OUR sight-seeing in Cairo is accomplished under the superintendence
of another guide and dragoman, a cheerful, willing, good-natured
and careful Moslem, with one eye. He looks exactly like the one-eyed
calender of the story; and his good eye has a humorous and inquiring
twinkle in it. His name is Hassan, but he prefers to be called Hadji,
the name he has taken since he made the pilgrimage to Mecca.
A man who has made the pilgrimage is called “the hhâgg,” a woman “the
hhâggeh.”—often spelled and pronounced “hadj” and “hadjee.” It seems to
be a privilege of travelers to spell Arabic words as they please, and no
two writers agree on a single word or name. The Arabs take a new name or
discard an old one as they like, and half a dozen favorite names do duty
for half the inhabitants. It is rare to meet one who hasn't somewhere
about him the name of Mohammed, Ahmed, Ali, Hassan, Hosayn, or Mahmoud.
People take a new name as they would a garment that strikes the fancy.
“You like go bazaar?” asks Hadji, after the party is mounted on donkeys
in front of the hotel.
“Yes, Hadji, go by the way of the Mooskee.”
The Mooskee is the best known street in Cairo, and the only one in
the old part of the town that the traveler can find unaided. It runs
straight, or nearly so, a mile perhaps, into the most densely built
quarters, and is broad enough for carriages. A considerable part of it
is roofed lightly over with cane or palm slats, through which the
sun sifts a little light, and, being watered, it is usually cool and
pleasant. It cannot be called a good or even road, but carriages and
donkeys pass over it without noise, the wheels making only a smothered
sound: you may pass through it many times and not discover that a canal
runs underneath it. The lower part of it is occupied by European shops.
There are no fine shops in it like those in the Ezbekeëh, and it is
not interesting like the bazaars, but it is always crowded. Probably no
street in the world offers such a variety of costumes and nationalities,
and in no one can be heard more languages. It is the main artery, from
which branch off the lesser veins and reticulations leading into the
bazaars.
If the Mooskee is crowded, the bazaars are a jam. Different trades and
nationalities have separate quarters, articles that are wanted are far
apart, and one will of necessity consume a day in making two or three
purchases. It is an achievement to find and bargain for a piece of tape.
In one quarter are red slippers, nothing but red slippers, hundreds of
shops hung with them, shops in which they are made and sold; the yellow
slippers are in another quarter, and by no chance does one merchant keep
both kinds. There are the silk bazaars, the gold bazaars, the silver
bazaars, the brass, the arms, the antiquity, the cotton, the spice, and
the fruit bazaars. In one quarter the merchants and manufacturers are
all Egyptians, in another Turks, in another Copts, or Algerines, or
Persians, or Armenians, or Greeks, or Syrians, or Jews.
And what is a bazaar? Simply a lane, narrow, straight or crooked,
winding, involved, interrupted by a fountain, or a mosque, intersected
by other lanes, a congeries of lanes, roofed with matting it may be,
on each side of which are the little shops, not much bigger than a
dry-goods box or a Saratoga trunk. Frequently there is a story above,
with hanging balconies and latticed windows. On the ledge of his shop
the merchant, in fine robes of silk and linen, sits cross-legged,
probably smoking his chibook. He sits all day sipping coffee and
gossipping with his friends, waiting for a customer. At the times of
prayer he spreads his prayer-carpet and pursues his devotions in sight
of all the world.
This Oriental microcosm called a bazaar is the most characteristic thing
in the East, and affords most entertainment; in these cool recesses,
which the sun only penetrates in glints, is all that is shabby and all
that is splendid in this land of violent contrasts. The shops are rude,
the passages are unpaved dirt, the matting above hangs in shreds, the
unpainted balconies are about to tumble down, the lattice-work is grey
with dust; fleas abound; you are jostled by an unsavory throng may be;
run against by loaded donkeys; grazed by the dripping goat-skins of the
water-carriers; beset by beggars; followed by Jews offering old brasses,
old cashmeres, old armor; squeezed against black backs from the Soudan;
and stunned by the sing-song cries of a dozen callings. But all this is
nothing. Here are the perfumes of Arabia, the colors of Paradise. These
narrow streets are streams of glancing color; these shops are more
brilliant than any picture—but in all is a softened harmony, the ancient
art of the East.
We are sitting at a corner, pricing some pieces of old brass and arms.
The merchant sends for tiny cups of coffee and offers cigarettes. He and
the dragoman are wrangling about the price of something for which five
times its value is asked. Not unlikely it will be sold for less than
it is worth, for neither trader nor traveler has any idea of its value.
