Chapter III: Part 3

You must touch at Brindisi, which is situated on the heel of the boot of Italy, if you wish to go a part of the way by land from the East to London or from London to the East. And as many people prefer travelling forty-eight hours across the Continent to rounding Gibraltar, one hears often of Brindisi, and pictures it as a shipping port of the importance of Liverpool or Marseilles. Instead of which it is as desolate as a summer resort in midwinter, and is like that throughout the year. There was a long, broad stone wharf, and tall stucco houses behind, and banks of coal which suggested the rear approach to Long Island City, and the soft blue Italian skies of which we had read were steely blue, and most of us wore overcoats. We lay bound fast to the wharf, with a plank thrown from the boat's side to the quay, for the day, and we had free permission to learn to walk on streets again for full twenty-four hours; but after facing the wind, and dodging guides who had nothing to show, we came back by preference to the clean deck and the steamer-chair. Desperate-looking Italian soldiers with feathers in their hats, and custom-house officers, and gendarmes paraded up and down the quay for our delectation, and a wicked little boy stood on the pier-head and sang "Ta-ra-ra-boom-chi-ay," pointedly varying this knowledge of our several nationalities by crying: "I _say_, buy box matches. Get out." This show of learning caused him to be regarded by his fellows with much envy, and they watched us to see how far we were impressed.

There are two things which need no newspaper advertising and which recognize no geographical lines; one is a pretty face and the other is a good song. I have seen photographs for sale of Isabelle Irving and Lillian Russell in as different localities as Santiago in Cuba, and Rotterdam, and I saw a play-bill in San Antonio, Texas, upon which the Countess Dudley and the Duchess of Leinster were reproduced under the names of the Walsh Sisters. A good song will travel as far, changing its name, too, perhaps, and its words, but keeping the same melody that has pleased people in a different part of the world. When the moon came out at Brindisi and hid the heaps of coal, and showed only the white houses and the pillar of Caesar, a party of young men with guitars and mandolins gathered under the bow and sang a song called "Oh, Caroline," which I had last heard Francis Wilson sing as a part of the score of "The Lion-tamer," to very different words. As the scene of "The Lion-tamer" is laid in Sicily, the song was more or less in place; but the contrast between the dark-browed Italian and Mr. Wilson's genial countenance which the song brought back was striking. And on the night after we had left Brindisi, when the crew gave a concert, one of them sang "Oh, promise me," and some one asked if the song had yet reached America. I did not undeceive him, but said it had.

After Brindisi the hands of the clock go back a few thousand years, and we see Cethdonia, where Ulysses owned much property, and Crete, from whence St. Paul set sail, with its long range of mountains covered with snow, and then we come back to the present near the island of Zante, where the earthquake moved a month ago and swallowed up the homes of the people.

The _Sutlej_ had been going out of her course all of the fourth day in order to dodge possible islands thrown up by the earthquake, and she was late. That night, as she steamed forward at her best speed, the level oily sea fell back from her bows with a steady ripple as she cut it in two and turned it back out of the way. A light on the horizon, like a policeman's lantern, which changed to the burnt-out end of a match and back again to a bull's-eye, told us that beyond the light lay the level sands of Egypt, almost as far-reaching and monotonous as the sea that touched its shore.

The force of habit is very strong on many people, and if they approach the land of the Pharaohs and of Cleopatra an hour after their usual bedtime, they feel no inclination to diverge from their usual habits on that account. When you consider how many hours there are for slumber, and how many are given to dances, you would think one hour of sleep might be spared out of a lifetime in order that you could see Port Said at night. There was a long line of lamps on the shore, like a gigantic row of footlights or a prairie fire along the horizon, and we passed towards this through buoys with red and green lights, with a long sea-wall reaching out on one side, and the natural reef of jagged rocks rising black out of the sea in the path of the moon on the other. Then black boats shot out from the shore and assailed us with strange cries, and men in turbans and long robes, and negroes in what looked like sacking, and which probably was sacking, but which could not hide the suppleness and strength of their limbs, climbed up over the high sides. These were the coal-trimmers making way for the black islands, filled with black coal and blacker men, who made fast to the side and began feeding the vessel through a blazing hole like an open fireplace in her iron side. Four braziers filled with soft coal burnt with a fierce red flame from the corners of the barges, and in this light from out of the depths half-naked negroes ran shrieking and crying with baskets of coal on their shoulders to the top of an inclined plank, and stood there for a second in the full glare of the opening until one could see the whites of their eyes and the sweat glistening on the black faces. Then they pitched the coal forward into the lighted opening, as though they were feeding a fire, and disappeared with a jump downward into the pit of blackness. The coal dust rose in great curtains of mist, through which the figures of the men and the red light showed dimly and with wavering outline, like shadows in an iron-mill, and through it all came their cries and shouts, and the roar of the coal blocks as they rattled down into the hold.

