It was the middle of the afternoon and the Street of the Camel was unusually quiet…Even the donkey-boys had been driven into the shade…
-The Mamur Zapt and the Donkey Vous, Michael Pearce
…that nightmare full of weird interest and more incident than any other two years of my life…we visited clairvoyants, alchemists, spiritualists, Druzes, Chaldeans, Persians, weird people from all sorts of weird places, but never elicited the smallest explanations.
-The Man Who Loved Egypt: Bimbashi McPherson, an autobiography by John McPherson, describing his two years of service as Mamur Zapt
Boris Karloff, as Ardath Bey- Excuse me…I dislike being touched…an Eastern prejudice.
-The Mummy (1932)
McPherson must have been happy to leave Edwardian England to roam the back alleys of Khedival Cairo looking for hash dealers, Sufi plotters, and reawakened Pharaonic murderers who made The Mummy read like a kindergarten story. Sixty years after the Mamur Zapt policed those alleyways on his white mule, Dā’ūd, Samwa’īl, and I were thankful that he left a few of those malefactors free to sell their best stuff to us.
