WHAT we in Cairo like most to do, is to do nothing in the charming
winter weather—to postpone the regular and necessary sight-seeing to
that limbo to which the Arabs relegate everything—bookra, that is,
tomorrow. Why not as well go to the Pyramids or to Heliopolis or to the
tombs of the Memlooks tomorrow! It is to be the same fair weather; we
never plan an excursion, with the proviso, “If it does not rain.” This
calm certainty of a clear sky adds twenty-five per cent, to the value of
life.
And yet, there is the Sirocco; that enervating, depressing south wind,
when all the sands of the hot desert rise up into the air and envelope
everything in grit and gloom. I have been on the Citadel terrace when
the city was only dimly outlined in the thick air, and all the horizon
and the sky were veiled in dust as if by a black Scotch mist. We once
waited three days after we had set a time to visit the Pyramids, for
the air to clear. The Sirocco is bad enough in the town, the fine dust
penetrates the closed recesses of all apartments; but outside the city
it is unbearable. Indeed any wind raises the sand disagreeably; and dust
is the great plague of Egypt. The streets of Cairo, except those that
are sprinkled, are seldom free from clouds of it. And it is an ancient
dust. I suppose the powdered dead of thousands of years are blowing
about in the air.
The desert makes itself apparent even in Cairo. Not only is it in the
air, but it lies in wait close to the walls and houses, ready to
enter at the gates, sifting in through every crevice. Only by constant
irrigation can it be driven back. As soon as we pass beyond the compact
city eastward, we enter the desert, unless we follow the course of some
refreshing canal. The drive upon it is a favorite one on summer nights.
I have spoken of the desert as hot; but it is always cool at night; and
it is the habit of foreigners who are detained in Cairo in the summer to
go every night to the desert to cool off.
The most conspicuous object in Cairo, from all points, is the Citadel,
built on a bold spur of the Mokattam range, and the adjoining Mosque of
Mohammed Ali in which that savage old reformer is buried. The mosque
is rather Turkish than Saracenic, and its two slender minarets are much
criticised. You who have been in Constantinople are familiar with the
like slight and graceful forms in that city; they certainly are not
so rich or elegant as many of the elaborately carved and more robust
minarets of Cairo which the genius of the old architects reared in the
sun-burst of Saracenic architecture; but they are very picturesque and
effective in their position and especially against a poetic evening sky.
When Salah-e'-deen robbed the pyramids to build the Citadel, he
doubtless thought he was erecting a fortification that would forever
protect his city and be an enduring home for the Sultans of Egypt. But
Mohammed Ali made it untenable as a fort by placing a commanding battery
on the Mokattam ledge; and now the Citadel (by which I mean all the
group of buildings) useless as a fort (except to overawe the city)
and abandoned as a palace, is little more than a ghost-walk of former
splendors. There are barracks in it; recruits are drilling in its
squares; the minister-of-war occupies some of its stately apartments;
the American General Stone, the chief officer of the Khedive's army,
uses others; in some we find the printing presses and the bureaus of the
engineers and the typographical corps; but vast halls and chambers
of audience, and suites of apartments of the harem, richly carved and
gilded, are now vacant and echo the footsteps of sentries and servitors.
And they have the shabby look of most Eastern architecture when its
first freshness is gone.
We sat in the room and on the platform where Mohammed Ali sat when the
slaughter of the Memlooks was going on; he sat motionless, so it is
reported, and gave no other sign of nervousness than the twisting of a
piece of paper in his hands. And yet he must have heard the cries under
his window, and, of course, the shots of the soldiers on the walls who
were executing his orders. We looked down from the balcony into the
narrow, walled lane, with its closed gates, in which the five hundred
Memlooks were hemmed in and massacred. Think of the nerve of the old
Turk, sitting still without changing countenance while five hundred,
or more, gallant swash-bucklers were being shot in cool blood under his
window! Probably he would not have been so impassive if he had seen one
of the devoted band escape by spurring his horse through a break in the
wall and take a fearful flying leap upon the rubbish below.
The world agrees to condemn this treacherous and ferocious act of
Mohammed Ali and, generally, I believe, to feel grateful to him for it.
Never was there a clan of men that needed exterminating so much as the
Memlooks. Nothing less would have suited their peculiarities. They were
merely a band of robbers, black-mailers, and freebooters, a terror
to Egypt. Dislodged from actual power, they were still greatly to be
dreaded, and no ruler was safe who did not obey them. The term Memlook
means “a white male slave,” and is still so used. The Memlooks, who
originally were mostly Circassian white slaves, climbed from the
position of favorites to that of tyrants. They established a long
dynasty of sultans, and their tombs yonder at the edge of the desert are
among the most beautiful specimens of the Saracenic architecture. Their
sovereignty was overthrown by Sultan Selim in 1517, but they remained
a powerful and aristocratic band which controlled governors, corrupted
even Oriental society by the introduction of monstrous vices, and
oppressed the people. I suppose that in the time of the French invasion
they may have been joined by bold adventurers of many nations. Egypt
could have no security so long as any of them remained. It was doubtless
in bad taste for Mohammed Ali to extend a friendly invitation to the
Memlooks to visit him, and then murder them when they were caught in his
trap; he finally died insane, and perhaps the lunacy was providentially
on him at that time.
