Crowded together are nooks and corners where native merchants ply their trades, and the gloom of some dark recess is lit by the glowing blue and scarlet and purple of Persian rugs, and the glare of polished and embossed brass. In the street the modern descendant of Tubal Cain is hard at work, and the tailor plies his needle, and the cigarette-maker rolls up his tobacco in its thin wrapper of paper, and the weaver bends over his loom, differing in nothing from that used by his forefathers a thousand years ago. Eatables and drinkables of strange flavour and colour are exposed for sale, and pedlars meet you at every turn uttering hoarse and discordant cries. There is quite a buzz of conversation, but I cannot understand a word. Why, I ask, did not Leibnitz carry out his grand idea and give us a universal language? It would have saved some of us a good deal of trouble. The pavement is too narrow for anyone to walk on, as the shopkeeper sits outside smoking his cigarette, while the customers also do the same, and the street is completely blocked. You are obliged to get into the narrow way where carriages and donkey and luggage waggons meet you at every step.
Women abound, all clad in black, with a black cloth over their faces, leaving only the eyes and nose visible, and a cheek of pallid skin. The nose is covered with a little gilt ornament, I suppose they call it, coming from the forehead, so that you really see nothing of it. Now and then you pass a coffee-house where smoking and gambling seem to be going on all day. In the course of my ramblings I came to a street lined with scribes on stones writing letters for their clients, and was struck with the firm, clear hand in which their letters are written—all in Arabic, of course. Every now and then a swell passes me in his carriage, with a running footman to clear the way with a white or black staff. I expect to be knocked down every minute. To walk the Mousky in peace and safety, you require to be as deaf as a post and to have a pair at least of good eyes at the back of your head.
Wearied, I return to the quiet and shady groves of the hotel, a large pile of buildings streaked red and yellow, with a grand bit of garden ground at the back, and a wooden tower, from which you may see all Cairo at a glance. All the houses are flat-roofed, and many of them look unfinished, though not in reality so. I sink into a rocking-chair, light my pipe, and talk of the future of Cairo. I say I want to visit a Coptic Church, the church which was held heretical by the Orthodox Church, as they were said to have held imperfect ideas of the dual nature of Christ. One gentleman tells me I had better keep away, as the priests will pick your pockets in the very church. He has 300 Copts in his employ, and gives them all a very bad character. I ask as to the Khedive; everyone gives him a bad character, though he has discovered one wife is enough for any man. ‘He has the bad blood of his father and grandfather,’ says an Englishman to me. He has a thin veneer of civilization, but he is weak and ignorant, eaten up with ambition, and over head and ears in debt, though his allowance is £100,000 a year, a sum which should go far in a city where the price of labour is from two piastres to five, the piastre being valued at twopence halfpenny.