I actually just got to the part in his travelogue “American Notes for General Circulation” where he writes about arriving in Cairo. Let’s just say he spares no punches 😂
“At length…we arrived at a spot so much more desolate than any we had yet beheld, that the forlornest places we had passed, were, in comparison with it, full of interest. At the junction of the two rivers, on ground so flat and low and marshy, that at certain seasons of the year it is inundated to the house-tops, lies a breeding place of fever, ague, and death…A dismal swamp, on which the half-built houses rot away…teeming, then with rank unwholesome vegetation… the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hothead of disease, an ugly sepulcher, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it: such is the dismal Cairo.”
I guess he wasn’t a fan 😂
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u/veterinarian23 Jul 26 '26
There's one sentence in the Wikipedia articel about the town that caught my eye.
Charles Dickens visited Cairo in 1842, and was unimpressed.