Читать книгу By-ways on Service: Notes from an Australian Journal онлайн

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Shortly the Pyramids emerge on the eastern sky-line, and over the thickening house-tops rises the splendid relief of the Makattam Hills, with the stately citadel perched on the fringe, looking down on the City under its soaring minarets.

You had formed plans for the economy of the day; they are all dissipated when you step from the train and realise yourself within a mile of the bazaars. Their call is irresistible. The Pyramids, the mosques, the museum—all can wait, to be visited if there is time for it. You enter a gharry and alight at the mouth of the Mooski. It is palpably a mouth to that seething network, as plainly defined (as you gaze up Mooski Street from the Square) as the entrance to an industrial exhibition.

There is a crowd of men in the early stages of Mooski Street, whose business, day and night, is to conduct. They lurk privily for the innocent, like the wicked men in the Book of Psalms. The guides have come so much into disrepute that they mostly hasten to tell you they are not guides. "What are you, then?"—"I am student, sair"; or "I am agent, sair"; or "I am your friend; I do not wish for money." You'll meet such self-abnegation nowhere on earth as in the Mooski. Those who do own to being guides will never name a price. "How much do you want?"—"I leave that to you, sair. If you are pleased, you give me what you think." ... This is all very subtle: the man who is agent will get his commission and tender for baksheesh for having put you in the way of purchase (whereas he is in league with the rogue who fleeces you in the sale). The student shows no sort of ideal scholastic contempt for lucre; it's of degrees of gullibility that he's chiefly a student—and an astute one, gathering where he has not strawed. The man who is your friend and wouldn't think of money turns out a mere liar, downright—who does care, greatly. These are the subtlest ways of approaching you and broaching the subject of a tour. The rascal may simply fall into step and ask the time of day and proceed to talk of the weather—merely glad of your company—and abruptly close the half-mile walk with a demand for cash, like any guide requisitioned. In short, it's to be doubted whether in any city men live on their wits more artfully and unscrupulously than in the Cairene bazaars.