard in the
nautilus or conch, when
"It remembers its august abode
And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there,"
is very strange to children, and I can remember how in childhood I
listened with perfect faith to the distant roaring, and marveled at the
mystery of the ocean song being thus forever kept alive, inland. Shells
seem so much like work of human hands, and are often so marked as with
letters, that it is not strange that faith soon found the supernatural in
them. The magic shell of all others is the cowrie. Why the Roman ladies
called it _porcella_, or little pig, because it has a pig's back, is the
objective explanation of its name, and how from its gloss that name, or
porcellana, was transferred to porcelain, is in books. But there is
another side to the shell, and another or esoteric meaning to "piggy,"
which was also known to the _dames du temps jadis_, to Archipiada and
Thais, _qui fut la belle Romaine_,--and this inner meaning makes of it a
type of birth or creation. Now all that symbolizes fertility, birth,
pleasure, warmth, light, and love is opposed to barrenness, cold, death,
and evil; whence it follows that the very sight of a shell, and
especially of a cowrie, frightens away the devils as well as a
horse-shoe, which by the way has also its cryptic meaning. Hence it was
selected to cast for luck, a world-old custom, which still lingers in the
game of props; and for the same reason it is hung on donkeys, the devil
being still scared away by the sight of a cowrie, even as he was scared
away of old by its prototype, as told by Rabelais.
As the sibyls sat in caves, so the sorceress sat in the dark archway,
immovable when not sought, mysterious as are all her kind, and something
to wonder at. It was after passing her, and feeling by quick intuition
what she was, that the court-yard became a fairy-land, and the fountain
its poet, and the palm-trees Tamar maids. There are people who believe
there is no mystery, that an analysis of the gypsy sorceress would have
shown an ignorant outcast; but while nature gives chiaro-oscuro and
beauty, and while God is the Unknown, I believe that the more light there
is cast by science the more stupendous will be the new abysses of
darkness revealed. These natures must be taken with the _life_ in them,
not dead,--and their life is mystery. The Hungarian gypsy lives in an
intense mystery, yes, in true magic in his singing. You may say that he
cannot, like Orpheus, move rocks or tame beasts with his music. If he
could he could do no more than astonish and move us, and he does that
now, and the _why_ is as deep a mystery as that would be.
So far is it from being only a degrading superstition in those who
believe that mortals like themselves can predict the future, that it
seems, on the contrary ennobling. It is precisely because man feels a
mystery within himself that he admits it may be higher in others; if
spirits whisper to him in dreams and airy passages of trembling light, or
in the music never heard but ever felt below, what may not be revealed to
others? You may tell me if you will that prophecies are all rubbish and
magic a lie, and it may be so,--nay, _is_ so, but the awful mystery of
the Unknown without a name and the yearning to penetrate it _is_, and is
all the more, because I have found all prophecies and jugglings and
thaumaturgy fail to bridge over the abyss. It is since I have read with
love and faith the evolutionists and physiologists of the most advanced
type that the Unknown has become to me most wonderful, and that I have
seen the light which never shone on sea or land as I never saw it before.
And therefore to me the gypsy and all the races who live in freedom and
near to nature are more poetic than ever. For which reason, after the
laws of acoustics have fully explained to me why the nautilus sounds like
a far off-ocean dirge, the unutterable longing _to know more_ seizes upon
me,
"Till my heart is full of longing
For the secret of the sea,
And the heart of the great ocean
Sends a thrilling pulse through me."
That gypsy fortune-teller, sitting in the shadow, is, moreover,
interesting as a living manifestation of a dead past. As in one of her
own shells when petrified we should have the ancient form without its
color, all the old elements being displaced by new ones, so we have the
old magic shape, though every atom in it is different; the same, yet not
the same Life in the future, and the divination thereof, was a
stupendous, ever-present reality to the ancient Egyptian, and the sole
inspiration of humanity when it produced few but tremendous results. It
is when we see it in such living forms that it is most interesting. As
in Western wilds we can tell exactly by the outline of the forests where
the borders of ancient inland seas once ran, so in the great greenwood of
history we can trace by the richness or absence of foliage and flower the
vanished landmarks of poetry, or perceive where the enchantment whose
charm has now flown like the snow of the foregone year once reigned in
beauty. So a line of lilies has shown me where the sea-foam once fell,
and pine-trees sang of masts preceding them.