Port Said occupies the same position to the waters of the world as Dodge City once did to the Western States of America--it is the meeting-place of vessels from every land over every water, just as Dodge City was the meeting-place of the great trails across the prairies. When a cowboy reached Dodge City after six months of constant riding by day and of sleeping under the stars by night, and with wild steers for company, he wanted wickedness in its worst form--such being the perversity of man. And you are told that Port Said offers to travellers and crew the same attractive features after a month or weeks of rough voyaging that Dodge City once offered to the trailsmen. In _The Light that Failed_ we are told that Port Said is the wickedest place on earth, that it is a sink of iniquity and a hole of vice, and a wild night in Port Said is described there with pitiless detail. Almost every young man who leaves home for the East is instructed by his friends to reproduce that night, or never return to civilization. And every sea-captain or traveller or ex-member of the Army of Occupation in Egypt that I met on this visit to the East either smiled darkly when he spoke of Port Said or raised his eyes in horror. They all agreed on two things--that it was the home of the most beautiful woman on earth, which is saying a good deal, and that it was the wickedest, wildest, and most vicious place that man had created and God forgotten. One would naturally buy pocket-knives at Sheffield, and ginger ale in Belfast, and would not lay in a stock of cigars if going to Havana; and so when guides in Continental cities and in the East have invited me to see and to buy strange things which caused me to doubt the morals of those who had gone before, I have always put them off, because I knew that some day I should visit Port Said. I did not want second-best and imitation wickedness, but the most awful wickedness of the entire world sounded as though it might prove most amusing. I expected a place blazing with lights, and with gambling-houses and _cafes chantants_ open to the air, and sailors fighting with bare knives, and guides who cheated and robbed you, or led you to dives where you could be drugged and robbed by others.

So I went on shore and gathered the guides together, and told them for the time being to sink their rivalry and to join with loyal local pride in showing me the worst Port Said could do. They consulted for some time, and then said that they were sorry, but the only gambling-house in the place closed at twelve, and so did the only _cafe chantant_; and as it was now nearly half-past twelve, every one was properly in bed. I expressed myself fully, and they were hurt, and said that Egypt was a great country, and that after I had seen Cairo I would say so. So I told them I had not meant to offend their pride of country, and that I was going to Cairo in order to see things almost as old as wickedness, and much more worth while, and that all I asked of Port Said was that it should live up to its name. I told them to hire a house, and wake the people in Port Said up, and show me the very worst, lowest, wickedest, and most vicious sights of which their city boasted; that I would give them four hours in which to do it, and what money they needed. I should like to print what, after long consultation, the five guides of Port Said--which is a place a half-mile across, and with which they were naturally acquainted--offered me as the acme of riotous dissipation. I do not do so, not because it would bring the blush to the cheek of the reader, but to the inhabitants of Port Said, who have enjoyed a notoriety they do not deserve, and who are like those desperadoes in the West who would rather be considered "bad" than the nonentities that they are. I bought photographs, a box of cigarettes, and a cup of black coffee at Port Said. That cannot be considered a night of wild dissipation. Port Said may have been a sink of iniquity when Mr. Kipling was last there, but when I visited it it was a coaling station. I would hate to be called a coaling station if I were Port Said, even by me.

When I awoke after my night of riot at Port Said the _Sutlej_ was steaming slowly down the Suez Canal, and its waters rippled against its sandy banks and sent up strange odors of fish and mud. On either side stretched long levels of yellow sand dotted with bunches of dark green grass, like tufts on a quilt, over which stalked an occasional camel, bending and rocking, and scorning the rival ship at its side. You have heard so much of the Suez Canal as an engineering feat that you rather expect, in your ignorance, to find the banks upheld by walls of masonry, and to pass through intricate locks from one level to another, or at least to see a well-beaten towpath at its side. But with the exception of dikes here and there, you pass between slipping sandy banks, which show less of the hand of man than does a mill-dam at home, and you begin to think that Ferdinand de Lesseps drew his walking-stick through the sand from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, and twenty thousand negroes followed him and dug a ditch. On either side of this ditch you see reproduced in real life the big colored prints which hung on the walls of the Sunday-School. There are the buffaloes drawing the ploughs of wood, and the wells of raw sun-baked clay, and the ditches and water-works of two cog-wheels and clay pots for irrigating the land, and the strings of camels, and the veiled women carrying earthen jars on the left shoulder. And beyond these stretches the yellow sand, not white and heavy, like our own, but dun-colored and fine, like dust, and over it amethyst skies bare of clouds, and tall palms. And then the boat stops again at Ismailia to let you off for Cairo, and the brave captains returning from leave, and the braver young women who are going out to work in hospitals, and the young wives with babies whom their fathers have not seen, and the commissioners returning to rule and bully a native prince, pass on to India, and you are assaulted by donkey-boys who want you to ride "Mark Twain," or "Lady Dunlo," or "Two-Pair-of-Black-Eyes-Oh-What-a-Surprise-Grand-Ole-Man." A jerky, rumbling train carries you from Ismailia past Tel-el-Kebir station, where the British army surprised the enemy by a night march and took a train back to Cairo in three hours. And then, after a five hours' ride, you stop at Cairo, and this chapter ends.

