I whispered to Alaa.
‘What’s it all about?’
He was looking embarrassed. I felt certain we had stumbled on some revolutionary activity or its equivalent in Egypt, overt feminism.
‘Come on, Alaa! Is she attacking the government?’
‘I don’t understand it!’
‘That’s Arabic, isn’t it?’
Frowning and unwilling, he answered me.
‘She is telling dirty stories.’
The young men burst into loud laughter then listened eagerly again. I watched this incomprehensible Scheherazade. She was, I suppose, in her sixties. She wore much jewellery, rings and bracelets and anklets. Earrings depended beneath the veil, which did not cover her hair. If that jewellery was not costume jewellery then it was very expensive indeed. It was only the second time in Egypt that I had seen a woman wear anklets. Presently she got up and walked away.
The young men dispersed.
‘Explanations, please.’
‘It’s too complicated.’
We drank tea. Except for us, this tourist area was deserted. I suggested that a simple thing to do would be to get out of the tourist area by drawing a beeline towards a poor quarter and sticking to it, for what does he know of Cairo who only the bazaar knows? Alaa agreed and took us into a side alley only a few yards from the first one and lighted by no more than a crack of sky. It was a cobbled alley with no sidewalks and lined mostly with blank wall. The few openings seemed to lead into small cellar-like spaces where equally small businesses were being carried on. In one a man was filing a piece of metal. In another two men were working over a pile of camel skin. In yet another a man was mending a small lathe. As we passed, each man spoke to Alaa. When we reached the end of the alley at a T-junction I asked him what they said.
‘In general they told me I should not have brought you down here. I am – how would you put it – letting down the image of Cairo. I should have kept you in the other alley.’
‘Where the old woman was.’
‘Yes.’
‘But I like this better than the other alley!’
Alaa nodded, glumly, I thought.
‘I guessed as much.’
We walked back into the tourist area, crossed it and emerged on the other side. Somewhere or other I remembered I had read that archeologists had decided, perhaps in the sort of ‘fun’ which might be expected from them, that just as you can identify various eras of civilization by the type of pottery which turns up in an excavation, so now in England you can identify the Victorian Age by the blue-and-white willow-pattern fragments of china.
‘Alaa, if you ever undertake again the job of bear-leading the ignorant round this city, or if it comes to that any other city in Egypt I give you for free a piece of information which will interest them and what is more make them feel you have lifted one corner of the veil that protects the tourist from real life. Wherever you see the head of Nefertiti that is a tourist area. Where you don’t it isn’t. What is more you can suggest to the tourist that if he can find one of those heads that includes her diseased eye you – or perhaps I – will present a ten pound note to the next person who looks as if he could do with it.’
‘In the mean time,’ said Ann, ‘have neither of you noticed the real difference between the city and the tourist area? It’s staring you in the face.’
I looked round. Alaa looked round. It was obvious that the people weren’t tourists, but that was all.
‘I pass.’
‘How many Egyptian women did you see in the tourist area?’
It was true. We had seen just the one old woman. Otherwise there had not been a woman in sight. But here, not a hundred yards away there were more women than men. We really were gathering genuine information, though useless. We have, I said to myself, and then out loud to the others in a suitable jargon, ‘We have identified an interface.’
How about that for splendour of language, precision, penetration, abstraction, and objectivity? We stood on the street corner, laughing at the ingenuity and particularity of words which by happenstance can illuminate a situation and at the same time ensure it is given the precise degree of importance of which it is worthy. We were so happy with our interface! There the olive-skinned men lounged in western suits. Here, the wrapped women bargained, cheapened cloth, bought and sold, were busy – busier by far than those caryatid and leisurely figures we had seen so often pacing down to the river under a clay or flashing pot. Nor were their clothes as colourful, but brown and black or sometimes a dull green. Here and there, though, young or youngish women threaded their way through the crowd in a very slight modification of western dress. Their skirts would be calf-length. Their faces would be uncovered but void of visible make-up, even the eyes. They wore as a veil some filmy stuff that covered but did not hide their hair. It seemed a gesture in the direction of something.
I asked Alaa. He nodded.
‘That is true. It means they accept Islam but in an Egyptian way, which is very modified.’
We came then to a gate. I wouldn’t know it again if I heard its name. There was an elegant building just inside, disused now. This was a water station. In the days when Cairo had existed only inside these gates the building had been set up just inside the gate so that travellers entering there could stop and drink. It was another sign of the civilization which had had so much to offer Europe had it not been for those miserable clashes of interest and belief. There was a mosque at the gate and we took off our shoes and went in, to stare up at the inside of a magnificent tower where the pendentives of the squinches hung like tree moss in a tropical forest. We examined the gate itself but declined an invitation to climb on the wall.