"I sometimes think that never blows so red
The rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
That every hyacinth the garden wears
Dropt in her lap from some once lovely head." {292}
The memory of that court-yard reminds me that I possess two Persian
tiles, each with a story. There is a house in Cairo which is said to be
more or less contemporary with the prophet, and it is inhabited by an old
white-bearded emir, more or less a descendant of the prophet. This old
gentleman once gave as a precious souvenir to an American lady two of the
beautiful old tiles from his house, whereof I had one. In the eyes of a
Muslim there is a degree of sanctity attached to this tile, as one on
which the eyes of the prophet may have rested,--or at least the eyes of
those who were nearer to him than we are. Long after I returned from
Cairo I wrote and published a fairy-book called Johnnykin, {292} in which
occurred the following lines:--
Trust not the Ghoul, love,
Heed not his smile;
_Out of the Mosque_, _love_,
_He stole the tile_.
One day my friend the Palmer from over the sea came to me with a present.
It was a beautiful Persian tile.
"Where did you get it?" I asked.
"I stole it out of a mosque in Syria."
"Did you ever read my Johnnykin?"
"Of course not."
"I know you never did." Here I repeated the verse. "But you remember
what the Persian poet says:--
"'And never since the vine-clad earth was young
Was some great crime committed on the earth,
But that some poet prophesied the deed.'"
"True, and also what the great Tsigane poet sang:--
"'O manush te lela sossi choredo,
Wafodiro se te choramengro.'
"He who takes the stolen ring,
Is worse than he who stole the thing."
"And it would have been better for you, while you were _dukkerin_ or
prophesying, to have prophesied about something more valuable than a
tile."
And so it came to pass that the two Persian tiles, one given by a
descendant of the Prophet, and the other the subject of a prophecy, rest
in my cabinet side by side.
In Egypt, as in Austria, or Syria, or Persia, or India, the gypsies are
the popular musicians. I had long sought for the derivation of the word
_banjo_, and one day I found that the Oriental gypsies called a gourd by
that name. Walking one day with the Palmer in Cambridge, we saw in a
window a very fine Hindu lute, or in fact a real banjo made of a gourd.
We inquired, and found that it belonged to a mutual friend, Mr. Charles
Brookfield, one of the best fellows living, and who, on being forthwith
"requisitioned" by the unanimous voice of all who sympathized with me in
my need, sent me the instrument. "He did not think it right," he said,
"to keep it, when Philology wanted it. If it had been any other
party,--but he always had a particular respect and awe of her." I do not
assert that this discovery settles the origin of the word _banjo_, but
the coincidence is, to say the least, remarkable.
I saw many gypsies in Egypt, but learned little from them. What I found
I stated in a work called the "Egyptian Sketch Book." It was to this
effect: My first information was derived from the late Khedive Ismael,
who during an interview with me said, "There are in Egypt many people
known as Rhagarin, or Ghagarin, who are probably the same as the gypsies
of Europe. They are wanderers, who live in tents, and are regarded with
contempt even by the peasantry. Their women tell fortunes, tattoo, and
sell small wares; the men work in iron. They are all adroit thieves, and
noted as such. The men may sometimes be seen going round the country
with monkeys. In fact, they appear to be in all respects the same people
as the gypsies of Europe."
I habitually employed, while in Cairo, the same donkey-driver, an
intelligent and well-behaved man named Mahomet, who spoke English fairly.
On asking him if he could show me any Rhagarin, he replied that there was
a fair or market held every Saturday at Boulac, where I would be sure to
meet with women of the tribe. The men, he said, seldom ventured into the
city, because they were subject to much insult and ill-treatment from the
common people.
On the day appointed I rode to Boulac. The market was very interesting.
