Keeping house in Egypt is great fun, if you can keep your temper. Servants a-plenty are a certainty, but what they will do next is always uncertain. Here a noted Egyptologist tells some amusing stories of his household difficulties.
BY ARTHUR WEIGALL,
Former Inspector General of Antiquities for the
Egyptian Government.
IN ordinary, amiable conversation with people whose interests have little in common with mine, I often find that the introduction of the subject of servants supplies just that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin. When I have been talking about my life in the land of the Pharaohs, for example, I have observed that some stray remark of mine about my domestic staff has kindled the light of interest in eyes that were rolling upward with boredom; and therefore I offer no apology for making this my present theme. Like illnesses and operations, it has an almost universal appeal.
What happens in Egypt, of course, is outside the scope of everyday experience in the West; yet servants are servants wherever they be, and certain of their qualities—such as that of smashing things with a light heart—are common to the whole species.
On the carefree banks of the Nile, I must explain, any one of the higher officials stationed in a provincial town has far more native servants in his household than he would ever dream of employing if he himself had to foot the bill; but, fortunately, an easy-going government makes him a liberal allowance for the maintenance of its dignity in far-away places, and he is usually responsible for the wages only of his personal servant, his cook and a boy or two.
MY own sun-bathed, sleepy-looking residence at Luxor, with its tree shaded outhouses and stables and its paradise of a garden going down to the river, always seemed to be full of blue or white robed people dreamily wandering about like all God’s chil’un in heaven. Some of them I did not even know by name, and to this day I have no idea what they were doing—if anything; but in general they contributed to the drowsy air of peace which characterized the place and which was very welcome when I came in, hot and tired, from my work.
There were two or three languid and rather Biblical-looking doorkeepers—men who, in accordance with the old Egyptian custom, sat all day on a bench at my gates, yawning and scratching themselves or talking in tired monosyllables to friends who came and sat all day on a bench with them to while away the long, long hours. When ever I passed through the gates they all stood up, and this, apparently, was their only function.
At the front door of the house itself there was a black cherub of a Nubian boy who wore a kind of white cassock with a red band around the waist and had a red fez on his head, a gold ring through the top of one ear and his father’s enormous boots lashed to his feet. His job was to dust with a feather brush the shoes of anybody entering the clean, whitewashed hall; but he often wandered away or else fell asleep in his chair, and woke up only in time to give one’s heels a belated flick.
He was called Abd’-el-Aziz, but he was so often either missing or in a dead sleep that I used to call him Abd’-el As-Was.
Inside the house there was my pussy-footed personal servant, Hassan—a sort of butler-valet—dressed in a Zouave Jacket, an embroidered vest and baggy Turkish trousers, which is the regular uniform of his calling. He was a ghost-like and silent personage, of a religious turn of mind, who used to go up onto the flat roof of the house two or three times a day to say his prayers, looking toward Mecca in the East and prostrating himself with such devotion that his forehead was gray with the dust of the floor when he returned to his duties.
To assist him there was a man who floated around in white, and did house maid’s work with the detached air of a somnambulist.
IN the kitchen, which was separate from the house, was the cook. He went home at night unless I had a party, in which case he slept on the kitchen table, where also he took his daily siesta; and there was a dishwasher whom I never saw, except on an occasional round of inspection at night, when I sometimes stumbled over him asleep on the floor. There was a room for the servants to sleep in, of course, but they seldom used it.
In the stables was a happy-go-lucky groom, assisted by a stable boy, who slept most of the day in the wheelbarrow; and in the garden was an aged gardener of great piety, whose chief business, when he was not saying his prayers, was to make little channels to conduct the water from the water wheel to the sunken beds so that each was flooded in turn, after which the flowers came up by themselves, more or less while you waited. A patriarchal octogenarian, who I think was his father, used to do the heavy fetching and carrying for him.
There was a boatman who slumbered peacefully most of the day in the bottom of the boat moored at my landing stage, and most of the night on the roof of the boat house; and, indeed, he was such a magnificent sleeper that often he would row me half way across the river before consciousness dawned in his eyes. Then there was another dreamy fellow with a satchel, who sauntered to and from the post office with the mail and was sent on errands when he could be found.
His brother was the leisurely and dignified laundry man and shoe cleaner; a cousin of his was the lamp man, slightly; sooted and smelling faintly of paraffin, whose business in the twilight seemed to be to smear the outside of the lamps with oil, trim the wicks so that they would smoke, and touch the furniture with his oily fingers. In the mornings he also was the garbage remover, inkpot filler and window cleaner.
