Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  Egyptians share the British love of irony: a junior and impoverished civil servant sitting in a café will often be addressed as ‘ya ustaaz’, ‘oh professor’. Taxi-drivers might call each other ‘muhandis’ (‘engineer’) and almost everyone is called ‘ya rayyis’ (‘oh President’). We found that many Egyptians had a strong sense of fatalism, with a popular expression being ‘If it is written upon the forehead then the eyes must see it.’ The answer to almost any problem was ‘ma aleysh’ – ‘it doesn’t matter’ – which could be maddening when the person saying it had just trodden on your toe. Once, when we were invited to a rooftop wedding party in the Cairo slum of Bulaq, the host welcomed us with the customary greeting ‘Nawwartina!’, meaning ‘Your presence has lit us up.’ Hours later, at the precise moment we left the party, there was an unexpected power cut, plunging the festivities into darkness. The Egyptians found this hysterical.

  Alexandria had a wonderful, open, maritime feel to it. Running along the length of the city was the corniche, a great sweeping thoroughfare that hugged the Mediterranean shore, flanked by a broad pavement and low harbour wall. The Nobel prize-winning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz wrote evocatively about the corniche in his 1960s book Miramar: he described his main character roaring along it at night in an open-topped sports car, feeling the wind in his hair and the city as his. Now fishermen sat all day in the balmy September heat, casting their lines into the clear water of the bay. Men in aprons wheeled brightly painted trolleys up and down, selling strange yellow beans soaked in brine called termees, wrapped in cones of newspaper. They were eaten by nibbling the top of the bean then squeezing it out of its skin into your mouth with thumb and forefinger, one of many Egyptian skills we had yet to perfect. Just before sunset young Alexandrians would come out in their best clothes to eat ice cream and eye each other up. Peregrine and I, as rare Europeans, would inevitably attract a good deal of attention from some of the girls, especially as Peregrine had got a local tailor to run him up a pair of white Egyptian naval officer’s trousers. We would notice girls walking past us in pairs, flashing us long looks, sometimes whispering a silky ‘Good evening, how are you?’ But that was as far as things went. Alexandria may have had a corniche, but this was not Rio.

  This city had a reputation for being a lot more liberated than Cairo, partly due to the cosmopolitan mix of Greeks, Italians and Jews who had settled here decades ago. But most of them left after the 1967 war and longtime residents told us that Alexandria was rapidly becoming like every other overcrowded Egyptian city. Certainly there was no sign of bikinis on the public beaches. In scenes repeated all over the Arab world, whole families would take to the water, the women completely clothed. Mothers veiled in headscarves and wearing several layers of all-enveloping garments would wade stolidly into the waves, holding on to their struggling children, while the men of the family always seemed to get away with the most contour-hugging swimming trunks to go with their swaying neck medallions. Once, with Peppy and Rosemary, who were dressed in conservative one-piece bathing suits, we made the mistake of spreading our towels too close to the city centre and almost immediately two young gigolos descended on us, their eyes feasting on the girls’ cleavages. The girls tried hard to be polite without encouraging them, and when eventually they left one of them whispered a parting shot to Rosemary: ‘Later I make love to you, Miss.’

  Yet the very next day we experienced the full warmth of selfless Egyptian hospitality. After a day’s swimming off the white sand beach at Agami, we were invited into the Police Naval Club by Muhammad, a genial police sergeant in white duck khaki. He spread out a rush mat for the girls to sit on, keeping a respectful distance, then fetched us bread and goat’s cheese wrapped in police documents. He even dispatched two policemen to fetch us ice-cold bottles of Fanta and offered us police transport back into Alexandria if we wanted. Muhammad had no ulterior motive other than to see us enjoy ourselves in his country and for us to think well of Egyptians, which we did.