IV

CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE

As a rule, when you visit the capital of a country for the first time it is sufficient that you should have studied the history of that particular country in order that you may properly appreciate the monuments and the show-places of its chief cities; it is not necessary that you should be an authority on the history of Norway and Sweden to understand Paris or New York. For a full appreciation of most of the great cities of the world one finds a single red-bound volume of Baedeker to be all-sufficient; but when you go to Cairo, in order that you may understand all that lies spread out for your pleasure, you should first have mastered the Old and the New Testament, a complete history of the world, several of Shakespeare's plays, and the files of the London _Times_ for the past ten years. Almost every man who was great, not only in the annals of his own country, but in the history of the world, has left his mark on this oldest country of Egypt, as tourists to the Colosseum have scratched their initials on its stones, and so hope for immortality. You are shown in Cairo the monuments of great monarchs and of a great people, who were not known beyond the limits of their own country in contemporaneous history only because there was no contemporaneous history, and of those who came thousands of years later. The isle of Rodda, between the two banks of the Nile at Cairo, marks where Moses was found in the bulrushes; a church covers the stones upon which Mary and Joseph rested; in the city of Alexandria is the spot where Alexander the Great scratched his name upon the sands of Egypt; the mouldering walls of Old Cairo are the souvenirs of Caesar, as are the monuments upon which the Egyptians carved his name with "Autocrator" after it. At Actium and Alexandria you think of Antony and of the two women, so widely opposed and so differently beautiful, whom Sarah Bernhardt and Julia Neilson re-embody to-day in Paris and in London, and to whom Shakespeare and Kingsley have paid tribute. Mansoorah marks the capture of Saint-Louis of France, and the crescent and star which is floating over Cairo at this minute speak of Osman Sultan Selim I., with whom began the dependence of Egypt as a part of the Ottoman Empire. From there you see the windmills and bake-ovens of Napoleon, which latter, stretching for miles across the desert, mark the march of his army. Abukir speaks of Nelson and the battle of the Nile; and after him come the less momentous names Tel-el-Kebir and "England's Only General," Wolseley, and the fall of Khartoom and the loss of Gordon. The history of Egypt is the history of the Old World.

Moses, Rameses II., Darius, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Mehemet Ali, and Nelson--these are all good names; and yet what they failed to do is apparently being done to-day by an Army of Occupation without force, but with the show of it only: not by a single great military hero, but by a lot of men in tweed suits who during business hours irrigate land and add up columns of irritating figures, and in their leisure moments solemnly play golf at the very base of the pyramids. The best of Cairo lies, of course, in that which is old, and not in what has been imported from the New World, and its most amusing features are the incongruities which these importations make possible. I am speaking of Cairo now from a tourist's point of view, and not from that of a political economist. He would probably be interested in the improved sanitation and the Mixed Tribunal.

I had pictured Cairo as an Oriental city of much color, with beautiful minarets piercing the sky-line, and with much richness of decoration on the outside of its palaces and mosques. Cairo is divided into two parts, that which is old and decaying and that which is European and modern; the prevailing colors of both are gray, a dull yellow, and white. The mosques are of gray stone, the houses of dirty white, and in the new part the palaces and residences remind one of white Italian villas. These are surrounded by tropical gardens, which alone save the city from one monotonous variation of sombre colors. 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 constantly in the streets that from the Citadel above the city its roar comes to you like the roar of London. In that city it is the voice of traffic and steam and manufactures, but in Cairo it emanates from the people themselves, who talk and pray and shout and live their lives out-of-doors. These people are the natives, the European residents, the Army of Occupation, and, during the winter months, the tourists. When you say natives you include Egyptians, Arabians, Copts, Syrians, negroes from the Upper Nile, and about a hundred other subdivisions, which embrace every known nationality of the East.

