My Winter on the Nile. Warner Charles Dudley

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      The world agrees to condemn this treacherous and ferocious act of Mohammed Ali and, generally, I believe, to feel grateful to him for it. Never was there a clan of men that needed exterminating so much as the Memlooks. Nothing less would have suited their peculiarities. They were merely a band of robbers, black-mailers, and freebooters, a terror to Egypt. Dislodged from actual power, they were still greatly to be dreaded, and no ruler was safe who did not obey them. The term Memlook means “a white male slave,” and is still so used. The Memlooks, who originally were mostly Circassian white slaves, climbed from the position of favorites to that of tyrants. They established a long dynasty of sultans, and their tombs yonder at the edge of the desert are among the most beautiful specimens of the Saracenic architecture. Their sovereignty was overthrown by Sultan Selim in 1517, but they remained a powerful and aristocratic band which controlled governors, corrupted even Oriental society by the introduction of monstrous vices, and oppressed the people. I suppose that in the time of the French invasion they may have been joined by bold adventurers of many nations. Egypt could have no security so long as any of them remained. It was doubtless in bad taste for Mohammed Ali to extend a friendly invitation to the Memlooks to visit him, and then murder them when they were caught in his trap; he finally died insane, and perhaps the lunacy was providentially on him at that time.

      In the Citadel precincts is a hall occupied by the “parliament” of the Khedive, when it is in session; a parliament whose members are selected by the Viceroy from all over Egypt, in order that he may have information of the state of the country, but a body that has no power and certainly not so much influence in the state as the harem has. But its very assemblage is an innovation in the Orient, and it may lead in time to infinite gab, to election briberies and multitudinous legislation, the accompaniments of the highest civilization. We may yet live to see a member of it rise to enquire into the expenses of the Khedive’s numerous family.

      The great Mosque of Mohammed Ali is in the best repair and is the least frequented of any in Cairo. Its vast, domed interior, rich in materials and ambitious in design, is impressive, but this, like all other great mosques, strikes the Western man as empty. On the floor are beautiful rugs; a tawdry chandelier hangs in the center, and the great spaces are strung with lanterns. No one was performing ablution at the handsome fountain in the marble-paved court; only a single worshipper was kneeling at prayer in all the edifice. But I heard a bird singing sweetly in the airy height of the dome.

      The view from the terrace of the mosque is the finest in Egypt, not perhaps in extent, but certainly in variety and objects of interest; and if the atmosphere and the light are both favorable, it is the most poetic. From it you command not only the city and a long sweep of the Nile, with fields of living green and dark lines of palms, but the ruins and pyramids of slumberous old Memphis, and, amid the yellow sands and backed by the desolate Libyan hills, the dreamy pyramids of Geezeh. We are advised to get this view at sunset, because then the light is soft and all the vast landscape has color. This is good advice so far as the city at our feet is concerned, with its hundreds of minarets and its wide expanse of flat roofs, palm-tops and open squares; there is the best light then also on the purple Mokattam hills; and the tombs of the Memlooks, north of the cemetery, with their fairy domes and exquisite minarets and the encompassing grey desert, the whole bathed in violet light, have a beauty that will linger with one who has once seen them forever. But looking beyond the Nile, you have the sun in your face. I should earnestly entreat the stranger to take this view at sunrise. I never saw it myself at that hour, being always otherwise engaged, but I am certain that the Pyramids and the Libyan desert would wake at early morning in a glow of transcendent beauty.

      We drive out the gate or Bab e’ Nasr beyond the desolate Moslem cemetery, to go to the tombs of the Circassian Memlook Sultans. We pass round and amid hills of rubbish, dirt, and broken pottery, the dumpings of the city for centuries, and travel a road so sandy that the horses can scarcely drag the heavy carriage through it. The public horses of Cairo are sorry beasts and only need a slight excuse for stopping at any time. There is nothing agreeable about the great Moslem cemetery; it is a field of sand-heaps, thickly dotted with little oven-shaped stucco tombs. They may be pleasanter below ground; for the vault into which the body is put, without a coffin, is high enough to permit its occupant to sit up, which he is obliged to do, whether he is able to sit up or not, the first night of his stay there, in order to answer the questions of two angels who come to examine him on his religious practices and views.

      The Tombs of the Sultans, which are in the desert, are in fact vast structures,—tombs and mosques united—and are built of parti-colored stone. They are remarkable for the beautiful and varied forms of their minarets and for their aërial domes; the latter are covered with the most wonderful arabesque carving and tracing. They stand deserted, with the sand drifting about them, and falling to rapid decay. In the interiors are still traces of exquisite carving and color, but much of the ornamentation, being of stucco on rude wooden frames, only adds to the appearance of decay. The decay of finery is never respectable.

      It is not correct, however, to speak of these mosque-tombs as deserted. Into all of them have crept families of the poor or of the vicious. And the business of the occupants, who call themselves guardians, is to extract backsheesh from the visitor. Spinning, knitting, baking, and all the simple household occupations go on in the courts and in the gaunt rooms; one tomb is used as a grist-mill. The women and girls dwelling there go unveiled; they were tattooed slightly upon the chin and the forehead, as most Egyptian women are; some of the younger were pretty, with regular features and handsome dark eyes. Near the mosques are lanes of wretched homes, occupied by as wretched people. The whole mortal neighborhood swarms (life out of death) with children; they are as thick as jars at a pottery factory; they are as numerous as the flies that live on the rims of their eyes and noses; they are as naked, most of them, as when they were born. The distended condition of their stomachs testify that they have plenty to eat, and they tumble about in the dirt, in the full enjoyment of this delicious climate. People can afford to be poor when nature is their friend.

      CHAPTER VII.—MOSLEM WORSHIP.—THE CALL TO PRAYER

      I SHOULD like to go once to an interesting city where there are no sights. That city could be enjoyed; and conscience—which never leaves any human being in peace until it has nagged him into a perfect condition morally, and keeps punching him about frivolous little details of duty, especially at the waking morning hour—would not come to insert her thumb among the rosy fingers of the dawn.

      Perhaps I do not make myself clear about conscience. Conscience is a kind of gastric juice that gnaws upon the very coatings of a person’s moral nature, if it has no indigestible sin to feed on. Of course I know that neither conscience nor gastric juice has a thumb. And, to get out of these figures, all I wish to say is, that in Cairo, when the traveler is aware of the glow of the morning stealing into his room, as if the day were really opened gently (not ripped and torn open as it is in our own cold north) by a rosy-fingered maiden, and an atmosphere of sweet leisure prevails, then Conscience suggests remorselessly: “To-day you must go to the Pyramids,” or, “You must take your pleasure in a drive in the Shoobra road,” or “You must explore dirty Old Cairo and its Coptic churches,” or “You must visit the mosques, and see the Howling Derweeshes.”

      But for this Conscience, I think nothing would be so sweet as the coming of an eastern morning. I fancy that the cool wind stirring in the palms is from the pure desert. It may be that these birds, so melodiously singing in the garden, are the small green birds who eat the fruits and drink the waters of Paradise, and in whose crops the souls of martyrs abide until Judgment. As I lie quite still, I hear the call of a muezzin from a minaret not far off, the voice now full and clear and now faint, СКАЧАТЬ