Queer Things About Egypt | Page 4

places in the world, and (not even
excepting Italy and Japan—my two favourite playgrounds heretofore)
never has any country so surprised and fascinated me as Egypt. It is so
full of different interests. The history of Egypt covers countless
centuries; the most ancient and perfect of monuments are those of
Pharaonic Egypt; the most exquisite monuments of Arabian art are
those in mediæval Cairo, but interesting above all are the life 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.
* * *
Queer Things About Egypt
INTRODUCTION
Cairo an Arab City of the Middle Ages
MEDIÆVAL 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 CÅ“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
mediæval 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 mediæval, 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.