Position 9 - The Harem Windows In The Court Of A Wealthy Cairene's House

The houses of the rich and noble Cairenes give little indication on the outside, of their interior beauty and richness. Indeed the streets are too narrow to make any exterior façade effective, even if it were present. As we have come in here from the street the porter has taken us through a passage with at least one turn and sometimes more, in order to prevent passers in the street from looking into the court. On two sides of it are ranged the different rooms and apartments of the house; the ground floor, the carved doorway to which you see here on the right behind the tree, is reserved for the men and is called the “salamlik.”

There the master of the house receives his friends, who, according to Moslem politeness, must not give the slightest intimation that they are aware of the existence of any women in the house. If any of these friends are taken to the second floor they raise their voices and let it be known that they are coming, in order to warn the women and give them time to retire or to veil themselves; for the harem, the apartment of the women, is on the upper floor. There is rarely any higher floor in a Cairo house.

Yonder elaborately and exquisitely carved windows are those of the harem, and there the ladies of the house spend their time listlessly lounging, and rarely going out for an airing. They lead the most uninteresting of lives, possess no culture or next to none, and by the men of their own race are given an exceedingly bad character, probably far worse than they actually deserve. But the stories of female intrigue and ingenuity in evading the vigilant husband, which one hears in Cairo, are legion, and some of them must be true. It is little wonder that women so penned up should resort to almost anything as a relief from the stifling life they lead.

But woe to her, whom one of these lounging servants, who are always about the court, betrays! She is then taken, or at least formerly was (even though the Koran requires four eye witnesses, who are almost never forthcoming), to the Nile, bound and cast in. Such punishment is, however, more common among the poor. But it goes back to hoary antiquity, for a papyrus of the 17th century B. C., now in the museum of Berlin, relates the intrigue of a priest's wife, who on being betrayed by the priest's steward, was cast into the Nile.

But the women are not the only sufferers. Said one of Lane's friends to him: “How many men in Cairo have lost their lives on account of women? A very handsome young libertine, who lived in this house which you now occupy, was beheaded here in the street before his own door, for an intrigue with the wife of a Bey, and all the women of Cairo wept for him.”

Those windows up there have probably witnessed such scenes. What superb works of art they are! It is in some of these carved windows of Cairo, that the finest work of the Saracen designer is found, though unfortunately they are rarely as old as such work in the mosques. They are too fragile and exposed, as well as too good conductors of fire to survive long. They are known as “Mushrabiyeh,” which means “drinking place,” because the porous jars of drinking water, in common use in Egypt, are placed here and exposed to a constant draught that the water which penetrates from the inside to the outside of the jar, may rapidly evaporate and thus produce cold, which cools the water remaining in the jar.

Without understanding the principle of physics involved, the natives thus obtain cool drinking water without the use of ice. The presence of these jars in such windows has thus given them their name; these little projecting oriels, of which you see three in the middle window, are the receptacles of such jars. The whole of the front and sides above the carved plinth at the bottom is a very porous grating through which the wind circulates freely. Such a grating is made of carved, globular balls, joined like beads to each other by connecting pegs of wood, a construction often exquisitely wrought and involving infinite labor.

Cook's tourists buy quantities of the crude modern specimens of such work, which mostly fall to pieces after they have gotten them home. The hands that wrought yonder windows have long been dust, and their successors have ceased these many years to possess the skill and patience to produce such masterpieces. Neither have they the support and encouragement of rich and powerful patrons as in the days of the prodigal Mamlukes, to whom, dissolute and venal as they were, we owe so much of the beauty that fills modern Cairo.

But now we must leave the things of this later Egypt and pass to the long bygone age and the vanished splendors of the Pharaohs, of which nevertheless enough remains to furnish us with a faint picture of what was once here. The treasure house of such things as have survived and need shelter in a permanent home, is provided by the Egyptian government in the splendid new museum of Cairo, which we discovered from the citadel (Position 1). It was formerly in an old palace by the suburb of Gizeh, on the road to the pyramids, and before that at Bulak, where the museum was founded by Mariette. Repairing to the new building, we shall glance at a few of the more important or interesting of the vast host of antiquities with which it is filled.