IN THE BAZAARS OF CAIRO
Cairo is the biggest city in Africa. It is larger than St. Louis and one
of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Orient. The Christians and the
Mohammedans here come together, and the civilizations of the East and the
West touch each other. The modern part of Cairo has put on the airs of
European capitals. It has as wide streets as Paris, and a park, full of
beautiful flowers and all varieties of shrubs and trees, lies in its very
centre. Here every night the military bands play European and American
airs, and veiled Mohammedan women walk about with white-faced French or
Italian babies, of which they are the nurses. People from every part
of the world listen to the music. The American jostles the Englishman
while the German and the Frenchman scowl at each other; the Greek and
the Italian move along side by side, as they did in the days when this
country was ruled by Rome, and now and then you see an old Turk in his
turban and gown, or a Bedouin Arab, or a white-robed, fair-faced heathen
from Tunis.
The European section of Cairo now has magnificent hotels. It is many
a year since the foreign traveller in Egypt has had to eat with his
fingers, or has seen a whole sheep served up to him by his Egyptian
host as used to be the case. To-day the food is the same as that you
get in Paris, and is served in the same way. One can buy anything he
wants in European Cairo, from a gas-range to a glove-buttoner, and from
a set of diamond earrings to a pair of shoestrings. Yesterday I had a
suit of clothes made by an English tailor, and I drive about every day
in an American motor car. There are, perhaps, fifty thousand Europeans
living in the city, and many American visitors have learned the way
to this great winter resort. The bulk of the Europeans are French and
Italian, and the Mouski, one of the main business streets, is lined for
a mile with French and Italian shops. There are thousands of Greeks,
and hundreds of Jews from Palestine, the states of southern Europe, and
Asia Minor. One sees every type of Caucasian moving about under dark red
fezzes and dressed in black clothes with coats buttoned to the chin.
The foreign part of Cairo is one of great wealth. There are mansions and
palaces here that would be called handsome in the suburbs of New York,
and property has greatly risen in value. Many of the finest houses are
owned by Greeks, whose shrewd brains are working now as in the classic
days. The Greeks look not unlike us and most of them talk both English
and French. They constitute the money aristocracy of Alexandria, and
many of the rich Greek merchants of that city have palatial winter homes
here. As I have said, they are famed as bankers and are the note-shavers
of Egypt. They lend money at high rates of interest, and I am told that
perhaps one fifth of the lands of the country belong to them. They have
bought them in under mortgages to save their notes. The lower classes of
the Greeks are the most turbulent of Egypt’s population.
[Illustration: FROM CAIRO TO KISUMU
Embraces the right shoulder of Africa which for centuries withstood the
attempts of rulers and traders to establish their dominion over the
continent]
The tourist who passes through Cairo and stays at one of the big hotels
is apt to think that the city is rapidly becoming a Christian one. As he
drives over asphalt streets lined with the fine buildings of the European
quarter, it seems altogether English and French. If he is acquainted with
many foreigners he finds them living in beautiful villas, or in apartment
houses like those of our own cities. He does his shopping in modern
stores and comes to the conclusion that the Arab element is passing away.
This is not so. Cairo is a city of the Egyptians. Not one tenth of
its inhabitants are Christians and it is the hundreds of thousands of
natives who make up the life blood of this metropolis. They are people
of a different world from ours, as we can see if we go down for a stroll
through their quarters. They do business in different ways and trade much
as they have been trading for generations. Their stores are crowded along
narrow streets that wind this way and that until one may lose himself in
them. Nearly every store is a factory, and most of the goods offered are
made in the shop where they are sold.
Although the foreigner and his innovations are in evidence, native Cairo
is much the same now in characters, customs, and dress as it was in the
days of Haroun Al Raschid. Here the visionary Alnaschar squats in his
narrow, cell-like store, with his basket of glass before him. He holds
the tube of a long water pipe in his mouth and is musing on the profits
he will make from peddling his glass, growing richer and richer, until
his sovereign will be glad to offer him his daughter in marriage and
he will spurn her as she kneels before him. We almost expect to see
the glass turned over as it is in the story, and his castles in the
air shattered with his kick. Next to him is a turbaned Mohammedan who
reminds us of Sinbad the Sailor, and a little farther on is a Barmecide
washing his hands with invisible soap in invisible water, and apparently
inviting his friends to come and have a great feast with him. Here two
long-gowned, gray-bearded men are sitting on a bench drinking coffee
together; and there a straight, tall maiden, robed in a gown which falls
from her head to her feet, with a long black veil covering all of her
face but her eyes, looks over the wares of a handsome young Syrian,
reminding us of how the houris shopped in the days of the “Thousand and
One Nights.”
