Cairo

Two entries, one of them stood in on a November afternoon, and the other still an intention with a plate number.

Rooftops of the old city at dusk, screened wooden windows and stone minarets against a dim indigo sky

Plate VI · iii · a · The Old City

Everyone arrives looking for the oldest thing here. The rooms worth sitting in are barely three hundred years old.

A day, properly arranged

The morning is remembered. The afternoon is still a plan.

The entries

One filled, one hollow, and the hollow one is my own fault.

Read the entry →

An empty room in an old Cairene house, lattice light from a carved wooden screen falling across a worn stone floor

Interior · a screened room, later Cairo

A mashrabiya is a piece of joinery doing the work of a curtain, a fan and a good manner all at once.

NOVEMBER, LATE AFTERNOON

Still on the list in Cairo

Not yet stood in. Kept here so I cannot quietly forget it.

Notes for Cairo

The Gayer-Anderson house is the whole reason this page exists. It is two seventeenth-century merchant houses joined together and furnished by a man with more taste than restraint, and the pleasure of it is that nothing is arranged as a museum would arrange it. Go up. The roof terrace is not a bonus, it is the argument.

November suited it: dry, low light through the screens by mid-afternoon, and no one else in the rooms. I cannot tell you what the summer does to those courtyards because I have not been in one, and I am not going to guess in print.

The Museum of Islamic Art sits a short way north and I have not been inside it. What I have is a rehang I keep hearing about and a metalwork collection I have only ever read about, which is enough to keep it listed and not nearly enough to let me describe it.

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Cairo

The entries

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