From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
THE STREETS OF CAIRO
Among those who have seen many Oriental cities there is controversy as to which of them most conspicuously embodies the characteristics of the East. Some lay claim to have found in Syria, others in Persia, and yet others in India the type in question; yet one cannot help suspecting that if a vote were taken upon a sort of scrutin de liste of all the more famous capitals and great towns of Asia and Northern Africa, Cairo would win the first place among cities, as Themistocles won it among Athenian commanders. Everybody, that is to say, after putting his own special favourite first, would put Cairo second. The colour and movement and perpetual play of light and shade on an ever-shifting mass of hues, that kaleidoscope of humanity which the ordinary every-day traffic of the Egyptian capital keeps twirling before the eyes must be bad to beat. Even here, on this hotel terrace, bathed in the morning glory of that peculiarly liquid sunshine which is almost a speciality of Egypt—even here, in front of Shepheard's, where the West is ever busily dashing its sombre blacks and sober greys on the glowing palette of the East, the effect is almost bewildering. But the coat and boots and billycock of the European, with their suggestions of the incongruous and the over-civilised and the unpicturesque, are easily got rid of. That is the charm of Cairo. You step aside from one of the main thoroughfares, crowded with Western vehicles of every description, from the drag to a pony trap, and in an instant you are at once in a maze of alleys, where no draught animal of any kind has ever set foot since the houses were built on either side, and through which you may thread your way, surrounded by the same moving masses of colour for as many hours as you please without emerging again into Western civilisation.
Lost, in every sense of the word, geographically as well as imaginatively—for there is no city, not even Venice, where you can become hopelessly désorienté with so little trouble—you wander on amid the restlessly flowing stream of swarthy turbaned faces and lithe white-and-blue robed figures, your ears filled with the strange cries and your senses intoxicated with the nameless odours of the East. Further and further you ramble, and deeper and deeper plunge into this magic labyrinth of winding ways. The alleys seem to narrow more and more every minute until the rich brown profusely-carven woodwork of the jutting gables on either side of the roadway almost threatens to meet and blot out the strip of burning blue above your head. As the street straitens the crowd appears to thicken, until at the moment when the one is at its narrowest and the other at its densest you step out into a little square in which the blaze of colour and the play of movement reach their height. You are in the carpet bazaar of Cairo—the spot at which the many-coloured throng around you finds its most gorgeous background. Carpets of every hue and web—Tunisian, Algerian, Smyrniote, Persian—drape the whole quadrangle with an arras worthy of a Sultan's seraglio. To think in "cold blood," and out of sight of it, of such a picture in such a frame would be to conjure up a vision of crude and garish magnificence at which the eye would ache and the taste revolt. But the East is an artist of unerring though unstudied skill, and every patch of brilliant and violently contrasted colour that it seems to have flung so recklessly together has fallen as by a divinely pre-established harmony into its proper and most effective place. And Nature herself, in compounding the pigments for these swarthy skins, has entered into a decorative conspiracy with man. Considered merely as an arrangement in browns, the faces of a Cairene crowd are a study in themselves. Between the light café-au-lait colour of the half-Westernised Levantine and the blue-black negroid from Abyssinia or the Soudan, there are well-nigh half a dozen different shades distinguishable to the attentive eye. The café-au-lait changes to chocolate, the chocolate to a kind of café noir, the kind that you complain of on grounds of defective strength; and this, again, to the kind that you complain of on the strength of excessive grounds. Then comes the lustreless jet, as of the unpolished boot; and then—last and lowest note of the gamut, the lower C, so to speak, in the descending scale of colour—comes that deep glossy ebony which might drive all the blacking manufacturers in the world to the despairing confession that, whatever a certain fashionable paradoxist of the day may say to the contrary, Nature is, here, at any rate, superior to art. It is from this point, however, that the artist, conscious or unconscious, takes his start, and there is simply no limit to the varied effects that he can produce with this army of browns on the one hand, and, on the other, every shade of yellow, from the deepest orange to the palest primrose, open to him for his turban, and for his body-garment every gradation of colour that divides "forget-me-not" from "navy" blue. White, I suppose, is, take it all round, the prevailing mode both for head-dress and robe; but for the latter blue is also "much worn," as the fashion-books say, and the variety of colour-schemes obtained by combining its varying values with every imaginable shade of brown in the face and of yellow and red in the turbans is inexhaustible and a source of ever-new delight.
But, after all, this whirlpool of colour furnishes only one element in Cairo's complex charm. It is a charm of endless contrast, not chromatic alone—of contrasts of race, features, form, costume, attitude, occupation, movement, mood; of everything, in short, which belongs to man and man's surroundings. This it is that makes the magic of the marvellous Eastern city for the Western eye. Splendour and squalor, the gracious and the hideous, stolidity and vivacity, dignity and frivolity, conflict and intermingle at every step. The mere confusion of races in its streets would be enough to bemuse the newly-arrived traveller. Gibraltar itself is beaten by it as a sentina gentium; nothing beats it that I have ever known or heard of, except Port Said. It is a perfect salad of nationalities, and a salad mixed by that "madman" who, according to the old recipe, should stir the bowl after the miser has added the vinegar and the spendthrift the oil. The babel of languages is positively Pentecostal. Parthians and Medes, Greeks and Arabians, dwellers in Mesopotamia and the parts of Libyia about Cyrene, are all represented here, and if the miracle of the first Whit Sunday were to repeat itself, the audience assembled here would be fully as well qualified to appreciate it as its original witnesses. Nor is the medley of manners less striking than the hotch-potch of races and the tangle of tongues. The Oriental of popular Western conception is grave and dignified of aspect, tall of stature, stately of gait, slow of speech and movement, calm and impassive of temperament; and popular Western conception is not wrong. The Oriental is all these things—and their opposites. In one form of him he treads the roadway with the majesty of Haroun Alraschid; in another he scampers through the streets like a Parisian gamin. Here his utterance is as measured, his manual actions as restrained as those of an English judge pronouncing a capital sentence; there, just across the street, he is as full of jabber and gesture as a Neapolitan lazzarone. The features of that venerable merchant who has pipes to sell are as absolutely unemotional as a Red Indian's; but if the purchaser who is haggling with him for the abatement of a piastre were pleading for the life of his only child the passionately suppliant expression of his countenance would more than satisfy the dramatic requirements of the situation. The East and the South, in short, join hands at this longitude and latitude with a singular effect, as of the contact of two extremes; and man, paradoxical as it may sound, is here both a more reserved and a more demonstrative animal than he is in the North and West.
