The Bennington banner. [volume] (Bennington, Vt.) 1858-1894, 1894-04-13
STREETS OF REAL CAIRO.
Sights More Wonderful Even Than Those
Seen at the Worlds Fair.

Sights More Wonderful Even Than Those
Seen at the Worlds Fair.
Among those who have seen many orr
entail cities there is controversy as to which
of them most conspicuously embodies the
characteristics of the east Some lay claim
to have found in Syria, others in Persia
and yet others in India the type in ques-
ton. Yet / cannot help suspecting that If
q vote were taken of all the more famous
capitals and great towns Of Asia and
northern Africa Cairo would win the first
place.
Everybody, after putting his own spe-
cial favorite first, would put Cairo sec
ond. The color and movement and per-
petual play of light and shade on an ever
shifting mass of hues, that kaleidoscope
of humanity which the ordinary, every
day traffic of the Egyptian capital keeps
whirling before the eyes, must be hard to
beat. Even here, on this hotel terrace, in
front of Shepherds, where the west is ever
busily dashing its somber blacks and So
Der grays on the glowing palette of the
east, the effect is almost bewildeTing
But the coat and boots and billycock of
the European with their suggestions of
the homogeneous, and the overcivilized, and
the unpicturesque, are easily got rid Of
That is the charm of Cairo. You step
aside from one of its main thoroughfares
crowded with western vehicles of every
description from the drag to pony trap,
and in an instant you are at once in
maze of alleys where no draft animal Of
any kind has ever set foot since the houses
were built on either side, and through
which you may tread your way, surround
ed by the same moving masses of color for
as many hours as you please, without
emerging again into western civilization.
Lost, in every sense of the word, geo.
graphically as well as imaginatively, you
wander on amid the restlessly flowing
stream of swarthy, turbaned faces and
1.-THE white and blue robed figures, your
ears filed with the strange cries and your
senses intoxicated with the heavy, name
less odors of the east. Farther and far
ther you ramble and deeper and deeper
plunge into this magic labyrinth of magic
ways The alleys seem to narrow more
and more every minute until the rich
brown, profusely carved woodwork of the
jutting gables on either side of the road
way almost threatens to meet and blot out
the strip of burning blue above your head.
AS the street straightens the crowd ap-
pears to thicken until at the moment
when one is at its narrowest and the other
at its densest you step out into little
square in which the blaze of color and the
play of movement reach their height. You
are in the carpet bazaar of Cairo, the spot
at which the many colored throng around
you finds its most gorgeous background.
Carpets of every hue and web-Tunisian,
Algerian, Smyrniot, Persian-drape the
whole quadrangle with an arras worthy
of sultan's seraglio.
To think in ''Cold blood" and out of
sight of it of such a picture in such a
frame would be to conjure up vision of
crude and garish magniticenCe at which
the eye would ache and the taste revolt
But the east is an artist of unerring
though unstudied skill, and every patch
of brilliant and violently contrasted color
that it seems to have flung so recklessly
together has fallen as by divinely pre-
established harmony into its proper and
most effective place. And nature herself,
in compounding her pigments for these
swarthy skins, has entered into decora
, tive conspiracy with man.
Considered merely rs an arrangement
in browns, the faces of Cairene crowd
are study in themselves. Between the
light cafe au lait color of the half western
lied Levantine and the blue black negroid
from Abyssinia or the Sudan there are
well nigh half dozen different shades
distinguishable to the attentive eye. The
cafe au lait changes to chocolate, the choc-
olate to kind of cafe noir, the kind that
you complain of on the grounds of defect
i've strength, and this again to the kind
that you complain of on the strength of
excessive grounds. Then comes the lus-
terless jet, as of the unpublished boot, and
then, last and lowest note of the gamut,
comes that deep, glossy ebony which might
drive all the backing manufacturers in
the world to the despairing confession that
nature is here, at any rate, superior to
art.-London Telegraph.