Visiting the Dead, 1326
Ibn Battuta
At Cairo too is the great cemetery of al-Qarafa, which is a place of peculiar sanctity, and contains the graves of innumerable scholars and pious believers. In the Qarafa the people build beautiful pavilions surrounded by walls, so that they look like houses. They also build chambers and hire Koran-readers, who recite night and day in agreeable voices. Some of them build religious houses and madrasas beside the mausoleums and on Thursday nights they go out to spend the night there with their children and women-folk, and make a circuit of the famous tombs. They go out to spend the night there on the ‘Night of mid-Shaban’, and the market-people take out all kinds of eatables.
Cairo in the Evening, 1873
Gabriel Charmes
An incessant murmur rises from the streets and other places of Cairo. In the evening, at sunset, the colours are still more brilliant. A vast blood-red curtain sets off the dark mass of the Pyramids of Gizeh; the tops of the palms and sycamores appear gilded; the desert, far yonder, passes through every gradation of grey, blue, violet and opal. On the Nile the white sails of the dahabiehs resemble the wings of great swans spreading their plumage over the water; the noise of the city has become so intense that it seems almost like the rolling of a distant thunder.
It is thus that Cairo should be contemplated morning and night, and if one would admire it freely and inspire himself deeply with the poesy of this wonderful city, that history, art, and nature have done everything to embellish.
Ibn Battuta
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| Egyptian Cemetery |
Cairo in the Evening, 1873
Gabriel Charmes
An incessant murmur rises from the streets and other places of Cairo. In the evening, at sunset, the colours are still more brilliant. A vast blood-red curtain sets off the dark mass of the Pyramids of Gizeh; the tops of the palms and sycamores appear gilded; the desert, far yonder, passes through every gradation of grey, blue, violet and opal. On the Nile the white sails of the dahabiehs resemble the wings of great swans spreading their plumage over the water; the noise of the city has become so intense that it seems almost like the rolling of a distant thunder.
It is thus that Cairo should be contemplated morning and night, and if one would admire it freely and inspire himself deeply with the poesy of this wonderful city, that history, art, and nature have done everything to embellish.
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