There was a night watchman with a gun, who, from time to time, walked In his sleep around the house in the black Egyptian darkness or in the silver moonlight, and, if he happened to wake up, sharply challenged anything suspicious, such as clothes on the line or the new pump or cats. If he tripped up and his gun went off, most of his colleagues crawled out of odd places where they, were sleeping and gathered around him, loosely gesticulating and whispering, while dogs barked and the town-guards called to one another in the distance.
AS I say, I never quite knew what the rest of the staff did; but, including my two native secretaries, there must have been about 20 persons in the household.
My personal servant, Hassan, was the only one who was not half asleep. What kept him awake was his pride of office; for when I first engaged him he was merely one of a crowd of servants in a hotel, and his sudden elevation to a position of dignity and trust aroused in him a very passion to please me.
The first time he waited on me at table in my house I was dumbfounded to hear the most deafening clatter of knives, spoons and forks on the sideboard, and, turning round, I saw that he was lifting up bunches of six or more spoons and deliberately dropping them onto the forks or knives, and then picking up the forks and dropping them on the spoons. I asked him what on earth he was doing, and he replied that he was making a noise like a hotel.
In other ways, too, he endeavored to introduce a spirit of good cheer. Once, in the early days of his service, he placed before me a flat pie with a lump on top of it like a large Easter egg, made of hard dough; and leaning over me, breathing heavily with excitement, he carefully cut this open with a knife. Out hopped two of the most bedraggled sparrows I have ever seen; one of them fluttered as far as my plate and there collapsed on its back, and the other zigzagged into the sugar bowl and thence to the floor.
Some weeks later, when I was giving a dinner party, he appeared with a broad belt of red flannel around his waist upon which was embroidered in large letters of yellow silk the legend, “Mister Weigall’s Boy,” written like that, in English, with noughts and crosses all round it. He had had it made at his own expense in the bazaar, so that all should know he was my servant. It was most embarrassing.
Shortly after this a middle-aged English lady of impeccable character and high social rank, who was on a visit to Luxor, came to lunch with me; but as she arrived somewhat early, and I was still out, Hassan felt it his duty to do the honors for me. He had seen the cocktail bar at the hotel, so he mixed nearly a tumblerful of neat whisky, gin, port wine, Benedictine and whatever else he could find, and brought it to her in the drawing room, and apparently stood over her till she drank it.
THEN he brought her two balloons and a false face to play with—relics of a gala dinner I had attended at the hotel a few nights before; and when she tired of these he fetched her my disreputable old brush and comb and shaving mirror, in case she might like to tidy up.
She had her hat off, and was singing quietly to herself when at length I came in.
These incidents occurred when he was new to his job; but in time he became a very efficient servant, though he was rather inclined to bully the others and to disturb their happy dreams. The cook hated him. He always wore rubber soled tennis shoes, and his step was as noiseless as a burglar’s; whereas the cook was a hearty fellow who stumped about in hard, red, native shoes when he was awake, and shook the earth with his snores when he was asleep. Their temperaments were fated to clash.
My work obliged me to travel about the country a good deal, and wherever I went Hassan accompanied me. If I took an exploring expedition into the desert in search of lost cities or forgotten gold mines, he rode behind me upon a camel with clattering pots, pans, kettles, cooking stoves and so forth hanging around his saddle, so that he sounded like an armed rebellion. If I was on horseback, riding from village to village to inspect the ancient ruins, he followed me on a donkey, likewise laden with kitchen utensils, while the dogs barked behind him and the villagers rushed out of their huts in alarm. Or if we went by train he took his entire field kitchen into the carriage with him, and from time to time fought his way through to my compartment to know whether I was in need of food or drink.
He had a quite fantastic idea of my importance, and hence of his own. One hot Summer’s evening, for instance, he had gone ahead to a certain village with instructions to prepare my camp somewhere near the railway station, because I wanted to take the early train next morning; but when I arrived after dark I found he had commandeered the station itself.
My bed, neatly made up, was standing in the middle of the platform outside the station master’s office. Beside it was a table with a book, an alarm clock, candle and matches upon it; a jug and basin and certain other bed room articles were grouped around; and my pajamas were laid out on a chair, with my slippers nearby. The sight was weirdly incongruous; was like one of those dreams in which you find yourself undressing in church or somewhere.
