Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, January 1922 · page 46 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #29 — page 46: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page from *Captain Billy's Whiz Bang* (a WWI-era satirical magazine) contains a lengthy prose description of Cairo's entertainments, presented as travel commentary. There are **no visible cartoons or illustrations** on this page—only text. The passage catalogs Cairo's attractions with exaggerated, moralistic disapproval typical of American satire of the 1910s-20s. It mocks colonial-era stereotypes: belly dancers, fortune-tellers, street performers, and particularly the red-light district, described with lurid Victorian language ("women outcasts," "caged like wild beasts"). The satire seems aimed at American travelers' fascination with "exotic" Cairo vice and seediness. The concluding anecdote about a beggar woman demanding "backsheesh" (alms) appears designed to deflate romantic notions of Eastern mystique through crude cynicism. The tone reflects contemporary American prejudices toward colonized spaces and working-class women abroad—presented as entertainment for readers back home.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
44 Captain Billy's Whiz Bang Cairo's amusements are varied: you may attend the opera house and listen to Italian music or see a French farce; take a turn at the hippodrome and have a circus; or stop at an open air play on the Esbeekeyah; or, if religiously inclined, take in the convent with its dancing dervishes and barbarous music; watch snake-charmers, glass-eaters, sword-swallowers, long-haired fakirs, chibook-smokers and munchers of scorpions; sip cafe noir (that looks and tastes like sweetened Nile mud) in a little shop where the waiters and loungers are as thick as the drink; or see Arabs gamble with dice and cards, much as they do in America; go to a kind of vaudeville, where a stringed band of lady-performers try to beguile travelers, with American airs and Persian dances, into buying drinks for them at the rate of one or two dollars a bottle, and poor stuff at that; or meander through the Fish Market at midnight where streets are filled with citizens and sight-seers, sidewalks with roystering soldiers, bazaars with shrewd traders, dens with drunken natives, and miles of houses with women outcasts from all quarters of the globe, leering, lurking and lustful, caged like wild beasts behind iron-barred gratings which are necessary to keep them from murderous assault on the morals, money and lives of the passersby. I was held up in an alleyway by a beautiful Ghawazee girl who said, with outstretched hand, "Me backsheesh to give God." She would