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Updated: May 22, 2025
Just four hours after leaving Alexandria our train entered the station at Cairo, where hotel-runners, cab-men, and porters gave the passengers a noisy reception. Complete arrangements having been made in advance for our party, we had time to take in the novel sights leisurely.
People with enviable nerves and unenviable tastes often enjoy sounds in the ratio of their lack of melody say, such everyday thoroughfare music as the slap and bang of coach-wheels on the cobble-stones; the creaking of street-cars round a sharp curve, like Milton's infernal doors "grating harsh thunder;" the squeaking falsettos of the cries by old-clothes' men, itinerant glaziers, fishmongers, fruiterers, tinkers and what not; the yells of rival coachmen at the railway-stations, giving one an idea of Bedlam; the street-fiddlers and violinists with horribly untuned instruments; the Italian open-air singers hoarsely shouting, "Shoo Fly" or "Viva Garibaldi! viva l'Italia!" the gongs beaten on steamboats and by hotel-runners at stations on the arrival of trains; the unearthly squeals and shrieks of new "musical instruments" sold cheap by street-peddlers; the horrible noise-producers which boys invent for the torture of nervous people such, for example, as this present season's, which is happily styled "the devil's fiddle," or "the chicken-box," whose simplest form is an emptied tomato-can, with a string passed through the end and pulled with the rosined fingers.
It seemed particularly bare and empty. "What a pity she's engaged!" Carlton said. "She loses so much by it." They steamed slowly into the harbor of the Piraeus at an early hour the next morning, with a flotilla of small boats filled with shrieking porters and hotel-runners at the sides.
As she stood there one of the hotel-runners, a burly, greasy Levantine in pursuit of a possible victim, shouldered her intentionally and roughly out of the way. He shoved her so sharply that she lost her balance and fell back against the rail.
About five o'clock I arrive at Hadji Agha, a large village forty miles from Tabreez; here, as soon as it is ascertained that I intend remaining over night, I am actually beset by rival khan-jees, who commence jabbering and gesticulating about the merits of their respective establishments, like hotel-runners in the United States; of course they are several degrees less rude and boisterous, and more considerate of one's personal inclinations than their prototypes in America, but they furnish yet another proof that there is nothing new under the sun.
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