Mixed with these are the residents, chiefly Greek and French and Turks, and the Army of Occupation, who, when they are not in beautiful uniforms, are in effective riding-clothes, and their wives and sisters in men's shirts and straw hats or Karkee riding-habits. The tourists, for their part, wear detective cameras and ready-made ties if they are Americans, and white helmets and pugarees floating over their necks and white umbrellas if they are English. This latter tropical outfit is spoiled somewhat by the fact that they are forced to wear overcoats the greater part of the time; but as they always take the overcoats off when they are being photographed at the base of the pyramids, their envious friends at home imagine they are in a warm climate.

The longer you remain in Cairo the more satisfying it becomes, as you find how uninterruptedly the old, old life of the people is going on about you, and as you discover for yourself bazars and mosques and tiny workshops and open cafes of which the guide-books say nothing, and to which there are no guides. You can see all the show-places in Cairo of which you have read in a week, and yet at the end of the week you feel as though what you had seen was not really the city, but just the goods in the shop-window. So keep away from show-places. Lose yourself in the streets, or sit idly on the terrace of your hotel and watch the show move by, feeling that the best of it, after all, lies in the fact that nothing you see is done for show; that it is all natural to the people or the place; that if they make pictures of themselves, they do so unconsciously; and that no one is posing except the tourist in his pith helmet.

The bazars in Cairo cover much ground, and run in cliques according to the nature of the goods they expose for sale. From a narrow avenue of red and yellow leather shoes you come to another lane of rugs and curtains and cloth, and through this to an alley of brass--brass lamps and brass pots and brass table-tops--and so on into groups of bookbinders, and of armorers, and sellers of perfumes. These lanes are unpaved, and only wide enough at places for two men to push past at one time; at the widest an open carriage can just make its way slowly, and only at the risk of the driver's falling off his box in a paroxysm of rage. The houses and shops that overhang these filthy streets are as primitive and old as the mud in which you tramp, but they are fantastically and unceasingly beautiful. On the level of the street is the bazar--a little box with a show-case at one side, and at the back an oven, or a forge, or a loom, according to the nature of the thing which is being made before your eyes. Goldsmiths beat and blow on the raw metal as you stand at their elbow; bakers knead their bread; laundrymen squirt water over the soiled linen; armorers hammer on a spear-head, which is afterwards to be dug up and sold as an assegai from the Soudan; and the bookbinders to the Khedive paste and tool the leather boxes for his Highness with the dust from the street covering them and their work, with two dogs fighting for garbage at their feet, and the uproar of thousands of people ringing in their ears. The Oriental cannot express himself in the street without shouting. Everybody shouts--donkey-boys and drivers, venders of a hundred trifles, police and storekeepers, auctioneers and beggars. They do not shout occasionally, but continually. They have to shout, or they will either trample on some one or some one will as certainly trample on them. Camels and donkeys and open carriages and mounted police move through the torrent of pedestrians as though they were figures of the imagination, and had no feelings or feet. On the second story over each bazar is the home of its owner. The windows of this story are latticed, and bulge forward so that the women of the harem may look down without being themselves seen. Above these are square, heavy balconies of carved open wood-work, very old and very beautiful. Scattered through the labyrinth of the bazars are the mosques, with wide, dirty steps covered with the red and yellow shoes of the worshippers within, and with high minarets, and facades carved in relief with sentences from the Koran, or with the name of the Sultan to whom the temple is dedicated.

The bazars are very much as one imagines they should be, the fact that impresses you most about them being, I think, that such beautiful things should come from such queer little holes of dirt and poverty, and that you should stand ankle-deep in mud while you are handling turquoises and gold filigree-work as delicate as that of Regent Street or Broadway. At the bazars to which the dragomen take tourists you will be invited to sit down on a cushion and to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, but you will pay, if you purchase anything, about a pound for each cup of coffee you take. The best bazars for bargains are those in Old Cairo, to which you should go alone. In either place it is the rule to offer one-third of what you are asked--as I found it was not the rule to do in Tangier--and it is not always safe to offer a third unless you want the article very much, as you will certainly get it at that price. You feel much more at home in the bazars and the cafes and in all of the out-of-door life of Cairo than in that of Tangier, owing to the good-nature of the Egyptian. The Moor resents your presence, and though that in itself is attractive, the absolute courtesy of the Egyptian, when it is not, as it seldom is, servility, has also its advantage. If you raised your stick to a Moorish donkey-boy, for instance, you would undoubtedly have as much rough-and-tumble fighting as you could attend to at one time; but you have to beat an Egyptian donkey-boy, or strike at him, or a dozen of him, if you want peace, and every time you hit him he comes up smiling, and with renewed assurances that the Flying Dutchman is a very good donkey, and that all the other donkeys are "velly sick." There is nothing so inspiring as the sight of a carefully bred American girl, who would feel remorse if she scolded her maid, beating eight or nine donkey-boys with her umbrella, until she breaks it, and so rides off breathless but triumphant. This shows that necessity knows no laws of social behavior.

