My Winter on the Nile

Each donkey has his driver or attendant, without whose presence, behind or at the side, the animal ceases to go forward. These boys, and some of them are men in stature, are the quickest-witted, most importunate, good-natured vagabonds in this world. They make a study of human nature, and accurately measure every traveler the moment he appears. They are agile to do errands, some of them are better guides than the professionals, they can be entrusted with any purchases you may make, they run, carrying their slippers in their hand, all day beside the donkey, and get only a pittance of pay. They are however a jolly, larkish set, always skylarking with each other, and are not unlike the newspaper boys of New York; now and then one of them becomes a trader or a dragoman and makes his fortune.

If you prefer a carriage, good vehicles have become plenty of late years, since there are broad streets for driving; and some very handsome equipages are seen, especially towards evening on the Shoobra road, up and down which people ride and drive to be seen and to see, as they do in Central or Hyde parks. It is en règle to have a sais running before the carriage, and it is the “swell thing” to have two of them. The running sais before a rapidly driven carriage is the prettiest sight in Cairo. He is usually a slender handsome black fellow, probably a Nubian, brilliantly dressed, graceful in every motion, running with perfect ease and able to keep up his pace for hours without apparent fatigue. In the days of narrow streets his services were indispensable to clear the way; and even now he is useful in the frequented ways where every one walks in the middle of the street, and the chattering, chaffing throngs are as heedless of anything coming as they are of the day of judgment. In red tarboosh with long tassel, silk and gold embroidered vest and jacket, colored girdle with ends knotted and hanging at the side, short silk trousers and bare legs, and long staff, gold-tipped, in the hand, as graceful in running as Antinous, they are most elegant appendages to a fashionable turnout. If they could not be naturalized in Central Park, it might fill some of the requirements of luxury to train a patriot from the Green Isle to run before the horses, in knee-breeches, flourishing a shillalah. Faith, I think he would clear the way.

Especially do I like to see the sais coming down the wind before a carriage of the royal harem. The outriders are eunuchs, two in front and two behind; they are blacks, dressed in black clothes, European cut, except the tarboosh. They ride fine horses, English fashion, rising in the saddle; they have long limbs, lank bodies, cruel, weak faces, and yet cunning; they are sleek, shiny, emasculated. Having no sex, you might say they have no souls. How can these anomalies have any virtue, since virtue implies the opportunity of its opposite? These semblances of men seem proud enough of their position, however, and of the part they play to their masters, as if they did not know the repugnance they excite. The carriage they attend is covered, but the silken hangings of the glass windows are drawn aside, revealing the white-veiled occupants. They indeed have no constitutional objections to being seen; the thin veil enhances their charms, and the observer who sees their painted faces and bright languishing eyes, no doubt gives them credit for as much beauty as they possess; and as they flash by, I suppose that every one, is convinced that he has seen one of the mysterious Circassian or Georgian beauties.

The minute the traveler shows himself on the hotel terrace, the donkey-boys clamor, and push forward their animals upon the sidewalk; it is no small difficulty to select one out of the tangle; there is noise enough used to fit out an expedition to the desert, and it is not till the dragoman has laid vigorously about him with his stick that the way is clear. Your nationality is known at a glance, and a donkey is instantly named to suit you—the same one being called, indifferently, “Bismarck” if you are German, “Bonaparte” if you are French, and “Yankee Doodle” if you are American, or “Ginger Bob” at a venture.

We are going to Boulak, the so-called port of Cairo, to select a dahabeëh for the Nile voyage. We are indeed only getting ready for this voyage, and seeing the city by the way. The donkey-boys speak English like natives—of Egypt. The one running beside me, a handsome boy in a long cotton shirt, is named, royally, Mahmoud Hassan.

“Are you the brother of Hassan whom I had yesterday?”

“No. He, Hassan not my brother; he better, he friend. Breakfast, lunch, supper, all together, all same; all same money. We friends.”