Outside the gate we passed at once from medieval to modern with traffic to be dodged and crowds hurrying to catch buses [see plate]. We plunged then into a kind of high tunnel between wooden-walled houses where the ground floors were occupied by small, open shops. It was dark and uncrowded, casual, a good place to take the weight off one’s feet. Ann went into a shop where men were making cushion covers. I wandered off while she watched this handicraft. Near the end of the tunnel I found a blanket hung up outside a shop that did in fact have a rather grotesque version of the head of Nefertiti appliquéd to it. I persuaded myself that it was a sport, the exception that proved the rule, an example of cultural back-breeding.
We wanted a loo so Alaa found us what was appropriate in a third-class hotel. According to tourist lore it should have been unbearably dirty but it wasn’t. Or at least it was no dirtier than a third-class hotel anywhere else. The only drawback was that damned Egyptian utility music, now turned expertly into Musak, the curse of our electronic society. Moreover Egyptians like any noise as loud as possible and of course Musak lends itself to sheer exhibitionism in the matter of decibels. Still, quiet is the most modern of luxuries and you can’t get it except at vast expense. In Cairo you can get something approximating to quiet in a mosque; but what a world in which to listen to silence you have to take your boots off!
Alaa, shouting through the Musak, told us there was another interface which we had not experienced: the ultimate drabness of the concrete city, high-rise after high-rise, piled-up tenements where the people gained nothing. They lost the group-living which is so precious to Egyptians where each person finds his identity, even when he does not like it. I replied that by and by we would experience this interface for the security of knowing what we were talking about in Cairene terms though really it wasn’t necessary. Any big city would show the same.
There was another part of the city that I did not much want to see because I had done so years before and once was enough. The massive flooding of fellaheen into the city has swollen the population beyond the capacity even of the tenements to absorb it. So in their tens of thousands the migrating people had taken over and now lived in the vast Muslim cemetery, as if the squatters of our own country should set up houses in Highgate Cemetery. But when I put this point Alaa told me it was nowhere as bad as
I thought, though it was bad enough. I had thought, when I saw the children playing football among the tombs where their parents lived, that the decaying bodies must be part of a hideous township, but it was not so. Every vault was securely underground since the bodies of the faithful, whether it be king or commoner must be buried wrapped but uncoffined in the earth: ‘Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was….’
The buildings, therefore, which the squatters have turned into undesirable residences of a township, are those set up for the guardians; small houses for those who tended and prayed at the graves. I thought we could do without a second visit, or might drive through it swiftly by car.
Then after a little more wandering we went to a restaurant, the name of which is familiar to every expatriate though I have forgotten it myself. It appears to be constructed entirely of bamboo, if that is sufficient for purposes of identification. I chose a vegetable casserole, supposing this to be a dish without meat, toying meanwhile with what the Greeks would call ‘mezethes’, I don’t know the Arabic. When the casserole came it proved to be fifty per cent meat, which defeated me. Still, the place was cheerful and cosmopolitan even by Cairene standards.
I ought to add that Cairo resembles an Egyptian village in at least one way. It subscribes to the higher untidiness. I don’t mean litter (though there is much of that) and I don’t mean dirt. I mean that the narrow street that joins two broader ones is likely to be heaped with rubble as though a house has collapsed; and you may find on inquiry that that is precisely what has happened. You have to inquire, for the fall of a house, as in ancient Rome, is so common an occurrence that it passes unnoticed except by those personally interested. You come across heaps of wall-plaster, old boarding, a few tiles, cardboard boxes and anonymous bits of material which give the whole mass an aspect of dirt which it does not deserve. It isn’t dirt. It’s débris and that is different. For the dirt of Cairo is specific. It is a direct result of a defect unknown in the villages. They have no drainage system, Cairo has. It is so old and designed for so much smaller a city that it has collapsed. In any street you are likely enough to see the broad, wet patch which is nothing more or less than sewage.
Lacking a sewerage system, employment of a simple pit dug in porous soil keeps the untidy villages clean. Employment of an inadequate sewerage system keeps Cairo, untidy at the best of times, subject to explosive disasters of dirt. The stories – and let us hope they are apocryphal – are hideous.
Meditating on all this with the hardihood of a man who has spent something like a month in a boat with an inadequate loo, I toyed with my meat and ate what vegetables I could find.
And then it was time for bed.