When you are weary of fighting your way through the noise and movement of the bazars, you can find equal entertainment on the terrace of your hotel. There are several hotels in Cairo. There is one to which you should certainly go if you like to see your name encompassed by those of countesses and princes, and of Americans who spell Smith with a "y" and put a hyphen between their second and third names. There are, as I say, a great many hotels in Cairo, but Shepheard's is so historical, and its terrace has been made the scene of so many novels, that all sorts of amusing people go there, from Sultans to the last man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo, and its terrace is like a private box at a mask ball. About the best way to see Cairo is in a wicker chair here under waving palms, something to smoke, and with a warm sun on your back, and the whole world passing by in front of you. Broadway, I have no doubt, is an interesting thoroughfare to those who do not know it. I should judge from the view one has of the soles of numerous boots planted against the windows of hotels along its course that Broadway to the visiting stranger is an infinite source of entertainment. But there are no camels on Broadway, and there are no sais.

A camel by itself is one of the most interesting animals that has ever been created, but when it blocks the way of a dog-cart, and a smart English groom endeavors to drive around it, the incongruity of the situation appeals to you as nothing on Broadway can ever do. Mr. Laurence Hutton, who was in Cairo before I reached it, has pointed out that the camel is the real aristocrat of Egypt. The camel belongs to one of the very first families; he was there when Mena ruled, and he is there now. It does not matter to him whether it is a Pharaoh or a Mameluke or a Napoleon or a Mixed Tribunal that is in power, his gods are unchanged, and he and the palm-tree have preserved their ancient individuality through centuries. He shows that he knows this in the proud way in which he holds his head, and in his disdainful manner of waving and unwinding his neck, and in the rudeness with which he impedes traffic and selfishly considers his own comfort. These are the signs of ancient lineage all the world over. He is not the shaggy, moth-eaten object we see in the circus tent at home. He is nicely shaven, like a French poodle, and covered with fine trappings, and he bends and struts with the dignity of a peacock. He possesses also that uncertainty of conduct that is the privilege of a royal mind; fellahin and Arabs pretend they are his masters, and lead him about with a rope, but that never disturbs him nor breaks his spirit. When he wants to lie down he lies down, whether he is in the desert or in the Ezbekiyeh Road; and when he decides to get up he leaves you in doubt for some feverish seconds as to which part of him will get up first. To properly appreciate the camel you should ride him and experience his getting up and his sitting down. He never does either of these things the same way twice. Sometimes he breaks one leg in two or three places where it had never broken before, and sinks or rises in a northeasterly direction, and then suddenly changes his course and lurches up from the rear, and you grasp his neck wildly, only to find that he is sinking rapidly to one side, and rising, with a jump equal to that of a horse taking a fence, in the front. He can disjoint himself in more different places, than explorers have found sources for the river Nile, and there is no keener pleasure than that which he affords you in watching the countenance of a friend who is being elevated on his back for the first time. He and the palm-tree can make any landscape striking, and he and the sais are the most picturesque features of Cairo.

The sais is a runner who keeps in front of a carriage and warns common people out of the way, and who beats them with a stick if they do not hurry up about it. He is a relic of the days when the traffic in all of the streets was so congested that he was an absolute necessity; now he makes it possible for a carriage to move forward at a trot, which without his aid it could not do. It is obvious that to do this he must run swiftly. Most men when they run bend their bodies forward and keep their mouths closed in order to save their wind. The sais runs with his shoulders thrown back and trumpeting like an enraged elephant. He holds his long wand at his side like a musket, and not trailing in his hand like a walking-stick, and he wears a soft shirt of white stuff, and a sleeveless coat buried in gold lace. His breeches are white, and as voluminous as a woman's skirts; they fall to a few inches above his knee; the rest of his brown leg is bare, and rigid with muscle. On his head he has a fez with a long black tassel, and a magnificent silk scarf of many colors is bound tightly around his waist. He is a perfect ideal of color and movement, and as he runs he bellows like a bull, or roars as you have heard a lion roar at feeding-time in a menagerie. It is not a human cry at all, and you never hear it, even to the last day of your stay in Cairo, without a start, as though it were a cry of "help!" at night, or the quick-clanging bell of a fire-engine. There is nothing else in Cairo which is so satisfying. There are sometimes two sais running abreast, dressed exactly alike, and with the upper part of their bodies as rigid as the wand pressed against their side, and with the ends of their scarf and the long tassel streaming out behind. As they yell and bellow, donkeys and carriages and people scramble out of their way until the carriage they precede has rolled rapidly by. Only princesses of the royal harem, and consuls-general, and the heads of the Army of Occupation and the Egyptian army are permitted two sais; other people may have one. They appealed to me as much more autocratic appendages than a troop of lifeguards. The rastaquouere who first introduces them in Paris will make his name known in a day, and a Lord Mayor's show or a box-seat on a four-in-hand will be a modest and middle-class distinction in comparison.

