Update: Raven is a god amongst men. He left this as a comment, and it's awesome:
Point of special interest at F-5: the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities.
If you would like to follow Harry Houdini's travels (or travails) in "Under the Pyramids" by map, here are grid references:
... we halted at the great Gare Centrale ["Main Station" at C/D-7/8].
... whilst the very theatre where I was vainly requested to play, and which I later attended as a spectator, had recently been renamed the "American Cosmograph" [period program; now the Cosmos Cinema, still at E-7].
We stopped at Shepherd's Hotel [actually "Shepheard's Hotel" E-7]....
Guided by our Baedeker, we had struck east past the Ezbekiyeh Gardens [E-8] along the Mouski in quest of the native quarter....
At length Abdul took us along the Sharia Mohammed Ali [F-8 → I-9] to the ancient mosque of Sultan Hassan [I-9], and the tower-flanked Bab-el-Azab [the original *gate* of Saladin's Citadel], beyond which climbs the steep-walled pass to the mighty citadel [J-10] that Saladin himself built with the stones of forgotten pyramids. It was sunset when we scaled that cliff, circled the modern mosque of Mohammed Ali [K-11], and looked down from the dizzying parapet over mystic Cairo — mystic Cairo all golden with its carven domes, its ethereal minarets, and its flaming gardens.
Far over the city towered the great Roman dome of the new museum [the Egyptian Museum at F-5]....
The next morning we visited the pyramids, riding out in a Victoria across the great Nile bridge with its bronze lions [Qasr El Nil, G-4], the island of Ghizereh with its massive lebbakh trees [covers B-2+3 to H-3+4], and the smaller English bridge to the western shore [H-3]. Down the shore road we drove, between great rows of lebbakhs and past the vast Zoölogical Gardens [K-2] to the suburb of Gizeh [on map as "El Giza" N-1+2], where a new bridge to Cairo proper has since been built [Abbas II Bridge across Roda Island, L-2+3+4]. Then, turning inland along the Sharia-el-Haram [L-2 → M-1 and leaving the map]....
Point of special interest at F-5: the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities.
ReplyDeleteIf you would like to follow Harry Houdini's travels (or travails) in "Under the Pyramids" by map, here are grid references:
... we halted at the great Gare Centrale ["Main Station" at C/D-7/8].
... whilst the very theatre where I was vainly requested to play, and which I later attended as a spectator, had recently been renamed the "American Cosmograph" [period program; now the Cosmos Cinema, still at E-7].
We stopped at Shepherd's Hotel [actually "Shepheard's Hotel" E-7]....
Guided by our Baedeker, we had struck east past the Ezbekiyeh Gardens [E-8] along the Mouski in quest of the native quarter....
At length Abdul took us along the Sharia Mohammed Ali [F-8 → I-9] to the ancient mosque of Sultan Hassan [I-9], and the tower-flanked Bab-el-Azab [the original *gate* of Saladin's Citadel], beyond which climbs the steep-walled pass to the mighty citadel [J-10] that Saladin himself built with the stones of forgotten pyramids. It was sunset when we scaled that cliff, circled the modern mosque of Mohammed Ali [K-11], and looked down from the dizzying parapet over mystic Cairo — mystic Cairo all golden with its carven domes, its ethereal minarets, and its flaming gardens.
Far over the city towered the great Roman dome of the new museum [the Egyptian Museum at F-5]....
The next morning we visited the pyramids, riding out in a Victoria across the great Nile bridge with its bronze lions [Qasr El Nil, G-4], the island of Ghizereh with its massive lebbakh trees [covers B-2+3 to H-3+4], and the smaller English bridge to the western shore [H-3]. Down the shore road we drove, between great rows of lebbakhs and past the vast Zoölogical Gardens [K-2] to the suburb of Gizeh [on map as "El Giza" N-1+2], where a new bridge to Cairo proper has since been built [Abbas II Bridge across Roda Island, L-2+3+4]. Then, turning inland along the Sharia-el-Haram [L-2 → M-1 and leaving the map]....
Thanks, dear Props, you are ever generous in praise and credit, as you are in sharing your own work.
ReplyDeleteI do love maps, and think they tend to enhance the enjoyment of literary adventures in this world, or any other... (cf. J.B. Post's Atlas of Fantasy, Alberto Manguel's Dictionary of Imaginary Places)....
Gettng maps as inexpensive graphics files via net, by the way, means that we can download even B&W files and color them in on our computers, print off the colorful versions on a print shop's laser printers, and get poster-sized maps laminated for long life. Since I also trim unneeded borders to maximize mapspace, I like my maps better than many printed-and-sold versions.
And of course you have also been known to fix blotches, creases, tears, etc., from archived maps that you've found before posting them, *koff*Antarctica*koff* as part of your public service, again something that can't be found just off-the-shelf elsewhere, talk about value-added!
@ Raven
ReplyDeleteYou're very kind, both in your praise and your generous contributions. Hopefully I'll be able to offer up some cartographic goodies in the near future.
A nice piece of research, well done Raven.
ReplyDeleteCairo is also important in Sax Rhomer’s Tales of Secret Egypt (1918). It isn’t about Fu Manchu, but it hovers around a Mythos connection, never really taking the plunge although there are some supernatural elements. Along the Egyptian idea there is The Green Eyes of Bast, (1920) but I just can’t remember much about the book. These books are good background for a scenario, though. Rhomer was a contemporary of Lovecraft, but I’m not aware if either read the other’s stories.
Download Tales of Secret Egypt http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40108
The Green Eyes of Bast, although not set in Egypt is useful as well http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15323
More Sax Rhomer books http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/110
@ CoastConFan :
ReplyDeleteThanks! Sax Rohmer's Tales of Secret Egypt is a great recommendation for a Cairo setting (Abû Tabâh is Rohmer's Egyptian near-parallel to Fu Manchu), and like Houdini our narrator-protagonist also resides in the Shepheard's Hotel at E-7, then the leading hotel in Cairo.
[Alas, the original hotel burnt to the ground in the 1952 Cairo Fire (riots) leading up to the revolution that overthrew British rule, but the rebuilt version downtown has an (archived) website with a little bit about its history. See also Wikipedia's article. Definitely the hotel stickers to have on your investigators' luggage!]
(And for lovers of historical footnotes, here's a bit on the biography and descendants of the man who founded Shepheard's Hotel, before leaving Egypt in 1860... five of his children having died there, four of them in infancy... to return to his native English Midlands. What HPL could have made of such a story, well, it must have been horrible enough in reality. A great hotelier deserved better.)
ReplyDelete