Great Cities Through Travelers' Eyes

by Peter Furtado

  CAIRO

  Built just a few miles from the ancient pyramids of Giza, Cairo was founded by the Arabs as a fortified camp named Al-Fustat in AD 641, and it soon became a mercantile and manufacturing centre. In 969 the conquering Fatimid dynasty created a new capital, Al-Qahira, for a caliphate that endured until 1171.

  In the 12th century Cairo became the capital of Saladin’s Ayyubid empire, and from 1260 the capital of the Mamluk empire. By the mid-14th century, it was the largest city in Europe and the Middle East, a centre of learning and faith as well as political power. In 1517 it was taken over by the Ottoman Turks.

  By the 19th century ancient Egypt was a place of fascination to many Westerners following Napoleon’s invasion of 1798, when he had taken with him a team of scholars and antiquarians to document the ancient culture (see pages 16–17). Most visitors stayed in Cairo en route to Giza.

  From 1882 to 1952, Egypt was under British rule, although formal independence was granted in 1922. In the First World War, Cairo was the headquarters for the British campaign against the Ottoman Turks; in the Second, it was the British headquarters for the Middle East Command and the North Africa campaign against Germany and Italy. Following the Egyptian nationalist revolution of 1952, it remains a capital very much in touch with its history.

  1050 NASIR KHUSRAW

  Persian poet Nasir Khusraw (1004–1088) is acknowledged as a great writer who travelled very widely across the Muslim world in the years 1046–52, recording what he saw in his Safarnama.

  Coming south from Syria, the first city encountered is New Cairo, Old Cairo being situated farther south. New Cairo is called al-Qahira al-Muizziyya, and the garrison town is called Fustat….

  The sultan’s palace is in the middle of Cairo, encompassed by an open space so that no building abuts it.… As the ground is open all around it, every night there are a thousand watchmen, five hundred mounted and five hundred on foot, who blow trumpets and beat drums at the time of evening prayer and then patrol until daybreak.

  Viewed from outside the city, the sultan’s palace looks like a mountain because of all the different buildings and the great height. From inside the city, however, one can see nothing at all because the walls are so high. They say that twelve thousand servants work in the palace, in addition to the women and slave-girls, whose number no one knows. It is said, nonetheless, that in the palace which consists of twelve buildings, there are thirty thousand individuals.

  The harem has ten gates on the ground level…. And a subterranean entrance through which the sultan may pass on horseback. Outside the city, he has built another palace connected to the harem palace by a passageway with a reinforced ceiling. The walls of his palace are of rocks hewn to look like one piece of stone and there are belvederes and tall porticoes….

  The city of Cairo has five gates; there is no wall, but the buildings are even stronger and higher than the ramparts and every house and building is itself a fortress. Most of the buildings are five storeys tall, although some are six. Drinking water is from the Nile, and water carriers transport water by camel. The closer the wall is to the river, the sweeter the water; it becomes more brackish the farther you get from the Nile. Old and New Cairo are said to have a thousand camels belonging to water carriers. The water carriers who port water on their backs are separate: they have brass cups and jugs and go into the narrow lanes where a camel cannot pass….

  Old Cairo is situated on a promontory. It was built on a hill for fear of the Nile waters. Looking at Old Cairo from a distance, you would think it was a mountain. There are places where the houses are fourteen storeys tall and others seven. I heard from a reliable source that one person has on top of a seven-storey house a garden where he raised a calf. He also has a waterwheel up there turned by this ox to lift water from a well down below. He has orange trees and also bananas and other fruit-bearing trees, flowers and herbs planted on the roof.

  1326 IBN BATTUTA

  Ibn Battuta (1304–1368/69 or 1377) was the greatest traveller of the medieval world. Born in Morocco, he travelled through much of North Africa, the Middle East and South and East Asia, and dictated his book, The Travels, towards the end of his life. He visited Cairo on his first pilgrimage to Mecca (see page 182).

  I arrived at length at Cairo, mother of cities and seat of Pharaoh the tyrant, mistress of broad regions and fruitful lands, boundless in multitude of buildings, peerless in beauty and splendour, the meeting place of comer and goer, the halting place of feeble and mighty, whose throngs surge as the waves of the sea, and can scarce be contained in her for all her size and capacity.…

  On the bank of the Nile opposite Old Cairo is the place known as The Garden, which is a pleasure park and promenade, containing many beautiful gardens, for the people of Cairo are given to pleasure and amusements. I witnessed a fete once in Cairo for the sultan’s recovery from a fractured hand; all the merchants decorated their bazaars and had rich stuffs, ornaments and silken fabrics hanging in their shops for several days.

  The mosque of ‘Amr is highly venerated and widely celebrated. The Friday service is held in it and the road runs through it from east to west. The madrasas of Cairo are so numerous they cannot be counted. As for the hospital ‘between the two castles’ near the mausoleum of Sultan Qala’un, no description is adequate: it contains an innumerable quantity of appliances and medicaments, and its daily revenue is as high as a thousand dinars.

