VEILED WOMEN.

Otago Witness, Issue 2287, 30 December 1897, Page 49

VEILED WOMEN.

One of the questions that agitated Cairo last winter was, How can the street railway company be compelled to curtain more effectually the trolley-car harems ? A large part of the city, and by no means the European section exclusively, is served by a rapid transit system. The cars do not differ materially from the open cars employed on American lines; but the rear seat is reserved for women, instead of smokers, and its nse is indicated by curtains that might be drawn, but in practice are not drawn, at the sides. Tvaere is no curtain in front to .divide the harem from the other seat?, and on an important route — like that, for example, from the Ezbekiyeh through the Boulevard Mehemet Ali to Old Cairo — the ceaseless chatter of its black-cloaked, blackveiled occupant?, regardless of the silk-robed men in front and the red night capped hangers-on at the sides, gives a hysteric suggestion of a picnic attended by masked mourners.

Many of the solid Moslems of Cairo are disquieted by the publicity of the street-car hareccs, and their feelings are understood, and to some extent shared, by a few of the Anglo-EgjpMans of the second and third generations. The Bhort line of the Constantinople underground railway is more mindful of Moslem customs. The harem divisions of its cars are f ally curtained ; but these divisions are too small to hold the women who flock from the ' Galata-Pera sections during shopping hours to the bazaars of StambouJ, and there is usually an overflow in the main part of the car. There are summer resorts among the islands of the Bosphorus where Turkish women sometimes go unveiled, and may be seen floating in light caiques under bright-coloured parasols with all the enjoyment of a Bar Harbour girl in a canoe. In Constantinople itself so many women bad put the veil aside as to call out a short time ago an irade from Abdul Hamid commanding them to cover their features. Travellers who see the 'straggle of "la jeune Turque " after Western forms of civilisation and the easier movement of Egyptian governmental circles in the same direction often receive the impression that the " changeless Bast " is changing faster than any other part of the world, and that " the veiled woman," brashicg sside all the imagined romance of her life behind the fretted moasharabieh, is meditating the ballot and the bicycle. But the danger is not yet imminent;. The incongruous mixture of West and Bast to be found in Constantinople, Cairo, and Alexandria is, because of its incongruities, peculiarly interesting. Nowhere else have I felt the strength of Islam as I did in an express train in Lower Egypt, when an imposing old Moslem stopped his chat with an American girl to consult his American watch, uncoiled bis 6ft of, satined length, dropped his alipperp, and prostrated himself in sunset prayer. The calm of tha Sheik's devotions, undisturbed by the presence of the " personally conducted," or by the fact tbat he mistook the direction of Mecca and bad to repeat his magbrib exercises on the platform with the wind blowing at 40 miles an hour, balloonibg his robes and untwisting the yards of white bedclothes about his head, was impressive. Young Turkey calls men of this stamp aouffous, zealots ; but the weak point of young Turkey is that it has little or no religion.

The veiled woman v/ill survive for many a year to come in Turkey; bat to see her wholly " uncontaminated " is eaeier in Morocco. There were ghosts yet abroad that cold, blue African dawn last November when the bare-legged Moors, in ragged burnouses, who were escorting our party through the defiles of the barren bills behind Taugier, began shouting at the beasts of a caravan that threatened our passage along the creek bed we were following. " Schwei I Schwei I Look out there 1 " yelled Ahmed and Mnstapha, and there in front of us were shrouded ghostß of Mohammed's jourccyirgs— ghosts of days when Rebecca saw Isaac in the distance and\" lighted off her camel " and " took a veil and covered herself " — ghosts of Eastern life from the beginning of recorded time. "Ar — r— rah ! " rolled out Tobi, the boy. " Arraz — zhimo ! R, — riah ! Himh ! Get aloDg there ! " Camels and mules and asses slouched and shouldered past us, pricked by the goads of their drivers, and followed — so it looked in the morning twi-light-^?by the sheeted dead — silent, yellowishwhite spectres, ..with nothing visibly human about ' them but a band clutching the long woollen draperies across mouth and nose. Some of the women carriei bundles of faggots as big a» the donkeys' loads ; bub a weight that bent them double could not relax their grip on the veil. One of the animals rubbed his pack against a rock, breaking the lashings. The nearest woman Bhared the beating, turning her head once and showing again that one hand, and above it big black,' stolid eyes.

