THE OUTSKIRTS OF CAIRO
Night. A long straight road, the artery of some capital, through which
our carriage drives at a fast trot, making a deafening clatter on the
pavement. Electric light everywhere. The shops are closing; it must
needs be late.
The road is Levantine in its general character; and we should have no
clear notion of the place did we not see in our rapid, noisy passage
signs that recall us to the land of the Arabs. People pass dressed in
the long robe and tarboosh of the East; and some of the houses, above
the European shops, are ornamented with mushrabiyas. But this blinding
electricity strikes a false note. In our hearts are we quite sure we are
in the East?
The road ends, opening on to darkness. Suddenly, without any warning,
it abuts upon a void in which the eyes see nothing, and we roll over
a yielding, felted soil, where all noise abruptly ceases--it is the
_desert_! . . . Not a vague, nondescript stretch of country such as in
the outskirts of our towns, not one of the solitudes of Europe, but the
threshold of the vast desolations of Arabia. _The desert_; and, even if
we had not known that it was awaiting us, we should have recognised it
by the indescribable quality of harshness and uniqueness which, in spite
of the darkness, cannot be mistaken.
But the night after all is not so black. It only seemed so, at the first
moment, by contrast with the glaring illumination of the street. In
reality it is transparent and blue. A half-moon, high up in the heavens,
and veiled by a diaphanous mist, shines gently, and as it is an Egyptian
moon, more subtle than ours, it leaves to things a little of their
colour. We can see now, as well as feel, this desert, which has opened
and imposed its silence upon us. Before us is the paleness of its sands
and the reddish-brown of its dead rocks. Verily, in no country but Egypt
are there such rapid surprises: to issue from a street flanked by shops
and stalls and, without transition, to find this! . . .
Our horses have, inevitably, to slacken speed as the wheels of our
carriage sink into the sand. Around us still are some stray ramblers,
who presently assume the air of ghosts, with their long black or white
draperies, and noiseless tread. And then, not a soul; nothing but the
sand and the moon.
But now almost at once, after the short intervening nothingness, we
find ourselves in a new town; streets with little low houses, little
cross-roads, little squares, all of them white, on whitened sands,
beneath a white moon. . . . But there is no electricity in this town, no
lights, and nobody is stirring; doors and windows are shut: no movement
of any kind, and the silence, at first, is like that of the surrounding
desert. It is a town in which the half-light of the moon, amongst so
much vague whiteness, is diffused in such a way that it seems to come
from all sides at once and things cast no shadows which might give them
definiteness; a town where the soil is so yielding that our progress
is weakened and retarded, as in dreams. It seems unreal; and, in
penetrating farther into it, a sense of fear comes over you that can
neither be dismissed nor defined.
For assuredly this is no ordinary town. . . . And yet the houses,
with their windows barred like those of a harem, are in no way
singular--except that they are shut and silent. It is all this
whiteness, perhaps, which freezes us. And then, too, the silence is
not, in fact, like that of the desert, which did at least seem natural,
inasmuch as there was nothing there; here, on the contrary, there is
a sense of innumerable presences, which shrink away as you pass but
nevertheless continue to watch attentively. . . . We pass mosques in
total darkness and they too are silent and white, with a slight bluish
tint cast on them by the moon. And sometimes, between the houses, there
are little enclosed spaces, like narrow gardens, but which can have no
possible verdure. And in these gardens numbers of little obelisks rise
from the sand--white obelisks, it is needless to say, for to-night
we are in the kingdom of absolute whiteness. What can they be, these
strange little gardens? . . . And the sand, meanwhile, which covers the
streets with its thick coatings, continues to deaden the sound of our
progress, out of compliment no doubt to all these watchful things that
are so silent around us.
At the crossings and in the little squares the obelisks become more
numerous, erected always at either end of a slab of stone that is about
the length of a man. Their little motionless groups, posted as if on the
watch, seem so little real in their vague whiteness that we feel tempted
to verify them by touching, and, verily, we should not be astonished if
our hand passed through them as through a ghost. Farther on there is a
wide expanse without any houses at all, where these ubiquitous little
obelisks abound in the sand like ears of corn in a field. There is
now no further room for illusion. We are in a cemetery, and have been
passing in the midst of houses of the dead, and mosques of the dead, in
a town of the dead.
Once emerged from this cemetery, which in the end at least disclosed
itself in its true character, we are involved again in the continuation
of the mysterious town, which takes us back into its network. Little
houses follow one another as before, only now the little gardens are
replaced by little burial enclosures. And everything grows more and more
indistinct, in the gentle light, which gradually grows less. It is as if
someone were putting frosted globes over the moon, so that soon, but for
the transparency of this air of Egypt and the prevailing whiteness of
things, there would be no light at all. Once at a window the light of a
lamp appears; it is the lantern of gravediggers. Anon we hear the voices
of men chanting a prayer; and the prayer is a prayer for the dead.