A few yards away, outside the ticket office, was another table spread for my evening meal, with a deck chair ready for the after-dinner cigar; and farther along, near the waiting room, Hassan himself was busy cooking a chicken over an oil stove.
THE station master was wringing his hands, declaring that it was most irregular; and his relief was great when I said I was afraid I should be disturbed by passing freight trains and what not, and would prefer to remove my camp to a nearby field.
On another occasion, during a night journey by train, I came back from the restaurant car and found Hassan ordering an irate Frenchman, who was traveling up to his sugar plantations, to leave my compartment—to which, of course, he had as much right as I. The Frenchman was on the point of braining him with a camera tripod when I intervened.
At Luxor, of course, he had not so many opportunities of showing off; but he dearly liked to buttonhole my guests and take them round the house, proudly opening cupboards and wardrobes and pointing out the merits of my boots and shoes or collars and ties, or asking them to feel the texture of my awful old dressing gown or something. Once when a certain English clergyman and his straitlaced wife had come over from the hotel to call, I returned to find Hassan in the bath room with them, forcing them to smell the soap; and while I was stammering an embarrassed “How d’you do,” he went into the corner of the room and flushed the drains as a parting demonstration.
Neither Hassan nor anybody else ever took visitors to see the kitchen, for kitchens in Egypt are definitely not show places. My cook, whose name was Ibrahim (Abraham), was as clean as any other native servant; yet there were aspects of his work which it was well to ignore. Ibrahim kneading pastry on the floor with his foot, or rolling it on the table recently used by him as a bed, or chasing doomed chickens in and out among the pots and pans were things which were not conducive to a good appetite.
HE was not at all a bad cook, and generally made something palatable and masticable of that tough and stringy meat of the country which so often leaves the diner searching in secret frenzy for a toothpick; but Hassan, who cooked for me in camp, always used to bring in Ibrahim’s dishes as though they smelt, and would often make little clucking noises with his tongue to indicate how shocked he was that such messes should be placed before me.
What the servants ate was always rather a mystery to me, but raw onions seemed to be the basis of their meals, and for some time after they had dined they were quite unfit for companionship with other persons. While eating they used to squat in a circle in a corner of the garden near the kitchen; and after the midday meal they crept away into obscure corners of the garden to dream their oniony dreams in the shade of the trees, while the flies crawled unnoticed over their peaceful, brown faces and the large black ants conducted tours of exploration among their clothes.
In spite of this somnolent life, the general work of the house was not too badly accomplished, and the rooms were kept very clean. Once or twice a month, under Hassan’s supervision, each room, in turn, was emptied of furniture and pails of water were swilled over the tiled floor, after which the men paddled about with mops, their feet and legs bare and their clothing hitched up. Mattresses, blankets, curtains and rugs were all taken up onto the roof and roasted in the sun for some hours; and every day, when things were shipshape once more, the gardener brought in a great bunch of flowers for Hassan to distribute about the house.
Once, when a particularly large bunch of roses had been sent in one evening when I was giving a dinner party, Hassan placed the flowers in a cheap enamel receptacle, which was part of some camping equipment I had just bought, but which, in his eyes, was an elegant vase; and on entering the dining room my guests and I were astounded to see this homely utensil standing in the middle of the table. But he seldom made mistakes of this kind, though I remember an occasion on which the cook mistook a newly purchased garden watering can of small size for a novel kind of teapot, and served the tea in it just when I was wanting everything to be at its best for the friends from England who had come to call.
EGYPTIAN servants are charmingly childlike and, in spite of a tendency to drop off to sleep before your eyes, are fairly intelligent. On the whole they are honest, and though Ibrahim, who went to market every morning, brought me back a rather garbled account of what he had spent, at least he did not allow other people to cheat me; while Hassan’s only dishonesty was his habit of stealing the sugar. Punctuality, however, is not the Egyptians’ strong point.
But whatever their faults, the whole staff somehow succeeded in preserving a dignified and profoundly peaceful atmosphere within my gates; and this is the chief memory I retain of my home at Luxor. It was a place of happy dreams and sweet repose—which is more than can be said of some houses in the West, where everybody is wide awake and bells are rung and everything is on the tick. After all, in domestic matters there is a lot to be said for taking it easy.
The Evening Star, Washington, DC, August 13, 1933