She is the crossroads of travellers, the sojourn of the weak and the powerful…the learned and the ignorant, the grave and the gay, the mild and the choleric, the noble and the base, the obscure and the illustrious. Like the waves of the sea she surges…
-Ibn Battuta, describing Cairo during his visit in 1325
Ibn Battuta might say that the drovers I rode to Cairo with 650 years later, if he were to describe them by choosing between the two extremes, were all weak, ignorant, grave, mild, and obscure. None of that is to cast aspersions because they would probably agree. When at the Imbaba camel market, visiting them from my downtown hotel and they holed up in a smoky stable, mixing their aseeda over a wood fire and pouring water from a skin almost within sight of the Nile Hilton and its gaudy casino, they left being powerful, learned, gay, choleric, and illustrious to the Cairenes. That, in their estimation, was no compliment, for the Sudanese were noble and the Egyptians were extremely base.