ABSTRACT
I DID not regret my decision to stay some time at Cairo and become in every respect a citizen of that city, for there can be no doubt that to do so is the only way to understand and to love it. Usually,travellers do not give themselves sufficient time to comprehend its intimate life, and to appreciate thoroughly its picturesque beauties, its contrasts and its memories. Yet Cairo is the only city of the Orient where we may find perfectly distinct the successive layers of several historic ages. Neither Bagdad, nor Damascus, nor Constantinople has preserved such subjects for study and reflection. In the first two, the stranger finds nothing but fragile buildings of brick and dried earth; the interiors do indeed present some magnificent examples of decoration, but nothing that has been established in conditions essential in serious and lasting art. Constantinople, with its houses of painted wood, must be rebuilt every twenty years, and retains nothing beyond the dull uniform appearance of bluish domes and white minarets. But Cairo, thanks to its inexhaustible quarries at Mokatam and the invariable mildness of its climate, possesses numberless monuments. The periods of the caliphs, the soudans and the Mameluke sultans correspond to systems of architecture of 111their own, of which Spain and Sicily have only in part the models and counterparts. The Moorish wonders of Granada and Cordova are recalled at every step the traveller takes in Cairo in the door of a mosque, a window, a minaret, an arabesque, of which the shape or the style gives us the exact date, however remote that date may be. The mosques alone could tell us the whole history of Mussulman Egypt, for every prince has built at least one, in his desire to pass on to posterity the remembrance of his time and of his glory. So the names of Amrou, Hakem, Tulun, Saladin, Bibars or Barbuk are kept ever fresh in the memory of this people, though the most ancient of these monuments have now no more to offer than crumbling walls and desert spaces.
