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128 Oriental Cairo
" Yes," said the prisoner. " I wanted to make the giraffe
grow as small as a rat."
"What!" said Perkins.
"It's a well-known thing," answered the native, " that the
giraffe expands with the sun to his present size, and that
he is really only as small as a rat at night. It is believed,
but it is not proved, that if you can get him into the shade
during the day he rapidly decreases in size, and I wish
to try."
The police told Perkins that the man had been arrested
more than once for having broken into the gardens at
night. Perkins questioned him and found that he had only
broken in to see the giraffe as small as a rat. The police
said that this idea is very prevalent among natives.
The Zoological Gardens of Cairo are an adorable place.
The garden is an old royal garden ; it belonged to the
Gizeh Palace of Ismail Pasha, so it has old trees and
gorgeous wildernesses of flowering shrubs and all the gimcrack
Oriental pleasaunces of a popular holiday-making
temple in Japan, like the Temple of Kwannon at Asakusa.
The Japanese would have put a temple into it boldly
the Egyptians were content with toy bridges and delicious
little summer-houses on the tops of wooded knolls,; not to
mention aberrations of taste like paths with coloured pebbles
cemented on them in patterns. There was something very
appropriate about turning Ismail Pasha's palace into a Zoo.
The gaudily attired blacks, who acted as keepers to the
animals, looked like part of an Exhibition themselves.
They and the climate give the Cairo Zoo a chance which
is denied to the collections of London, Antwerp, and Paris.
In any Zoological Gardens the chief interest lies in the
tropical animals—the largest beasts of prey and pachiderms
and the most outrageous birds, all come from the tropics,
and the humans which go with them are blacks. At Cairo
you sec them as nearly as possible under their own conditions.
Directly you enter you are surrounded by enormous macaws
and toucans and hornbills of metallic blues and reds and
greens, chained to perches. They look as if they ought to
;