A Writer's World

by Jan Morris

  Egypt

  Rolling grandly northward out of the African interior, at last the noble River Nile splits into the several streams of its Egyptian delta, and creates a region so rich, so old, so deep-rooted in constancy, that there is something almost obscene to its fecundity. At the head of this country, at the point where the river divides, there stands the city of Cairo. It is the capital of Egypt, the largest city in Africa, the metropolis of the Arab world, the intellectual centre of Islam, and for more than a millennium it has been one of the great places of the earth.

  *

  Nothing ever quite dies in Cairo, for the air is marvellously clear and dry, and the temper of the country astringently preservative. If you stand upon the Mokattam Hills, the bare-back ridge that commands the place, you can see the pyramids of Giza upon its outskirts. From here they look faintly pink and translucent, like alabaster pyramids. They stand upon the very edge of the desert, where the sands are abruptly disciplined by the passage of the river, and they look fearfully old, terribly mysterious and rather frightening. Years ago the traveller would find these monuments lonely and brooding in the sand, with a Sphinx to keep them company and an attendant priesthood of unscrupulous dragomen. Today the city has expanded upstream, and digested a little irrigated desert too, until a line of villas, night clubs, hotels and golf courses links the capital with the Pharaohs, and the pyramids have acquired a distinctly suburban flavour. They are to Cairo what the Tivoli Gardens are, perhaps, to Copenhagen.

  Another layer of the city’s life is darkly medieval, straight-descended from the times when the Arab conquerors, storming in from their Eastern deserts, seized Egypt in the name of Islam. Look westward from your eyrie on the hill, and you will see a mottled section of the city, brownish and confused, from which there seems to exude (if you are of an imaginative turn) a vapour of age, spice and squalor. This is the Cairo of the Middle Ages. A forest of incomparable minarets springs out of the crumbled hodge-podge of its streets: one with a spiral staircase, one with a bulbous top, some single, some double, some like pepper-pots, some like hollyhocks, some elegantly simple, some assertively ornate, some phallic, some demure, rising from the huddle of houses around them like so many variegated airshafts from an underground chamber. There is said to be a mosque for every day of the Cairo year, and around them there lingers, miraculously pickled, the spirit of mediaeval Islam, just emerging from the chaos of animism and pagan superstition. Among these narrow lanes and tottering houses the Evil Eye is still potent, and a hundred taboos and incantations restrict the course of daily life.

  At one of the great gates in the city wall you may still see dirty scraps of linen and paper pinned there in supplication to some misty saint of prehistory, and when there is a festival at a mosque, and the squeaky swings are erected for the children, and an endless crowd clamours through the night around the tomb of the local holy man, then all the gallery of medieval characters emerges into the street in the lamplight – the half-mad dervish, tattered and daemonic; the savage emaciated beggar, with long nails and gleaming eyes; the circumciser, preparing his instruments delicately at a trestle table; the saintly imam, bland and courteous; the comfortable merchant, distributing sweetmeats and largesse; the clowns and peddlers and pickpockets, and many a small company of women, identically dressed in coarse-grained black, squatting in circles at street corners, gossiping loudly or idly rapping tambourines.

  Two or three minutes in a wild-driven bus will whisk you from this enclave to the boulevards of modern Cairo, the power-house of the Middle East. Westernized Cairo was born in 1798, when Napoleon arrived in Egypt with his team of savants, and it has developed since under a series of foreign influences and interferences. Today, truly independent at last, it is a city so sophisticated and well equipped that all the other Arab capitals pale into provincialism. The Republic of Egypt is the self-appointed leader of the Arab world, and there is no denying the dynamism and assurance of its capital. A company of tall new buildings has burgeoned beside the river: two great hotels, all glass plate and high tariffs; a tower with a revolving restaurant on top; vast new official offices, immaculate outside, raggle-taggle within; expensive apartment blocks and sprawling housing estates. A splendid new corniche runs along the waterfront, from one side of the city to the other. A spanking new bridge spans the river. It is not a stylish city, contemporary Cairo, and its sense of dignity comes almost entirely from its river and its past, but it has undeniable punch and power.