Oriental Cairo is a city of donkeys and camels. In the French quarter
you may have a ride on an electric street car for a few cents, or you
may hire an automobile to carry you over the asphalt. The streets of the
native city are too narrow for such things, and again and again we are
crowded to the wall for fear that the spongy feet of the great camels may
tread upon us. We are grazed by loaded donkeys, carrying grain, bricks,
or bags on their backs, and the donkey boy trotting behind an animal
ridden by some rich Egyptian or his wife calls upon us to get out of the
way.
The donkeys of Egypt are small, rugged animals. One sees them everywhere
with all sorts of odd figures mounted on them. Here is an Egyptian woman
sitting astride of one, her legs bent up like a spring and her black feet
sticking out in the stirrups. She is dressed in black, in a gown which
makes her look like a balloon. There is a long veil over her face with a
slit at the eyes, where a brass spool separates it from the head-dress
and you see nothing but strips of bare skin an inch wide above and below.
Here is a sheik with a great turban and a long gown; his legs, ending
in big yellow slippers, reach almost to the ground on each side of his
donkey. He has no bridle, but guides the beast with a stick. A donkey-boy
in bare feet, whose sole clothing consists of a blue cotton nightgown and
a brown skullcap, runs behind poking up the donkey with a stick. Now he
gives it a cut, and the donkey jerks its hinder part from one side to the
other as it scallops the road in attempting to get out of the way of the
rod. Here is a drove of donkeys laden with bags for the market. They are
not harnessed, and the bags are balanced upon their backs without ropes
or saddles.
The ordinary donkey of Egypt is very cheap indeed, but the country has
some of the finest asses and mules I have ever seen, and there are royal
white jackasses ridden by wealthy Mohammedans which are worth from
five hundred to a thousand dollars per beast. The best of these come
from Mecca. They are pacers, fourteen hands high, and very swift. The
pedigrees of some of them are nearly as long as those of Arabian horses.
It is said that the Arabs who raise them will never sell a female of this
breed.
But to return to the characters of the bazaar. They are of the oddest,
and one must have an educated eye to know who they are. Take that man in
a green turban, who is looked up to by his fellows. The dragoman tells
us that he has a sure passport to Heaven, and that the green turban is
a sign that he has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and thus earned the
right to the colours of the Prophet. Behind him comes a fine-featured,
yellow-faced man in a blue gown wearing a turban of blue. We ask our
guide who he may be and are told, with a sneer, that he is a Copt. He is
one of the Christians of modern Egypt, descended from the fanatical band
described by Charles Kingsley in his novel “Hypatia.” Like all his class
he is intelligent, and like most of them well dressed. The Copts are
among the shrewdest of the business Egyptians, and with prosperity they
have grown in wealth. They are money lenders and land speculators. Many
of them have offices under the government, and not a few have amassed
fortunes. Some of them are very religious and some can recite the Bible
by heart. They differ from their neighbours in that they believe in
having only one wife.
The crowd in these streets is by no means all men, however. There are
women scattered through it, and such women! We look at them, and as their
large soulful eyes, fringed with dark lashes, smile back at us, we wish
that the veils would drop from their faces. The complexions which can be
seen in the slit in the veils are of all colours from black to brunette,
and from brown to the creamy white of the fairest Circassian. We are
not particularly pleased with their costume, but our dragoman tells us
that they dress better at home. The better classes wear black bombazine
garments made so full that they hide every outline of the figure. Some of
them have their cloaks tied in at the waist so that they look like black
bed ticks on legs. Here, as one raises her skirt, we see that she wears
bloomers falling to her ankles, which make us think of the fourteen-yard
breeches worn by the girls of Algiers. The poorer women wear gowns of
blue cotton, a single garment and the veil making up a whole costume.
Astride their shoulders or their hips some of them carry babies, many of
whom are as naked as when they were born.
