MALTESE PEDDLERSMALTESE PEDDLERS
When an American goes to sea, he reads books,or he calculates the number of tons of coal it is taking to run the vessel at that rate of speed, and he determines that rate of speed by counting the rise and fall of the piston-rod, with his watch in his hand; and when this ceases to amuse him he plays cards in the smoking-room or holds pools on the run and on the pilot's number. The Englishman joins in these latter amusements, because nothing better offers. But when his foot is on his native heath or on the deck of one of his own vessels, he demonstrates his preference for that sort of entertainment which requires exercise and little thought. If it is at a country-house, he plays games which entail considerable running about, and at picnics he enjoys "Throw the handkerchief," and on board ship he plays cricket and other games dear to the heart of the American at the age of five. This is partly because he always exercises and likes moving about, as Americans do not, and because the reading of books (except such books asMr. Potter of Texas, which, I firmly believe, every Englishman I ever met has read, and upon which they have bestowed the most unqualified approval as the truest picture of American life and character they have ever found) entertains him for but a very short period at a time.
So a netting is placed about the upper deck for him, and he plays cricket; not only he, but his wife and his sister and his mother and the unattached young ladies under the captain's care, who are going out to India, presumably to be metat the wharf by prospective husbands. There is something most charming in the absolute equality which this sport entails, and the seriousness with which the English regard it. We could not in America expect a white-haired lady with spectacles to bowl overhand, or to see that it is considered quite as a matter of course that she should do it by the member of the last Oxford eleven, nor would our young women be able to hold a hot ball, or to take it with the hands crossed and only partly open, and not palm to palm and wide apart. An American, as a rule, walks in order that he may reach a certain point, but the Englishman walks for the sake of the walking. And he plays games, also, apparently for the exercise there is in them; games in which people sit in a circle and discuss whether love or reason should guide them in going into matrimony do not appeal to him so strongly as do "Oranges and lemons," or "Where are you, Jacob?" which is a very fine game, in which an early training in sliding to bases gives you a certain advantage. It is certainly instructive to hear a captain who got his company through storming Fort Nilt last year in the Pamir inquire, anxiously, "Oranges or lemons? Yes, I know. Butwhichshould I say, old chap? I'm a little rusty in the game, you know." If people can get back to the days when they were children by playing games, or in any other way, no one can blame them.
The island of Gozo rose up out of the sea on the fourth day—a yellow rib of rock on theright, with houses and temples on it—and demonstrated how few days of water are necessary to rob one's memory of the usual look of a house. One would imagine by the general interest in them that we had spent the last few years of our lives in tents, or in the arctic regions under huts of snow and ice. And then the ship heads in towards Malta, and instead of dropping anchor and waiting for a tender, glides calmly into what is apparently its chief thoroughfare. It is like a Venice of the sea, and you feel as though you were intruding in a gentleman's front yard. The houses and battlements and ramparts lie close on either side, so near that one could toss a biscuit into the hands of the Tommies smoking on the guns, or the natives lounging on the steps that run from the front doors into the sea itself. The yard-arms reach above the line of the house-tops, and the bowsprit seems to threaten havoc with the window-panes of the custom-house. We are not apparently entering a harbor, but steaming down the main street of a city—a city of yellow limestone, with streets, walls, houses, and waste places all of yellow limestone. We might, for all the disturbance we are making, be moving forward in a bark canoe, and not in an ocean steamer drawing twenty-five feet of water. And then when the anchor drops, dozens of little boats, yellow and green and blue, with high posts at the bow and sterns like those on gondolas, shoot out from the steps, and their owners clamor for the proudprivilege of carrying us over the few feet of water which runs between the line of houses and the ship's sides.
STREET OF SANTA LUCIA, MALTASTREET OF SANTA LUCIA, MALTA
There was at the Centennial Exposition the head of a woman cut in butter, which attracted much attention from the rural visitors. For this they passed by the women painted on canvas or carved in marble, they were too like the real thing, and the countrymen probably knew how difficult it is to make butter into moulds. For some reason Malta reminds you of this butter lady. It is a real city—with real houses and cathedral and streets, no doubt, but you have a feeling that they are not genuine, and that though it is very cleverly done, it is, after all, a city carved out of cheese or butter. Some of the cheese is mouldy and covered with green, and some of the walls have holes in them, as has aerated bread orSchweitzerkase, and the streets and the pavements, and the carved façades of the churches and opera-house, and the earth and the hills beyond—everything upon which your eye can rest is glaring and yellow, with not a red roof to relieve it; it is all just yellow limestone, and it looks like Dutch cheese. It is like no other place exactly that you have ever seen. The approach into the canal-like harbor under the guns and the search-lights of the fortifications, the moats and drawbridges, and the glaring monotony of the place itself, which seems to have been cut out of one piece and painted with one brush, suggest those little toy fortresses of yellowwood which appear in the shop windows at Christmas-time.