  There are a large number of religious establishments called khanqahs, and the nobles vie with one another in building them. Each of these is set apart for a separate school of darwishes, mostly Persians, who are men of good education and adepts in the mystical doctrines. Each has a superior and a doorkeeper and their affairs are admirably organized. They have many special customs, one of which has to do with their food. The steward of the house comes in the morning to the darwishes, and each indicates what food he desires, and when they assemble for meals, each person is given his bread and soup in a separate dish, none sharing with another. They eat twice a day. They are each given winter clothes and summer clothes, and a monthly allowance of from twenty to thirty dirhams. Every Thursday night they receive sugar cakes, soap to wash their clothes, the price of a bath and oil for their lamps. These men are celibate; the married men have separate convents.

  At Cairo too is the great cemetery of al-Qarafa, a place of peculiar sanctity which contains the graves of innumerable scholars and believers. In the Qarafa the people build beautiful pavilions surrounded by walls, so that they look like houses. They also build chambers and hire Koran-readers who recite night and day in agreeable voices. Some of them build religious houses and madrasas beside the mausoleums and on Thursday nights they go out to spend the night there with their children and women-folk, and make a circuit of the famous tombs. They go out to spend the night there also on the ‘Night of mid Sha’ban’, and the market-people take out all kinds of food to eat. Among the many sanctuaries is the holy shrine where there reposes the head of al-Husayn. Beside it is a vast monastery, on the doors of which are silver rings and plates.

  1850 GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

  The 27-year-old novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) saw Egypt – and Cairo in particular, where he spent seven weeks – as the polar opposite of his native Normandy, which he despised for its dullness and small-mindedness. For him, as for many others in the 19th century, Cairo provided the allure of the exotic Orient, the supposed sensuality of which was highly prized by the 19th-century Western imagination. The following is from a letter Flaubert wrote to his mother from Cairo in 1850.

  3 February I have caught a bad cold by staying five hours upright on a wall to see the ceremony of the Danseh. This is what it is: the word ‘danseh’ means ‘trampling’, and never was a name better given. It has to do with a man, who passes on horseback over several others crouched on the ground like dogs. At certain epochs of the year this festival is repeated only at Cairo in memory of, and to renew the miracle of, a certain holy Mussulman, who once entered
Cairo marching thus on horseback over earthen vessels without breaking them. The sheik, who repeats this ceremony, should wound the men no more than the saint broke the earthen vessels. If the men die of it, their sins are the cause. I saw dervishes there, who had iron spits passed through their mouths and their chests. Oranges were spitted at the two ends of the iron rods. The crowd of the faithful howled with enthusiasm; to that you must join music savage enough to drive one mad. When the sheik appeared on horseback, my gentlemen laid themselves on the ground with their heads down; they were put in rows like herrings, and heaped close to one another, so that there should be no interval between the bodies. A man walked over them to see if the platform of humanity was firm and close, and then to clear the course, a hail, a tempest, a hurricane of whacks administered by eunuchs began to rain right and left at random, on whatever happened to be there. We were perched on a wall, Sassetti and Joseph at our feet. We stayed there from eleven till nearly four. It was very cold, and we had hardly room to stir, so great was the crowd, and so small the place we had taken; but it was a very good one and nothing escaped us. We heard the palm sticks sound dully on the tarbouches [fezzes] like the drumsticks on drums full of tow, or rather on balls of wool. This is exact. The sheik advanced, his horse held by two attendants, and himself supported by two others; and the good gentleman needed it. His hands began to tremble, a nervous attack seized him, and at the end of his parade, he was almost unconscious. His horse passed at a slow walk over the bodies of more than two hundred men lying flat on their stomachs. As for how many died of it, it is impossible to know anything about them; the crowd pours in behind the sheik in such a way, when once he has passed, that it is no easier to know what has become of these unfortunates, than to make out the fate of a pin thrown into a torrent.

  1863 GEORGE HOSKINS

  British Egyptologist G. A. Hoskins (1802–1864) visited Egypt in the 1830s and again thirty years later, a visit described in his book A Winter in Upper and Lower Egypt (1864).

  Cairo has changed little within the last quarter of a century. The mosques are more dilapidated, and the colours in them much less bright. One great improvement has been effected. The Uzbekeeh, a large square containing 450,000 square feet, which, during the inundation, was formerly covered with water, and at other times a cornfield, is now beautifully planted, affording the greatest of all luxuries in a hot climate – delicious shade.

  Under the trees are some indifferent cafés, where excellent coffee, sherbet and punch may be had, and where a very poor band plays in the evenings. On Sundays the promenade is very crowded – Franks and Turks in their Nizam dresses. European tradesmen, who have not adopted the latter, generally wear the red tarboosh, while their wives and daughters appear in European dresses, though not in the best taste.

