orientalcairocit00sladuoft

13^ Oriental Cairo
which have seen much better days. Brass will always mend,
and the more it has been used the better it will clean.
Never ask the price of anything. The impulse of the pauper
dealer at the Market of the Afternoon is to put an impossible
value on anything of wliich a foreigner asks the price. He
thinks at once that the object is one on which foreigners set a
value, and he thinks that all foreigners are fools. Glance
over his stock, settle in your own mind the price at which a
thing will be a real bargain, tap it with your stick and show
him the small piastre or piastre, or the few piastres which
you intend to give for it, and if he will not take it go and
start bargaining for something with the man at the next
stall. You are sure to have offered him too much for it
according to the native ideas, and he will call you back. If
he hasn't called you back before you leave the market offer
him a little more if you covet the article to that extent.
Everything takes time in the East : a man may be perfectly
willing to take your price, but he likes to do a little talking
and chaffering over it. Don't waste time talking to him ; do
your photographing ; look at the professional story-tellers in
their rings of listeners, the snake-charmers, the gamblers, the
people with performing monkeys, the donkeys having their
parties as they roll in the dust at the edge of the market.
While you are amusing yourself the dealers to whom you
have made offers are making up their minds. It worries
them when you shop in this inadvertent way. They are
afraid that you will forget them and not come back to make
another offer. Quite often they curse you instead. I like
being cursed :
doing it.
I try and photograph them while they are
I was never molested at the Market of the Afternoon.
Sometimes a policeman would follow me about in a friendly
way to see that I had no trouble. The police, though they
are Nationalists in their sympathies, are very polite to English-
men :
they
will even listen to his advice in the execution of
their duty. It was a wonderful sight that market, with its
long rows of ragged dealers with various expressions of
cunning engendered by their hard struggles against prices,