Dark Star Safari

2. The Mother of the World

The weather forecast printed in a box in the Cairo newspaper was Dust, on the cold day in February that I arrived, a day of gritty wind and dust-browned sky. The weather forecast for the next day was the same — no temperature prediction, nothing about sunshine or clouds or rain; just the one word, Dust. It was the sort of weather report you might expect on the planet Mars. Nevertheless, Cairo (population 16 million), a city of bad air and hideous traffic, was made habitable, even pleasant, by its genial populace and its big placid river, brown under a brown sky.

Tourists have been visiting Egypt for 2500 years — Herodotus (roughly 480–420 BC) was the first methodical sightseer. He was fascinated by Egyptian geography and ruins — and was also collecting information for his History, of which the whole of Volume Two is Egyptiana. Herodotus traveled as far as the First Cataract, that is Aswan. Later Greeks and Romans were tourists in Egypt, raiding tombs, stealing whatever they could carry, and leaving graffiti which is still visible today. The grander structures were also pilfered and for two thousand years such things — obelisks mainly — were dragged away and set up elsewhere and goggled at. Though obelisks were sacred to the sun god, no one had any idea of their meaning. The Egyptians called them tekhenu; the Greeks named them obeliskos, because they looked like small spits for kebabs.

The first stolen obelisk was set up in Rome in 10 BC, and a dozen more followed. Felix Fabri of Ulm, a German friar, went to Egypt in 1480, taking notes throughout his trip. An obelisk he sketched in Alexandria now stands in New York’s Central Park. In the same spirit of plunder and trophy hunting, Mussolini looted a fourth-century obelisk from Ethiopia, the Obelisk of Axum. This treasure now stands in front of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, near Caracalla. Because the scattered wars in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made travel difficult, Egypt was regarded as a safe and colorful destination. Egypt stood for the Orient, for the exotic, for sensuality and paganism. Egyptology did not start in earnest until the early nineteenth century, when the Rosetta stone was deciphered and at last the ruins disclosed the secrets of their script. This discovery unleashed a rage for Egyptiana and travelers, writers and painters flocked to the Nile Valley in search of the exotic.

Even then, Egyptian ruins had been ruins for thousands of years. The Egyptians themselves had never left and, though Arabized and Islamized, and nominally conquered by the French, the British, the Turks, their homeland the battleground of European wars, Egyptians went on farming, fishing, and living at the edges of their broken temples and tombs. They were blessed with the Nile. The ruins they regarded as a sort of quarry, a great stockpile of building materials to cannibalize for new houses and walls. But foreign soldiers had done the same, customarily garrisoning themselves in the ancient shrines — any temple unsuitable for French or British cavalrymen was commandeered for their animals.

Throughout, as Egypt was looted and trampled and gaped at, Egyptians remained Egyptian. In pharaonic times Egyptians made a habit of repelling, or subverting or enslaving anyone who ventured into their kingdom. But ever since Herodotus they have been welcoming foreigners, with a mixture of banter, hearty browbeating, teasing humor, effusiveness, and the sort of insincere familiarity I associate with people trying to become intimate enough with me to pick my pocket.

‘Meesta, meesta! My fren,’ what country you come from? America Number One! My fren’, you come with me … my house. You come. Meesta!’

In Cairo, there was a thin line between pestering and hospitality — indeed, they often amounted to the same thing, and although there were plenty of beggars there was little thievery. Egyptians seemed amazingly agreeable. You think they have been briefed to make jokes, by some government bureau but no, they are just hungry, desperation making them genial and innovative. It was obvious they were hoping to make a buck but at least they had the grace to do it with a smile.

‘You don’t speak Arabic today,’ Amir the cab driver said, ‘but you speak Arabic very good tomorrow.’

Everyone in this vast much-visited city had the patter. Amir then taught me the Arabic for please, thank you and sorry. I already knew inshallah, which means ‘God willing.’

‘Now teach me “No, thank you — I have no need.” ’

Amir did so, and before he dropped me he insisted that I hire him the next day.