All the mystery and the melancholy of (he East is embodied in the white, skulking figures of the Moorish peasant women. Not the " sad-eyed, solemn Oairene " in funeral crape, nor the black prisons of horsehair in wbich Bagdad women do penance for being born, nor the blind-folded Syrian girls groping their way under dark swathing sheets, with pinholes pricked before the eyes, stir such a feeling. Morocco is antiquity canned alive. It is the remotest past still doing business across the straits from Gibraltar. Dolma Bagche, the great palace on the shores of the Bosphorus, to which Abdal Hamid scarcely dares descend, looks like a Nice hotel. Ismail Pasha's palace of Gizeh, outside of Cairo, now turned into a museum, is as flimsy as a tenement block run up by a jerry-builder. In contrast with these essentially modern structures there are harems in " Tetuan of Barbary " promising nothing outside, but patterned within after the courts of the Albambra. Washington Irving tells how tbe Moora who were driven from Granada retired to Tetuan. • Their descendants still keep tbe keys of their Spanish houses against the day they may return. There are no trolley cars in Tetuan, and its women are shut up as Alnaicbar, the barber's fifth brother in the " Arabian Nights," planned to shut up the Grand Vizier's daughter ; or as Zayda, Zorayda, and Zorahajda were shut up in the Albambra's Tower of tbe Princesses.

Tetnan is as squalid as other African cities. Its streets are tortuous lanes ; its houses coated with dirty whitewash. The peasant women squatting in its market place might; pose for second-hand scarecrows in their umbrella hats and veils like fsed-bags. But for the modern Ziyda, Zorayda, and Zorahayda, read the three wives of a wealthy pasha. These personages received me in a square court with a mosaic pavement. About the sides ran two-storeyed arcades, with stuccoed columns. In the middle was a fountain overhung by orange trees. The youngest wife — let her be Zorahayda — stood by the water teasing a parrot with figs. This modern inmate of an old-school harem was a pretty creature, 20 years old possibly, and as good-natured as a plump and well-conditioned baby. She had a smooth, soft ?kin, not dark, but tinged with the yellow of cream. Like Lalla Eookh's odalisques, she had served herself with

. . . the kohol's jetty dye, To give that loDg-, dark languish to the eye. She had made her eyebrows meet in the middle with it also. Her finger tipa, a la, Homer's " rosy-fingered morn," had baen dipped in henna, resembling tbe hands of a cigarette smoker. She had long, heavy bair and fine features, as have many Moors. She wore a loose robe of white muslin, through wbich showed another of pink and white striped silk. These garments were open in front, and displayed a blue silk jacket embroidered with gold and a long pink silk smock. A scarf of gold tinsel was twisted about her waist and another in her hair.

After the usual salutation of a Moslem to a Christian, "Neharak said" (The day be blessed), Zorahayda led the way under the arches to a room occupying one'side o£ the court, but not more than Bft deep, and open

to the air. It was, ia fact, a second arcads, partly closed in front, but not enough to shut out the sunshine. A couch ran completely about it, broken only by the arches that gave upon the court. Rug's were the furniture of coucb, floor, and walls. Where ruga failed, briliiaiit-hued tiles made up the deficiency. Here lounged Ziycfa, the first wife, a heavy woman of 40, noticeable for her small, high-arched feet in white silk stockings. Her slippers lay on the rug in front of her. Zorayda, .the second wife, was a peevish-looking person of 25. Like Ziyda, she had her own place on the couch marked by her own heap of cushions. The pretty third wife hissed, and a young negress fetched a low stand of inlaid wood, 'a big basket of little cakes, and a samovar. Moorish tea is immoderately sweat, and tastes of mint and lemon verbena. Then the second wife held her handkerchief, two yards long, but as tbin as gossamer, over a stick of burning incense, and gave it to me to wipe my lips. The women showered themselves and their guests with perfume from stork - necked silver bottles, and there was a flourishing of kohl brushes to touch up damaged lids and brows. An entente cordiale being thus established, my hostesses displayed their jewellery, of which they had quantities, and examined, my clothing, especially hafc and Bhoee, witff curiosity, but without approval. It was like a ecene out of an old book of travels. "It speaks," said the third wife, holding my watch to her ear. In other rooms about the court were other women squatting in rows on their su3hi»ns, as if they had been squatticg always and would squat till doomsday. There was a state apartment on the second floor where dust lay thick on the rotting canopies of an unused European bed. An exquisite little piano, with case of inlaid wood and ivory, was dropping to pieces unopened. There was a clock thac did not "speak" and that nobody knew how to wind, and there were tawdry wax flowers under glass caseß that were hid in reverent admiration. These European objects, whose uses were imperfectly understood, took the place occupied by Chinese or South Sea curios in the parlour of our old-time New England sea captain. — Eliza. Putnam Heaton. in fee Cosmopolitan (U.S.)«