city of Cairo, to whose people, male and female, Allah has given subtlety in abundance.  Their jesters are known to have surpassed in refinement the jesters of Damascus, as did their twelve police captains the hardiest and most corrupt of Bagdad in the tolerant days of Harun-al-Raschid; while their old women, not to mention their young wives, could deceive the Father of Lies himself.  Delhi is a great place—­most bazaar storytellers in India make their villain hail from there; but when the agony and intrigue are piled highest and the tale halts till the very last breathless sprinkle of cowries has ceased to fall on his mat, why then, with wagging head and hooked forefinger, the storyteller goes on: 

’But there was a man from Cairo, an Egyptian of the Egyptians, who’—­and all the crowd knows that a bit of real metropolitan devilry is coming.

III

A SERPENT OF OLD NILE

Modern Cairo is an unkempt place.  The streets are dirty and ill-constructed, the pavements unswept and often broken, the tramways thrown, rather than laid, down, the gutters neglected.  One expects better than this in a city where the tourist spends so much every season.  Granted that the tourist is a dog, he comes at least with a bone in his mouth, and a bone that many people pick.  He should have a cleaner kennel.  The official answer is that the tourist-traffic is a flea-bite compared with the cotton industry.  Even so, land in Cairo city must be too valuable to be used for cotton growing.  It might just as well be paved or swept.  There is some sort of authority supposed to be in charge of municipal matters, but its work is crippled by what is called ’The Capitulations.’  It was told to me that every one in Cairo except the English, who appear to be the mean whites of these parts, has the privilege of appealing to his consul on every conceivable subject from the disposal of a garbage-can to that of a corpse.  As almost every one with claims to respectability, and certainly every one without any, keeps a consul, it follows that there is one consul per superficial meter, arshin, or cubit of Ezekiel within the city.  And since every consul is zealous for the honour of his country and not at all above annoying the English on general principles, municipal progress is slow.

Cairo strikes one as unventilated and unsterilised, even when the sun and wind are scouring it together.  The tourist talks a good deal, as you may see here, but the permanent European resident does not open his mouth more than is necessary—­sound travels so far across flat water.  Besides, the whole position of things, politically and administratively, is essentially false.