THE "Wakalah," as the Caravanserai or Khan is called in Egypt, combines
the offices of hotel, lodging-house, and store.
It is at Cairo, as at
Constantinople, a massive pile of buildings surrounding a quadrangular
"Hosh" or court-yard. On the ground-floor are rooms like caverns for
merchandise, and shops of different kinds-tailors, cobblers, bakers,
tobacconists, fruiterers, and others. A roofless gallery or a covered
verandah, into which all the apartments open, runs round the first and
sometimes the second story: the latter, however, is usually exposed to
the sun and wind. The accommodations consist of sets of two or three
rooms, generally an inner one and an outer; the latter contains a
hearth for cooking, a bathing-place, and similar necessaries. The
staircases are high, narrow, and exceedingly dirty; dark at night, and
often in bad repair; a goat or donkey is tethered upon the different
landings; here and there a fresh skin is stretched in process of
tanning, and the smell reminds the veteran traveller of those closets
in the old French
[p.42]inns where cat used to be prepared for playing the part of jugged
hare. The interior is unfurnished; even the pegs upon which clothes are
hung have been pulled down for fire-wood: the walls are bare but for
stains, thick cobwebs depend in festoons from the blackened rafters of
the ceiling, and the stone floor would disgrace a civilised prison: the
windows are huge apertures carefully barred with wood or iron, and in
rare places show remains of glass or paper pasted over the framework.
In the court-yard the poorer sort of travellers consort with tethered
beasts of burden, beggars howl, and slaves lie basking and scratching
themselves upon mountainous heaps of cotton bales and other merchandise.
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