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Pick out all the strangest, most ragged, most uncouth figures you ever saw in old pictures, from childhood up to the present day; select from every theatrical representation within the range of your experience the most monstrous and absurd caricatures upon humanity; bring to your aid all the masquerades and burlesque fancy-balls you ever visited, tumble them together in the great bag of your imagination, and pour them out over a vague wilderness of open spaces, dirty streets, high walls, and rickety little booths, and you have no idea at all of the queer old markets of the Katai Gorod.
But if you have a passion for human oddities rather than curiosities of merchandise, you must visit the second-hand markets extending along the walls of the Katai Gorod, where you will find not only every conceivable variety of old clothes, clocks, cooking utensils, and rubbish of all sorts, but the queerest imaginable conglomeration of human beings from the far East to the far West.
A favorite resort of mine during my sojourn in that strange old city of the Czars was in the markets of the Katai Gorod. Those of the Riadi and Gostovini Dvor present the greatest attractions, perhaps, in the way of shops and merchandise; for there, by the aid of time, patience, and money, you can get any thing you want, from saints' armlets and devils down to candlesticks and cucumbers.
The Town of the Tent, resting on the bank of the Nile, still remained the metropolis, as it did after the fall of both El Askar and Katâi the disaster to these latter cities giving additional prestige to El Kâhira. The building of a mosque was regarded by the rulers not only as an expression of religious zeal, but as a contribution to the life of the State.
They are well planted with trees, and have spacious sidewalks on each side; but, unlike the boulevards of Paris, are only dotted at irregular intervals with houses. To the eastward lies the Katai Gorod, or Chinese City, and to the westward the Beloi Gorod, or White City.
The route they had taken in the glow of the setting sun, once they had left European Cairo behind, lay through the El Katai quarter, having chosen the road leading from the mosque of Sultan Hassan, through the Bazaar of the Amourers to reach the great gate, the very heart of old Cairo.
He beautified his capital by building a sumptuous palace and his well-known mosque, which still stands in his new royal suburb of Katai; he encouraged the small farmers and reduced the taxation, yet he left five millions in the treasury when he died in 884.
Keeping still to the northeast, another city was added, in 860, by the first independent Muslim King of Egypt, Ibn Tûlûn, called El Katâi; the "wards" became divided into separate quarters for various nations and classes, and here was erected the remarkable Mosque of Ibn Tûlûn.
Outside the walls of the Katai Gorod, in an open square, or plaza, are rows of wooden booths, in which innumerable varieties of living stock are offered for sale geese, ducks, chickens, rabbits, pigeons, and birds of various sorts.
Every where we are pilgrims on the same journey. Wherever we sojourn among men, "The dead around us lie, And the death-bell tolls." The traktirs, or tea-houses, are prominent among the remarkable institutions of Russia. In Moscow they abound in every street, lane, and by-alley. That situated near the Katai Gorod is said to be the best.
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