I saw no European or Frangi there, except my companion, Baron de Cosson,
who afterwards traveled far into the White Nile country, and who had with
his brother Edward many remarkable adventures in Abyssinia, which were
well recorded by the latter in a book. All around were thousands of
blue-skirted and red-tarbouched or white-turbaned Egyptians, buying or
selling, or else amusing themselves, but with an excess of outcry and
hallo which indicates their grown child character. There were dealers in
donkeys and horses roaring aloud, "He is for ten napoleons! Had I asked
twenty you would have gladly given me fifteen!" "O true believers, here
is a Syrian steed which will give renown to the purchaser!" Strolling
loosely about were dealers in sugar-cane and pea-nuts, which are called
gooba in Africa as in America, pipe peddlers and venders of rosaries,
jugglers and minstrels. At last we came to a middle-aged woman seated on
the ground behind a basket containing beads, glass armlets, and such
trinkets. She was dressed like any Arab-woman of the lower class, but
was not veiled, and on her chin blue lines were tattooed. Her features
and expression were, however, gypsy, and not Egyptian. And as she sat
there quietly I wondered how a woman could feel in her heart who was
looked down upon with infinite scorn by an Egyptian, who might justly be
looked down on in his turn with sublime contempt by an average American
Methodist colored whitewasher who "took de 'Ledger.'" Yet there was in
the woman the quiet expression which associates itself with
respectability, and it is worth remarking that whenever a race is greatly
looked down on by another from the stand-point of mere color, as in
America, or mere religion, as in Mahometan lands, it always contains
proportionally a larger number of _decent_ people than are to be found
among those who immediately oppress it. An average Chinese is as a human
being far superior to a hoodlum, and a man of color to the white man who
cannot speak of him or to him except as a "naygur" or a "nigger." It is
when a man realizes that he is superior in _nothing_ else save race,
color, religion, family, inherited fortune, and their contingent
advantages that he develops most readily into the prig and snob.
I spoke to the woman in Romany, using such words as would have been
intelligible to any of her race in any other country; but she did not
understand me, and declared that she could speak nothing but Arabic. At
my request Mahomet explained to her that I had come from a distant
country in Orobba, or Europe, where there were many Rhagarin, who said
that their fathers came from Egypt, and that I wished to know if any in
the old country could speak the old language. She replied that the
Rhagarin of Montesinos could still speak it; but that her people in Egypt
had lost the tongue. Mahomet, in translating, here remarked that
Montesinos meant Mount Sinai or Syria. I then asked her if the Rhagarin
had no peculiar name for themselves, and she answered, "Yes; we call
ourselves Tataren."
This at least was satisfactory. All over Southern Germany and in Norway
the gypsies are called Tartaren, and though the word means Tartars, and
is misapplied, it indicates the race. The woman seemed to be much
gratified at the interest I manifested in her people. I gave her a
double piaster, and asked for its value in blue glass armlets. She gave
me four, and as I turned to depart called me back, and with a
good-natured smile handed me four more as a present. This generosity was
very gypsy-like, and very unlike the habitual meanness of the ordinary
Egyptian.
After this Mahomet took me to a number of Rhagarin. They all resembled
the one whom I had seen, and all were sellers of small articles and
fortune-tellers. They all differed slightly from common Egyptians in
appearance, and were more unlike them in not being importunate for money,
nor disagreeable in their manners. But though they were as certainly
gypsies as old Charlotte Cooper herself, none of them could speak Romany.
I used to amuse myself by imagining what some of my English gypsy friends
would have done if turned loose in Cairo among their cousins. How
naturally old Charlotte would have waylaid and "dukkered" and amazed the
English ladies in the Muskee, and how easily that reprobate old amiable
cosmopolite, the Windsor Frog, would have mingled with the motley mob of
donkey-boys and tourists before Shepherd's Hotel, and appointed himself
an _attache_ to their excursions to the Pyramids, and drunk their pale
ale or anything else to their healths, and then at the end of the day
have claimed a wage for his politeness! And how well the climate would
have agreed with them, and how they would have agreed that it was of all
lands the best for _tannin_, or tenting out, in the world!