In the Citadel precincts is a hall occupied by the “parliament” of the
Khedive, when it is in session; a parliament whose members are
selected by the Viceroy from all over Egypt, in order that he may have
information of the state of the country, but a body that has no power
and certainly not so much influence in the state as the harem has. But
its very assemblage is an innovation in the Orient, and it may lead
in time to infinite gab, to election briberies and multitudinous
legislation, the accompaniments of the highest civilization. We may
yet live to see a member of it rise to enquire into the expenses of the
Khedive's numerous family.
The great Mosque of Mohammed Ali is in the best repair and is the least
frequented of any in Cairo. Its vast, domed interior, rich in materials
and ambitious in design, is impressive, but this, like all other great
mosques, strikes the Western man as empty. On the floor are beautiful
rugs; a tawdry chandelier hangs in the center, and the great spaces are
strung with lanterns. No one was performing ablution at the handsome
fountain in the marble-paved court; only a single worshipper was
kneeling at prayer in all the edifice. But I heard a bird singing
sweetly in the airy height of the dome.
The view from the terrace of the mosque is the finest in Egypt, not
perhaps in extent, but certainly in variety and objects of interest;
and if the atmosphere and the light are both favorable, it is the most
poetic. From it you command not only the city and a long sweep of the
Nile, with fields of living green and dark lines of palms, but the ruins
and pyramids of slumberous old Memphis, and, amid the yellow sands and
backed by the desolate Libyan hills, the dreamy pyramids of Geezeh. We
are advised to get this view at sunset, because then the light is soft
and all the vast landscape has color. This is good advice so far as the
city at our feet is concerned, with its hundreds of minarets and its
wide expanse of flat roofs, palm-tops and open squares; there is the
best light then also on the purple Mokattam hills; and the tombs of the
Memlooks, north of the cemetery, with their fairy domes and exquisite
minarets and the encompassing grey desert, the whole bathed in violet
light, have a beauty that will linger with one who has once seen them
forever. But looking beyond the Nile, you have the sun in your face. I
should earnestly entreat the stranger to take this view at sunrise. I
never saw it myself at that hour, being always otherwise engaged, but I
am certain that the Pyramids and the Libyan desert would wake at early
morning in a glow of transcendent beauty.
We drive out the gate or Bab e' Nasr beyond the desolate Moslem
cemetery, to go to the tombs of the Circassian Memlook Sultans. We pass
round and amid hills of rubbish, dirt, and broken pottery, the dumpings
of the city for centuries, and travel a road so sandy that the horses
can scarcely drag the heavy carriage through it. The public horses of
Cairo are sorry beasts and only need a slight excuse for stopping at any
time. There is nothing agreeable about the great Moslem cemetery; it
is a field of sand-heaps, thickly dotted with little oven-shaped stucco
tombs. They may be pleasanter below ground; for the vault into which the
body is put, without a coffin, is high enough to permit its occupant to
sit up, which he is obliged to do, whether he is able to sit up or not,
the first night of his stay there, in order to answer the questions of
two angels who come to examine him on his religious practices and views.
The Tombs of the Sultans, which are in the desert, are in fact vast
structures,—tombs and mosques united—and are built of parti-colored
stone. They are remarkable for the beautiful and varied forms of their
minarets and for their aërial domes; the latter are covered with the
most wonderful arabesque carving and tracing. They stand deserted,
with the sand drifting about them, and falling to rapid decay. In the
interiors are still traces of exquisite carving and color, but much of
the ornamentation, being of stucco on rude wooden frames, only adds to
the appearance of decay. The decay of finery is never respectable.
It is not correct, however, to speak of these mosque-tombs as deserted.
Into all of them have crept families of the poor or of the vicious.
And the business of the occupants, who call themselves guardians, is to
extract backsheesh from the visitor. Spinning, knitting, baking, and all
the simple household occupations go on in the courts and in the gaunt
rooms; one tomb is used as a grist-mill. The women and girls dwelling
there go unveiled; they were tattooed slightly upon the chin and the
forehead, as most Egyptian women are; some of the younger were pretty,
with regular features and handsome dark eyes. Near the mosques are lanes
of wretched homes, occupied by as wretched people. The whole mortal
neighborhood swarms (life out of death) with children; they are as thick
as jars at a pottery factory; they are as numerous as the flies that
live on the rims of their eyes and noses; they are as naked, most of
them, as when they were born. The distended condition of their stomachs
testify that they have plenty to eat, and they tumble about in the dirt,
in the full enjoyment of this delicious climate. People can afford to be
poor when nature is their friend.
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