These camels and sais are but two of the things you see from your wicker chair on the marble terrace at Shepheard's. The others are hundreds of donkey-boys in blue night-gowns slit open at the throat and showing their bare breasts, and with them as many long-eared donkeys, rendered even more absurd than they are in a state of nature by fantastic clippings of their coats and strings of jangling brass and blue beads around their necks.

There are also the women of Cairo, the enslaved half of Egypt, who have been brought, through generations of training and tradition, to look upon any man save their husband as their enemy, as a thing to be shunned. This has become instinct with them, as it is instinctive with women of Northern countries to turn to men for sympathy or support, as being in some ways stronger than themselves. But these women of Cairo, who look like an army of nuns, are virtually shut off from mankind, with the exception of one man, as are nuns, and they have not the one great consolation allowed the nun--they have no souls to be saved, nor religion, nor a belief in a future life.

There was a young girl married while I was in Cairo. The streets around the palace of her father were hung with flags for a week; the garden about his house was enclosed with a tent which was worth in money twenty thousand dollars, and which was as beautiful to the eye as the interior of a mosque; for a week the sheiks who rented the estates of the high contracting parties were fed at their expense; for a week men sang and bands played and the whole neighborhood feasted; and on the last night everybody went to the wedding and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and listened to a young man singing Arabian love-songs. I naturally did not see the bride. The women who did see her described her as very beautiful, barely sixteen years old, and covered with pearls and diamonds. She was weeping bitterly; her mother, it appeared, had arranged the match. I did not see her, but I saw the bridegroom. He was fat and stupid, and over sixty, and he had white hair and a white beard. A priest recited the Koran before him at the door of the house, and a band played, and the people cheered the Khedive three times, and then the crowd parted, and the bridegroom was marched to the door which led to the stairs, at the top of which the girl awaited him. Two grinning eunuchs crouched on this dark staircase, with lamps held high above their heads, and closed the door behind him. His sixteen-year-old bride has him to herself now--him and his eunuchs--until he or she dies. We could show similitudes between this wedding and some others in civilized lands, but it is much too serious a matter to be cynical about.

The women of Egypt are as much slaves as ever were the negroes of our South. They are petted and fattened and given a home, but they must look at life through barriers--barriers across their boxes at the opera, and barriers across the windows of their broughams when they drive abroad, and barriers across their very faces. As long as one-half of the Egyptian people are enslaved and held in bondage and classed as animals without souls, so long will an Army of Occupation ride over the land, and insult by its presence the khedival power. No country in these days can be truly great in which the women have no voice, no influence, and no respect. There are worse things in Egypt than bad irrigation, and the harem is the worst of them. If the Egyptians want to be free themselves, they should first free their daughters and their mothers. The educated Egyptian is ashamed of his national costume; but let him feel shame for some of his national customs. A frock-coat and a harem will not go together.

The English, who have done so many fine things for Egypt's good, and who keep an army there to emphasize the fact, have arranged that any slave who comes to the office of the Consul-General and claims his protection can have it; but these slaves of the married men are not granted even this chance of escape.

And so they live like birds in a cage. They eat and dress and undress, and expose their youth and beauty, and hide their age and ugliness, until they die. The cry along the Nile a few years ago was, "Egypt for the Egyptians," and a very good cry it was, although the wrong man first started it. But there was another cry raised in the land of Egypt many hundreds of years before of "Let my people go," and the woman who can raise that again to-day, and who can set free her sisters of the East, will be doing a greater work than any woman is doing at the present time or has ever done.