‘No, thank you — I have no need,’ I said in Arabic.

He laughed but of course kept pestering.

‘My name Guda. Like the Dutch cheese,’ the cab driver said. ‘This is not limousine — not cost a hundred pounds. Just car, black and white taxi only. But clean. Fast. Handsome driver.’

And he spent the entire ride nagging me to hire him for the whole day. That was the theme in Cairo. Once someone had your attention they didn’t want to let go, for if they did you would slip away, forcing them to spend the day prowling for a fare. Business was terrible. But I saw this patter as another age-old artifact, like the plaster sphinxes and the chess sets and the camel saddles they sold to the tourists, the patter was another home-made curio, polished over the centuries.

Nearer the ruins and the pyramids and the sights they just gabbled, aiming to nail you, and they were expert, like Mohammed Kaburia, chubby, greasy-faced, wearing a made-in-China nylon jacket. It was sunset in Gizeh. I wanted to see the pyramids and the Sphinx in this weird dusty light.

‘Only twenty for the horse — you come, my fren’. You see Safinkees! I take you into a pyramid and you see the rooms and touch the moomiya.’

I fished for my twenty Egyptian pounds. We mounted the horses and were off, trotting through garbage beside ancient walls.

‘You pay later. Hey, how many wives you got? I got four — two Egyptian, two English. I keep them very busy!’

‘Of course.’

‘You are a gentleman. I can see in your face.’

‘Twenty pounds, right?’

‘No, no — twenty American dollars. See Safinkees. You touch the moomiya! My fren’ he let me. He know me. Maybe you buy picture. Papyrus. Mother-of-pearl box.’

‘You said twenty pounds.’

‘I say “twenty.” You hear me say “twenty”? Use Visa card!’ He leaned over and whipped my pony. ‘Make the horse gallop. I see you next week. Ha!’

He took out a mobile phone and stabbed the buttons with his stubby fingers and shouted into it and then, ‘This my phone. “Hello, hello!” Cost 2000. Horse is 5000. Arabian is 20,000 — maybe 30,000. Money! You give me baksheesh.’

‘Money, money.’

‘America — best country! America money — best money!’

We were still jogging along, up one muddy littered alley, down another, as dusk fell, as men in gowns and women in robes walked in a stately way, in spite of the puddles, and children shrieked at me on my pony.

‘You give me America money. I take you inside pyramid!’

‘Money, money, money, money. Please stop saying money.’

Mohammed howled into his mobile phone and dug his heels into his horse’s belly and slapped the reins against his horse’s flanks. And he led me past the wall, which was the perimeter of the enclosure of the Gizeh pyramids, a tumbledown neighborhood of squatters and slum-dwellers attached to the wall. In Egypt every wall attracts dumpers, litterers, shitters and pissers, dogs and cats, and the noisiest children.

Mohammed was manic in his banter: ‘America — strong country. Number one country. My fren,’ baksheesh! You buy papyrus … You touch moomiya … You take picture in pyramid … See Safinkees.’

Yakkety-yak, all for money.

And yet, in spite of his banter and his pestering and his deceits, the jaunt on horseback that early evening in Gizeh was gorgeous. Trotting through the back alleys that were stinking with garbage and litter in the mud, the basins of dirty water and buckets of garbage and chamber pots that were being thrown from upper balconies, with a squawk that might have meant ‘gardy loo.’ The smoke from the fires lit in braziers, the stink of the pissed-on walls, the graffiti, the dust piles, the brick shards, the baked mud, the neighborhood so decrepit and worn, so pulverized, it looked as though it had been made out of wholewheat flour and baked five thousand years ago and was now turning back into little crumbs. And yet I loved riding through the crepuscular dusk, parting the air that was penetrated with food smells and smoke and garbage, jogging through the puddles, with the muezzin howling, the dogs barking, the children chasing my sorry pony — the lovely evening sky showing through the dust cloud and striped bright yellow and cobalt blue. And then the pyramid, smaller than I had expected, so brown and corrugated and geometric it looked like giant origami folded from cardboard.

