Adventure stories; Americans -- Foreign countries -- Fiction; Balloon ascensions -- Fiction; Sawyer, Tom (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
So then we come out and got some little donkeys and rode a piece, and
then went in a boat another piece, and then more donkeys, and got to
Cairo; and all the way the road was as smooth and beautiful a road as
ever I see, and had tall date-pa’ms on both sides, and naked children
everywhere, and the men was as red as copper, and fine and strong and
handsome. And the city was a curiosity. Such narrow streets—why, they
were just lanes, and crowded with people with turbans, and women with
veils, and everybody rigged out in blazing bright clothes and all sorts
of colors, and you wondered how the camels and the people got by each
other in such narrow little cracks, but they done it—a perfect jam, you
see, and everybody noisy. The stores warn’t big enough to turn around
in, but you didn’t have to go in; the storekeeper sat tailor fashion on
his counter, smoking his snaky long pipe, and had his things where he
could reach them to sell, and he was just as good as in the street, for
the camel-loads brushed him as they went by.
Now and then a grand person flew by in a carriage with fancy dressed
men running and yelling in front of it and whacking anybody with a long
rod that didn’t get out of the way. And by and by along comes the
Sultan riding horseback at the head of a procession, and fairly took
your breath away his clothes was so splendid; and everybody fell flat
and laid on his stomach while he went by. I forgot, but a feller helped
me to remember. He was one that had a rod and run in front.
There was churches, but they don’t know enough to keep Sunday; they
keep Friday and break the Sabbath. You have to take off your shoes when
you go in. There was crowds of men and boys in the church, setting in
groups on the stone floor and making no end of noise—getting their
lessons by heart, Tom said, out of the Koran, which they think is a
Bible, and people that knows better knows enough to not let on. I never
see such a big church in my life before, and most awful high, it was;
it made you dizzy to look up; our village church at home ain’t a
circumstance to it; if you was to put it in there, people would think
it was a drygoods box.
What I wanted to see was a dervish, because I was interested in
dervishes on accounts of the one that played the trick on the
camel-driver. So we found a lot in a kind of a church, and they called
themselves Whirling Dervishes; and they did whirl, too. I never see
anything like it. They had tall sugar-loaf hats on, and linen
petticoats; and they spun and spun and spun, round and round like tops,
and the petticoats stood out on a slant, and it was the prettiest thing
I ever see, and made me drunk to look at it. They was all Moslems, Tom
said, and when I asked him what a Moslem was, he said it was a person
that wasn’t a Presbyterian. So there is plenty of them in Missouri,
though I didn’t know it before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account