The Pale, Intelligent Coptic Youth, Who Had Followed Me Everywhere,
And Who Now Stood Like A Statue Gazing Upon Me With His Lustrous Eyes,
Murmured In English, "This Is A Very Good Place; This Most Interestin'
Place In Cairo."
Certainly it is a place one can never forget.
For it holds in its
dusty arms - what? Something impalpable, something ineffable, something
strange as death, spectral, cold, yet exciting, something that seems
to creep into it out of the distant past and to whisper: "I am here. I
am not utterly dead. Still I have a voice and can murmur to you, eyes
and can regard you, a soul and can, if only for a moment, be your
companion in this sad, yet sacred, place."
Contrast is the salt, the pepper, too, of life, and one of the great
joys of travel is that at will one can command contrast. From silence
one can plunge into noise, from stillness one can hasten to movement,
from the strangeness and the wonder of the antique past one can step
into the brilliance, the gaiety, the vivid animation of the present.
From Babylon one can go to Bulak; and on to Bab Zouweleh, with its
crying children, its veiled women, its cake-sellers, its fruiterers,
its turbaned Ethiopians, its black Nubians, and almost fair Egyptians;
one can visit the bazaars, or on a market morning spend an hour at
Shareh-el-Gamaleyeh, watching the disdainful camels pass, soft-footed,
along the shadowy streets, and the flat-nosed African negroes, with
their almost purple-black skins, their bulging eyes, in which yellow
lights are caught, and their huge hands with turned-back thumbs, count
their gains, or yell their disappointment over a bargain from which
they have come out not victors, but vanquished.
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