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Street Life in Cairo 5^
This man had not got ;(^io, and had never had i^io, and
never would have ;^io, and he knew that if I took it to
the Museum the director would sweep it away in instant
contempt. But he thought that if he "bluffed" me like
this, I might try to buy it from him for some smaller price,
a pound, or ten shillings, or even two shillings. But I said,
" For an imitation one piastre is enough. But this is a very
cleverly made imitation, so I will give you two for it. Do
not bother me any more until you wish to take two piastres."
Of course he picked me up farther down the street and let
me have it for two piastres ; he was making a hundred per
cent on it, or more, and probably had a pocketful.
I may have readers so unfamiliar with Egypt as to have
to ask what scarabs are. Scarabs are the little beetles made
of glazed earthenware, or stones like cornelian and amethyst,
which in the case of the former always bear the cartouche
or oval name-hieroglyphic of the person for whom they
were made. All are singularly faithful copies of a real beetle
still to be found in Egypt.
The tiny statues of the gods—only an inch or two long
many of them—are much easier to convict if they are chipped,
for the colour which a chip assumes after twenty or thirty
centuries is totally different from an artificially coloured
chip ; and the glaze itself, even when buried in the dry
sand of Egypt, goes a bit grey in that immense period of
time. These little gods are absolutely fascinating. They
are mostly blue or green, and the animal heads, of ape or
ibis or hippopotamus or what not, make them the quaintest
little things. In museums you find them of bronze or,
occasionally, gold ; but even the bronze seldom pass into
the hands of the humbler curio-dealers. There are plenty
of genuine earthenware gods in the Cairo shops, but the
street hawkers do not offer them much even in imitations.
They incline more to rather ingenious forgeries, made, in
a coarse, effective style, of clay, about six inches long, of
which the real value is a small piastre, a penny farthing,
each, but which the guileless American sometimes purchases
at two hundred and forty times the proper price. They