Opposite is a shop where three men sit cross-legged, making cashmere
shawls by piecing old bits of India scarfs. Next shop is occupied only
by a boy who is reading the Koran in a loud voice, rocking forwards
and backwards. A stooping seller of sherbet comes along clinking his
glasses. A vender of sweetmeats sets his tray before us. A sorry beggar,
a dwarf, beseeches in figurative language.
“What does he want, Hadji?”
“He say him hungry, want piece bread; O, no matter for he.”
The dragomans never interpret anything, except by short cuts. What the
dwarf is really saying, according to Mr. Lane, is, “For the sake of God!
O ye charitable. I am seeking from my lord a cake of bread. I am the
guest of God and the Prophet.”
As we cannot content him by replying in like strain, “God enrich thee,”
we earn his blessing by a copper or two.
Across the street is an opening into a nest of shops, gaily hung with
embroideries from Constantinople, silks from Broussa and Beyrout, stuffs
of Damascus; a Persian rug is spread on the mastabah of the shop, swords
and inlaid pistols with flint locks shine amid the rich stuffs. Looking
down this street, one way, is a long vista of bright color, the street
passing under round arches through which I see an old wall painted in
red and white squares, upon which the sun falls in a flood of white
light. The street in which we are sitting turns abruptly at a little
distance, and apparently ends in a high Moorish house, with queer little
latticed windows, and balconies, and dusty recesses full of mystery in
this half light; and at the corner opposite that, I see part of a public
fountain and hear very distinctly the “studying” of the school over it.
The public fountain is one of the best institutions of Cairo as well
as one of the most ornamental. On the street it is a rounded Saracenic
structure, highly ornamented in carved marble or stucco, and gaily
painted, having in front two or three faucets from which the water is
drawn. Within is a tank which is replenished by water brought in skins
from the Nile. Most of these fountains are charitable foundations, by
pious Moslems who leave or set apart a certain sum to ensure the yearly
supply of so many skins of water. Charity to the poor is one of the
good traits of the Moslems, and the giving of alms and the building of
fountains are the works that will be rewarded in Paradise.
These fountains, some of which are very beautiful, are often erected
near a mosque. Over them, in a room with a vaulted roof and open to the
street by three or four arches with pillars, is usually a boys' school.
In this room on the floor sit the master and his scholars. Each pupil
has before him his lesson written on a wooden tablet, and this he is
reading at the top of his voice, committing it to memory, and swaying
incessantly backwards and forwards—a movement that is supposed to assist
the memory. With twenty boys shouting together, the noise is heard
above all the clamor of the street. If a boy looks off or stops his
recitation, the stick of the schoolmaster sets him going again.
The boys learn first the alphabet, then the ninety-nine epithets of
God, and then the Koran, chapter by chapter. This is the sum of human
knowledge absolutely necessary; if the boy needs writing and arithmetic
he learns them from the steelyard weigher in the market; or if he is to
enter any of the professions, he has a regular course of study in
the Mosque El Ezher, which has thousands of students and is the great
University of the East.
Sitting in the bazaar for an hour one will see strange sights; wedding
and funeral processions are not the least interesting of them. We can
never get accustomed to the ungainly camel, thrusting his huge bulk into
these narrow limits, and stretching his snake neck from side to side,
his dark driver sitting high up in the dusk of the roof on the wooden
saddle, and swaying to and fro with the long stride of the beast. The
camel ought to be used in funeral processions, but I believe he is not.
We hear now a chanting down the dusky street. Somebody is being carried
to his tomb in the desert outside the city. The procession has to
squeeze through the crowd. First come a half dozen old men, ragged and
half blind, harbingers of death, who move slowly, crying in a whining
tone, “There is no deity but God; Mohammed is God's apostle; God bless
and save him.” Then come two or three schoolboys singing in a more
lively air verses of a funeral hymn. The bier is borne by friends of
the deceased, who are relieved occasionally by casual passengers. On
the bier, swathed in grave-clothes, lies the body, with a Cashmere shawl
thrown over it. It is followed by female hired mourners, who beat their
breasts and howl with shrill and prolonged ululations. The rear is
brought up by the female mourners, relations—a group of a dozen in this
case—whose hair is dishevelled and who are crying and shrieking with
a perfect abandonment to the luxury of grief. Passengers in the street
stop and say, “God is most great,” and the women point to the bier and
say, “I testify that there is no deity but God.”
