Cairo

Description

A city of a thousand minarets and the citadel standing over it on its ridge, palm groves green along both banks of the Nile, and — across the desert haze — the pyramids themselves, holding pale and exact against the sky. The party’s dahabeah rounded a bend in the river after five days’ travel from Rashid and Cairo simply appeared: the scale of it unmistakable even at a distance, the city announcing itself long before the landing.

The dahabeah nosed into the crowded landing at Bulaq, choked with lateen yards and the bellow of porters, the water slick with melon rind and bilge. From there the party made their way inland on foot, through the narrow lanes of the Muski district, to the Auberge du Muski — their new base in the Frank Quarter.

Notable Features

• The Citadel — visible on its ridge from across the city; a landmark orienting point (also visible from the Auberge’s roof terrace).
• Bulaq — the busy port landing serving Cairo, crowded with boats, porters, and lateen yards.
• The Muski district — see The Muski for detail; the narrow market lane the party walked inland along from Bulaq.
• The Frank Quarter — see Frank Quarter; where the Auberge du Muski and the party’s base sit.
• The Pyramids of Giza — visible across the desert haze from within the city and from the Auberge’s roof terrace. Not yet visited as of the end of Session 4 — the excursion (donkeys, the Old Cairo ferry, far-bank mounts) has been priced and offered through Sergeant Bruyère but not undertaken. Treat as an upcoming set-piece, not a resolved location.

The City at Eid al-Fitr, 16 to 18 September 1814

The party did not arrive in an ordinary Cairo. They arrived on the first morning of Eid al-Fitr, at the end of Ramadan, and for three days the city is not doing what it usually does.

Thirty days of fasting broke the night before. The whole city ate after dark for a month and did not eat in daylight at all, and now that is over, and Cairo is loud in a way it will not be again this year. Children are in new clothes, which for many of them is the only new cloth they will get. Swings and rough wooden roundabouts have gone up in the open ground and the squares, and they are busy from early. Sweets move everywhere. Kahk, the ring-shaped sugar cake of the feast, is in every hand and every doorway, baked in the last exhausted week of the fast and now given away at a rate that would look reckless if it were about the money, which it is not.

The commercial city stops. Shops shut, or open late and grudgingly, and a European who expects to transact business on the first day of the feast will spend it standing in a lane being cheerfully ignored. The only district running to its usual rhythm is the Frank Quarter, which observes nothing and notices little.

And the dead are visited. This is the part worth knowing. On the two Eids the city walks out to its cemeteries, and Cairo’s cemeteries are a district in their own right, streets and tomb-houses and family enclosures where people sit the day out among their own. They bring palm branches. They bring food and kahk and give it to the poor at the graveside. For three days the largest crowds in the city are the ones sitting with their dead, which is worth holding in mind on the morning the party rides the other way, across the river, out to the oldest tombs on earth, where nobody has come to sit with anyone in four thousand years.

Connections

• The Nile River — the river the party travelled to reach Cairo from Rashid.
• Rashid — the party’s first Egyptian landfall after Alexandria, downriver at the Nile’s mouth.
• The Muski and Frank Quarter — the districts of Cairo the party has entered so far.
• Auberge du Muski — the party’s standing base within the city.

Appearances