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CHAPTER XXXIV
Helwan, the Week-end Resort of Cairo
HELVVAN
is an overrated place except as a spa.
Doctors seem to think well of its baths— perhaps
because they are the only baths a patient, whose business will
not allow him to leave Egypt, can be sent to. They are
certainly very up-to-date. Otherwise, whatever you get at
Helwan you can get better elsewhere. It has a racecourse ;
but you get better racing at Ghezira ; it has golf, but you get
better golf at Ghezira, both in Cairo, less than half an hour's
drive from your hotel ; it has wonderful views of the Pyramid
Field, but hardly more wonderful than the view from the
roof garden of the Hotel Semiramis, in the best quarter of
Cairo. And as a desert resort it is inferior to the Mena
House—which is on the edge of a better bit of the desert
for riding, on account of the innumerable antiquities within
a day's ride, and is right out in the country, whereas Helwan
is a town of the type I hate, consisting of new letting-villas
and lodging-houses, arranged in rectangular blocks with
hotels on the outskirts. It all looks horribly new ; the houses
have taken on the colours of the desert : the population has
taken on the manners of a picnicking place ; few of the
gardens have yet grown ; little is left unspoiled except the
waters, which have attracted the rheumatic in all ages.
I am speaking, of course, of the new HelwSn inland. The
old Helwan, on the banks of the Nile, is a mere Arab village,
which no one would think of, did it not possess a picturesque
lunch- and tea-pavilion called the Villa San Giovanni, which
overhangs the river like a Japanese tea-house.
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