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Oriental Cairo
there. He does, it is true, converse with you most amiably
about the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid— partly with a view
to expanding his tip, partly because it is his nature to be
amiable and affable, and because he feels that he is your
host, entertaining you on his property. But he is profoundly
lazy, and hardly takes you a yard off the bee-line from the
tramway station to the Pyramid of Cheops and the Sphinx.
It is no wonder that Cairo's only road is beloved of
motorists and tandem-drivers, for it is, especially after it
has struggled away from the outskirts of Gizeh, the village
which gives its name to these Pyramids, a strikingly beautiful
one ; and even before this there are old trees and seductive
gardens in the Khedivial suburb surrendered to a zoological
garden and a college. The avenue, which shades the trams
all the way out to the Pyramids, is nowhere finer than here,
and the land speculator, who has beaten down palaces, has
spared the trees, where he has not begun to put up his
ridiculous German villas.
But when this suddenly ends, and the causeway-head is
reached, your heart leaps within you : it is to be hoped that
you will pay your first visit, as I did, while the autumn
inundation turns the whole champaign into a lake, with the
Pyramids on its farther shore.
The jumping-off place for the Pyramids is one of the most
bustling spots in Egypt. The tram pulls up in the shadiest
bit of its own avenue. Its arrival has been awaited by a
small army of camel-boys, donkey-boys, guides, and all sorts
of Arabs who come under neither of these categories. The
camels make a splendid background, and the foreground is
sketchy with tourists of all ages and conditions in special
desert dress. Mr. Thackeray's caricatures hardly exaggerate
their eccentricities, though most of them do not mean to
wander a hundred yards from the down-trodden road between
the Mena House and the Pyramids. The Mcna House im-
presses you almost as much as the monuments themselves,
when you emerge from the tram-station in the custody of
some enterprising Arab, and begin to ride or walk up the
steep, white, winding road which leads past the Pyramid of