orientalcairocit00sladuoft

ALL
PART I
THE CITY OF "THE ARABIAN NIGHTS"
CHAPTER I
The Old-World Oriental Life of Cairo
Egyptians are born with a natural
The rich Egyptian in the intervals
desire to please.
of putting on a
swagger which he imagines to be English, and the frothing
Nationalist, when he is not Benjamin-Franklin-ing to
audiences of students, are as anxious to please as a spaniel,
while the poor, whether in the villages of Upper Egypt or in
the Arab city at Cairo, show the smiling good-nature of the
Orient. I thought the unspoiled Egyptian poor delightful
people ; they are Nature's gentlemen, kind, adorably simple,
with natural good manners. Even the Egyptian is not
specially untruthful when it involves an automatic loss of
bakshish. The life of the poor in the Arab city still preserves
the grace of the Middle Ages. The men wear turbans and
the long blue gowns called galabeaJis ;
the women, whose faces
are shrouded by the burka, wear a sort of black bridal veil,
which makes them look as if they walked about with a bag
over them, coming nearly down to their feet, bare, except
for the heavy anclets, which give them a biblical finish.
The black muffled women of the city look like walking
mysteries as they shuffle along the street. You lose nothing
by their being veiled ; when you see them unveil, which is
a matter of no consequence and frequent occurence, you
see a fat round face, pointed at chin and forehead, with the
39