‘Safinkees,’ he said and waved his arms.

The Greek word ‘sphinx’ is unpronounceable to Egyptians, and also inaccurate — the fanciful Greeks associated it with their own mythical creature, appropriated it, much as the Arabs have done.

‘What do you call it?’ I asked.

‘His name Abu-el-Houl,’ Mohammed said.

But that is no more than an Arab nickname meaning the Father of Terror. The enigmatic creature is Ra-Herakhti, manifestation of the sun rising, with a lion’s body and the facial features of Khafre, who was King of Egypt at the time of its construction, 4500 years ago. Sesheb ankh or ‘living image’ is the ancient Egyptian term for such a statue.

Holding on to my saddle I peered into the dusk at the worn down and noseless face resting on crumbly forepaws, like a sand sculpture that had been rained on.

Because the Sphinx is the embodiment of dawn, it faces east, and so the sun was setting in the dust cloud directly behind it. You would not know that from some of the paintings that have been done of it. But Egyptian ruins are so atmospheric they tend to inspire the watcher into blurring reality, the over-excited traveler into seeing much more than is there. Hardly a painting depicts the Sphinx as it is, and even the stickler for Middle Eastern detail, David Roberts, gives it a yearning expression and, for effect, makes it face the wrong way. Earlier painters gave it thick lips and big staring eyes, the painter-traveler Vivant Denon gave it a Negroid face and a wondering gaze.

‘No drawing that I have seen conveys a proper idea of it,’ Flaubert wrote, which is probably true. But when he rode out to it in 1849 he repeated the name the Arabs had told him, Abu el-Houl, the Father of Terror, and noted in his diary, ‘We stop before the Sphinx; it fixes us with a terrifying stare.’ But he also said it seemed to him dog-like, ‘pug-nosed and tattered,’ and Flaubert’s friend Maxime Du Camp claimed that it looked ‘like an enormous mushroom when viewed from behind.’ The Sphinx was the one sight on his Grand Tour that Mark Twain did not mock. The pages in The Innocents Abroad that concern the Sphinx are unique in that breezy book and rare in Twain’s work for his descriptive flights, as he rhapsodizes, even gushes, studying the thing. ‘So sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient … It was MEMORY-RETROSPECTION wrought into visible tangible form … [and] … reveals to one something of what he shall feel when he shall stand in the presence of God.’

This is travelers’ invention — I saw it, you didn’t, therefore I am licensed to exaggerate. Twain tells us how he had longed to see the Sphinx, but he at least had seen a photo of it. Flaubert had seen drawings of the Sphinx but never a photograph — there were none. In fact, Maxime Du Camp claimed to be the first to take a picture of it. In his life of Flaubert, Geoffrey Wall noted that these men were probably the last Europeans to see it in this way, afresh. But photography’s spoiling the visual pleasure of places is nothing compared to the way the Internet and our age of information have destroyed the pleasure of discovery in travel.

Invention in travel accords with Jorge Luis Borges’s view, floated beautifully through his poem ‘Happiness’ (La Dicha), that in our encounters with the world, ‘everything happens for the first time.’ Just as ‘whoever embraces a woman is Adam,’ and ‘whoever lights a match in the dark is inventing fire,’ anyone’s first view of the Sphinx sees it new: ‘In the desert I saw the young Sphinx, which has just been sculpted … Everything happens for the first time but in a way that is eternal.’

Ruins especially lend themselves to invention; because they are incomplete, we finish them in our imagination. And although later that evening I ran into a beaky-faced man, in wilting clothes, thirtyish, fogeyish, frumpish, one of those pale bosomy academics you could easily mistake for a senile old woman, who waved his art history degree at me and said with slushy pedantry, ‘The Sphinx is vastly overrated,’ the Sphinx is a perfect object to turn into something of your very own, something grand, or in Nigel’s case, something negligible.

Mohammed said, ‘You give me money. I show you moomiya. You touch!’

‘Please stop saying money.’