  No sooner had we rushed back to Cairo for the start of term and the first of our lectures than we were told they were postponed for a week. Some of my fellow students were clearly disappointed. The Couch People, now reduced to the two quietest and cleverest girls in the class, Janet and Jane, made a bee line for the nearest library. Another shy pair, Julia and Yolanda, had by now been corrupted by Peregrine’s and my disdain for homework and were like birds released from a cage. Together, the four of us lost no time in boarding an already overcrowded bus for the long journey south along the Red Sea coast to Hurghada, then a little-known fishing village but one popular with backpackers. South of Suez the road became rutted and potholed, requiring all the driver’s skill as he threw the bus around the bends. We passed the beach at Ain Sukhna, nicknamed ‘Mine Sukhna’ on account of the number of landmines left over from the 1973 Arab–Israeli war. A story doing the rounds in Cairo had it that an American family had chosen a fatal spot to pitch their parasol on the beach, with the father driving the spike of the parasol straight on to a buried mine. It was a long journey and as the afternoon sun sank lower it was easy to see how the Red Sea had got its name, from the reflected colour of the great sandstone crags that rose up inland.

  On the bus we met two young holidaying Egyptians who were to become close friends all year. Haitham was a large jovial police cadet, a self-declared arm-wrestling champion and spear-fishing enthusiast. Wael’s father was some top general and although he did not appear to have any profession himself he was never short of money, jokes and enthusiasm for adventure. While we checked into a guesthouse they put up a tent, but the next day we hired a boat to stay out overnight on the Red Sea. I knew nothing about sailing, nor did the girls, but Peregrine and the Egyptians seemed to and soon we were pulling away from the coastline, moving into deeper water where a procession of huge black manta rays flapped slowly past beneath the boat. Terns hovered and screamed above the mast and skeins of flying fish flew across the shallow waves. After a few hours we moored up at a completely barren and uninhabited island – the classic desert island, in fact. If we had not brought boxes of flat Egyptian bread, fresh water, fruit and other supplies we might have had to turn our hand to some Ray Mears survival techniques, but Haitham and Wael were soon casting lines into the sea and that night we feasted on fresh fish cooked in oil with rice and mint tea. Later we lay on our backs on deck, gazing up at one shooting star after another, lulled to sleep by the warm breeze blowing in from the Sinai, the gentle rolling motion of the boat at anchor and the soft slapping of the waves against her hull. In such a perfect place even Haitham’s snoring was forgiven.

  Back in Cairo, the main aim was to learn to speak colloquial Egyptian Arabic. This was really what I had taken this whole degree course for; I wanted more than anything to converse with Arabs in their own language. But some of the students who had excelled at the more academic work back in Exeter found Cairo initially overwhelming and disorienting. This was, after all, the biggest city in Africa and the Middle East, a teeming, overcrowded, polluted metropolis of over ten million people. In the first week one girl burst into tears when a taxi-driver leered at her, another hit a young man full in the face when he tried to touch her breasts. Some people had to be talked out of jacking it in and going home. The course itself was anything but demanding. The previous year the students had been sent up to Alexandria and given so much homework they saw nothing of Egyptian life. There had been complaints, no doubt exacerbated by the country’s president getting assassinated two months into the course. So we were given an easy ride: just two hours of lectures a day, four days a week, with no homework and no exams. All we had to do was stroll down to a dusty schoolhouse where our lecturers came to teach us from two of Cairo’s best-known universities, Ain Shams and the American University in Cairo, known as the AUC.

  By the time lectures began four of us had found a landlady from Egypt’s 10 per cent minority of Coptic Christians. Not being Muslim, she had no religious scruples about lending out her flat to a m
ixed group of male and female students, just as long as we paid the rent on time. Julia and Yolanda shared one bedroom, I shared the other with Peregrine. Naively, he and I decided we should find ourselves Egyptian girlfriends; we had no idea how we were going to go about this but it gave us plenty to talk about as we sat in cafés admiring the scenery. In this part of Cairo, girls were used to seeing Westerners and our burgeoning knowledge of Arabic soon melted the ice when we met them in shops and patisseries. Yet even here, in the so-called ‘diplomatic quarter’, there was an unmistakable stigma attached to being seen getting too close to a foreigner. In this predominantly Islamic society the general assumption was that if an Egyptian girl dated a Westerner then she must be sleeping with him, and only marriage to him could save her honour. On the few occasions that I managed to secure a date, the girl in question would turn up chaperoned by her mother, who would treat me politely but with understandable suspicion. Why on earth was her daughter wasting time with this Christian ‘khawaaga’ (foreigner) when she should be saving her attentions for a good Egyptian fiancé, chosen by her family?