These tenantless houses were never built for dwellings. They are simply
places where men assemble on certain anniversaries, to pray for the
dead. Every Moslem family of any note has its little temple of this
kind, near to the family graves. And there are so many of them that now
the place is become a town--and a town in the desert--that is to say, in
a place useless for any other purpose; a secure place indeed, for we
may be sure that the ground occupied by these poor tombs runs no risk of
being coveted--not even in the irreverent times of the future. No, it is
on the other side of Cairo--on the other bank of the Nile, amongst the
verdure of the palm-trees, that we must look for the suburb in course
of transformation, with its villas of the invading foreigner, and the
myriad electric lights along its motor roads. On this side there is no
such fear; the peace and desuetude are eternal; and the winding sheet of
the Arabian sands is ready always for its burial office.
At the end of this town of the dead, the desert again opens before us
its mournful whitened expanse. On such a night as this, when the wind
blows cold and the misty moon shows like a sad opal, it looks like a
steppe under snow.
But it is a desert planted with ruins, with the ghosts of mosques; a
whole colony of high tumbling domes are scattered here at hazard on the
shifting extent of the sands. And what strange old-fashioned domes they
are! The archaism of their silhouettes strikes us from the first,
as much as their isolation in such a place. They look like bells, or
gigantic dervish hats placed on pedestals, and those farthest away give
the impression of squat, large-headed figures posted there as sentinels,
watching the vague horizon of Arabia beyond.
They are the proud tombs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
where the Mameluke Sultans, who oppressed Egypt for nearly three hundred
years, sleep now in complete abandonment. Nowadays, it is true, some
visits are beginning to be paid to them--on winter nights when the moon
is full and they throw on the sands their great clear-cut shadows. At
such times the light is considered favourable, and they rank among the
curiosities exploited by the agencies. Numbers of tourists (who persist
in calling them the tombs of the caliphs) betake themselves thither of
an evening--a noisy caravan mounted on little donkeys. But to-night
the moon is too pale and uncertain, and we shall no doubt be alone in
troubling them in their ghostly communion.
To-night indeed the light is quite unusual. As just now in the town of
the dead, it is diffused on all sides and gives even to the most massive
objects the transparent semblance of unreality. But nevertheless
it shows their detail and leaves them something of their daylight
colouring, so that all these funeral domes, raised on the ruins of the
mosques, which serve them as pedestals, have preserved their reddish or
brown colours, although the sand which separates them, and makes between
the tombs of the different sultans little dead solitudes, remains pale
and wan.
And meanwhile our carriage, proceeding always without noise, traces
on this same sand little furrows which the wind will have effaced by
to-morrow. There are no roads of any kind; they would indeed be as
useless as they are impossible to make. You may pass here where you
like, and fancy yourself far away from any place inhabited by living
beings. The great town, which we know to be so close, appears from
time to time, thanks to the undulations of the ground, as a mere
phosphorescence, a reflection of its myriad electric lights. We are
indeed in the desert of the dead, in the sole company of the moon,
which, by the fantasy of this wonderful Egyptian sky, is to-night a moon
of grey pearl, one might almost say a moon of mother-of-pearl.
Each of these funeral mosques is a thing of splendour, if one examines
it closely in its solitude. These strange upraised domes, which from
a distance look like the head-dresses of dervishes or magi, are
embroidered with arabesques, and the walls are crowned with denticulated
trefoils of exquisite fashioning.
But nobody venerates these tombs of the Mameluke oppressors, or keeps
them in repair; and within them there are no more chants, no prayers
to Allah. Night after night they pass in an infinity of silence. Piety
contents itself with not destroying them; leaving them there at the
mercy of time and the sun and the wind which withers and crumbles
them. And all around are the signs of ruin. Tottering cupolas show us
irreparable cracks; the halves of broken arches are outlined to-night
in shadow against the mother-of-pearl light of the sky, and debris of
sculptured stones are strewn about. But nevertheless these tombs,
that are well-nigh accursed, still stir in us a vague sense of
alarm--particularly those in the distance, which rise up like
silhouettes of misshapen giants in enormous hats--dark on the white
sheet of sand--and stand there in groups, or scattered in confusion, at
the entrance to the vast empty regions beyond.
*****
We had chosen a time when the light was doubtful in order that we might
avoid the tourists, but as we approach the funeral dwelling of Sultan
Barkuk, the assassin, we see, issuing from it, a whole band, some twenty
in a line, who emerge from the darkness of the abandoned walls, each
trotting on his little donkey and each followed by the inevitable
Bedouin driver, who taps with his stick upon the rump of the beast. They
are returning to Cairo, their visit ended, and exchange in a loud voice,
from one ass to another, more or less inept impressions in various
European languages. . . . And look! There is even amongst them the
almost proverbial belated dame who, for private reasons of her own,
follows at a respectable distance behind. She is a little mature
perhaps, so far as can be judged in the moonlight, but nevertheless
still sympathetic to her driver, who, with both hands, supports her from
behind on her saddle, with a touching solicitude that is peculiar to
the country. Ah! these little donkeys of Egypt, so observant, so
philosophical and sly, why cannot they write their memoirs! What a
number of droll things they must have seen at night in the outskirts of
Cairo!
This good lady evidently belongs to that extensive category of hardy
explorers who, despite their high respectability at home, do not
hesitate, once they are landed on the banks of the Nile, to supplement
their treatment by the sun and the dry winds with a little of the
“Bedouin cure.”