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4 Oriental Cairo
that Cairo was inhabited entirely by the unlovely effendi in
his cheap, ill-fitting parodies of European clothes tempered
by the use of a tarbiish.
But beyond the excursion with a dragoman to the Turkish
Bazar they never think of going into the native city, which is
as Oriental as Granada was in the days of the Moors, and not
totally different to the Baghdad of the Arabian Nights.
It was as a city which still maintains the atmosphere of
the Arabian Nights that Cairo appealed most to me ; and
while I was there I converted here a gay officer, there a
society butterfly into an ardent mosque-hunter or an en-
thusiastic observer of the mediaeval life in the Arab city.
The kodak certainly played no small part in the con-
version of most of them, for there are few well-off people
who go to Eg}'pt without a camera, and they were fascinated
with the photographs I took for the production of the
illustrations of this book. When my converts were once
bitten with the mania for photographing in the Arab city^
they generally went there every day, regardless of the
bargaining in the bazars and the fleas of the Market of the
Afternoon.
I often had to go alone when I had exhausted the
enthusiasms or the muscles of all my friends. But I never
felt lonely, even if I was in the wrong part of the city for
AH my faithful guide to find me and accompany me.
Nothing could induce Ali to come to the hotel for me
when I wanted him in some other direction than the Babes-Zuweyla.
Two or three times he made appointments
to come when I pressed him. But as he never kept them
I understood that he had some reason, which he would
not disclose, for objecting, such as Ramidge's servant had
against taking him to a native theatre.
But I never, if I could help it, went inside a mosque
alone. It was so difficult to get any atmosphere without
the sympathetic society of others interested in its art and
its romance. The attendants and the worshippers in the
mosques never seem to think about these aspects. To them,
even a mosque like Kl-Mcrdani is nothing but a place of