Of course the first and last thought one has of Malta is that the island was the home of the Order of the Knights of St. John, or Knights Hospitallers. This order, which was the most noble of those of the days of mediæval chivalry, was composed of that band of warrior monks who waged war against the infidels, who kept certain vows, and who, under the banner of the white cross, became honored and feared throughout the then known world. Their headquarters changed from place to place during the four hundred years that stretched from the eleventh century, when the order was first established, up to 1530, when Charles V. made over Malta and all its dependencies in perpetual sovereignty to the keeping of these Knights. They had no sooner fortified the island than there began the nine months' siege of the Turks, one of the most memorable sieges in history. When it was ended, the Turks re-embarked ten thousand of the forty thousand men they had landed, and of the nine thousand Knights present under the Grand Master Jean de la Valette when the siege had opened, but six hundred capable of bearing arms remained alive.
The order continued in possession of their island until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the French, under General Bonaparte, took it with but little trouble. The French in turn were besieged by Maltese and English, andafter two years capitulated. In 1814 the island was transferred to England. It now, in its monuments and its memories, speaks of the days of chivalry; but present and mixed with these is the ubiquitous red coat of the British soldier; and the eight-pointed Maltese cross, which suggests Ivanhoe, is placed side by side with the lion and the unicorn; the culverin has given way to the quick-throbbing Maxim gun, the Templar's sword to the Lee-Metford rifle, and the heroes of Walter Scott to the friends of Mr. Rudyard Kipling.
The most conspicuous relic of the French occupation is not a noble one. It is the penitential hood of the Maltese woman—a strangely picturesque article of apparel, like a cowl or Shaker bonnet, only much larger than the latter, and with a cape which hangs over the shoulders. The women hold the two projecting flaps of the hood together at the throat, and unless you are advancing directly towards them, their faces are quite invisible. The hoods and capes are black, and are worn as a penance for the frailty of the women of Malta when the French took the place and robbed the churches, and pillaged the storehouses of the Knights, and bore themselves with less restraint than the infidel Turks had done.
Malta retains a slight suggestion of mediævalism in the garb of the Capuchin monks, whose tonsured heads and bare feet and roped waists look like a masquerade in their close proximity to the young officers in tweeds and varnished boots.But one gets the best idea of the past from the great Church of St. John, which is full of the trophies and gifts of the Grand Masters of the Order, and floored with two thousand marble tombs of the Knights themselves. Each Grand Master vied with those who had preceded him in enriching this church, and each Knight on his promotion made it a gift, so that to-day it is rich in these and wonderfully beautiful. This is the chief show-place, and the Governor's palace is another, and, to descend from the sublimity of the past to the absurdity of the present, so is also the guard-room of the officer of the day, which generations of English subalterns have helped to decorate. Each year a committee of officers go over the pictures on its walls and rub out the least amusing, and this survival of the fittest has resulted in a most entertaining gallery of black and white.
The Order of Jerusalem, or of St. John, still obtains in Europe, and those who can show fourteen quarterings on one side and twelve on the other are entitled to belong to it; but they are carpet knights, and wearing an enamel Maltese cross on the left side of an evening coat is a different thing from carrying it on a shield for Saracens to hack at.
BRINDISIBRINDISI
Sicily showed itself for a few hours while the boat continued on its way to Brindisi; and as that day happened to be the 4th of March, the captain of theSutlejwas asked to make a calculation for which there will be no further need forfour years to come. This calculation showed at what point in the Mediterranean ocean theSutlejwould be when a President was being inaugurated in Washington, and at the proper time the passengers were invited to the cabin, and the fact that a government was changing into the hands of one who could best take care of it was impressed upon them in different ways. And later, after dinner, the captain of theSutlejmade a speech, and said things about the important event (which he insisted on calling an election) which was then taking place in America, and the English cheered and drank the new President's health, and the two Americans on board, who fortunately were both good Democrats, felt not so far from home as before.
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: "Isay, 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.
PILLAR OF CÆSAR AT BRINDISIPILLAR OF CÆSAR AT BRINDISI
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 andthe pillar of Cæsar, 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.
TheSutlejhad 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 andback 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.
APPROACH TO ISMAÏLIA BY THE SUEZ CANALAPPROACH TO ISMAÏLIA BY THE SUEZ CANAL
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 flamefrom 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. InThe Light that Failedwe are toldthat 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 andcafés chantantsopen 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.
STEAM-DREDGESTEAM-DREDGE AT WORK IN THE SUEZ CANAL
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 onlycafé 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 theSutlejwas 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 Ismaïlia 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 Ismaïlia 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.
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 LondonTimesfor 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 theirinitials 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 Cæsar, 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-Kebirand "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, Cæsar, 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.
WORKER IN BRASSBAZAR OF A WORKER IN BRASS
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 newpart 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 soconstantly 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 onabout you, and as you discover for yourself bazars and mosques and tiny workshops and open cafés 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 asprimitive 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 lookdown 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 façades carved in relief with sentences from the Koran, or with the name of the Sultan to whom the temple is dedicated.
GROUP OF NATIVESGROUP OF NATIVES IN FRONT OF SHEPHEARD'S HOTEL
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 cafés and in all of the out-of-door life of Cairo than in that of Tangier, owing tothe 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 hasbeen 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 thisin 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 theriver 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-timein 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 rastaquouère 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.
A BRITISH SQUAREA BRITISH SQUARE FORMED IN FRONT OF THE PYRAMIDS
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 andstrings 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 describedher 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 countryin 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 classesonly. 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.