The women who pass before you in the procession at the foot of the terrace are of two classes only. There is no middle class in Egypt. The poor are huddled up in a black bag that hides their bodies from the crown of the head to the feet. What looks like the upper end of a black silk stocking falls over the face from the bridge of the nose and fastens behind the ears, and a brass tube about the size of a spool is tied between the eyes. You see in consequence nothing but their eyes, and as these are perhaps their best feature, they do not all suffer from their enforced disguise. The only women whose bare faces you can see, and from whom you may judge of the beauty of the rest, are the good women of the Coptic village, who form a sort of sisterhood, and the dancing-girls, who are not so good. Some of these have the straight nose, the narrow eyes, and the perfect figure of Cleopatra, as we picture her; but the faces of the majority are formless, with broad, fat noses, full lips, and their figures are without waists or hips, and their ankles are as round as a man's upper arm. When they are pretty they are very pretty, but those that are so are so few and are so covered with gold that one suspects they are very much the exception. Of the women of the upper class you see only a glimpse as they are swept by in their broughams, with the sais in front and a eunuch on the box and the curtains half lowered.

(From a Photograph taken on the top of the Pyramid just before sunset)]

Besides these, much passes that is intended for your especial entertainment. Sellers of turquoises, which they dig out from various creases in their robes; venders of stuffed crocodiles and live monkeys; strange men from the desert with a jackal, which they throw, bound by all four legs, and snarling and snapping, on the marble at your feet; little girls who sing songs, and play accompaniments to them on their throats with the tips of their fingers; women conjurers, who draw strings of needles and burning flax from their mouths, and who swallow nasty little wriggling snakes, and hatch pretty fluffy little chickens out of the slabs of the terrace. Or else there is a troop of blue and white Egyptian soldiers marching by, or gorgeous young officers on polo ponies, or red-coated Tommies on donkeys, with their toes trailing in the dust and the ribbons of their Scotch caps floating out behind; and consuls-general with gorgeous guards in gold lace, and with wicked-looking curved silver swords; or the young Khedive himself, who comes with a great clatter of hoofs and bellowing sais before, and another galloping troop of cavalry in the rear, at the sound of which the people run to the curb and touch the fez, as he raises his hand to his, and rolls by in a cloud of dust.

There are very good things to see, and with a companion on one side to explain them, and another on the other side to whom you can impart this information as though you had been born knowing it, you cannot spend a more entertaining afternoon. There is only one drawback, and that is a lurking doubt that you should be up and about seeing the show-places. Friday, in consequence, is the best day in Cairo, as all the things you ought to see are then closed, and you can sit still on the terrace with a clear conscience. Among the mosques and the tombs and the palaces and museums to which all good tourists go, and of which there are excellent descriptions, giving their various dimensions and other particulars, in the guide-books, there are the Citadel and the Mosque of Mehemet Ali. The Citadel is the fortress built on the hill above the city, but which, with the Oriental incompleteness of that time, was reared upon high but not upon the highest ground. The sequel to this naturally was that when Mehemet Ali wanted the city of Cairo he sought out the highest ground, and dropped cannon-balls into the fortress until it capitulated. He afterwards asked all the Mamelukes to dinner at the Citadel, and then had them treacherously killed--all but one, who rode his horse down the side of the Citadel and escaped. If you can imagine the reservoir at Forty-second Street placed upon the top of Madison Square Garden, and a man riding down the side of it, you can understand what a very difficult and dangerous thing this was to do. There is no doubt that he did it, for I saw a picture of him in the very act in a book of history when I was at school, and I also have seen the marks of his horse's hoofs in the stone parapet of the Citadel, and they are just as fresh as they were three years ago, when they were on the other side.

The Mosque of Mehemet Ali surmounts the Citadel, and its twin minarets are the distinguishing mark of Cairo; they are as conspicuous for miles above the city as is the dome of St. Paul's over London, and they are as light and graceful as it is impressive and heavy. The men on guard tie big yellow shoes on your feet before they allow you to enter this mosque, the outer court-yard of which is floored with alabaster, over which you slide as though you were on a mirror or a sheet of ice. It is very beautiful, and one is as unwilling to walk on it as to tramp in muddy boots over a satin train. The floor of the mosque is covered with the most magnificent rugs, as wide-spreading as a sheet and as heavy as so much gold; alabaster pillars reach to the top of the square, empty building, and from these rise five domes, colored blue and red, and lightened with gilded letters. It is very rich-looking, gloomy, silent, and impressive. It is the best of the mosques. From the outside, on the ramparts, you can see Cairo stretching out below for miles in a level gray jumble of flat roofs and rounded domes and slender minarets, with the high walls of a palace here and the thick green of a park there to break the monotony; beyond it lies the Nile, a twisting ribbon of silver; and beyond that rich green fields and canals and bunches of palm-trees; and seven miles away, where the green ceases and the desert begins, are three monuments of gray stone, looking, at that distance, disappointingly small and familiarly commonplace. It is not, I think, until you have seen them several times, and have climbed to their top and gazed up at them from below, that you appreciate the pyramids as you had expected to appreciate them; but after they have laid their charm upon you, you will find yourself twisting your neck to take another look, or going out of your way to see them again before the sun has said good-night to them, as it has done ever since it first climbed over the edge of the world and found them waiting there.

