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8 Oriental Cairo
On every side the poor are working patiently for the little
gains of the Orient with tools unchanged from the dawn of
commerce. The wood-turner, who creates the exquisite
vteshrcbiya lattices, has a loose-strung bow for his lathe ;
the cotton-carder flicks the down from the fibre with a
faineant lute ;
the tarbush-maker does his felting with teasels
from the hedge. This is the city of the Arabian NigJits.
II
CAIRO THE SCENE OF THE "ARABIAN NIGHTS"
To avoid being taken to task for calling Cairo " A city of
the Arabian Nightsl' I shall shelter myself behind the
authority of the two most eminent writers in our language on
Arabic Egypt. I refer, of course, to Edward Lane, whose
translation of the Arabian Nights is, after the Bible, perhaps
the greatest " foreign classic," and to his nephew, Stanley
Lane-Poole, whom I am proud to remember as one of my
literary friends at Oxford. He was a recognised authority on
the subject even when he was an undergraduate, and it was
he who first brought home to me how extraordinarily romantic
is the art of the Saracen,
Since then I have been enraptured with it, face to face, in
three continents and many lands, and have turned to his
writings for fresh inspiration times literally without number.
From the passage which I quote in the Appendix from
Lane it will be seen that it was sixteenth-century Cairo which
supplied the local colour of the Arabian Nights, though the
stories themselves have some of them been in existence for
centuries longer, and some of them are not Arab at all.
No one who means to study Oriental Cairo seriously
should go there without the three precious volumes of Lane's
Arabian Nights (published by Chatto & Windus). Its
notes throw a direct light on the Arabic Cairo of to-day,
and it clothes with life a multitude of grand old mosques
and palaces, neglected, decayed, or in ruins, by showing the
tragedies and comedies and everyday existence which went
on in them 350 years ago.