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Oriental Cairo
It is only his regularity at the cafe that makes him worth
considering as a customer, and he spends much more time
on talking to his men-friends than the female charmers of
the Fishmarket and the Sharia VVagh-el-Birket, popularly
known as the Esbekiya Street.
The Egyptian pays interminable calls upon his friends,
with nothing to enliven them but conversation, coffee, and
tobacco. It is' indeed lucky for him that tobacco is cheap
in Egypt.
How the cafe-keeper lives in Egypt is a mystery to me,
unless the Egyptian subscribes to a cafe as he would to a club.
He never seems to be doing anything for the good of the
house, except hiring a pipe for some pitiful coin. He smokes,
reads the cafe's newspaper, plays dominoes, talks to his friends,
or ogles the foreign ladies. He seems to do anything rather
than order drinks—except in the Esbekiya Street, where
he sits and sips the beverages forbidden by the Koran,
with a dear little white donkey waiting for him in the
gutter.
When he is in a more licentious mood he goes to the
cafe in the Esbekiya Street, where a band of white female
slaves discourses the lowest class of music, or to see dancing
women whose dancing consists only of suggestive movements
of their bodies—an ineffably dull performance in any other
respect. The Fishmarket appeals more powerfully to him
than to a European. This is a quarter of Cairo infested by
the Ghaivazce dancers and Jewish and Levantine and Italian
women of pleasure. Some of them are beautiful and fascinating
women. But most of them are monsters, with no
attraction but their great passionate eyes. The Arabs like
large women. I have said elsewhere what a horrible sight it
is to go through the Fishmarket when these women are
hanging about for patrons. It is bad enough to see the
Oriental Jewesses sitting on the pavement, with their handsome
bare legs heavily ancleted and stretched out to attract
attention, but it is worse to see a pretty Italian woman with
her slender, neatly stockinged legs confined in anclets to show
that she is Orientalised— a creature at the beck and call of