Arabeah, the city’s universal horse-drawn cab? Five miles? In this heat? The Effendi must be mocking. That left Cairo’s normal mode of transport, the donkey. Owen was not enthusiastic.
-The Fig Tree Murder, A Mamur Zapt Mystery, Michael Pearce
Downtown Cairo forty years ago was still full of donkey carts. They hauled trash and delivered milk. From their beds they sold watermelons piled into high pyramids and called out for glass bottles and metal refuse to be recycled. Some were driven by wild-eyed boys beating their galloping animals with sticks, others by patient old men with all day to get across town at a walk.
The fact that their donkeys were clogging the narrow roads and backing up motor traffic was only part of the reason it would take a donkey man all day to deliver greens from the Rawd al Faraj wholesale vegetable market, leaving Bulaq and passing Bab al-Hadid and Ezbekiyya and ‘Ataba, jamming way through the Muski’s retail shoppers and around al-Azhar’s milling prayerful up to the foot of the Muqattam Hills, and back again. What an urban planning lesson they could teach along that route.
Once late at night I was returning from Gamaliyya. Don’t ask why I was there past twelve. The streets were quiet and empty, strangely so, until I heard the clip clop of a donkey cart atrot coming from behind. I waved down the driver. To Garden City? Irkab, he said, Mount up- an imperative form of the verb I would learn very well later on the Way of the Forty. He took me home in silence. I always wondered what he must have thought, to have come across an Effendi at that hour, there.