An excerpt from the Safar-nama of Nasir Khusraw:

“Coming south from Syria, the first city encountered is New Cairo, Old Cairo being situated farther south. New Cairo is called al-Qahira al-Muizziyya, and the garrison town is called Fustat...

A description of the Sultan’s palace

The Sultan’s palace is in the middle of Cairo, encompassed by an open space so that no building abuts it. Engineers who have measured it have found it to be the size of Mayyafariqin. As the ground is open all around it, every night there are a thousand watchmen, five hundred mounted and five hundred on foot, who blow trumpets and beat drums at the time of evening prayer and then patrol until daybreak.

Viewed from outside the city, the Sultan’s palace looks like a mountain because of all the different buildings and the great height. From inside the city, however, one can see nothing at all because the walls are so high. They say that twelve thousand hired servants work in the palace, in addition to the women and slavegirls, whose number no one knows. It is said, nonetheless, that in the palace which consists of twelve buildings, there are thirty thousand individuals.

The harem has ten gates on the ground level, each with a name, as follows (excluding the subterranean ones): the Golden Gate, the River Gate, the Wind Gate, the Festival Gate, the Ramp Gate and the Sariyya Gate.There is a subterranean entrance through which the sultan may pass on horseback. Outside the city, he has built another palace connected to the harem palace by a passageway with a reinforced ceiling. The walls of his palace are of rocks hewn to look like one piece of stone and there are bevelderes and tall porticos. Inside the vestibule are platforms ...

The city of Cairo has five gates, Bab al-Nasr, Bab al-Futuh, Bab al-Qantara, Bab al-Zuwayla and Bab al-Khalili. There is no wall, but the buildings are even stronger and higher than the ramparts and every house and building is itself a fortress. Most of the buildings are five stories tall, although some are six. Drinking water is from the Nile, and water carriers transport water by camel. The closer the wall is to the river, the sweeter the water; it becomes more brackish the farther you get from the Nile. Old and New Cairo are said to have a thousand camels belonging to water carriers. The water carriers who port (carry) water on their backs are separate: they have brass cups and jugs and go into the narrow lanes where a camel cannot pass...

 A description of the City of Cairo (Fustat)

The city of Old Cairo is situated on a promontory. To the east of the city is a hill, not too high, of rock and stone. On one side of the city is the mosque of Ibn Tulun, built on a rise with two reinforced walls. With the exception of the walls of Amid and Mayyafariqin, I never saw the likes of this mosque. It was built by one of the Abbasid emirs who was governor of Egypt.The city of Old Cairo was built on a hill for fear of the Nile waters. Once the site was just large boulders, but they have all been broken up and the ground levelled. Now they call such a place an aqaba.

Looking at Old Cairo from a distance, because of the way it is situated, you would think it was a mountain. There are places where the houses are fourteen stories tall and others seven. I heard from a reliable source that one person has on top of a seven-story house a garden where he raised a calf. He also has a waterwheel up there turned by this ox to lift water from a well down below. He has orange trees and also bananas and other fruit-bearing trees, flowers, and herbs planted on the roof...”

 Source: Thackston, W. Wheeler McIntosh, ed. trans., Nasir-i Khusraw’s Book of Travels (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2010), 56-67.