  The groups that will interest the stranger most are the citizens playing at dominoes, chess and backgammon, and the peasants collected round the jugglers. If the cafés were good, and the gardens better taken care of, few promenades in the world would be more delightful. Some of the houses which surround it are handsome, especially the palace of the late pasha’s sister, and Shepheard’s large hotel – with all its defects, the best in Cairo – as well as the Hotel d’Orient, the next best, on the opposite side of the square; but the artist will admire more the old houses, with their picturesque latticed wood windows, or Mushrebeehs. The minaret of a mosque, surrounded by trees, adds to the effect.…

  These are a few of the architectural attractions of the streets of Cairo, but the crowds which animate them are not less interesting. Rich and poor, high and low, are conglomerated together. Every variety of costume, and every shade of complexion, from the swarthy Nubian to the fair Circassian. Sometimes the attention is drawn to the harem of a rich Turk, enveloped in silks of black and gay colours, of a breadth that would satisfy even a Parisienne’s taste (though they wear no crinoline), as if, like fair Fatima, of Tripoli, ‘they had been bought by the hundred-weight, and trundled home in a wheelbarrow’. They are often mounted on donkeys, richly caparisoned, of a merit and value unknown in Europe.

  Besides the harems, the most extraordinary groups of women are often seen on foot in the bazaars; nothing human distinguishable except a pair of fine black eyes, not sparing in their glances, peeping over the linen masks that cover their faces from the eyes downwards, the rest of the body having the appearance of an immense lump of merchandise covered with folds of linen or silk, scarcely showing their yellow boots. They are mostly attended by slaves, or some elderly female relation.…

  The mosques are the pride of Cairo. Unwashed, unpainted, unrepaired and even crumbling into dust, as many of them are, their beautiful minarets rival the palms in gracefulness; and, combined with the glorious street architecture, the elegant fountains and picturesque costumes, are enough to drive an artist crazy, that the noise and confusion of the ever-moving crowds prevent their drawing them. While the sun shines, nothing but the plague thins the bazaars of Cairo.…

  At all the mosques which are now used for prayer, it is necessary to submit to put on slippers at the entrance, or have the feet covered with cloths. The Moslems always take off their shoes when there are people praying, and every right-minded visitor, whatever may be his creed, will be careful not to offend their feelings.

  The visit to the mosques is rather expensive; a carriage costs ten shillings, and a fee of about two shillings is expected at each mosque; the janissary also looks for, at least, four shillings.

  The citadel, which forms so grand a feature in the views of Cairo, is well worth seeing, and may be visited on donkeys or in a carriage.… The whole of the city is seen, with its innumerable minarets; that of Sultan Hassan, immediately beneath, being particularly distinguishable. In the distance, the desert, the Nile and the Pyramids of Geezeh [sic] and Sakkara. The inundation, like a lake, adds now to the interest of the view, though it nearly doubles the distance of the pyramids for those who wish to visit them in October.

  1940S G. S. FRASER

  Scottish poet G. S. Fraser (1915–1980) was one of many Allied soldiers who visited Cairo during the Second World War. In his memoir A Stranger and Afraid (1983) he recalled his sojourn in olfactory fashion.

  When I think of Cairo now, I think of something sick and dying; an old beggar, propped up against a wall, too palsied to raise a hand or supplicate alms; but in a passive way he can still enjoy the sun…. But who can possess a city? Who can possess it, as he possess his own body, so that a vague consciousness of its proportions is always in his mind?…

  Cairo probably seemed to me a more confusing city than it really is because I saw it through a haze of heat and odours – the smells of spice, of cooking fat, of overripe fruit, of sun-dried sweat, of hot baked earth, of urine, of garlic, and, again and again, too sweet, of jasmine; a complex that, in the beginning of the hot weather, seemed to melt down to the general consistency of smouldering rubber…a smell of the outskirts of hell. Ceasing, soon, consciously to notice all this, I would sometimes, in the Garden City near the Embassy, pass a lawn of thin, patchy grass that had just been watered through a sprinkler; and I would realize, for a moment, how parched and acrid my nostrils were. The smell of the Nile itself, of course, was different; by its banks, at night, there was a damp, vegetative coolness, that seemed to have, in a vague, evocative way, something almost sexual about it. And it was voluptuousness, in a cool large room, to bend over and sniff, in a glass bowl on a table, at a crisp red rose. But in such a room there would be European women; and their skins would have dried a little, in that cruel climate, and one would be aware of their powder, and their scent. Beauty, whether of body or character, lay, in that city, under a constant siege. In my memory, that hot baked smell prevails; that, and the grittiness – the dust gathering thickly on the glossy leaves of the evergreens, and the warm winds stinging eyes and nostrils with fine sand – and the breathlessness, the inner exhaustion. Under the glaring day, one seemed to see the human image sagging and wilting a little, and expec
ted sallow fingers and faces to run and stretch, as if they were made of wax.

  CHICAGO

  Chicago, originally a French trading post, did not grow significantly until the opening of canal and rail links in 1848, which made it an important transport hub for the American Midwest, particularly important for its grain siloes, its huge stockyards and meat-packing industry. Much of the early city was destroyed in a devastating fire in 1871.

  Following the fire the city was speedily rebuilt, with major public health improvements and grand office building and department stores, giving rise to the so-called Gilded Age; the population passed one million in 1890. In the early 20th century it saw considerable immigration of a range of ethnic groups, including Irish, Italians and blacks from the Southern states.