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Updated: June 9, 2025
Shiftless housewives lolled with unkempt hair on the housetops; women of the harem looked out of the little mushrabieh panels in the clattering, narrow bazaars. Just at their feet was a mosque one of the thousand nameless mosques of Cairo. It was the season of Ramadan, and a Friday, the Sunday of the Mahommedan the Ghimah.
This trade is carried on in a very picturesque street, called the "Sûk-en-Nahassīn," or street of the coppersmiths, where in tiny little shops 4 or 5 feet square, most of the copper and brass industry of Cairo is carried on. Opening out of this street are other bazaars, many very ancient, and each built for some special trade.
If Sowerby had been trapped and was already dead, the knowledge would creep through the bazaars like a soft wind of the night, and all the Arab world would rejoice that a cursed Inglesi, making the unpardonable breach of their code, had been given to the crocodiles, been smothered, or stabbed, or tortured to death with fire. And, if it were so, what could be done?
The mosques have neither domes nor minarets a sign of the rigid Wahabi influence which swept over Arabia. This sect refuse to have any feature about their buildings, or ritual which was not actually enjoined by Mohammed in his Koran. There are a few carved lintels and doorways, and the bazaars are quaintly pretty, but beyond this the only architectural features are Portuguese.
One well-known oulama has lately finished his studies after twenty-seven years at the University, and is justly proud of the length of his stay. The life of the scholar is easy, the way of knowledge is long, the contrast exquisite between the foul lanes and noisy bazaars outside and this cool heaven of learning.
When we went ashore we found ourselves in a city of perhaps sixty thousand inhabitants, commonplace in aspect, altho its bazaars are well filled with European goods, and a fair display of Oriental stuffs and antiquities, and animated by considerable briskness of trade.
Then up they went through the narrow dingy streets with their overhanging houses that made a pleasant shade, past the quarters of the tinsmiths and the jewelers, the tailors and the sandal-makers. Naomi looked eagerly in at the gay bazaars piled high with fine linens and embroideries, rich scarves and veils, spices and coffee, dried fruits and nuts.
And anon the morning comes, and then, at last, the evening when the triste bazaars open again, and the strong of heart and nerve move not from their doorways, but sit still in the dusk to watch the grim world go by. But mostly they hurry out to the bazaars once more, answering to the fevered call: "Buy buy buy buy buy!"
But you see it was a strong thing our appearing without our several incumbrances, and though an old married woman like me may do as she pleases, yet for a bridegroom of not three weeks' standing to resort to bazaars solus argues some weighty cause." "And argues rightly." "Then you are content to be supposed to have an unproduceably eccentric melancholy bride?"
The bazaars are well worth visiting, and the working of elephants in the great teak yards is one of the tourist's principal sights. But the great Shwe Dagon pagoda is of course the centre of interest, and indeed it is one of the most astonishing places of worship it has been my fortune to visit.
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