…the cafetiers, pastry-cooks, restaurant keepers, the gamins, camelots, and old women who hawk [drugs] on the streets… We got much fun out of the raids we organized and kept our dope hounds busy and content…
-The Man Who Loved Egypt, J. W. McPherson, describing his anti-narcotics work in old Cairo
I remember the coffee house waiters, basbousa makers, fūl vendors, street boys, and black sheet-wrapped Sitts selling hash in Cairo’s old quarter known as Darb al-Ahmar, the Way of the Red, all playing mouse to the narcs playing cat. But camelots? No idea what McPherson means there.