shoulder. At length--still in the dark--we arrived at a stairway, and,
ascending, found ourselves in a second-story court, which was roofed
over with matting. This court was surrounded by chambers fitted with
rough, sliding fronts: almost all of the fronts were at the moment
thrown up, as a window is thrown up and held by its pulleys. In one of
these rooms we found Assiout ware in all its varieties; but we made a
slow choice. We were evidently in a lodging-house of native Cairo; all
the chambers save this one store-room appeared to be occupied as
bachelors' apartments. The two rooms nearest us belonged to El Azhar
students, so Mustapha said: he could speak no English, but he imparted
the information in Arabic to our dragoman. Seeing that we were more
interested in the general scene than in his red jugs, Mustapha left the
Assiout ware to its fate, and, lighting a cigarette, seated himself on
the railing with a disengaged air, as much as to say: "Two more mad
women! But it's nothing to me." One of the students was evidently an
ascetic; his room contained piles of books and pamphlets, and almost
nothing else; his one rug was spread out close to the front in order to
get the light, and placed upon it we saw his open inkstand, his pens,
and a page of freshly copied manuscript. When we asked where he was,
Mustapha replied that he had gone down to the fountain to wash himself,
so that he could say his prayers. The second chamber belonged to a
student of another disposition; this extravagant young man had three
rugs; clothes hung from pegs upon his walls, and he possessed an extra
pair of lemon-colored slippers; in addition we saw cups and saucers upon
a shelf. Only two books were visible, and these were put away in a
corner; instead of books he had flowers; the whole place was adorned
with them; pots containing plants in full bloom were standing on the
floor round the walls of his largely exposed abode, and were also drawn
up in two rows in the passageway outside, where he himself, sitting on a
mat, was sewing. His blossoms were so gay that involuntarily we smiled.
Whereupon he smiled too, and gave us a salam. Opposite the rooms of the
students there was a large chamber, almost entirely filled with white
bales, like small cotton bales; in a niche between these high piles, an
old man, kneeling at the threshold, was washing something in a large
earthen-ware tub of a pink tint. His body was bare from the waist
upward, and, as he b