Abd-el-Atti, our dragoman, is riding ahead on his grey donkey, and I have no difficulty in following his broad back and short legs, even though his donkey should be lost to sight in the press. He rides as Egyptians do, without stirrups, and uses his heels as spurs. Since Mohammed Abd-el-Atti Effendi first went up the Nile, it is many years ago now, with Mr. Wm. C. Prime, and got his name prominently into the Nile literature, he has grown older, stout, and rich; he is entitled by his position to the distinction of “Effendi.” He boasts a good family, as good as any; most of his relatives are, and he himself has been, in government employ; but he left it because, as he says, he prefers one master to a thousand. When a boy he went with the embassy of Mohammed Ali to England, and since that time he has traveled extensively as courier in Europe and the Levant and as mail-carrier to India. Mr. Prime described him as having somewhat the complexion and features of the North American Indian; it is true, but he has a shrewd restless eye, and very mobile features, quick to image his good humor or the reverse, breaking into smiles, or clouding over upon his easily aroused suspicion. He is a good study of the Moslem and the real Oriental, a combination of the easy, procrastinating fatalism, and yet with a tindery temper and an activity of body and mind that we do not usually associate with the East. His prejudices are inveterate, and he is an unforgiving enemy and a fast, self-sacrificing friend. Not to be driven, he can always be won by kindness. Fond of money and not forgetting the last piastre due him, he is generous and lavish to a fault. A devout Moslem, he has seen too much of the world not to be liberalized. He knows the Koran and the legendary history of the Arabs, and speaks and writes Arabic above the average. An exceedingly shrewd observer and reader of character, and a mimic of other’s peculiarities, he is a good raconteur, in his peculiar English, and capital company. It is, by the way, worth mentioning what sharp observers all these Eastern people become, whose business it is to study and humor the whims and eccentricities of travelers. The western man who thinks that the Eastern people are childlike or effete, will change his mind after a few months acquaintance with the shrewd Egyptians. Abd-el-Atti has a good deal of influence and even authority in his sphere, and although his executive ability is without system, he brings things to pass. Wherever he goes, however, there is a ripple and a noise. He would like to go to Nubia with us this winter, he says, “for shange of air.”

So much is necessary concerning the character who is to be our companion for many months. No dragoman is better known in the East; he is the sheykh of the dragomans of Cairo, and by reason of his age and experience he is hailed on the river as the sultan of the Nile. He dresses like an Englishman, except his fez.

The great worry of the voyager in Egypt, from the moment he lands, is about a dragoman; his comfort and pleasure depend very much upon a right selection. The dragoman and the dahabeëh interest him more than the sphinx and the great pyramids. Taking strangers up the Nile seems to be the great business of Egypt, and all the intricacies and tricks of it are slowly learned. Ignorant of the language and of the character of the people, the stranger may well be in a maze of doubt and perplexity. His gorgeously attired dragoman, whose recommendations would fit him to hold combined the offices of President of the American Bible Society and caterer for Delmonico, often turns out to be ignorant of his simplest duties, to have an inhabited but uninhabitable boat, to furnish a meagre table, and to be a sly knave. The traveler will certainly have no peace from the importunity of the dragomans until he makes his choice. One hint can be given: it is always best in a Moslem country to take a Moslem dragoman.

We are on our way to Boulak. The sky is full of white light. The air is full of dust; the streets are full of noise color, vivid life and motion. Everything is flowing, free, joyous. Naturally people fall into picturesque groups, forming, separating, shifting like scenes on the stage. Neither the rich silks and brilliant dyes, nor the tattered rags, and browns and greys are out of place; full dress and nakedness are equally en régie. Here is a grave, long-bearded merchant in full turban and silk gown, riding his caparisoned donkey to his shop, followed by his pipe-bearer; here is a half-naked fellah seated on the rear of his sorry-eyed beast, with a basket of greens in front of him; here are a group of women, hunched astride their donkeys, some in white silk and some in black, shapeless in their balloon mantles, peeping at the world over their veils; here a handsome sais runs ahead of a carriage with a fat Turk lolling in it, and scatters the loiterers right and left; there are porters and beggars fast asleep by the roadside, only their heads covered from the sun; there are lines of idlers squatting in all-day leisure by the wall, smoking, or merely waiting for tomorrow.

