orientalcairocit00sladuoft

82 Oriental Cairo
They are odiously vulc]^ar, because their faces and attitudes
are caricatured to make the tourist like them as much as
Mr. Lance Thackeray's satirical postcards of Germans on
donkeys and spinsters on camels. They are always in
shocking taste and bear hardly any resemblance to their
originals. The tourists buy them as greedily as they buy
the smoked sky-blue and scarlet statuettes of European
exhibitions.
The attractions of the Tentmakers' Bazar for the Philistine
of Philistia do not end here. When they are tired of
bargaining for tent-linings and are no longer to be attracted
by the broiderer's blandishments of " No sharge for Ice kin,' "
there are saddlers to be encountered, not like the irresistible
saddlers of the si'ik at Tunis, whose sabre-taches, and school
children's satchels, and purses and mirror-bags are so fascinating
that you buy them for all your relations and end by
keeping them all for yourself, or the barbaric leather-workers
of Omdurman. The saddlers of Cairo are saddlers who
devote themselves to the production of donkey-saddles of
red brocade and camel-trappings adorned with cowries and
little bits of looking-glass. There is not much that any
reasonable Philistine can buy from them except embroidered
canvas saddle-bags, which make good antimacassars for
suburban homes ; the little leather cases, which look as if
they contained opera glasses but really hold passages from
the Koran, which are considered good for binding on the
arm when you have a headache ; Greek purses, or a stray
paper case which costs you about two shillings, and looks as
if it had cost twenty, and makes a delightful blotter with
its quaint arabesquings.
This is all of the bazars which the dragoman allows the
tame tourist to see ; and
even that goes a long way, because
you cannot pass from the Turkish Bazar to the scentmakcrs'
and tentmakers' without passing some of the unspoiled bazars
like the silkmakers', and you are surrounded by picturesque
native life.
But that is not the way in which I love to do the bazars.
I generally approach them from the other side, going down