Queer Things About Egypt | Page 4

of the fields and the bazars, where people still live and work as they did in the days of the Bible and the Pharaohs.
I have also much to say about the exhilaration of riding and camping in the desert; the utterly strange life in the Great Oasis; the comedy of the Nile steamers which go up from Cairo to Assuan and the Sudan; the life in unbeaten tracks like the Fayum; the life in the dead cities of the Delta, like Rosetta and Damietta; the lotus life and the exquisite beauty of Luxor, where you are within a short walk of the finest ruins in Egypt, while you are staying in a most luxurious hotel; and the gay winter season which society spends in Assuan, "the City of the Idle Rich."
Cairo is an Arab capital, and Cairo needs a book to itself. There are thousands of natives in Cairo who have never heard of the Pharaohs and the monuments of ancient Egypt. If you want to see Egypt pure and simple, naked and unashamed, you must go down into the Delta, or up into Upper Egypt. I give a general sketch of the rural life, which you will see, in my chapters on the Egyptian State railways and the Nile as seen from Cook's steamers. But the monuments have chapters to themselves, grouped round the principal temples and tombs, and mostly in connection with Luxor.
At Luxor, if you only reside at the Karnak end of the town, away from the vulgarities and toutings of the front, you live at the Court of the great Rameses, in an atmosphere so exquisitely mild that life is a dream.
I have given many pages to describing that dream, not forgetting the humours of the donkey-boys who conduct you to the Court.
DOUGLAS SLADEN.
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Queer Things About Egypt
INTRODUCTION
Cairo an Arab City of the Middle Ages
MEDI??VAL Cairo is a subject so fascinating, so full of details, that it demands a volume to itself. The only way in which I could include it in the present work without devoting to it at least fifty or sixty thousand words, and thereby curtailing the space indispensable for a description of the life and cities on the Nile, from the Sea to Assuan, was to generalise upon it in an introductory essay. My point of view is indicated by the title I have chosen for it, Cairo an Arab City of the Middle Ages. I have an additional reason for relegating this little historical study of the glorious old buildings of Cairo into an introduction. For it is written in a serious vein, while the rest of the book, especially the dozen chapters about the irresistible drolleries of education, Society, and housekeeping in Egypt, which follow the Introduction, present queer things about Egypt at every turn.
In the Ismailia quarter, where the Savoy Hotel lies, Cairo is a cross between Northumberland Avenue and Victoria Street. A mile away, in the Bab-es-Suweyla, the apparition of Saladin, the chivalrous Sultan who fought against our Richard C?��sur de Lion in the Crusades, would look quite natural.
And Saladin must often have passed here, for he was one of the principal founders of the greatness of Cairo, and the
Bab-es-Suweyla is one of the gates of El-Kahira, the city founded by his predecessors two hundred years before.
It was Saladin who gave Cairo her Citadel; it was Saladin who founded the first Medressa, or mosque-college, which he attached to the venerable Mosque of Imam Shafyi, now surrounded by the tombs of the Mamelukes, one of the three mosques in Cairo which Christians are not allowed to visit, and the only one of the three which is worth a visit from the artistic point of view.
The Citadel of Cairo may be taken as an example of the surviving medi?|val spirit of the Arab builder almost as much as the Mosque of El-Bordeini, built in the seventeenth century, and the Mosque of Mohammed Bey, built in the eighteenth. Its appearance from below is altogether medi?|val, though the two principal features, the Bab-el-Azab and the Mosque of Mehemet Ali, were, the former, rebuilt in the eighteenth century, and the latter built altogether in the nineteenth. The Mosque of Mehemet Ali, whose beauties are all external, and depend on distance for enchantment, is the crowning grace of Cairo. No matter whether you are on your house-top courting the breeze at sunset, or floating on the waters of the Nile, or seated on the Great Pyramid, the landscape is always crowned by the vast dome and obelisk minarets of the mosque erected to the memory of the founder of the dynasty of the Khedives. But its arcaded courtyard is only tolerable, and its interior not better than that of the Brighton Pavilion.
The Bab-el-Azab, inside, shows less of the cloven foot of modern cheapness.