The Hotel-Gate Is Besieged By Crews Of Donkey-Drivers; The
Noble Stately Arab Women, With Tawny Skins (Of Which A Simple Robe
Of Floating Blue Cotton Enables You Liberally To See The Colour)
And Large Black Eyes, Come To The Well Hard By For Water:
Camels
are perpetually arriving and setting down their loads:
The court
is full of bustling dragomans, ayahs, and children from India; and
poor old venerable he-nurses, with grey beards and crimson turbans,
tending little white-faced babies that have seen the light at
Dumdum or Futtyghur: a copper-coloured barber, seated on his hams,
is shaving a camel-driver at the great inn-gate. The bells are
ringing prodigiously; and Lieutenant Waghorn is bouncing in and out
of the courtyard full of business. He only left Bombay yesterday
morning, was seen in the Red Sea on Tuesday, is engaged to dinner
this afternoon in the Regent's Park, and (as it is about two
minutes since I saw him in the courtyard) I make no doubt he is by
this time at Alexandria, or at Malta, say, perhaps, at both. Il en
est capable. If any man can be at two places at once (which I
don't believe or deny) Waghorn is he.
Six o'clock bell rings. Sixty people sit down to a quasi-French
banquet: thirty Indian officers in moustaches and jackets; ten
civilians in ditto and spectacles; ten pale-faced ladies with
ringlets, to whom all pay prodigious attention. All the pale
ladies drink pale ale, which, perhaps, accounts for it; in fact the
Bombay and Suez passengers have just arrived, and hence this
crowding and bustling, and display of military jackets and
moustaches, and ringlets and beauty. The windows are open, and a
rush of mosquitoes from the Ezbekieh waters, attracted by the wax
candles, adds greatly to the excitement of the scene. There was a
little tough old Major, who persisted in flinging open the windows,
to admit these volatile creatures, with a noble disregard to their
sting - and the pale ringlets did not seem to heed them either,
though the delicate shoulders of some of them were bare.
All the meat, ragouts, fricandeaux, and roasts, which are served
round at dinner, seem to me to be of the same meat: a black
uncertain sort of viand do these "fleshpots of Egypt" contain. But
what the meat is no one knew: is it the donkey? The animal is
more plentiful than any other in Cairo.
After dinner, the ladies retiring, some of us take a mixture of hot
water, sugar, and pale French brandy, which is said to be
deleterious, but is by no means unpalatable. One of the Indians
offers a bundle of Bengal cheroots; and we make acquaintance with
those honest bearded white-jacketed Majors and military Commanders,
finding England here in a French hotel kept by an Italian, at the
city of Grand Cairo, in Africa.
On retiring to bed you take a towel with you into the sacred
interior, behind the mosquito curtains.
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