He laughed, he gabbled, I was not listening, I didn’t really care, I was laughing myself. I felt a great happiness — the horse, the light, the decay, the ancient shapes, the children’s laughter — and it became one of the epiphanies of my traveling life.

I dismounted and leading my horse closer to the Sphinx I was approached by a woman who asked, using gestures, if I would help her lift a heavy plastic basket. I heaved it — but it was heavy, perhaps forty pounds — Mohammed was laughing at me from where he sat on his horse — and she curtsied while I placed the big basket on to her noggin. She could not hoist it alone but she easily carried it on her head.

Riding back to the stables, Mohammed began shouting ahead of me, louder than before.

‘Look! Look! See that man!’

The man was standing by a wall, a young man in a white robe, a tangle of turban on his head.

‘He not from Egypt! He from Sudan! I know, I know — because his face! He from there.’

Mohammed waved his arm, indicating far away — southerly, in a Sudanese direction.

‘Black!’ he howled, for blackness was such a novelty in Lower Egypt; and he galloped onward. ‘Black!’

Traveling south of Egypt I would be entering the Sudan. I did not have a Sudanese visa and for Americans such visas were hard to come by. The reason was understandable. On the pretext that Sudan was making anti-American bombs (and some people felt to correct the negative image created by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, to look decisive and presidential, even if it meant risking lives and flattening foreign real estate), President Clinton ordered air strikes against the Sudan. He succeeded in destroying a pharmaceutical factory outside of Khartoum in August 1998. This bomb crater would be on my itinerary, for after the bombs were dropped no one in the United States took much interest. Though we become hysterical at the thought that someone might bomb us, bombs that we explode elsewhere, in little countries far away, are just theater, of little consequence, another public performance of our White House, the event factory.

‘I would like to see the bomb site,’ I was telling the Sudanese ambassador, Salih Mashamoun, in his office in Cairo. He was a pleasant, well-educated man who had been ambassador to Vietnam. He was Nubian, he said, from northern Sudan, and raised speaking Nubian.

‘Is Nubian anything like Arabic?’

‘Nubian has no connection with Arabic. It is the true pharaonic tongue.’

He said that he regarded Nubians as the genuine Egyptians and that colonialists had confused the issue by imposing a frontier that divided Egypt and the Sudan. Talking with him made me want to go to Nubia.

‘There, inshallah, you will find pyramids and ruins that are greater than Egyptian. Nubia is the source of Egyptian culture. You must see Dongola and Meroe. The upper Nile. The Nubian tombs.’

But first I needed a visa. I made repeated visits to the Sudanese Embassy. The doorman got to know me, and after three visits he simply waved me through the gate and I went unaccompanied upstairs to the ambassador’s office, and when I put my head through the door he beckoned me in and urged me to sit and talk and offered me tea and told me that Khartoum had not responded to my visa application.

‘But perhaps, inshallah, it will be given.’

‘What shall I do?’

‘You can reapply. Or see Mr Qurashi. He is consul.’

Mr Qurashi Saleh Ahmed was thin, smirking, officious, always waving a cigarette, with a male secretary who constantly shouted at him. Mr Qurashi blew smoke at him and did not respond.

‘No fax from Khartoum.’

‘Maybe it will come tomorrow.’

‘Inshallah.’

It was helpful at this early stage of my trip to be reminded of the conflicting meanings of inshallah, which are: ‘We hope’ and ‘Don’t count on it.’

Mr Qurashi said, ‘You can reapply.’

Inaction from an official in such circumstances inspires the thought: Does he want baksheesh? I hung around, wondering whether to offer a bribe, and how to phrase the offer.

I took Mr Qurashi aside and said, ‘Is there anything I might do to help this matter along?’

He said nothing, he happened to be reading a closely typed letter.

‘Perhaps I could pay in advance?’

He was not tempted, he accepted my new application, he urged me to pay another visit because phones were unreliable. ‘But they will be repaired, inshallah.’