When the funeral has passed and its incongruous mingling of chanting and
shrieking dies away, we turn towards the gold bazaar. All the goldsmiths
and silversmiths are Copts; throughout Egypt the working of the precious
metals is in their hands. Descended from the ancient Egyptians, or at
least having more of the blood of the original race in them than others,
they have inherited the traditional skill of the ancient workers in
these metals. They reproduce the old jewelry, the barbarous ornaments,
and work by the same rude methods, producing sometimes the finest work
with the most clumsy tools.
The gold-bazaar is the narrowest passage we have seen. We step down into
its twilight from a broader street. It is in fact about three feet wide,
a lane with an uneven floor of earth, often slippery. On each side are
the little shops, just large enough for the dealer and his iron safe,
or for a tiny forge, bellows and anvil. Two people have to make way for
each other in squeezing along this alley, and if a donkey comes through
he monopolizes the way and the passengers have to climb upon the
mastabahs either side. The mastabah is a raised seat of stone or brick,
built against the front of the shop and level with its floor, say two
feet and a half high and two feet broad. The lower shutter of the
shop turns down upon the mastabah and forms a seat upon which a rug is
spread. The shopkeeper may sit upon this, or withdraw into his shop to
make room for customers, who remove their shoes before drawing up their
feet upon the carpet. Sometimes three or four persons will crowd into
this box called a shop. The bazaar is a noisy as well as a crowded
place, for to the buzz of talk and the cries of the itinerant venders
is added the clang of the goldsmiths' hammers; it winds down into the
recesses of decaying houses and emerges in another direction.
We are to have manufactured a bracelet of gold of a pattern as old
as the Pharaohs, and made with the same instruments that the cunning
goldsmiths used three thousand years ago. While we are seated and
bargaining for the work, the goldsmith unlocks his safe and shows us
necklaces, bracelets, anklets, and earrings in the very forms, bizarre
but graceful, of the jewelry of which the Israelites spoiled the
Egyptian women. We see just such in the Museum at Boulak; though these
are not so fine as the magnificent jewelry which Queen Aah-hotep, the
mother of Amosis, attempted to carry with her into the under-world, and
which the scientific violators of her tomb rescued at Thebes.
In the shop opposite to us are squeezed in three Egyptian women and a
baby, who have come to spend the day in cheapening some bit of jewelry.
There is apparently nothing that the Cairo women like so much as
shopping—at least those who are permitted to go out at all—and they eke
out its delights by consuming a day or two in buying one article. These
women are taking the trade leisurely, examining slowly and carefully the
whole stock of the goldsmith and deliberating on each bead and drop of a
necklace, glancing slily at us and the passers-by out of their dark eyes
meantime. They have brought cakes of bread for lunch, and the baby
is publicly fed as often as he desires. These women have the power of
sitting still in one spot for hours, squatting with perfect patience in
a posture that would give a western woman the cramp for her lifetime. We
are an hour in bargaining with the goldsmith, and are to return late in
the afternoon and see the bracelet made before our eyes, for no one is
expected to trust his fellow here.
Thus far the gold has only been melted into an ingot, and that with many
precautions against fraud. I first count out the napoleons of which the
bracelet is to be made. These are weighed. A fire is then kindled in the
little forge, the crucible heated, and I drop the napoleons into it, one
by one. We all carefully watch the melting to be sure that no gold is
spilled in the charcoal and no base metal added. The melted mass is then
run into an ingot, and the ingot is weighed against the same number of
napoleons that compose it. And I carry away the ingot.
When we return the women are still squatting in the shop in the attitude
of the morning. They show neither impatience nor weariness; nor does the
shopkeeper. The baby is sprawled out in his brown loveliness, and
the purchase of a barbarous necklace of beads is about concluded. Our
goldsmith now removes his outer garment, revealing his fine gown
of striped silk, pushes up his sleeves and prepares for work. His
only-tools are a small anvil, a hammer and a pair of pincers. The ingot
is heated and hammered, and heated and hammered, until it is drawn out
into an even, thick wire. This is then folded in three to the required
length, and twisted, till the gold looks like molasses candy; the
ends are then hammered together, and the bracelet is bent to its form.
Finally it is weighed again and cleaned. If the owner wishes he can have
put on it the government stamp. Gold ornaments that are stamped, the
goldsmith will take back at any time and give for them their weight in
coin, less two per cent.
On our way home we encounter a wedding procession; this is the
procession conducting the bride to the house of the bridegroom; that to
the bath having taken place two days before. The night of the day before
going to the bridegroom is called the “Night of henna.” The bride has an
entertainment at her own house, receives presents of money, and has her
hands and her feet dyed with henna. The going to the bridegroom is on
the eve of either Monday or Friday. These processions we often meet in
the streets of Cairo; they wander about circuitously through the town
making all the noise and display possible. The procession is a rambling
affair and generally attended by a rabble of boys and men.
