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APPENDIX III
Artists* Bits in Cairo, with Directions how to
find them
(Artists may be grateful to me for indicating the streets in which they will
find the best subjects in the Old Orie7ital parts of Cairo.)
FROM
the big square called the Place Bab-el-Khalk
which stands next to the Governorat of Cairo and
opposite the Arab Museum, there runs down to the Bab-es-
Zuweyla a little winding street called the Sharia Taht-er-
Reba'a. It is a very typical native street, chiefly devoted
to wood-turners, who use a bow-string instead of a bench and
lathe and seem to spend most of their time in turning the
little pegs of hard wood used in the manufacture of nieshrebiya
work. You will pass more than one quaint old fountain with
a Koran-school buzzing in the arcade above, and more than
one small mosque as you go down the street. But it is not
until you are almost opposite the back wall of the great
El-Moayyad mosque that you come to the little Place-el-
Gulchani, where there are generally tentmakers working at
the preposterous embroideries to which they give so much
more attention than the actual manufacture of marquees.
At first it looks a very ordinary little square, having for
its principal feature a plain flight of mosque steps leading up
to rather a dead wall. But at the top of the steps there is an
open passage, and, if you happen to look through that, you
see something as shining and blue as a huge turquoise. You
fly up the steps and through the passage, and there in the
centre of a courtyard see a little sort of tower covered with
glorious ancient tiles of the richest turquoise blue. This is
the tekke of the Dervishes who take for their patron the well-
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