Cairo

“ I found in Cairo a mixture of all nations; some brought thither by the love of knowledge, some by the hope of gain, and many by the desire of living after their own manner without observation, and of lying hid in the obscurity of multitudes: for, in a city, populous as Cairo, it is possible to obtain at the same time the gratifications of society, and the secrecy of solitude. ”

“ But all the time the bright, unclouded sun looked down on a smiling land, and in Cairo streets the din of the hammers, the voices of the boys driving heavily laden donkeys, the call of the camel-drivers leading their caravans into the great squares, the clang of the brasses of the sherbet-sellers, the song of the vendor of sweetmeats, the drone of the merchant praising his wares, went on amid scenes of wealth and luxury, and the city glowed with colour and gleamed with light. ”

“ The populace is up and stirring, and you can hear the cries of the donkeymen and water-carriers from under the sycamores and acacias that shade the road to Boulak. Over the rich palm-gardens, the blue streak of the river and the plain beyond, you see the phantoms of two pyramids in the haze which still curtains the Libyan Desert. Northward, beyond the parks and palaces of Shoobra, the Nile stretches his two great arms toward the sea, dotted, far into the distance, with sails that flash in the sun. From no other point, and at no other time, is Cairo so grand and beautiful. ”

“ From the entrance to the Great Pyramid in the north face I had an enchanting view of Cairo on the right, in sun and shadow with a sky of most beautiful cloud-forms, and on the left the lovely pearly and rosy desert stretching away into the golden West. How cheerily, how consolingly the wholesome, refreshing Present receives us back after those wanderings down the corridors of the dead Ages! Let us wash our faces and smile again and feel young. ”

“ No doubt the one great reward of the persistent traveller is to find new varieties of his fellow man. Cairo is the pousse café of humanity—probably the most cosmopolitan city in the world. The guide books talk about rock tombs and mosques, but the travellers find their real enjoyment in the bazaars and along the crowded streets and on the sheer banks of the Nile, which stand out as an animated panorama for hundreds of miles. The first hour in Cairo is compensation for many an hour of tedious travel. ”

“ Life and prosperity seem everywhere to prevail, and the station at Cairo conducts you at once into a fine city, with broad streets, well watered, and shaded by trees, handsome shops, fine hotels, beautiful gardens, and the inevitable statue of Mohammed Ali, who did so much to develop modern Egypt. Palaces of all kinds attract the eye, one of the finest of these being the residence of Lord Cromer. Cairo is distinctly a society place, though, perhaps, not so much so as Cannes or Nice, and living is dear, though cheaper than it used to be. ”

“ Nothing can be conceived more animated and picturesque than Cairo during the early morning or at night. It seems the most bustling and populous city in the world. The narrow streets, abounding with bazaars, present the appearance of a mob, through which troops of richly dressed cavaliers force with difficulty their prancing way, arrested often in their course by the procession of a harem returning from the bath, the women enveloped in inscrutable black garments, and veils and masks of white linen, and borne along by the prettiest donkeys in the world. ”

“ But as yet all was quiet, and when I found myself once more in Cairo, in my old quarters at the Grand New Hotel, where I had been six years before, sitting on the same balcony overlooking the Ezbekieh Square, and listening to the same music floating up from under the palm trees below, I felt as if I were at home, and gave myself up to the full enjoyment of the most delightful of Eastern cities. For a Winter's residence, there is nothing to equal Cairo. The flood of light, which gives brightness and color to everything ”

“ We have come to Cairo, and the world is again before us.
CHAPTER XXXIII.—THE KHEDIVE. WHAT excitement there is in adjacency to a great city! To hear its inarticulate hum, to feel the thrill of its myriads, the magnetism of a vast society! How the pulse quickens at the mere sight of multitudes of buildings, and the overhanging haze of smoke and dust that covers a little from the sight of the angels the great human struggle and folly. How impatient one is to dive into the ocean of his fellows. ”

