Cairo in 1798 as a city wherein to wander was much safer for the wanderer than was London in that year of grace. It had no Alsatia, such as Whitefriars had been in the days of Nigel, nor "Holy Land," such as the Seven Dials was down almost to our own day. It had no criminal class, and its mendicants were then as now few, and almost all strangers from elsewhere. The peaceful citizen or stranger could walk through any part of the town by day or night free from the dangers he would even to-day encounter if he ventured through some of the slums of the "World's Metropolis." Cairo is to-day unchanged from what it was in this respect save in the infamous quarter of the town devoted to the nightly carnival of vice that European civilisation demands, and, under the august protection of Consuls-General and all the pomp and glory of diplomatic dignity, obtains.
Volney has drawn a sufficiently deplorable picture of the visible poverty of the Cairenes as he saw them in 1783, but it is highly probable that this glaring poverty was to a large extent of the same self-flaunting type so common in India, where certain sufficiently well-to-do classes of the people seem by their outward showing to know no mean between ostentatious prodigality and a pretence of poverty. But there was then in Cairo a class that gained its uncertain meals from still more uncertain employment, or from the hospitality or charity that in the East so seldom fails. There were, too, some waifs and wastrels, as there will always be in all great cities and towns until civilisation shall have passed its present hobbledehoy-hood. These two classes suffered much from the total suspension of business in the town, and rendered desperate by the complete failure of all their ordinary means of livelihood, and emboldened by the absence of all authority resulting from the flight of the Mamaluks and almost all the officials and leading men of the town, broke out in lawless disorder, and, joined by many of those whom the panic-stampede had reduced to poverty, began pillaging the deserted houses and mansions of all that was left in them.
Bonaparte being informed of this, at once sent parties of soldiers into the town with the double object of suppressing outrage and robbery and of seizing everything of value that the Mamaluks and other fugitives had been forced by the haste of their departure to leave behind them. Proclamation was also made that whatever had been taken by any person from any of the deserted houses should at once be surrendered to the French, and, as a warning to those who might be inclined to disobey this command, several men who were caught either in the act of stealing or in the possession of stolen property were summarily executed. Not content with these measures for the recovery and protection of what he no doubt regarded as his lawful booty, Bonaparte is said to have countenanced, if he did not actually order, the infliction of torture with a view to forcing the disclosure of hidden wealth.