16
We set off early next morning in Alaa’s car, which was better than Bassem’s but not much better. Nevertheless, we did not propose to misuse it so drastically. We were to make an expedition to the Fayoum, which is not quite an oasis but very nearly. On the map the Fayoum looks simple enough; a green bulge hanging on the side of the green snake which is the Nile Valley. There is a lake in the Fayoum, natural in origin perhaps but site of the vast reservoir which the early pharaohs had constructed there. It is possible that the Bahr Yusuf runs in the bed of an early river which cannot be counted as one of the Niles because the beds are different. It may have been a river that flowed into the Qattara Depression; or perhaps there was a river joining all the oases of the Western Desert and this was a tributary; so that in effect, Joseph’s Canal was an improvement on nature in the sense that a river was turned into a canal of controllable water. Even now, Bahr Yusuf leaves the main river more than a hundred miles south, between Mallawi and Minya and wanders along by the Western Desert to end in the Fayoum at Birket Qarun, the ancient reservoir. You can approach the Fayoum from the south and stay among green fields all the way; but we proposed to go north about, through the desert. That road goes from Giza, leads past the pyramids and strikes out into the howling wilderness. It is the Sahara and it looks flatter than the Eastern Desert because you are only able to see about one-thousandth of the way across, there being three thousand or more miles of rock and sand between where the pyramids are and the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. So to say whether it is flatter than the Eastern Desert or not is a bit of sheer local impertinence; but it looks flatter and as far as the Fayoum is concerned remains that way. So we drove then into this flat or flattish area of sun and sand, orangey white and brown, where power lines looped from pylon to pylon endlessly and the desert was marked or pock-marked all over with purposes of an ineluctable kind with here and there evidence more interpretable of men. There were disturbed sites on the horizon. Alaa said they were desert cities and intended to syphon off the surplus population from the green valley. But once again the government was at a stand because no one would go. Nor, I thought, would I! If ever there were places built for the damned these are they. It seemed so demonstrably fatuous to expect to settle there without compulsion or enormous bribery, that knowing now their propensity to shift whole populations without a by-your-leave, I had instant suspicions of the government. But if to force people into such a position would be criminal, to invite them there would be ridiculous. It was a puzzle.
Then we came to a camp among the pylons and it looked occupied.
‘What is it? A prison?’
‘I think,’ said Alaa carefully, ‘it is a camp for police.’
‘But there’s nothing out here to police!’
‘Training. Training special police. You know. For riots.’
‘Riot police?’
‘On the French pattern. All very civilized.’
We dropped the topic. Now a dark line appeared on the horizon. It was the descent to the shallow Fayoum and its green fields. Here and there in the desert were buildings and a set of ruins that might have been of archeological interest in a country not over supplied, as Egypt is, with archeological sites. Then there was a trickle of water running through the desert towards the Fayoum but interrupted before it got there. There were greenhouses. It was, we saw, the Institute for the Multiplication of Mango and Olive Trees. It consisted of four greenhouses and one small wooden office. The trickle of water ran close by it, one of the few trickles that arise in the desert. We stopped and went in, I walking behind my new brazen forehead. The place was run by a European, a Doctor of Science, a botanist. He had an Egyptian graduate assistant. They seemed surprised that anyone should be interested. They showed us around. We inspected thousands of seedlings, all rigidly controlled and all healthy. It was one of those modern establishments where, as they say, plants are not so much grown as manufactured. Here they were using the latest method of multiplication, ‘meristemming’, which relies on the apparently magical capacity of a single cell from the growing tip of a seedling to divide and grow into the complete organism in the right conditions. At one point, the individual cells have to ‘tumble’ in a solution of nutrient otherwise the whole process doesn’t work.
It was impressive and I said so.
The doctor spoke abruptly.
‘All the same. I’m leaving next week.’
‘You sound as if you mean “leaving for good”.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Who will take your place?’
‘Nobody. Him. My Egyptian assistant.’
The young graduate assistant spoke.
‘Egypt needs one million olive trees. There is ground everywhere on the edges of cultivation which is suitable for olives.’
The doctor nodded.
‘Yes. The land is there all right. Nothing simpler.’
‘And he will grow them? This young man? You?’
The assistant shook his head.
‘I do not think so.’
The doctor took up the explanation.
‘The science side is okay. It can be done. Could be done. And the minister – he’s all right. He wants me to have a free hand – wanted me to. He believes in this place. He wants Egypt to have her million olive trees – think of it! An ind
ustry as big and bigger, healthier, more valuable than sugar!’
‘Well, why not?’
‘You don’t know Egypt, do you?’
‘No.’
‘The bureaucracy. It’s … a pyramid, as old and as immovable. No matter what the minister says or tries to do, somewhere in the pyramid the order dies, is lost. I am quite simply giving up. After years and years, I am giving up and going home.’
‘What will happen to the institute?’
‘This young man will try to run it, God help him.’
The Egyptian assistant shook his head. He spoke in his careful English.