The gypsiest-looking gypsy in Cairo, with whom I became somewhat
familiar, was a boy of sixteen, a snake-charmer; a dark and even handsome
youth, but with eyes of such wild wickedness that no one who had ever
seen him excited could hope that he would ever become as other human
beings. I believe that he had come, as do all of his calling, from a
snake-catching line of ancestors, and that he had taken in from them, as
did Elsie Venner, the serpent nature. They had gone snaking, generation
after generation, from the days of the serpent worship of old, it may be
back to the old Serpent himself; and this tawny, sinuous, active thing of
evil, this boy, without the least sense of sympathy for any pain, who
devoured a cobra alive with as much indifference as he had just shown in
petting it, was the result. He was a human snake. I had long before
reading the wonderfully original work of Doctor Holmes reflected deeply
on the moral and immoral influences which serpent worship of old, in
Syria and other lands, must have had upon its followers. But Elsie
Venner sets forth the serpent nature as benumbed or suspended by cold New
England winters and New England religions, moral and social influences;
the Ophites of old and the Cairene gypsy showed the boy as warmed to life
in lands whose winters are as burning summers. Elsie Venner is not
sensual, and sensuality is the leading trait of the human-serpent nature.
Herein lies an error, just as a sculptor would err who should present
Lady Godiva as fully draped, or Sappho merely as a sweet singer of
Lesbos, or Antinous only as a fine young man. He who would harrow hell
and rake out the devil, and then exhibit to us an ordinary sinner, or an
_opera bouffe_ "Mefistofele," as the result, reminds one of the seven
Suabians who went to hunt a monster,--"_a Ungeheuer_,"--and returned with
a hare. Elsie Venner is not a hare; she is a wonderful creation; but she
is a winter-snake. I confess that I have no patience, however, with
those who pretend to show us summer-snakes, and would fain dabble with
vice; who are amateurs in the diabolical, and drawing-room dilettanti in
damnation. Such, as I have said before, are the aesthetic adorers of
Villon, whom the old _roue_ himself would have most despised, and the
admirers of "Faustine," whom Faustina would have picked up between her
thumb and finger, and eyed with serene contempt before throwing them out
of the window. A future age will have for these would-be wickeds, who
are only monks half turned inside out, more laughter than we now indulge
in at Chloe and Strephon.
I always regarded my young friend Abdullah as a natural child of the
devil and a serpent-souled young sinner, and he never disappointed me in
my opinion of him. I never in my life felt any antipathy to serpents,
and he evidently regarded me as a _sapengro_, or snake-master. The first
day I met him he put into my hands a cobra which had the fangs extracted,
and then handled an asp which still had its poison teeth. On his asking
me if I was afraid of it, and my telling him "No," he gave it to me, and
after I had petted it, he always manifested an understanding,--I cannot
say sympathy. I should have liked to see that boy's sister, if he ever
had one, and was not hatched out from some egg found in the desert by an
Egyptian incubus or incubator. She must have been a charming young lady,
and his mother must have been a beauty, especially when in
court-dress,--with her broom _et praeterea nihil_. But neither, alas,
could be ever seen by me, for it is written in the "Gittin" that there
are three hundred species of male demons, but what the female herself is
like is known to no one.
Abdullah first made his appearance before me at Shepherd's Hotel, and
despite his amazing natural impudence, which appeared to such splendid
advantage in the street that I always thought he must be a lineal
descendant of the brazen serpent himself, he evinced a certain timidity
which was to me inexplicable, until I recalled that the big snake of
Irish legends had shown the same modesty when Saint Patrick wanted him to
enter the chest which he had prepared for his prison. "Sure, it's a nate
little house I've made for yees," said the saint, "wid an iligant
parlor." "I don't like the look av it at all, at all," says the sarpent,
as he squinted at it suspiciously, "and I'm loath to _inter_ it."
Abdullah looked at the parlor as if he too were loath to "inter" it; but
he was in charge of one in whom his race instinctively trust, so I led
him in. His apparel was simple: it consisted of a coarse shirt, very
short, with a belt around the waist, and an old tarbouch on his head.
Between the shirt and his bare skin, as in a bag, was about a half peck
of cobras, asps, vipers, and similar squirming property; while between
his cap and his hair were generally stowed one or two enormous living
scorpions, and any small serpents that he could not trust to dwell with
the larger ones. When I asked Abdullah where he contrived to get such
vast scorpions and such lively serpents, he replied, "Out in the desert."
