The centerpiece was a stuffed shark. Its back had been broken in several places, and stuffing was leaking out of its sides, giving it the incongruous homeliness of an old sofa. A stuffed alligator was pinned up on a wall; its thick varnish had gone black and viscous with age. A Victorian collection of butterflies and other insects had been propped in glass cases against another wall. Every exhibit had lost wings, legs, scales, antennae, bits of thorax -- and these fragments had collected in dusty mounds at the bottom of each case. There were two stuffed seals, oddly bulgy and crooked, like vaudeville horses. One prominent case contained a peculiar, pinkish jigsaw puzzle. After a bit of study, it was possible to make out legs and shells. Further thought revealed that a man in search of a hobby to keep him occupied during the long winter evenings might just conceivably assemble all these pieces to make a pair of lobsters.
The attendant plucked at my arm. There was a farther room -- the aquarium itself. It was not just any old aquarium, either. It looked more like the den of a mad poisoner. The shelves of the room were lined with druggist's jars, and every jar was packed solid with dead fish. The jars had been filled on much the same principle as the seating arrangements in a Cairo streetcar: their contents had been piled in, higgledy-piggledy, without respect to species, genus, habitat or anything else. Fish from the sea and fish from fresh water enjoyed in death the same solution of formalin. Their colors had gone long ago; now their corpses had blended to a uniform creamy white. I spotted eels, mullet, perch, sea horses, catfish, carp, sardines, bass, groupers -- all stirred up together into a gruesome fish pie. The room was high with the thin stink of their preservative.
I gave the attendant a pound. For such a comprehensive little tour of Cairo, it seemed the smallest tip that I could reasonably offer.
-- Jonathan Raban, Arabia: A Journey through the Labyrinth (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), pp. 292-93.