One may ramble, however, through the streets of Cairo for an hour at a time without finding very many opportunities for comparing the Eastern and Western types. Choose well your region and your hour, and you will find few Englishmen at the bazaars, and, indeed, few European costumes at all, save those which here and there incongruously clothe some Levantine trader of race too obvious to need the confession of his scarlet fez. As you slowly make your way back to your hotel, conducted, as you will inevitably have to be were you the most inspired of topographers, by an improvised native guide, you will pass unvaryingly, at any rate until you hit off the Muski or the Boulevard Mehemet Ali, through the same burnoused and turbaned crowd that has surrounded you from the first. Yet no! If you are fortunate you may, just at the moment when the tide of Oriental life is at its full, come across one crowning contrast, one final shock of piquant opposites, one topmost culmination and apex of the pyramid of picturesque contrarieties which has been accumulating, layer by layer, during your walk. Has that piece of good fortune befallen you? Yes, it has.
Look down this narrow alley. Let your eye thread its way through the seething, jostling, rainbow-coloured multitude that streams along it; past the water-carrier, with his bellied skin-wallet slung across his shoulders, and his metal cups jingling musically to the cry of his trade; past the camel-rider, swaying on his ungainly beast; past the group of chattering loungers outside the cross-legged, gravely-smoking slipper-seller's stall: and what is that apparition which has just turned the corner from the main street, and is now advancing slowly towards you along that narrow strip of blinding sunlight in the middle of the road? What is that figure, which completes the scheme of colour with one vivid blot of scarlet and another of white, and puts the last dramatic touch to the contrast of East and West? The scarlet blot is the uniform coat of the British linesman; the white blot is the pith pickelhaube of the same; and the whole apparition is that of Private Thomas Atkins, of the 115th, or South-West Wurzelshire Regiment, sedately taking the air on a donkey! To see him jigging rhythmically towards you, the sole visible representative of Western civilisation, the one bright "Occidental Star"—to borrow the description of Queen Elizabeth from the Preface to the Prayer Book—amid this enveloping cloud of Orientals, is to feel oneself confronted with the strangest possible combination of the humanly comic and the historically impressive.
He is a trifle short, is Tommy, and his stature is not increased to the eye by the surmounting pickelhaube, which looks, as no doubt it must look if it is fully to serve its purpose, several sizes too large for its wearer. But he carries himself well, and he could not bestride his charger with more resolute dignity if the charger were Copenhagen and he the Iron Duke. Behind him trots the donkey-boy, rending the air with friendly yells, and dividing his copper visage with a grin which shows his entire four-octave keyboard of dazzling white teeth, while jocular exclamations in Arabic assail the rider's ears from every side. But in comparison with the stony immobility of Atkins's countenance the expression of the Sphinx is one of shy and uneasy self-consciousness. No sign of animation, no evidence even of any perception of surrounding objects; nay, no hint of any acknowledgment of a community of human nature with the living beings among whom he is passing is visible in any feature of his face until he is abreast of his countryman. Then for one brief moment the wooden lineaments relax, the eye is cast towards you with a momentary flash of recognition, the cockney nez retroussé receives an almost imperceptible upward jerk, a faint smile flickers on the lips for a moment, to be immediately afterwards suppressed as a weakness not to be indulged in before the barbarian, and the gallant fellow turns the corner of the street and disappears from view. He was here and he has gone! The vision of the red coat and white helmet has passed before the eyes and vanished as fleetingly as a dream. The English uniform has flitted for a moment across the scene, like a streak of stormy sunlight across a swollen river; has flitted and flashed away, and the eternal tide of Oriental life flows on.
O, Thomas! is it an allegory—an " allegory on the banks of the Nile?" Dost thou, the symbol of British conquest in thy military attire, symbolise also in the swiftness of thy transit its brief duration? Four of the world's conquerors have already swept over this hoary land and are gone. Persian and Macedonian, and Roman and Arab—they have all passed, like the bird or the arrow of Ecclesiastes, behind whose flight the air closes, so that no man can tell of its passage. Their records remain, as all things remain in this country of the imperishable; but the traces of their power in anything more human or vital than graven granite or moulded clay might be sought in vain. The conquests which create peoples, the wars which sow the seeds of States are here unknown. Master after master of Egypt has come as a conqueror; and as conquerors always, and as nation-builders never, the dynasties founded by them have ruled and have disappeared, the fruits of their victories perishing with them, and the mere tradition of their triumphs alone remaining. Where are the hoof-prints of Cambyses, and of Alexander, of Cæsar and of Omar? Can it be, O Thomas, that thy donkey, even thine, makes tracks as fleeting as the chargers of those mighty warriors, and that thy sojourn here is destined, like theirs and their descendants', to be remembered but as a mere brief episode in the history of this strange monumental people, who still look forth upon the traveller with the self-same eyes and faces that confront him from their sculptured tombs?