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The Approach to the Native City 69
cylinder which joins her veils. But the Arish woman is not
content unless she has a silver head-band with a row of
little chains falling down on each side, half-concealing her
face, or a necklace of two or three strings of huge gold
and coral beads, and another string tied round her fore-
head. She is addicted to fine bracelets also, and her bare
face is often very pretty.
Alternating with the women are porters carrying anything
from a piano downwards, lemonade-sellers, men with ladders,
forage camels, sheikhs on donkeys, and friends walking
two or three abreast, only concerned with their conversation.
Not only the pavement but the whole street is full of them
and looks as if it would congeal if it were not for the
arabeah drivers, who charge them like snow-ploughs, crying,
" Oivar riglak .'" In the midst of all the shoddy shops and
stalls, here and there a noble Mameluke gateway, which once
had a mansion behind it, rears its head. But the whole effect
is one of cheap shops kept by Greeks, to which the European
goes for certain odds and ends, and the native for cheap
splendour in his apparel. Where a Mameluke house still
survives it has generally been hopelessly transformed.
Until he gets close down to the bazar there is nothing
to make the tourist put his hand in his pocket. At first the
shops have fairly good stocks. Mingled with jewellers' are
shops where boots and hosiery, fly-whisks and footballs, dis-
pute priority. The traffic of carriages, carts, porters, native
women, lemonade-sellers, and sheep is inconceivable. You
would never get through it unless your coachman with a yell
of" Ozuar riglak" which means " mind your legs," charged the
crowd with his game little Arab horses. The effect is much
heightened if you get a shower of rain, which turns any street
in Cairo into a lake of mud in a quarter of an hour. But rain
is rare ; on twenty-nine days out of thirty you can reckon on
enough sunshine to photograph any good subject like an
Arish woman, that is, a woman from the Eastern Desert, in
trousers and fine bracelets, and the odds are, with her face
uncovered. Very pretty they are sometimes, with lithe,
majestic figures.