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.
We hear now a chanting down the dusky street. Somebody is being carried to his tomb in the desert outside the city. The procession has to squeeze through the crowd. First come a half dozen old men, ragged and half blind, harbingers of death, who move slowly, crying in a whining tone, “There is no deity but God; Mohammed is God’s apostle; God bless and save him.” Then come two or three schoolboys singing in a more lively air verses of a funeral hymn. The bier is borne by friends of the deceased, who are relieved occasionally by casual passengers. On the bier, swathed in grave-clothes, lies the body, with a Cashmere shawl thrown over it. It is followed by female hired mourners, who beat their breasts and howl with shrill and prolonged ululations. The rear is brought up by the female mourners, relations—a group of a dozen in this case—whose hair is dishevelled and who are crying and shrieking with a perfect abandonment to the luxury of grief. Passengers in the street stop and say, “God is most great,” and the women point to the bier and say, “I testify that there is no deity but God.”
When the funeral has passed and its incongruous mingling of chanting and shrieking dies away, we turn towards the gold bazaar. All the goldsmiths and silversmiths are Copts; throughout Egypt the working of the precious metals is in their hands. Descended from the ancient Egyptians, or at least having more of the blood of the original race in them than others, they have inherited the traditional skill of the ancient workers in these metals. They reproduce the old jewelry, the barbarous ornaments, and work by the same rude methods, producing sometimes the finest work with the most clumsy tools.
The gold-bazaar is the narrowest passage we have seen. We step down into its twilight from a broader street. It is in fact about three feet wide, a lane with an uneven floor of earth, often slippery. On each side are the little shops, just