DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.27180#0153
CHAPTER XIV
THE MOKATTAM
When I referred to it as a mountain in conversation with a
Swiss the other day, he smiled, for the Mokattam is not much
more than a hundred metres high. No Swiss can realize that
the beauty of a mountain has as little to do with its height
as the taste of a liver-sausage with its cubic contents, and that
Cairo would suffer appreciably if the Mokattam were even
so much as half as high as the Rigi. Only cigars dare be over-
sized. The Mokattam is a human mountain and belongs to
the city. It is the back of the chair on which Cairo is seated;
it fits the Nile and its islands and the sea of houses, and the
pyramids in the distance might be its outposts. Similar
heights accompany the whole valley far down into the south,
and the proximity of this scenery has doubtless had as much
share in the shaping of the Egyptian formal sense as Paris
and the Seine have contributed to French art or Venice and
the lagoons to the school of Titian. The mountains are the
place where brigandage and gluttony and boundless meta-
physics thrive. In any case the Mokattam is high enough
even to satisfy those climbers who must feel that their necks
are endangered, as you will see by what follows.
At the very beginning we had learned to know it, during
the growth of our passion for the pyramids and when we
discovered that in the old days they had got the materials for
the pyramids here. I fancy it was our first Sunday in Egypt.
Old Rennebaum took us to the quarries. Inside the moun-
tain where the rock was softest, and therefore most highly
prized, the Egyptians hollowed out the stone; and hall-like
i37
THE MOKATTAM
When I referred to it as a mountain in conversation with a
Swiss the other day, he smiled, for the Mokattam is not much
more than a hundred metres high. No Swiss can realize that
the beauty of a mountain has as little to do with its height
as the taste of a liver-sausage with its cubic contents, and that
Cairo would suffer appreciably if the Mokattam were even
so much as half as high as the Rigi. Only cigars dare be over-
sized. The Mokattam is a human mountain and belongs to
the city. It is the back of the chair on which Cairo is seated;
it fits the Nile and its islands and the sea of houses, and the
pyramids in the distance might be its outposts. Similar
heights accompany the whole valley far down into the south,
and the proximity of this scenery has doubtless had as much
share in the shaping of the Egyptian formal sense as Paris
and the Seine have contributed to French art or Venice and
the lagoons to the school of Titian. The mountains are the
place where brigandage and gluttony and boundless meta-
physics thrive. In any case the Mokattam is high enough
even to satisfy those climbers who must feel that their necks
are endangered, as you will see by what follows.
At the very beginning we had learned to know it, during
the growth of our passion for the pyramids and when we
discovered that in the old days they had got the materials for
the pyramids here. I fancy it was our first Sunday in Egypt.
Old Rennebaum took us to the quarries. Inside the moun-
tain where the rock was softest, and therefore most highly
prized, the Egyptians hollowed out the stone; and hall-like
i37