[Illustration: The streets of old Cairo resound with the cries of vendors
of sweetmeats and drinks. Lemonade is dispensed from a great brass bottle
on the back of the seller, while around his waist is a tin tray of
glasses or cups.]
[Illustration: Over many warehouses, shops, and even stables of old Cairo
are homes of the well-to-do with marble floors covered with fine rugs.
The supporting arch is much used because long timbers are not available.]
Here is a lady with a eunuch, who, as black as your hat and as sombre as
the Sphinx, guards the high-born dame lest she should flirt with that
handsome young man from Tunis sitting cross-legged in the midst of his
bottles of attar of roses. He offers a bottle to the lady while he talks
of its merits in the most flowery terms. Here is a barefooted girl, who,
strange to say, has no veil over her face, but whose comely features
might be considered by a jealous lover to warrant such protection. Her
chin is tattooed and the nails of her fingers and toes are stained deep
orange with henna. She has a great tray on her head and is calling out
her wares in the strangest language: “Buy my oranges! They are sweet as
honey, and I know that God will make my basket light.”
This is in Arabic, and one hears the same extravagant sort of talk all
about him. Here two Turks meet and salute each other. They almost fight
in their struggle each to humble himself first by kissing the hand of the
other. After they have done so a third passes and they all say: “_Naharak
sayed_”—“May thy day be happy and blessed.” There are no more polite
people on earth than these Mohammedans, whose everyday talk is poetry.
I can always amuse myself for days in watching the trading in the
bazaars. I saw an Egyptian woman buying some meat to-day. The butcher’s
whole stock consisted of a couple of sheep, one of which hung from a nail
on the wall. The woman drew her finger nail along the piece she wished to
take home, and the butcher sawed it off with a clasp knife. He weighed
it on a pair of rude scales, and the woman objected, saying that he had
given her too much. He then took one end of the strip of meat in his
hand, and putting the other end in his mouth, severed it by drawing the
knife quickly across it. He handed the piece he had held in his mouth to
the woman, who took it and paid for it, evidently seeing nothing out of
the way in his methods.
In the bazaars the merchants sit in little booths no bigger than the
packing-box of a piano. A ledge about two feet high, and of about the
same width, runs along the front of the store, on which the customers
sit. A purchaser is usually offered coffee, and asked to take a smoke
out of the long-stemmed water pipe of the proprietor. It takes a
great time to make a deal, for the Mohammedan always asks three times
what he expects to get, and never comes down without bargaining. The
better merchants all keep book accounts, which they foot up in Arabic
characters, taking the ink out of a brass inkstand with a handle a foot
long which is so made that it will contain the pen as well as the ink.
This inkwell is thrust into the belt of the gown when the proprietor
leaves his shop.
If one is not satisfied at one place he can go to another. In the
Cinnamon Bazaar there are dozens of stores that sell nothing but spices,
and in the Shoemakers’ Bazaar are the gorgeously embroidered slippers and
red-leather shoes, turned up at the toes, worn by all good Mohammedans.
In the Silver Bazaar the jewellers are at work. They use no tools of
modern invention. Their bellows is a bag of goatskin with a piece of
gun-barrel for the mouth and two sticks like those used for the ordinary
fire bellows at the end. One’s only guarantee of getting a good article
is to buy the silver, have it tested by the government assayer, and let
the jeweller make it up under his own eyes. Poor jewellery is often sold,
and I remember buying a silver bracelet for a friend during a visit to
Cairo which looked very pretty and very barbaric, but six months after
its presentation it began to change colour, and proved to be brass washed
with silver.
I see many watches displayed, for there is now a craze among the
peasants of Egypt to own watches. They want a cheap article, and in many
cases buy a fresh watch every year. As a result the Swiss and Germans
have been flooding the country with poor movements, put up in fancy
German silver, nickel, and gun-metal cases, and are selling them at two
dollars and upward apiece. They are not equal to our timepieces which
sell at one dollar. Some of these watches are advertised as of American
make, and sell the quicker on that account. I doubt not that a good
American watch would sell well and displace the poor stuff now sent in by
the Swiss. In one bazaar only brass articles are shown, while in another
nothing but rugs are sold. The Persian Bazaar and the Turkish Bazaar are
managed by men of these nations. In fact, wandering through the business
parts of Cairo, one can see types of every oriental people on the globe.