  In our student flat we revelled in the enormous balcony that overlooked the Chinese embassy, at which we occasionally threw paper darts that never landed anywhere near it. But we had no air-conditioning and the temperature often stayed up in the thirties all through the night, leaving us gasping for air on sweat-soaked sheets. We soon decided there must be some sort of pact going on in the insect community. At night the mosquitoes would dive-bomb us constantly, forcing us to hide under the covers until we could stand the heat no longer. Then at dawn, as if changing shifts, the mosquitoes would stop work and hand over to the flies. Egyptian flies were a novel experience for us all: they were small and silent but they were oblivious to the wave of a hand. With no warning they would settle on our eyelids, lips or nostrils and we would virtually have to swat them to move them on. On later trips into rural villages we saw children who had clearly given up trying to wave them off, with moving black clusters around their eyes and nostrils. We also encountered men with glaucoma, a fly-borne disease that turns the eyes grey and sightless. It is easily treatable, but not out there in the sticks.

  In Cairo every apartment block has a bawwab, a concierge. Usually a proud Nubian from the south of Egypt, he knows everybody in the building and everything that is going on. I quickly got on the right side of Ahmed in our block by learning a handful of words in Nubian, a separate language from Arabic, but Peregrine ran into a misunderstanding almost immediately. He put his shoes outside our door in the hope that Ahmed would polish them for a small tip. Ahmed duly took them away, but after two days had still not returned them. Peregrine went downstairs to investigate, only to find Ahmed happily wearing them. The bawwab’s smile faded a few days later, however, when we held our first party on the landlady’s enormous roof terrace. Several of our new-found Egyptian friends had too much to drink and Ahmed scolded us the next day with the words: ‘Too much noise last night. Water – and other liquids – came crashing down from your balcony.’

  Egypt was an incredibly cheap place to live, ideally suited for impoverished students. Our rent was just fifteen pounds a week each and our staple food was the ta’miya sandwich, a round wedge of pitta bread stuffed with deep-fried falafel (ground chickpeas), salad and sesame-seed sauce. It cost about two pence. The important thing was to remember to say ‘without salad, please’, as we never knew what microscopic beasties lurked within. Sometimes, of course, we forgot and would spend the next twenty-four hours lying on our beds feeling wretched, although Peregrine offered another explanation: ‘I’m feeling quite sick tonight,’ he’d say. ‘I think it must be the lack of alcohol.’ But by 1982 Cairo tap water was so heavily chlorinated you could drink it happily if you could stand the taste of swimming pool. To get round this we bought jugs of the fresh fruit juice at which Egypt excels; in the autumn it would be mangoes, then there would be strawberries, guavas and bananas. Our local juice-vendor would see me coming down the street and he would set about preparing my favourite cocktail with a huge smile. Again, a mouth-watering glass of chilled mango juice cost all of five pence. Egyptians often tried to make us accept drinks for free as a reward for speaking Arabic, and for them it would turn into a battle of honour to make us accept their hospitality when we of all people could afford to pay.

  One of the things we most enjoyed doing was riding up at the Pyramids. There were few things better than getting up to Giza early in the morning before the tourist coaches arrived. We would check in at our favourite stables, saddle up and canter across the sand, up over the crest of a dune to watch the sun’s rays lighting up the three pyramids against a sky of pure pale blue. Because the Pyramids of Giza are built on a slight plateau they overlook the whole of Cairo. On the one hand, this gives you fresh air and a great view over the nearby date palms to a million rooftops, then all the way to the Citadel and the Muqattam hills. On the other hand, one look at the brown layer of smog that hangs over the city tells you that what you are breathing every day is probably not what the doctor ordered.