I went the next day, and the day after. The same taxi driver, Guda (‘like same as Dutch cheese’, I got the joke every day), who said, ‘In my whole life, I have never taken an American to this embassy. And why you want to go to Sudan?’

‘To see the pyramids. To talk to the people.’

‘Leetle birameed! Boor beeble!’

There is no ‘p’ in Arabic, no ‘v’ either.

More visits followed, I wanted to give this visa my best shot; but in a narrative of this kind such stories of delays are not interesting. The traveler awaiting a visa sits in a stinking armchair in the embassy foyer, looking at the national map and the colored photographs of the national sights and the dusty national calendar, the framed picture of the head of state smiling insincerely, the unfamiliar national flag; cranky officials, the sounds of telephones and murmurs, the back and forth of harassed secretaries. It is easy in these circumstances to talk yourself out of going, for this awful building and this dreary room begin to seem like the country itself.

To pass the time in this week of waiting, I went to the Cairo Museum, I visited the Nobel Prize-winner, Naguib Mahfouz, whom I had last seen in the Intensive Care Ward of the Military Hospital after his stabbing by a Muslim fanatic (recently hanged); I went to a party, I got other, easier visas.

Images of the African interior, where I was headed, filled the Cairo Museum, and I consoled myselfby strolling up and down the enormous rooms and the ornate displays, looking at the Africa of wild animals and majestic palms and sculptural faces with the heavy-lidded Nubian gaze, vividly displayed in ancient carvings and paintings and bas-reliefs and sculptures in the museum. Representations in gold and ebony and precious stones of lions, cheetahs, cobras, eagles, hippos were everywhere, not as incidental decorations but as idols, the cobra god Wadjet, the bat-eared jackal Anubis, god of mummification, the sly sexual lion-headed goddess Sekhmet, lion-bodied men, alabaster cats, huge gold hawks, and even the chariots and the gold beds were given an African theme in the vivid imagery of posts with the features of hippos and rails in the shapes of leopards.

Small blue-glazed hippos, King Tut’s cheetah-skin shield, the multitude of stone-carved upright cats — all of them feline gods. To me this was an African treasure house, with fantastic mummifications, the mummified falcon, Horus, mummified sacred ibis; fish in mummy wrappings, and a crocodile in cloth, too, for crocs were worshiped up the Nile in Kom-Ombo, where I wanted to go. The Goddess of Joy, Bastet the cat, mummified as a slender gauzy idol. The Egyptian sentiment and craze for preservation had them mummifying their pets, their trophies, their prize catches, much as a moose hunter seeks a taxidermist and just as frivolous — a mummified Nile perch five feet long, a mummified dog with its tail jerked vertical, the skeleton of a horse.

I was reminded of how from medieval times mummies were taken to Europe for use in medicine (Montaigne mentions this in his essay ‘On the Cannibals’) and that Othello’s handkerchief, woven by an Egyptian, had magic properties, for it was ‘dyed in mummy.’

Nothing was weirder to me than the seated baboon, also a manifestation of Thoth (as well as ‘god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned’), this one mummified but coming apart, the wrapping over its head falling loose, its unwrapped paw extended, still furry and a little dusty, like an ape stirring in a haunted house, shedding its bandages, peeping through its blindfold, looking hairy and vindictive.

And if you were planning to worship anything it might as well be the three-thousand-year-old stone carving, towering over me, of the goddess Taweret, ‘The Great One’ — a pregnant hippo standing upright with its big belly ballooning out, with human arms and a lion’s hind legs, associated with fertility and childbirth.

These marvels were within walking distance of the Sudanese Embassy, and my desire to see others like them on the Nile and in Nubia kept me pestering Ambassador Mashamoun for a visa.

‘Nothing yet but maybe soon, inshallah,’ his excellency said. ‘Will you take tea?’

He was more upbeat than many others. I went to a party given by a hospitable family in the salubrious suburb of El Maadi and at dinner an American woman on my left, hearing of my proposed trip said, ‘I have never been to Africa.’

‘I’ve never been to Africa either,’ an American man said across the table.

‘But this is Africa,’ I said.