This one is preceded by half a dozen shabbily dressed musicians beating
different sorts of drums and blowing hautboys, each instrument on its
own hook; the tune, if there was one, has become discouraged, and
the melody has dropped out; thump, pound, squeak, the music is more
disorganized than the procession, and draggles on in noisy dissonance
like a drunken militia band at the end of a day's “general training.”
Next come some veiled women in black; and following them are several
small virgins in white. The bride walks next, with a woman each side of
her to direct her steps. This is necessary, for she is covered from head
to feet with a red cashmere shawl hanging from a sort of crown on the
the top of her head. She is in appearance, simply a red cone. Over her
and on three sides of her, but open in front, is a canopy of pink silk,
borne on poles by four men. Behind straggle more musicians, piping and
thumping in an independent nonchalance, followed by gleeful boys. One
attendant sprinkles rose-water on the spectators, and two or three
others seem to have a general direction of the course of the train, and
ask backsheesh for it whenever a stranger is met.
The procession gets tired occasionally and sits down in the dust of
the road to rest. Sometimes it is accompanied by dancers and other
performers to amuse the crowd. I saw one yesterday which had halted by
the roadside, all the women except the bride squatting down in patient
resignation. In a hollow square of spectators, in front, a male dancer
was exhibiting his steps. Holding a wand perpendicularly before him
with both hands, he moved backwards and forwards, with a mincing gait,
exhibiting neither grace nor agility, but looking around with the most
conceited expression I ever saw on a human face. Occasionally he would
look down at his legs with the most approving glance, as much as to
say, “I trust, God being great, that you are taking particular notice of
those legs; it seems to me that they couldn't be improved.” The fellow
enjoyed his dancing if no one else did, and it was impossible to get
him to desist and let the procession move on. At last the cortege made a
detour round the man who seemed to be so popular with himself, and left
him to enjoy his own performance.
Sometimes the expense of this zeffeh, or bridal procession, is shared by
two parties, and I have seen two brides walking under the same canopy,
but going to different husbands. The public is not excluded from an
interest in these weddings. The house of a bridegroom, near the Mooskee,
was illuminated a night or two before the wedding, colored lanterns
were hung across the street, and story-tellers were engaged to recite in
front of the house. On the night of the marriage there was a crowd
which greatly enjoyed the indelicate songs and stories of the hired
performers. Late in the evening an old woman appeared at a window and
proclaimed that the husband was contented with his wife.
An accompaniment of a bridal procession which we sometimes saw we could
not understand. Before the procession proper, walked another, preceded
by a man carrying on his head a high wooden cabinet, with four legs, the
front covered with pieces of looking-glass and bits of brass; behind him
were musicians and attendants, followed by a boy on horseback, dressed
richly in clothes too large for him and like a girl's. It turned out
to be a parade before circumcision, the friends of the lad having taken
advantage of the bridal ceremony of a neighbor to make a display.
The wooden case was merely the sign of the barber who walked in the
procession and was to perform the operation.
“I suppose you are married?” I ask Hadji when the procession has gone
by.
“Yes, sir, long time.”
“And you have never had but one wife?”
“Have one. He quite nuff for me.”
“How old was she when you married her?”
“Oh, I marry he, when he much girl! I tink he eleven, maybe twelve, not
more I tink.”
Girls in Egypt are marriageable at ten or eleven, and it is said that
if not married before they are fourteen they have an excellent chance of
being old maids. Precocious to mature, they are quick to fall away and
lose their beauty; the laboring classes especially are ugly and flabby
before eighteen. The low mental, not to say physical, condition of
Egyptian women is no doubt largely due to these early marriages. The
girl is married and is a mother before she has an opportunity to educate
herself or to learn the duties of wife or mother, ignorant of how to
make a home pleasant and even of housekeeping, and when she is utterly
unfit to have the care and training of a child. Ignorant and foolish,
and, as Mr. Lane says, passionate, women and mothers can never produce a
great race. And the only reform for Egypt that will give it new vitality
and a place in the world must begin with the women.
The Khedive, who either has foresight or listens to good advice, issued
a firman some years ago forbidding the marriage of girls under fifteen.
It does not seem to be respected either in city or country; though I
believe that it has some influence in the city, and generally girls are
not married so young in Cairo as in the country. Yet I heard recently in
this city of a man of sixty who took a wife of twelve. As this was not
his first wife, it could not be said of him, as it is said of some great
geniuses, that he struck twelve the first time.
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