  Not long after our arrival in Cairo, Peregrine and I joined a group of diplomats from the British Embassy for a gallop over the sands. After skirting the Pyramids our horses sensed we were heading back towards the stables and nothing I could do would either slow my horse down or get it to change course. We entered a narrow track beside a cemetery and I rounded a bend to see a riderless horse galloping straight at us. There was just time to swerve abruptly and I was thrown clear, landing unharmed with a bump on the sand. As I was picking myself up and dusting off the sand, I was introduced to one of the better horsemen in our party, a young First Secretary (a middle rank in the Foreign Office) who was said to be going places fast. He was Sherard Cowper-Coles, the man who was to save my life twenty-two years later in Riyadh with his swift and decisive action there as ambassador in June 2004.

  Meanwhile, Peregrine had been keeping quiet about his impending twenty-first birthday, confiding it only in me for some obscure reason. We decided to celebrate it at the Sahara City nightclub up near the Pyramids, a sprawling encampment of brightly coloured tents that has long since been dismantled. The place stayed open until three in the morning and as soon as the waiters learned it was Peregrine’s birthday they ushered us to prime seats near the stage usually reserved for big-spending Egyptian guests. After the acrobatics and the singing came the pièce de résistance: Al-Raqs Al-Sharqi or ‘Oriental dance’, otherwise known as belly dancing. Neither of us had ever seen this before and we were mesmerized. A full Arab orchestra took their seats, warming up with the melancholy half-tones so typical of Arab music. There followed a pause of no more than a second, then the drums began, the musicians strumming the taut goat-skins of their earthenware tabla drums with their thumbs and fingers, holding the drums sideways across their knees and beating out an exhilarating rhythm. With all eyes now on the stage, the dancer burst through a parted curtain to huge applause, twirling around with her skirts swirling after her. Peregrine and I exchanged glances. Her midriff was encased in a sort of curious, see-through gauze that looked as if it had been lifted from a hospital A&E department. We were told that Egypt’s first president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had issued a decree in the 1950s ordering the skin to be covered and this netting was the most that dancers could get away with. So what was the point of belly dancing, we thought, if you could not see the belly? But the dancer’s skill soon became apparent as she sidestepped nimbly across the stage, arching her body backwards and from side to side, then curling her arms above her head with fingers crooked, allowing her black tresses to tumble down the top of her back. As the drumming slowed to a deliberate, rhythmic beat, she placed her hands on her hips and expertly gyrated her belly in time to the music, catching men’s eyes in the audience as if to say ‘Yes, I know exactly what you are thinking.’ The few women in the tent looked distinctly uncomfortable but the men wore expressions of glazed satisfaction. This was what they had come to see, and now we too could apprecia
te what all the fuss was about. Twenty years later, when I became the BBC’s Middle East Correspondent in Cairo, I went on one of the more enjoyable assignments of my career, covering the first international belly-dancing contest to be held in Cairo. Despite the enthusiasm and dedication of the various Japanese, American and German contestants I interviewed, nothing could match the passion and drama of that first performance we watched in Giza as impressionable twenty-one-year-olds.

  It was all very well carousing into the small hours at Sahara City, but our student grants were not going to last the year if we went on like this. So to make a bit of money I decided to try my hand at teaching in the mornings before our lectures started, enrolling on the staff of the imperiously named Sadat Academy for Management Sciences. As far as I could tell, they just taught English, so that was what I offered, despite having no qualifications or training whatsoever. The pay was generous for Egypt: £5.50 an hour, tax-free. But I was soon to discover that teaching English to Egyptian undergraduates, some of whom were older than I was, was no pushover.

  Two of them were particularly bright and particularly lazy. In a college for the children of the privileged elite they reckoned their futures were assured. Mustafa was the son of a famous general, a hero of the Sinai tank battles, Hamdi the son of a politician. Their progression into the ranks of the political or commercial über-class seemed inevitable. At first I politely refused their invitations to dinner, not wishing to be accused of favouritism in a town that can keep no secrets. Eventually I went along, taking Yolanda and Julia along with me. Mustafa, our host, gave us an exaggerated welcome then ran back into the smoking kitchen. He had burned the dinner to a crisp. ‘Mustafa, he can cook,’ said Hamdi, ‘but it is nothing like foods.’ While we waited for a takeaway to arrive we sat out on his crumbling balcony, listening to the two boys trading slang.