orientalcairocit00sladuoft

262 Oriental Cairo
listening to that interminable sermon and refusing the cups
of coffee with which hospitality plied me at intervals of a few
minutes. Ramidge, who knew more about Egyptian weddings
than we did, now insisted that we should leave. We were so
dead tired that we did not notice anything on our way
home. I did not even remember to ask Ramidge whether
the zeffcli serenading the bridegroom round the streets took
place that night or the night before.
Since, with the exception of a fortnight, I have always lived
in the Ismailiya quarter when in Cairo, I don't know whether
the more native parts suffer more frequently from the
night zcffeJis accorded to bridegrooms. Wc used to hear
them only once in a way, but I was lucky enough to see
one once about half-past one when I was returning from a
dance at the Savoy Hotel. It was passing down the Sharia
Manakh. First came a band on foot playing the usual mad
tunes and making an awful noise over it (all the people in the
hotel who had not been to dances and had not turned out to
see what it was, were swearing about it next morning). Then
came men carrying mesJials, cressets of blazing wood stuck on
tall staves or frames. These were followed by other men
carrying a sort of set piece— a large frame with about fifty
lamps on it, arranged in four revolving circles. The bridegroom
and his friends followed in a sort of circle, all facing
this frame, and each of them carrying a lighted candle and a
flower, and the procession wound up with more musicians.
Every now and then it stopped, and somebody sang some-
thing in the droning, Oriental way, which is more like reciting.
The whole thing was exceedingly noisy and exceedingly
picturesque. In front of the bridegroom himself were men
walking backwards with huge crystal affairs in their hands.
At first I thought that it was a pilgrim's procession. For
once ill the Fayum I was awoken in the small hours of the
morning by that tell-tale music, and saw passing under my
window a number of these i>iesh'als and people carrying
candles in front of a local hadji who had arrived by train (it
must have been a luggage train, for they don't have a
night passenger train service in the Fayum). That was