“ Seen in the gloom of the evening, its towers and minarets showing in the moonlight, its streets pervaded with the dull red glow of the lights that gleam in the adjacent bazaars and cabarets, and with its white-walled buildings towering in the darkness, Cairo looks like a scene from the Arabian Nights, but viewed by daylight the picture is not so entrancing, for the semi-darkness serves to hide from the eye of the traveler the squalor and filth that the sunlight reveals and that is part and parcel of all oriental cities and towns. ”

“ We are away up over the river Nile, and far above the minarets of the mosques that rise out of the vast plain of houses below. We are at a height as great as the tops of the Pyramids, which stand out upon the yellow desert off to the left. The sun is blazing and there is a smoky haze over the Nile valley, but it is not dense enough to hide Cairo. The city lying beneath us is the largest on the African continent and one of the mightiest of the world. ”

“ That is the charm of Cairo. You step aside from one of the main thoroughfares, crowded with Western vehicles of every description, from the drag to a pony trap, and in an instant you are at once in a maze of alleys, where no draught animal of any kind has ever set foot since the houses were built on either side, and through which you may thread your way, surrounded by the same moving masses of colour for as many hours as you please without emerging again into Western civilisation. ”

“ It is difficult at first to form any true idea of native Cairo; its life is so varied and its interests so diverse that the new-comer is bewildered.
Types of many races, clad in strange Eastern costumes, crowd the narrow streets, which are overlooked by many beautiful buildings whose dark shadows lend additional glory to the sunlight. Richly carved doorways give glimpses of cool courts and gardens within the houses, while awnings of many colours shade the bazaars and shopping streets. ”

“ Fascinating though the streets of Cairo are, continuous sight-seeing in the heat and glare is tiring, and it is always a pleasant change to escape from the movement and bustle outside, and enjoy the quietude of some cool mosque or palace courtyard. ”

“ A short residence in Cairo proves very captivating to many Englishmen; they like the independent sort of life which they lead; their perfect freedom from all the thralls imposed by society at home, and, when tired of dreaming away existence after the indolent fashion of the East, plunge into the surrounding deserts, and enjoy all the excitement attendant upon danger. ”

“ The days of the beauty of Cairo are numbered. The mosques are falling to decay, the exquisite lattice windows rotting away and replaced by European glass and jalousies. Only the people and the Government remain unchanged. Read all the pretty paragraphs about civilisation here, and then say, Bosh!
If you know anyone coming here and wanting a good servant and dragoman, recommend my dear Omar Abou el-Haláweh of Alexandria. ”

“ I need not have been afraid that the charms of Constantinople would spoil Cairo for me, although at first I was disappointed. Most places have to be lived up to, especially one like Cairo, whose attractions are vaunted by every tourist, every woman of fashion, every scholar, every idle club-man, everybody, either with brains or without. I wondered how it could be all things to all men. ”

“ Thanks to the protecting hand of England, Cairo, which once was little better than Constantinople, is now as safe as London. On the Nile, it is hardly possible to leave one's boat, save under the care of a dragoman. Even at Luxor and Assuân, the attentions of the native population are of a rather overpowering character. But at Cairo, whether amid the hurrying crowds in the bazaars or on the quiet road to the Gézirah, there is no annoyance of any kind to be apprehended. ”

“ But neither grandeur nor knowledge itself could avail to save it; and of its many splendid structures, but a single column remains to mark its site.
But here at our feet is Cairo, teeming with life, and with the human passions all at work; and yet it seems like a city of the dead. We hear no sound, no cry; life seems to be stagnant there; but it is not. The surface is not greatly ruffled, but beneath it the passions are fermenting: who shall follow them in their various changes and their devious windings? But we will not philosophise. Here, just below us, is the mosque of Sultan Hassan ”

“ When we came to Cairo last fall, fresh from European cities, it seemed very shabby. Now that we come from Upper Egypt, with our eyes trained to eight hundred miles of mud-hovels, Cairo is magnificent. But it is Cairo. There are just as many people squatting in the dust of the highways as when we last saw them, and they have the air of not having moved in three months. We ride to Shepherd’s Hotel; there are twenty dragomans for every tourist who wants to go to Syria, there is the usual hurry of arrival and departure, and no one to be found; we call at the consul’s: it is not his hour ”

