orientalcairocit00sladuoft

76 Oriental Cairo
Scent Bazar I was attracted to an Arab cabinet, a little
mahogany box about a foot long, with six little drawers and
decorated with ivory and bronze, altogether rather Japanese.
I asked the price, knowing that five shillings would be a
liberal offer for this battered old affair. " Two guineas," he
said, true to his hereditary instincts. At that moment an old
woman with a face which evidently had been lovely passed
through the bazar singing to the accompaniment of a
tambourine. " She has been a beautiful woman once," I said
to the scentmakcr. " Yes, sir," he said, " but she is a wreck
now."
I gave a look at his box, and went on to the Silk Bazar,
which is always picturesque, with yarn-spinners using the
same primitive descending peg-top as the yarn- spinners of
Sicily use to this day, an inheritance from the Saracenic
lords who left the Isle not much short of a thousand years
ago.
Nothing pleased me more in the Silk Bazar than the
weavers, who sat with their legs buried under the floor,
working the treadles of the tiny looms which produced
such beautiful results. Mere they make the women's veils ;
here they have their silks put up in quires on book-shelves
as they do in Japan. There is so little difference between
the shops in an Arab bazar and a Japanese street. Both make
counters of their floors, and you sit on the dikka outside your
bazar-shop in Cairo as you sit on the edge of the floor of the
Japanese shop. Both are raised about a foot from the
ground.
In the same bazar they sell the Arab soap that is made in
spheres like tennis balls, and is said to have merits which
certainly do not advertise themselves on the babies' skins.
The Sudanese Bazar is on the other side of the Sukkariya.
It is not worth going into for its wares, but it has some
{)icturesquc houses, and it leads up to the great mosque of
El-Azhar, the University of the Moslem world.
The Sudanese, if they are Sudanese, though I have
never seen any there, sell little but mangy leopard skins
and the cheap painted bo.xes which you see in any Arab or