Chapter 20

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.

Here is a country which is not a country but a longish strip of
market-garden, nominally in charge of a government which is not a
government but the disconnected satrapy of a half-dead empire,
controlled pecksniffingly by a Power which is not a Power but an Agency,
which Agency has been tied up by years, custom, and blackmail into all
sorts of intimate relations with six or seven European Powers, all with
rights and perquisites, none of whose subjects seem directly amenable to
any Power which at first, second, or third hand is supposed to be
responsible. That is the barest outline. To fill in the details (if any
living man knows them) would be as easy as to explain baseball to an
Englishman or the Eton Wall game to a citizen of the United States. But
it is a fascinating play. There are Frenchmen in it, whose logical mind
it offends, and they revenge themselves by printing the finance-reports
and the catalogue of the Bulak Museum in pure French.