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134 Oriental Cairo
The market itself is held on a raised platform, raised, I
think, by the accident of level roads being cut round it.
You climb the steps and you find yourself in a scene more
suggestive of a Nile village than the capital of the Caliphs.
All the beggars in Cairo seem to be enjoying the make-believe
of selling and buying.
The favourite form of shop and shelter is an empty warehouse
packing-case laid on its side. It is high enough for
people who sit on the ground to squat in (and conduct a
restaurant if need be). The barbers' shops are mostly um-
brellas. The patients who are having their heads shaved sit
as close to the stick as possible. The barber hops round like
a sparrow.
I can't say much about the old-clothes sellers : their neighbourhood
smelt too close for me to go very close to it. The
garments were hung on some sort of racks under some sort of
shelter, and the tout ensemble was really not so very unlike a
sale of costumes at a Kensington shop. The metal merchants
were much more to my taste than the rag merchants. They
knelt on the ground and arranged their wares in the dust in the
true Eastern jumble-sale style. The dust makes a nice soft
counter, and you can do your accounts on it if you can
write.
Rough tools and agricultural implements, battered lamps
and second-hand brass are the staples of the metal merchant
but old bottles play a not unimportant part. Brass enters so
largely into the furniture of the Egyptian that there is an
extensive business to be done in its remnants. He has brass
lamps, brass fittings for pipe and waterpipe, brass-handled
knives, long-handled brass saucepans for making coffee, brass
coffee-sets (pot, tray, cups, and saucers), brass censors
and candlesticks; the water-seller has brass essence sprinklers,
goblets, saucers, and tumbler-carriers ; the lemonade-sellers
have resplendent brass fittings ; the noble brass hot-water
jugs of restaurants are not much more likely to come to the
rag market than the Kiirsce, the chased brass tables and
stools, and the fine braziers and stands of the rich ; all Arabs
use the brass basins called tisht, and the brass jugs with narrow
;