As we get down to Old Boulak the Saturday market is encountered. All Egyptian markets occupy the street or some open place, and whatever is for sale here, is exposed to the dust and the sun; fish, candy, dates, live sheep, doora, beans, all the doubtful and greasy compounds on brass trays which the people eat, nuts, raisins, sugar-cane, cheap jewelry. It is difficult to force a way through the noisy crowd. The donkey-boy cries perpetually, to clear the way, take care, “shimalak!” to the left, “yemenak!” to the right, ya! riglak! look out for your left leg, look out for your right leg, make way boy, make way old woman; but we joggle the old woman, and just escape stepping on the children and babies strewn in the street, and tread on the edge of mats spread on the ground, upon which provisions are exposed (to the dust) for sale. In the narrow, shabby streets, with dilapidated old balconies meeting overhead, we encounter loaded camels, donkeys with double panniers, hawkers of vegetables; and dodge through, bewildered by color and stunned by noise. What is it that makes all picturesque? More dirt, shabbiness, and nakedness never were assembled. That fellow who has cut armholes in a sack for holding nuts, and slipped into it for his sole garment, would not make a good figure on Broadway, but he is in place here, and as fitly dressed as anybody. These rascals will wear a bit of old carpet as if it were a king’s robe, and go about in a pair of drawers that are all rags and strings, and a coarse towel twisted about the head for turban, with a gay insouciance that is pleasing. In fact, I suppose that a good, well-fitting black or nice brown skin is about as good as a suit of clothes.

But O! the wrinkled, flabby-breasted old women, who make a pretence of drawing the shawl over one eye; the naked, big-stomached children with spindle legs, who sit in the sand and never brush away the circle of flies around each gummy eye! The tumble-down houses, kennels in which the family sleep, the poverty of thousands of years, borne as if it were the only lot of life! In spite of all this, there is not, I venture to say, in the world beside, anything so full of color, so gay and bizarre as a street in Cairo. And we are in a squalid suburb.

At the shore of the swift and now falling Nile, at Boulak, are moored, four or five deep, the passenger dahabeëhs, more than a hundred of them, gay with new paint and new carpets, to catch the traveler. There are small and large, old and new (but all looking new); those that were used for freight during the summer and may be full of vermin, and those reserved exclusively for strangers. They can be hired at from sixty pounds to two hundred pounds a month; the English owner of one handsomely furnished wanted seven hundred and fifty pounds for a three-months’ voyage. The Nile trip adds luxury to itself every year, and is getting so costly that only Americans will be able to afford it.

After hours of search we settle upon a boat that will suit us, a large boat that had only made a short trip, and so new that we are at liberty to christen it; and the bargaining for it begins. That is, the bargaining revolves around that boat, but glances off as we depart in a rage to this or that other, until we appear to me to be hiring half the craft on the river. We appear to come to terms; again and again Abd-el-Atti says, “Well, it is finish,” but new difficulties arise.

The owners were an odd pair: a tall Arab in soiled gown and turban, named Ahmed Aboo Yoosef, a mild and wary Moslem; and Habib Bagdadli, a furtive little Jew in Frank dress, with a cast in one of his pathetic eyes and a beseeching look, who spoke bad French fluently. Aboo Yoosef was ready to come to terms, but Bagdadli stood out; then Bagdadli acquiesced but Aboo made conditions. Ab-del-Atti alternately coaxed and stormed; he pulled the Arab’s beard; and he put his arm round his neck and whispered in his ear.

“Come, let us to go, dis Jews make me mad. I can’t do anything with dis little Jews.”

Our dragoman’s greatest abhorrence is a Jew. Where is this one from? I ask.

“He from Algiers.” The Algerian Jews have a bad reputation.

“No, no, monsieur, pas Algiers;” cries the little Jew, appealing to me with a pitiful look; “I am from Bagdad.” In proof of this there was his name—Habib Bagdadli.

The bargaining goes on, with fine gesticulation, despairing attitudes, tones of anger and of grief, violent protestations and fallings into apathy and dejection. It is Arab against Arab and a Jew thrown in.

“I will have this boat, but I not put you out of the way on it;” says Abd-el-Atti, and goes at it again.

My sympathies are divided. I can see that the Arab and the Jew will be ruined if they take what we offer. I know that we shall be ruined if we give what they ask. This pathetic-eyed little Jew makes me feel that I am oppressing his race; and yet I am quite certain that he is trying to overreach us. How the bargain is finally struck I know not, but made it seems to be, and clinched by Aboo reluctantly pulling his purse from his bosom and handing Abd-el-Atti a napoleon. That binds the bargain; instead of the hirer paying something, the lessor gives a pledge.