  *

  It is the very opposite of a backwater. It is a fermenting city, often bombastic, always on the move. Fielding tells the story of a blind man, asked to convey his impression of the colour red, who replied that it had always seemed to him ‘somewhat like the sound of a trumpet’. Cairo is not silvery: but something similarly blatant and penetrating is the image that should be summoned for you, when it leaps into the headlines again. Something is always happening here. It may be some great economist flying patiently in, or a statesman flying philosophically out, or a new démarche from Moscow, or a British economic mission, or a fulmination against Israel, or a reconciliation with Iraq, or the arrival of a Russian dam-builder, or a meeting of the Arab League – a threat, a parade, or simply the President of Egypt sweeping by, with a roar of his convoying motor cycles and a scream of sirens, in his big black bullet-proof car.

  It is a blazing place. It blazes with heat. It blazes with a confrontation of opposites, the clash of the modern and the traditional. Above all it blazes with the glare of contemporary history. Pause on a bridge in Cairo, amid the blare of the traffic and the shove of the citizenry, and you can almost hear the balance of the powers shifting about you, as the black, brown and yellow peoples come storming into their own. In Cairo is distilled the essence of the Afro-Asian risorgimento. It is fertile in ideas and bold ambitions – often undistinguished, sometimes positively childish, but always intensely vigorous, brassy, combative and opportunist. Its corporate tastes run to the belly-dancer, the dirty story, overeating, hearty badinage. It loves fireworks and big-bosomed singers. Its newspapers are clever. Its cartoonists are brilliantly mordant. Its radio programmes, laced with propaganda, shriek from every coffee-house. It is a city with an incipient fever, always swelling towards the moment when the sweat will break out at last.

  All the material amenities of Western life are available in Cairo, but it never feels remotely like a Western city. It welcomes you kindly, and guides you helpfully across the streets, and engages you in cordial conversation – only to do something distinctly queer at the end of the lane. Sometimes these things are frightening (when a mob streams down the back streets, or the great tanks rumble by). Sometimes they are very charming (when you share a bowl of beans with a jolly family in a park). Sometimes they are baffling (when you wake in the morning to learn of some totally unpredictable about-face of national policies). Sometimes they are marvellously encouraging (when some young upstart politician expresses a truth so clear, so clean, so free of inherited trammels that all our horny conjectures seem out of date). The particular forces of history and conflict that have moulded our Western societies have had little share in the making of Cairo. It is a city sui generis, sustained by all the hopes, strengths, weaknesses and grievances of an emergent world.

  It is not really a rich city, any more than Egypt is a rich country. It is, though, a capital of formidable character and natural power. It stands there at the head of its teeming delta like a watchtower at the gate of a lush garden, and around it the world seems to lie supine, so that when this old city stretches its arms, its elongated shadow spreads across Asia and Africa and along the Mediterranean shores like the image of a genie. It is unlike any other city on the face of the earth: just as the greatheart Nile, passing proud but placid through the hubbub of the capital, marches down to the sea with a sad deep majesty all its own, as of a man who has watched the cavalcade of life pass by, and wonders what all the fuss is about.

  Gamal Abdel Nasser’s revolutionary regime, altho
ugh I admired it in many ways, was frankly autocratic, and I often had occasion to write about its techniques, both in the city and in the countryside.

  If you leave your car for long in the village street of Bai-el-’Arab you are likely to find things scribbled in the dust on the windscreen: a funny face perhaps, a name or two, an obscure witticism, and ‘Long Live Gamal Abdel Nasser!’ There is probably not a village in the Egyptian Republic where you can escape the impact of al-Gumhuria – the regime led by Colonel Nasser which, in the eyes of its supporters, is now dragging Egypt by the heels from its misery. This does not mean that Bai-el-’Arab looks or feels very different because of the junta’s ruthless reforms. It remains largely inviolate, like a thousand others, all but untouched by the material progress of a century or more, still deep in poverty and ignorance.

