Early 19 Century Cairo
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Craftsmen did their work in their shops under the customer's eye; there was one street for gold- and
silversmiths and jewellers, another for leatherworkers and brass-founders, others for potters,
silk-spinners, makers of weapons, dyers and perfumers.
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There was no appetite, no refinement of the senses,
that could not be satisfied somewhere in the bazaars,
and if the city was squalid it was also very
much alive.
Nightfall and darkness (there were no street lights) put an end to the hubbub. Soon after the mueddins' fifth and
final call the gates of the city were locked, and many of the streets with large wooden doors at either end were
shut up for the night as well. `One might pass through the whole length of the metropolis,' Lane says, `and scarcely
meet more than a dozen or twenty persons, excepting the watchmen and guards, and the porters at the gates of the
bye streets and quarters. The sentinel, or guard, calls out to the approaching passenger in Turkish "Who is that?",
and is answered in Arabic, "A citizen". The private watchman, in the same case, exclaims, "Attest the unity of God!"
or merely, "Attest the unity!" The reply given to this is, "There is no deity but God!" '
The Nile was the all-provider of this existence. It grew every ounce of food, it supplied water to the wells which
were dug in each quarter of the city, and it was the main highway to the outside world. The ceremony of the opening of
the canals when the flood rose in August was one of the great occasions of the year. The river at Cairo was about
half a mile wide, but it was divided by two islands, Bulaq and Rhoda, where crops were grown and where some of the
wealthier people had their pleasure-gardens. Memphis, the ancient capital a little further up the river, had decayed
to nothing. In the desert at Gizeh the Sphinx lay buried up to its neck in sand, its nose already broken.
There was one other aspect of the city which gave it a special importance, and which made travellers think of it not
simply as Cairo but Grand Cairo: it was the great terminal of the caravan routes that spread out over northern Africa
and the Near East. No one dreamed of travelling alone through the desert any more than one would dream of crossing the
Atlantic in a canoe.
You waited until a caravan was being formed in Cairo, and then applied to the sheikh in command
for permission to accompany it. Sometimes months would go by before all was ready, and then on a certain day the order
to march would be given, and a long straggling procession of camels, mules, donkeys and men on foot would set off into
the desert. Incoming caravans signalled their arrival at the pyramids and were then told where to cross the Nile and encamp.
The distances covered were prodigious. One route - and of course there were no clearly defined tracks in the desert,
merely a general line of march that led on from one waterhole or oasis to the next - took you north-east to Damascus,
where the traveller could join other caravans headed for Aleppo and Baghdad; another carried the pilgrims down to
Mecca and the Red Sea; another followed the general course of the Nile to Sennar and Darfur in the Sudan; still
another led off to Fezzan in the west.
Every journey was an adventure, and the traders, like migratory birds, were
controlled by the seasons and beset at every stage by unpredictable hazards such as civil wars, Bedouin raids, drought,
floods and sickness. A year, two years on the road - this was nothing to an experienced merchant. Taking with him
his wives, his children and his slaves, he would go on and on wherever the markets offered a profit, and in the end
nomadism became an object in itself, and many of these men could endure no other way of life. No one knew the extent
of this vast, haphazard network. It was quite possible for a man to travel from Egypt to Timbuktu on the other side of
Africa, and it is certain that Indian and even Chinese goods appeared in the bazaars in Cairo.
The merchants dealt in kind rather than in money. In Cairo they obtained grain, rice, cotton, flax, and the
thousand and one products of the bazaars. These things, increasing in value with every mile they travelled, would
be bartered for other goods in the Near East and in the primitive villages in the far interior of Africa. The Sudan
trade was particularly profitable. It produced black slaves, gold, ivory, ostrich feathers, rhinoceros horn,
gum arabic, ebony, coffee (brought from Ethiopia) and spices (from the Red Sea). Petroleum was also brought in
small quantities from the Arabian Gulf; it was either drunk as a medicine or rubbed on the body. Thus there was a
continual interchange at Cairo, a constant ebb and flow of strange faces and of strange goods displayed for sale,
a commotion of arrivals and departures. Part 1
Part 3
Extract from “The Blue Nile”, Written by Alan Moorehead. Westerham Press Ltd Kent, London: 1972.
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