Trouble, however, is not ended. Certain alterations and additions are to be made, and it is nearly two weeks before the evasive couple complete them. The next day they offer us twenty pounds to release them. The pair are always hanging about for some mitigation or for some advance. The gentle Jew, who seems to me friendless, always excites the ire of our dragoman; “Here comes dis little Jews,” he exclaims as he encounters him in the street, and forces him to go and fulfil some neglected promise.

The boat is of the largest size, and has never been above the Cataract; the owners guarantee that it can go, and there is put in the contract a forfeit of a hundred pounds if it will not. We shall see afterwards how the owners sought to circumvent us. The wiles of the Egyptians are slowly learned by the open-minded stranger.

CHAPTER V.—IN THE BAZAAR

OUR sight-seeing in Cairo is accomplished under the superintendence of another guide and dragoman, a cheerful, willing, good-natured and careful Moslem, with one eye. He looks exactly like the one-eyed calender of the story; and his good eye has a humorous and inquiring twinkle in it. His name is Hassan, but he prefers to be called Hadji, the name he has taken since he made the pilgrimage to Mecca.

A man who has made the pilgrimage is called “the hhâgg,” a woman “the hhâggeh.”—often spelled and pronounced “hadj” and “hadjee.” It seems to be a privilege of travelers to spell Arabic words as they please, and no two writers agree on a single word or name. The Arabs take a new name or discard an old one as they like, and half a dozen favorite names do duty for half the inhabitants. It is rare to meet one who hasn’t somewhere about him the name of Mohammed, Ahmed, Ali, Hassan, Hosayn, or Mahmoud. People take a new name as they would a garment that strikes the fancy.

“You like go bazaar?” asks Hadji, after the party is mounted on donkeys in front of the hotel.

“Yes, Hadji, go by the way of the Mooskee.”

The Mooskee is the best known street in Cairo, and the only one in the old part of the town that the traveler can find unaided. It runs straight, or nearly so, a mile perhaps, into the most densely built quarters, and is broad enough for carriages. A considerable part of it is roofed lightly over with cane or palm slats, through which the sun sifts a little light, and, being watered, it is usually cool and pleasant. It cannot be called a good or even road, but carriages and donkeys pass over it without noise, the wheels making only a smothered sound: you may pass through it many times and not discover that a canal runs underneath it. The lower part of it is occupied by European shops. There are no fine shops in it like those in the Ezbekeëh, and it is not interesting like the bazaars, but it is always crowded. Probably no street in the world offers such a variety of costumes and nationalities, and in no one can be heard more languages. It is the main artery, from which branch off the lesser veins and reticulations leading into the bazaars.

If the Mooskee is crowded, the bazaars are a jam. Different trades and nationalities have separate quarters, articles that are wanted are far apart, and one will of necessity consume a day in making two or three purchases. It is an achievement to find and bargain for a piece of tape.

In one quarter are red slippers, nothing but red slippers, hundreds of shops hung with them, shops in which they are made and sold; the yellow slippers are in another quarter, and by no chance does one merchant keep both kinds. There are the silk bazaars, the gold bazaars, the silver bazaars, the brass, the arms, the antiquity, the cotton, the spice, and the fruit bazaars. In one quarter the merchants and manufacturers are all Egyptians, in another Turks, in another Copts, or Algerines, or Persians, or Armenians, or Greeks, or Syrians, or Jews.

And what is a bazaar? Simply a lane, narrow, straight or crooked, winding, involved, interrupted by a fountain, or a mosque, intersected by other lanes, a congeries of lanes, roofed with matting it may be, on each side of which are the little shops, not much bigger than a dry-goods box or a Saratoga trunk. Frequently there is a story above, with hanging balconies and latticed windows. On the ledge of his shop the merchant, in fine robes of silk and linen, sits cross-legged, probably smoking his chibook. He sits all day sipping coffee and gossipping with his friends, waiting for a customer. At the times of prayer he spreads his prayer-carpet and pursues his devotions in sight of all the world.

