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CHAPTER II
Street Life in Cairo as seen from the Continental
Hotel
CAIRO
is a kodaker's paradise not quite so elastic as
Omdurman. For in hot countries people are apt to
carry on their occupations in the shade, and in Omdurman
there is no shade, as the Khalifa would not allow any one
to have a two-story house but himself.
Fortunately, Cairo is full of wide sunny spaces, and the
Arab always makes a shop of the street, so there is an
immense amount of street life in full sunshine.
There is one great advantage in staying at the Continental
Hotel for the two or three months of the Cairo season
you can see, without dressing to go out, the most roaring
farce ever presented off the stage. The great hotel has a
nice sunny terrace with a balustrade which looks out on
the Street of the Camel—the Regent Street of Cairo—and
the Eskebiya Gardens and a regular museum of touts.
It is doubtful which could be satirised more successfully
as a human Zoological Gardens, the people who sit on the
terrace behind the railings, Americans chiefly, with a strong
dash of Jews, Turks, and Infidels, which last name the
Mohammedan applies to the Levantine with singular felicity
—or the extraordinary collection, of parasites in the street
below.
Those of the parasites, who are not dragomans have
something to sell, generally something that no sane person
would want to buy.
The street Arab who walks about with a stuffed croco-
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