There is a mosque on the outside of the city which people visit on certain days to see the howling dervishes go through their peculiar form of worship. This mosque consists of four square walls with a dome. It is whitewashed within, and bare and rude and old. The sunlight enters it through square holes cut in the dome, and beats upon thirty or forty men who stand in a semicircle facing the East. They are of all sorts, from Arabs of the desert with long hair and wild eyes, to fat, pleased-looking merchants from the bazars, and the beggars and water-carriers of the streets. Around them on chairs are the tourists and the residents, like the spectators at a play rather than the guests of a religious sect watching a religious ceremony. Most of the men wear their hats, and some of the women take careful notes and make sketches. They reminded me of medical students at a clinic when a man is being cut up. An archdeacon from one of our Western cities wore his hat, to show, probably, that he disapproved of the whole thing; but as he used to eat with his knife while on board the _Fulda_, his conduct in any place was not to be considered. The priest recites something from the Koran, and the men repeat it, moving their bodies back and forward as they do so with gradually increasing rapidity. What they may be saying is quite unintelligible, and the chorus they make resembles that of no human sound, but rather the gasping or panting of an animal. It is to the visitor absolutely without any religious significance; all that is impressive about it is its horrible earnestness and its at times repulsive results. As the voice of the priest grows more accentuated the bodies of the men swing farther and lower, until their hair sweeps the floor, and their eyes, when they throw their bodies back, are on a level with those of the spectators. A drum beats in quickening time to the voice of the priest and to the gasps of the dervishes, and a flute playing a weird accompaniment seems to mock at their fierce grunts and breathings. It was one of the most unpleasant exhibitions I ever witnessed, and affected one's nerves to such a degree that several of the women had to leave. The eyes of the men rolled in their sockets, and their lips parted, and through their clinched teeth came fiercer and louder gasps, until the chorus of sound reached you like the quick panting of an engine as it draws out of a station. The sweat ran from them like water from a sponge, and the veins stood out on their faces, showing in congested knots beneath the skin. Some of them groaned, and others shrieked and cried out, "Allah! Allah!" This acted like the strokes of a whip on the others, who rocked more and more violently, and swung themselves almost off their feet. Then, as the music grew fainter the motion of the bending bodies grew less vigorous and finally ceased, and the men stood rigid, some apparently unmoved and unconcerned, and others turning and reeling in a fit.

While this was going forward, and you felt as though you were assisting at a heathen rite in which self-punishment was being inflicted as a bid for God's indulgence, two interesting things happened. An officer in the English Army of Occupation turned to his dragoman and cried at the top of his voice, angrily: "Do you call this worth ten piasters? Well, I don't. Now if you've got anything to show me, take me to see it. This isn't worth coming to see. You're a rank impostor."

The other thing was the act of a native woman, who brought her child to the door and handed it to a priest, who took it in his arms and passed with it in front of the swinging, gasping, crazy semicircle of men. The child was about three years old, and was dying, and the mother had brought it there to be cured by the breath of the dervishes. As it passed before them, the hair of some of the men swept its arm, and it turned its frightened eyes up to those of the priest, who smiled gravely down upon the baby and bore him outstretched in his arms three times in front of the swinging crescent. The faith of the child's mother appealed to some of us more than did the Englishman's desire to get his money's worth. The incident is only of interest here as showing perhaps why the Army of Occupation is not as popular as it might be. This officer was no doubt an excellent soldier--the ribbons on his tunic showed that--and no one would have thought of questioning his ability to handle raw recruits or his knowledge of tactics. But in handling the Egyptian tactics do not count for so much as tact.

There are several ways of reaching the pyramids, and it is eminently in keeping with the other incongruities of the place and time that the most popular way of visiting them is on a four-in-hand coach, with a guard in a red coat and a bell-shaped white beaver tooting on his horn, and a young gentleman with a boutonniere and an unhappy smile holding the reins and working his way in and out between long strings of camels. There is a very smart hotel about two hundred yards from the foot of the pyramids, and you take a donkey there or a camel and ride up a sandy road to the base of the Pyramid of Cheops. There are then several things that you may do. You can either climb to the top of this first pyramid, or crawl into its interior, or walk over to see the Sphinx, or make a tour of subterranean tombs and passageways of alabaster and polished stones, which are lighted for you by magnesium wire or stumps of candles.