This Oriental microcosm called a bazaar is the most characteristic thing in the East, and affords most entertainment; in these cool recesses, which the sun only penetrates in glints, is all that is shabby and all that is splendid in this land of violent contrasts. The shops are rude, the passages are unpaved dirt, the matting above hangs in shreds, the unpainted balconies are about to tumble down, the lattice-work is grey with dust; fleas abound; you are jostled by an unsavory throng may be; run against by loaded donkeys; grazed by the dripping goat-skins of the water-carriers; beset by beggars; followed by Jews offering old brasses, old cashmeres, old armor; squeezed against black backs from the Soudan; and stunned by the sing-song cries of a dozen callings. But all this is nothing. Here are the perfumes of Arabia, the colors of Paradise. These narrow streets are streams of glancing color; these shops are more brilliant than any picture—but in all is a softened harmony, the ancient art of the East.

We are sitting at a corner, pricing some pieces of old brass and arms. The merchant sends for tiny cups of coffee and offers cigarettes. He and the dragoman are wrangling about the price of something for which five times its value is asked. Not unlikely it will be sold for less than it is worth, for neither trader nor traveler has any idea of its value. Opposite is a shop where three men sit cross-legged, making cashmere shawls by piecing old bits of India scarfs. Next shop is occupied only by a boy who is reading the Koran in a loud voice, rocking forwards and backwards. A stooping seller of sherbet comes along clinking his glasses. A vender of sweetmeats sets his tray before us. A sorry beggar, a dwarf, beseeches in figurative language.

“What does he want, Hadji?”

“He say him hungry, want piece bread; O, no matter for he.”

The dragomans never interpret anything, except by short cuts. What the dwarf is really saying, according to Mr. Lane, is, “For the sake of God! O ye charitable. I am seeking from my lord a cake of bread. I am the guest of God and the Prophet.”

As we cannot content him by replying in like strain, “God enrich thee,” we earn his blessing by a copper or two.

Across the street is an opening into a nest of shops, gaily hung with embroideries from Constantinople, silks from Broussa and Beyrout, stuffs of Damascus; a Persian rug is spread on the mastabah of the shop, swords and inlaid pistols with flint locks shine amid the rich stuffs. Looking down this street, one way, is a long vista of bright color, the street passing under round arches through which I see an old wall painted in red and white squares, upon which the sun falls in a flood of white light. The street in which we are sitting turns abruptly at a little distance, and apparently ends in a high Moorish house, with queer little latticed windows, and balconies, and dusty recesses full of mystery in this half light; and at the corner opposite that, I see part of a public fountain and hear very distinctly the “studying” of the school over it.

The public fountain is one of the best institutions of Cairo as well as one of the most ornamental. On the street it is a rounded Saracenic structure, highly ornamented in carved marble or stucco, and gaily painted, having in front two or three faucets from which the water is drawn. Within is a tank which is replenished by water brought in skins from the Nile. Most of these fountains are charitable foundations, by pious Moslems who leave or set apart a certain sum to ensure the yearly supply of so many skins of water. Charity to the poor is one of the good traits of the Moslems, and the giving of alms and the building of fountains are the works that will be rewarded in Paradise.

These fountains, some of which are very beautiful, are often erected near a mosque. Over them, in a room with a vaulted roof and open to the street by three or four arches with pillars, is usually a boys’ school. In this room on the floor sit the master and his scholars. Each pupil has before him his lesson written on a wooden tablet, and this he is reading at the top of his voice, committing it to memory, and swaying incessantly backwards and forwards—a movement that is supposed to assist the memory. With twenty boys shouting together, the noise is heard above all the clamor of the street. If a boy looks off or stops his recitation, the stick of the schoolmaster sets him going again.

The boys learn first the alphabet, then the ninety-nine epithets of God, and then the Koran, chapter by chapter. This is the sum of human knowledge absolutely necessary; if the boy needs writing and arithmetic he learns them from the steelyard weigher in the market; or if he is to enter any of the professions, he has a regular course of study in the Mosque El Ezher, which has thousands of students and is the great University of the East.

Sitting in the bazaar for an hour one will see strange sights; wedding and funeral processions are not the least interesting of them. We can never get accustomed to the ungainly camel, thrusting his huge bulk into these narrow limits, and stretching his snake neck from side to side, his dark driver sitting high up in the dusk of the roof on the wooden saddle, and swaying to and fro with the long stride of the beast. The camel ought to be used in funeral processions, but I believe he is not.