When Coming From The Desert I Rode Through A Village Which Lies
Near To The City On The Eastern Side, There Approached Me With Busy
Face And Earnest Gestures A Personage In The Turkish Dress.
His
long flowing beard gave him rather a majestic look, but his
briskness of manner, and his visible anxiety to accost me, seemed
strange in an Oriental.
The man in fact was French, or of French
origin, and his object was to warn me of the plague, and prevent me
from entering the city.
"Arretez-vous, monsieur, je vous en prie - arretez-vous; il ne faut
pas entrer dans la ville; la peste y regne partout."
"Oui, je sais,{31} mais - "
"Mais monsieur, je dis la peste - la peste; c'est de LA PESTE, qu'il
est question."
"Oui, je sais, mais - "
"Mais monsieur, je dis encore LA PESTE - LA PESTE. Je vous conjure
de ne pas entrer dans la ville - vous seriez dans une ville
empestee."
"Oui, je sais, mais - "
"Mais monsieur, je dois donc vous avertir tout bonnement que si
vous entrez dans la ville, vous serez - enfin vous serez COMPROMIS!"
{32}
"Oui, je sais, mais - "
The Frenchman was at last convinced that it was vain to reason
with a mere Englishman, who could not understand what it was to be
"compromised." I thanked him most sincerely for his kindly meant
warning; in hot countries it is very unusual indeed for a man to go
out in the glare of the sun and give free advice to a stranger.
When I arrived at Cairo I summoned Osman Effendi, who was, as I
knew, the owner of several houses, and would be able to provide me
with apartments. He had no difficulty in doing this, for there was
not one European traveller in Cairo besides myself. Poor Osman! he
met me with a sorrowful countenance, for the fear of the plague sat
heavily on his soul. He seemed as if he felt that he was doing
wrong in lending me a resting-place, and he betrayed such a
listlessness about temporal matters, as one might look for in a man
who believed that his days were numbered. He caught me too soon
after my arrival coming out from the public baths, {33} and from
that time forward he was sadly afraid of me, for he shared the
opinions of Europeans with respect to the effect of contagion.
Osman's history is a curious one. He was a Scotchman born, and
when very young, being then a drummer-boy, he landed in Egypt with
Fraser's force. He was taken prisoner, and according to Mahometan
custom, the alternative of death or the Koran was offered to him;
he did not choose death, and therefore went through the ceremonies
which were necessary for turning him into a good Mahometan. But
what amused me most in his history was this, that very soon after
having embraced Islam he was obliged in practice to become curious
and discriminating in his new faith, to make war upon Mahometan
dissenters, and follow the orthodox standard of the Prophet in
fierce campaigns against the Wahabees, who are the Unitarians of
the Mussulman world. The Wahabees were crushed, and Osman
returning home in triumph from his holy wars, began to flourish in
the world. He acquired property, and became effendi, or gentleman.
At the time of my visit to Cairo he seemed to be much respected by
his brother Mahometans, and gave pledge of his sincere alienation
from Christianity by keeping a couple of wives. He affected the
same sort of reserve in mentioning them as is generally shown by
Orientals. He invited me, indeed, to see his harem, but he made
both his wives bundle out before I was admitted. He felt, as it
seemed to me, that neither of them would bear criticism, and I
think that this idea, rather than any motive of sincere jealousy,
induced him to keep them out of sight. The rooms of the harem
reminded me of an English nursery rather than of a Mahometan
paradise. One is apt to judge of a woman before one sees her by
the air of elegance or coarseness with which she surrounds her
home; I judged Osman's wives by this test, and condemned them both.
But the strangest feature in Osman's character was his
inextinguishable nationality. In vain they had brought him over
the seas in early boyhood; in vain had he suffered captivity,
conversion, circumcision; in vain they had passed him through fire
in their Arabian campaigns, they could not cut away or burn out
poor Osman's inborn love of all that was Scotch; in vain men called
him Effendi; in vain he swept along in eastern robes; in vain the
rival wives adorned his harem: the joy of his heart still plainly
lay in this, that he had three shelves of books, and that the books
were thoroughbred Scotch - the Edinburgh this, the Edinburgh that,
and above all, I recollect, he prided himself upon the "Edinburgh
Cabinet Library."
The fear of the plague is its forerunner. It is likely enough that
at the time of my seeing poor Osman the deadly taint was beginning
to creep through his veins, but it was not till after I had left
Cairo that he was visibly stricken. He died.
As soon as I had seen all that I wanted to see in Cairo and in the
neighbourhood I wished to make my escape from a city that lay under
the terrible curse of the plague, but Mysseri fell ill, in
consequence, I believe, of the hardships which he had been
suffering in my service. After a while he recovered sufficiently
to undertake a journey, but then there was some difficulty in
procuring beasts of burthen, and it was not till the nineteenth day
of my sojourn that I quitted the city.
During all this time the power of the plague was rapidly
increasing. When I first arrived, it was said that the daily
number of "accidents" by plague, out of a population of about two
hundred thousand, did not exceed four or five hundred, but before I
went away the deaths were reckoned at twelve hundred a day.
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