‘No, no. Africa is …’ The woman made a gesture, like Mohammed’s gesture at the Nubian boy, meaning down there somewhere.

Without perhaps intending to be negative the partygoers conveyed to me nothing but discouragements.

‘I was in the Sudan,’ a man said. ‘Lovely people. But the roads are awful. I wonder how you’ll manage?’

‘When were you in the Sudan?’

‘Oh, this was’ — and he wagged his head — ‘this was years ago.’

An Irish diplomat said, ‘Your man in Kenya met with six members of the opposition in Khartoum last week and after he left every single one of them was arrested.’

The American man who had claimed Egypt wasn’t Africa said: ‘Zambia’s the place you want to avoid. Zambia’s a mess. People have high walls around their houses. You can’t walk the streets.’

‘Ethiopia — now there’s a place you want to stay away from. It’s still at war with Eritrea.’

A Ugandan man said, ‘Don’t go anywhere near Uganda until after the eighth of March. There’s an election that day and it will be violent.’

‘You heard the AIDS statistics in Kenya? AIDS is wiping out whole communities.’

‘Kenya’s kind of funny. They hired a guy to look at corruption — Richard Leakey. He found lots of it, but when he turned in his report he was sacked.’

‘The thing about the roads in Tanzania is that there aren’t any.’

‘There are no roads in the Congo either. That’s why it’s ungovernable. Anyway it’s really about six countries.’

‘The Sudan is two countries. The Muslim north. The Christian south.’

‘Those land seizures in Zimbabwe are horrendous. White farmers wake up in the morning and find hundreds of Africans camped in their fields saying, “This is ours now.” ’

‘Did anyone read that book about the massacres in Rwanda? I tell you, I got so depressed I couldn’t finish it.’

‘Somalia’s not even a country. It has no government, just these so-called war lords, about fifty of them all fighting it out, like street gangs.’

‘You know about the drought in the Ogaden? Three years without rain.’

Dessert was served and there were more pronouncements of this sort, gesturing south at the big hopeless heart of the continent.

A man with a Slavic accent claimed that he had met me many years ago. He became very friendly, though he could not remember where or when we had met — Uganda perhaps, he said, in the 1960s. At his matiest he confided in me, saying, ‘Colonialism just slowed down a process that was inevitable. These countries are like the Africa of hundreds of years ago.’

This was a crudely coded way of saying Africans were reverting to savagery. But in another respect what he was saying was true. After a spell of being familiar and promising, Africa had slipped into a stereotype of itself: starving people in a blighted land governed by tyrants, rumors of unspeakable atrocities, despair and darkness.

Not a darkness, in fact, but it was all a blankness so blank and so distant you could ascribe almost anything to it — theft, anarchy, cannibalism, rebellion, massacre, starvation, violence, disease, division. No one could dispute what you said; in fact, the literature that existed, the news, the documentation, seemed to support the notion that it was all a savage jungle. To these party guests Africa was the blank space that it had been in the nineteenth century, the sort of white space on a map that Marlow mentions at the beginning of Heart of Darkness. For Marlow, only the blank spaces on the map hold any attraction, and it was Africa, ‘the biggest, the most blank, so to speak — that I had a hankering after.’ Young Marlow exactly resembles young Conrad (little Jozef Korzeniowski) in this respect, in his love for ‘exciting spaces of white paper.’

I was not dismayed by the apparent ignorance in what these people said. Their pessimism made Africa seem contradictory, unknown, worth visiting. They were saying what everyone said all the time: Ain’t Africa awful! But really they were proving that the features in the African map had dimmed and faded so utterly that it had gone blank. Marlow goes on to say that about the time he set off for the Congo Africa ‘had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery — a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness.’

Blind whiteness and crepuscular darkness amount to pretty much the same thing: terra incognita. There was a sort of poetic logic, too. In Moby Dick whiteness stands for wickedness. So the image I carried with me on my trip was of a burned-out wilderness, empty of significant life, of no promise, a land of despair, full of predators, that I was tumbling down the side of a dark star.