  Its intricate jumble of mud huts lies off the main road in the delta country north of Cairo. From its dusty courtyards, across the fields, you may see the great white sails of the Nile boats sweeping by. Near by, blindfold oxen tramp endlessly round their water-wheels, and men with their clothes rolled up to the thigh pump water into irrigation canals with archaic instruments. The fields of cotton, wheat and beans are dazzlingly bright. The narrow roads are lined with trees. Only an occasional car passes by with an alarming blast of its horn.

  Both Muslims and Copts live in this small community, and it is easy to enter their houses, for they are friendly and hospitable. As you drink their coffee you may see for yourself how the fellah, the Egyptian peasant, lives: in squalor indescribable, sharing his mud floor with dogs, goats, chickens, turkeys and sometimes cattle, with a hard bed to lie on, and an open fire to cook by, and a litter of junk and tin cans, the whole enveloped in a pall of dust. Dirt and want dominate the lives of these people, but their society is not without grace. Their courtesy is instinctive, and here and there you will find traces of aesthetic yearnings; a door-knocker made curiously in the shape of a hand, some childish colourful wood-carving, an ornamental tray or a trinket of beaten brass.

  *

  A convoy of cars recently arrived in this village bringing a high dignitary of the regime, Major Magdi Hassanein, and a number of important visitors. They were welcomed with ceremony, for the purpose of the dignitary’s visit was to choose suitable fellahin from Bai-el-’Arab for resettlement in Liberation Province, an enormous agricultural area which is being reclaimed by irrigation in the western desert. A good house, new clothes and secure communal living were among the prizes for selection, and the response was ecstatic. In a field beside the road a marquee of large carpets was erected, and a band struck up a reedy melody, all third-tones and offbeats. Caparisoned Arab horses performed their celebrated dance – the haute école of rural Egypt. Slogans of enthusiasm were shouted, and the women shrilled the queer high-pitched whistle they reserve for weddings and such festivities.

  Liberation Province, like many other projects of the regime, is a courageous and imaginative conception, but if this government is in many ways reasonable, it is also despotic. The Press is muzzled; laws of profound effect are issued suddenly and unpredictably; foreign issues are shamelessly exploited for purely political ends; opponents of the regime are removed without ceremony. So at a whisper from the cheer-leaders at Bai-el-’Arab there is a roar of approval and a chorus of ‘Long Live Major Magdi Hassanein!’

  Inside the school some of the candidates for Liberation Province are lined up for visitors to see, like material for some new master race. ‘They must all be under 30, and literate, and of good appearance. See how intelligent they look! They will wear a fine new gabardine uniform in Liberation Province. They will be examined by psychologists to see if they are suitable. Come and see them taking their written examination.’

  There they sit at a wooden table, these new Egyptians, each in a spotless white galabiya, each fingering a newly sharpened pencil, each with a virgin question sheet in front of him. ‘They will start in a moment. It is a very stringent test. Watch them prepare for it! No, no, certainly they have not been chosen already. They are about to begin. Wait!’ But here the candidates rise as one man, with a look of ineffable piety upon their faces, and bawl a few more ‘Long Lives!’ before resuming their academic duties.

  *

  So despotism applies itself to the humanities, and it may be that an iron hand is necessary for the rebuilding of Egypt, together with regular infusions of compulsory pride and loyalty. On balance, despite the scepticism of the financiers, the odium of the intellectuals, the misgivings of the liberals, the fears of the Jewish minority and the growing alienation of the Arab world, al-Gumhuria seems to be good for Egypt. But who can foresee whether the thrusting young men of the junta, with their examinations and their big battalions, will be able to last the course; or whether they will be outlived, like so many before them, by the flies, the mud houses and the old tin cans?

  On the other side of Cairo is the oasis of Kharga, on the west bank of the Nile, a group of small desert villages which has been traditionally a place of exile. Nestorius, who was of the opinion that the Virgin Mary could not really be called the Mother of God, was banished there after propounding this revolutionary doctrine in the fifth century, and so, it is said, was Athanasius of the Creed. Under President Nasser it was a place of incarceration for political opponents, mostly members of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, one of several detention camps into which it was very easy for a man to disappear without warning or appeal. I went there for The Times hoping to meet some of the prisoners.