“ Half the hidden charm of {85} Cairo and its surroundings, it has been said, consists of the strongly incongruous sights that meet an observant eye: the modern woman leaning on her bicycle, and steadfastly looking at the unchanging eyes of the Sphinx, or a laughing party of officers and Americans in the shadow of the Great Pyramid, or among the tombs of the caliphs, its Oriental bazaar crowded with British soldiers and sailors: an old world and a new. ”

“ Cairo is a city of mosques and minarets, as one quickly discovers when he takes a bird's eye view of the city from the citadel which stands upon an eminence in the suburbs. While the main streets are suggestive of Europe, the native quarters and bazaars are distinctly Oriental, many of the streets being too narrow for a carriage. The shops are for the most part little open booths, and each line of business has its particular section. On one street silver and gold smiths monopolize the space; another street is gay with red shoes; in another the red fez, the universal hat, is conspicuous ”

“ There is a charm about Cairo peculiar to itself. Nowhere else do we find that strange mixture of western civilization and eastern barbarism that exists in the Egyptian capital, which seems, by the way, to be yearly increasing in popularity as a winter resort. Everything in the place is original and therefore charming, and, although surrounded with every European luxury and comfort, so utterly unlike Europe. ”

“ At last they mentioned Egypt and one of my uncles said, ‘Travellers say that there is not on the face of the earth aught fairer than Cairo and its Nile.’ Quoth my father, ‘Who has not seen Cairo has not seen the world. Its dust is gold and its Nile a wonder; its women are houris and its houses palaces: its air is temperate and the fragrance of its breezes outvies the scent of aloes-wood: and how should it be otherwise, being the mother of the world? Bravo for him who says . . . . . .’ And he repeated the following verses:
Shall I from Cairo wend and leave the sweets of its delight? ”

“ We took the cars and came up here to ancient Cairo, which is an Oriental city and of the completest pattern. There is little about it to disabuse one’s mind of the error if he should take it into his head that he was in the heart of Arabia. Stately camels and dromedaries, swarthy Egyptians, and likewise Turks and black Ethiopians, turbaned, sashed, and blazing in a rich variety of Oriental costumes of all shades of flashy colors, are what one sees on every hand crowding the narrow streets and the honeycombed bazaars. ”

“ Kāra wandered about the streets. Cairo is a marvel to the most blasé traveler; it could not fail to impress an inexperienced native. But the Egyptian masked the astonishment under an expression cold and reserved and a manner dignified and undemonstrative. No one must suspect he was fresh from the desert and the Nile country. The shops of the jewelers especially attracted his attention, and he stopped many times to examine the splendid gems displayed in the windows. ”

“ Cairo has a population of four hundred thousand souls. The new part of the town, called Ismaïlia, has been persistently abused by almost all writers, who describe it as dusty, as shadeless, as dreary, as glaring, as hideous, as blankly and broadly empty, as adorned with half-built houses which are falling into ruin—one has read all this before arriving. ”

“ It is not, therefore, the buildings, either new or old, which make Cairo one of the most picturesque and incongruous and entertaining of cities in the whole world; it is the people who live in it and who move about in it, and who are so [106] constantly in the streets that from the Citadel above the city its roar comes to you like the roar of London. ”

“ Cairo as a beautiful and ancient oriental city has ceased to exist, and is being rapidly transformed into a bad imitation of modern Paris, only with bluer skies, a more brilliant sun, and a more serene climate than it is possible to find in Europe. ”

“ All too soon you must go hack to Cairo, where the Bedouin ceases to be the proud son of the desert and becomes a peddler, where sheep become mutton and clover is only fodder. But Cairo is about what the tourist expects of it and what the hotel proprietor thinks you want. He fills the halls of his hotel with gaily painted columns, and on each side of the staircase are gaudy figures; and for those tourists who take their Egypt between the slipper bazaar and the fish-market it may do.{19} ”