I arranged, in fact, to go out with him some day a-snaking and scorp'ing,
and have ever since regretted that I did not avail myself of the
opportunity. He showed off his snakes to the ladies, and concluded by
offering to eat the largest one alive before our eyes for a dollar, which
price he speedily reduced to a half. There was a young New England lady
present who was very anxious to witness this performance; but as I
informed Abdullah that if he attempted anything of the kind I would kick
him out-of-doors, snakes and all, he ceased to offer to show himself a
cannibal. Perhaps he had learned what Rabbi Simon ben Yochai taught,
that it is a good deed to smash the heads of the best of serpents, even
as it is a duty to kill the best of Goyim. And if by Goyim he meant
Philistines, I agree with him.
I often met Abdullah after that, and helped him to several very good
exhibitions. Two or three things I learned from him. One was that the
cobra, when wide awake, yet not too violently excited, lifts its head and
maintains a curious swaying motion, which, when accompanied by music, may
readily be mistaken for dancing acquired from a teacher. The Hindu
_sappa-wallahs_ make people believe that this "dancing" is really the
result of tuition, and that it is influenced by music. Later, I found
that the common people in Egypt continue to believe that the snakes which
Abdullah and his tribe exhibit are as dangerous and deadly as can be, and
that they are managed by magic. Whether they believe, as it was held of
old by the Rabbis, that serpents are to be tamed by sorcery only on the
Sabbath, I never learned.
Abdullah was crafty enough for a whole generation of snakes, but in the
wisdom attributed to serpents he was woefully wanting. He would run by
my side in the street as I rode, expecting that I would pause to accept a
large wiggling scorpion as a gift, or purchase a viper, I suppose for a
riding-whip or a necktie. One day when I was in a jam of about a hundred
donkey-boys, trying to outride the roaring mob, and all of a fever with
heat and dust, Abdullah spied me, and, joining the mob, kept running by
my side, crying in maddening monotony, "Snake, sah! Scorpion, sah! Very
fine snake to-day, sah!"--just as if his serpents were edible delicacies,
which were for that day particularly fresh and nice.
There are three kinds of gypsies in Egypt,--the Rhagarin, the Helebis,
and the Nauar. They have secret jargons among themselves; but as I
ascertained subsequently from specimens given by Captain Newboldt {302a}
and Seetzen, as quoted by Pott, {302b} their language is made up of
Arabic "back-slang," Turkish and Greek, with a very little Romany,--so
little that it is not wonderful that I could not converse with them in
it. The Syrian gypsies, or Nuri, who are seen with bears and monkeys in
Cairo, are strangers in the land. With them a conversation is not
difficult. It is remarkable that while English, German, and Turkish or
Syrian gypsy look so different and difficult as printed in books, it is
on the whole an easy matter to get on with them in conversation. The
roots being the same, a little management soon supplies the rest.
Abdullah was a Helebi. The last time I saw him I was sitting on the
balcony of Shepherd's Hotel, in the early evening, with an American, who
had never seen a snake-charmer. I called the boy, and inadvertently gave
him his pay in advance, telling him to show all his stock in trade. But
the temptation to swindle was too great, and seizing the coin he rushed
back into the darkness. From that hour I beheld him no more. I think I
can see that last gleam of his demon eyes as he turned and fled. I met
in after-days with other snake-boys, but for an eye which indicated an
unadulterated child of the devil, and for general blackguardly behavior
to match, I never found anybody like my young friend Abdullah.
The last snake-masters whom I came across were two sailors at the
Oriental Seamen's Home in London. And strangely enough, on the day of my
visit they had obtained in London, of all places, a very large and
profitable job; for they had been employed to draw the teeth of all the
poisonous serpents in the Zoological Garden. Whether these practitioners
ever applied for or received positions as members of the Dental College I
do not know, any more than if they were entitled to practice as surgeons
without licenses. Like all the Hindu _sappa-wallahs_, or snake-men, they
are what in Europe would be called gypsies.