  It is the perfect place for exile. It lies in a wide declivity in the western desert, about 140 miles west of the Nile, overlooked by burning bluffs and surrounded on every side by waterless sands. So unfriendly is the desert, so brooding of appearance, that it feels as though at any moment the sands may reach some momentous decision, and engulf the whole oasis, palm groves, villages, detention camp and all. A rough road, once the route of slave caravans from the Sudan, runs away north-east to the Nile; but the easiest way to get to Kharga is to take a diesel rail-car from a place on the river called Nag Hamadi. This endearing little vehicle (the locals say its father was a steam train, its mother a bus) starts very early in the morning and arrives in the shallow bowl of the oasis just as the terrible heat of the sun is at its most blistering. The passenger thus disembarks feeling rather as though he too has been fostering schisms.

  I spent a couple of days learning something of Kharga’s curious character. It had a hushed, swathed quality to it, I thought, well befitting a collection of small villages of so bleak a position and so ominous a reputation. The sand of the desert, moving restlessly and irresistibly with the prevailing winds, was in fact marching upon the place inch by inch through the years. Some of the outlying settlements had already been swamped. Some had built great protective walls around themselves. In one small hamlet a single householder was left in possession, and he too was preparing to leave, for a brutal yellow sand-dune was poised above his shack. ‘The sand has its needs,’ he said philosophically. ‘We must allow the sand its rights.’ Everywhere there were broken walls, shattered houses and discredited barricades, all half-buried in the dunes.

  The detention camp was several miles away in the desert, and nobody seemed very keen to take me there, so I settled down in the main village of the oasis hoping to find some friendly guard or prisoner at large, but content enough to drink my coffee in the rambling main square of the place. Its manner was deadened but soothing; its people, mostly Berbers, listless but friendly. Many of the narrow streets were roofed with wood and earth, to dissuade the wild Beduin marauders of old from riding pell-mell down them on horseback. Along these shady paths the people moved with padded footsteps, carrying baskets decorated with odd little tufts of wool, and at night lanterns swung down side streets and over the open fronts of stores (with piles of beans, big glass pots of spices, and silent shopkeepers lounging against shutters). Hardly a woman was to be seen in this town of rigid tradition; only one cringing soul, embalme
d in black, did I meet scurrying from the square in the shadow of a wall. The weather was excessively hot, and the hours of Kharga passed heavily.

  On market day, though, the place was transformed, and then I found a trail to my prisoners. The main street was lined with butchers’ stalls, piled high with white fatty camel-meat which the butchers, after a few brusque strokes with the chopper, tore between their bloody hands with a noise of rending flesh and muscles. Piles of this horrible stuff, I noticed, were being loaded into a small truck, guarded by a couple of policemen, and when I asked where it was going they said: ‘To the prisoners.’ Oho, I said, might I come too? Certainly not, they said. They were political prisoners, and obviously no foreigner could talk to them – what would the Governor say? However, somebody added with the suspicion of a wink, I might be interested instead to visit the hospital of Kharga, just over there, turn right at the square, and very interesting I would find it. So I went along that morning, and a young and agreeable doctor showed me round the place. In one ward we found a number of grumpy and scrofulous patients lying on palliasses on the floor. ‘What’s this?’ said I. ‘Not enough beds, then?’ ‘Oh, we have enough normally,’ said the doctor casually, ‘but just at the moment we’ve got a ward full of prisoners from the camp. Care to meet them?’

  And there they were, those successors of Athanasius, propounders of very different faiths: some of them communists, some Muslim Brethren. They looked a murderous lot, all the more sinister because of the bandages and plasters which covered their eyes or supported their limbs. We talked of this and that, of the past and the future, of the conditions of their detention and their hopes of release. Every morning, I learnt, they were given a lecture of indoctrination by a representative of the regime, but something in their eyes told me they were far from brainwashed. Two grey-haired police guards watched us from the veranda as we talked; and now and then a savage old reprobate lying on a bed in the corner intervened with some caustic witticism, delivered in the most cultured of English accents and with the bite of an educated and incisive mind.