The Egyptian permit for a temporary sojourn

Egypt examined every passport before landing and required the Egyptian visa of every traveller: a year's visa cost eight shillings in 1929, a transit visa of three days one shilling, and a sanitary officer's fee of twenty-five piastres was taken at arrival and at departure. A tourist whose steamer only touched at Port Said or Alexandria, and who wished to see the country while it lay at anchor, could instead obtain from the Passport Office a permit for a temporary sojourn, for forty-eight hours at most and a fee of twenty piastres (Baedeker, 1929).

No such permit has been found, so the paper Bearer prints is set on Baedeker's words, and the office says so above it. For the investigators who dash to Cairo between two sailings.

Bearer makes an investigator's papers for Call of Cthulhu and any 1920s or 1930s tabletop campaign: the passport a consul would have filled in, with the visas and frontier stamps a campaign leaves in it, and the permits, certificates and tickets of the period, to print or to share.

An example

Open this example in the office

The paper

A reconstruction

This paper is a reconstruction. Baedeker's Egypt of 1929, read, says a tourist touching at an Egyptian port could obtain from the Passport Office a permit for a temporary sojourn while his boat was at anchor, for forty-eight hours at most and a fee of P.T. 20. No such permit has been found, nor the rule that made it: the words and the layout are ours.

Still to be confirmed

• the permit is known from Baedeker of 1929 only; it is offered over the whole period and in English, the language of the Cairo City Police stamps read. What would settle it: an Egyptian permit for a temporary sojourn, or the Passport Office's rules, of 1920 to 1939.

Sources

• Karl Baedeker, Leipzig, Egypt and the Sûdân, Handbook for Travellers, eighth edition, 1929, p. xvi: passports with the Egyptian visa essential, examined before landing; the visa a year, 8s., a transit visa three days, 1s.; a sanitary officer's fee of P.T. 25 at arrival and departure; tourists touching at Egyptian ports and wishing to visit the country while their boats are at anchor may obtain from the Passport Office a permit for a temporary sojourn (not exceeding 48 hrs.; fee P.T. 20); firearms by special permit only (read directly)

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