orientalcairocit00sladuoft

304 Oriental Cairo
In such a busy neighbourhood of course there are the
usual porters' restaurants, and lettuce-carts with their frames
as elaborately carved as Sicilian carts, and men in a species
of sentry-boxes to protect them from the sun as they sell
the public water from the tap. Here too you see so many
men's heads tied up in large red cotton handkerchiefs instead
of hats, that you recognise how very African the Sicilian
peasant is in his appearance.
The peripatetic water-seller is much in evidence here
too, walking about with a gorgeous brass essence-bottle
with a tapering spout, a water pitcher, and a couple of brass
saucers, which are as tuneful as bells when he clinks them
together.
And here too are photographers in shabby booths, which
seem to be knocked up out of packing-cases, who take and
finish your photograph in about five minutes for about
fivepence. Why do they always want to take your photograph
on waste land ? There are innumerable unemployed
porters hanging about Rod-el-Farag, but I never saw any
of them killing time by having their photographs taken.
The drive along the Shubra road to the Shubra palace of
Hassan Pasha, the Khedive's uncle, was formerly the Hyde
Park drive of Cairo. But nowadays people drive out to
Ghezira and the Pyramids instead. The road is longer at
any rate ; and poor Shubra is shorn of its glory, for villa after
villa has gone under to the jerry-builder, though few of his
abominable creations have risen upon their dust. There are
still, however, a few left to show what these Cairo paradises
were like. As architecture they did not count for much ;
they were huge, loosely rectangular Italian villas, without
any of the graces of a Cardinal's summer palace to the
outward eye, but doubtless cool, and all that could be coveted
by the master of a harem, within. They were surrounded
by gardens, in which the chief clement was shade and the
most decorative features were palm-trees. Some of them
were rich in warm-climate fruit trees, such as oranges and
bananas and prickly pears. Nearly all of them had fig-
trees. The prickly pears, having an enormous deal of