I’m feeling fine, tomorrow will be at the Camel Market and next day by dark in the Oasis, have been bumming along the Nile, in the baths, mosques, pyramids, blind alleys, you know all these places…there is so much in the streets I’ll never see if I stay at home with my dictionary.
-Letter Home, April 12, 1979
In lieu of bumming along the Nile, I find that reading the 19th Century Lexicon of the Arabic Language by Edward Lane is far more evocative of Cairene baths than the 1914 edition of Karl Baedeker’s Egypt: Handbook for Travellers, which describes “the pleasanter operation of shampooing, performed by the Abu Kees, who is requested to do his duty with the word Keiyisni, Rub Me, who then rubs the bather with the Kees”, which Lane defines as “A Purse of Sewn Together Rags for Money and for Pearls and Sapphires, and The Membrane that Holds the Child in the Womb, and hence also, The Scrotum”.