I was not dismayed. The traveler’s conceit is that he is heading into the unknown. The best travel is a leap in the dark. If the destination were familiar and friendly what would be the point in going there?

Still in Lower Egypt, in the opposite Arabesque corner of Africa from Cape Town, I had all sorts of chance encounters with Black Africa, the tantalizing suggestions of the bewitchment of the larger continent, the African faces that are sometimes identical to African masks.

Traipsing between my hotel in the shadow of the Sphinx and the Sudanese Embassy, in the middle of Cairo; the museum, the coffee shops, the university where I was buying books and checking facts; the party in El Maadi, the literary gatherings — I encountered the tall slender Sudanese, the mute watchfulness of Nubians, the big beautiful animals — lions, elephants, cheetahs — carved in bold relief on coffins and bedsteads; sometimes it was drumming, a syncopation in the night air, or the aroma of Zanzibari cloves, or Kenyan coffee, or a splintered tea-chest in a rubbish heap stenciled Tea — Uganda. Ethiopians and West Africans hawked tourist carvings in the markets of Cairo, and as the Haj was soon to start, and Cairo was a gateway to Jeddah and the holy places of Saudi Arabia, I got used to seeing the sneering small-boned people of Djibouti and Somalia, robed Muslims from Mali and Chad and Niger, Nigerian Hausas, Fang people and Dogons and Malian mullahs from Timbuktu, all robed in white, for their pilgrimage. Representations of the whole of Africa gathered here, as though this was the polyglot capital of a vast black empire and I was seeing examples of every animal and every sort of food and every human face.

What reassured me was the appropriateness of this African imagery in my Egyptian captivity, my prologue waiting for a Sudanese visa, for in that self-conscious mental narrative that serves a writer as a sort of memory gimmick, seeing these features and these faces was just right as an introduction, as grace notes and little pips that would be repeated themes, struck louder as my trip progressed, went deeper, grew denser, got blacker.

Needing to boost my morale with a sense of accomplishment, and to make use of my time in Cairo — Umm al Dunya, Mother of the World — I decided to apply for some other visas. I went to the Uganda Embassy, still with Guda at the wheel, utterly lost in the district of Dokki. ‘I have never taken an American to this embassy!’

But the Ugandan was friendly, Stephen Mushana, a youngish round-faced man in the dusty Second Secretary’s office in Midan El Messaha. He was fluent in Arabic from five years in Cairo. His home village was in a deep valley in craggy southwest Uganda. He was a Mukiga, a member of the Bakiga tribe, whose customs have always fascinated me, their frenzied dances, their ingenious terrace farming, their Urine Ceremony — a promise of polygamy performed by the groom and his brothers that assures that a widow will be guaranteed a husband, one of those surviving brothers.

‘My brother died,’ the Ugandan consul said. ‘But I didn’t have to marry his wife.’ He paused as though wondering how much more information to give me. ‘Well, she died a little while later.’

‘Sorry to hear it.’

‘AIDS is very bad in my country.’

‘It didn’t exist when I lived there.’

‘Maybe it existed but people didn’t know it.’

‘I left there thirty-six years ago.’

‘I was two years old!’

I got this all the time. The average life expectancy in Africa was so short that many diplomats were in their thirties, and some in their twenties, and they had no memory of their country as a big placid republic but only as a nest of problems. I had never seen these places at war; some of them grew up on war — there had been fighting in Uganda from the 1970s onward.

‘It must have been good then.’

‘Very good. Very peaceful.’ And looking back it seemed to me a golden age, and I remembered friends and colleagues.

‘Do you know Aggrey Awori?’

Mushana said, ‘He’s an old man.’

Awori was my age, regarded as a miracle of longevity in an AIDS stricken country; a Harvard graduate, Class of ’63, a track star. Thirty years ago, a rising bureaucrat, friend and confidant of the pugnacious prime minister, Milton Obote, a pompous gap-toothed northerner who had placed his trust in a goofy general named Idi Amin. Awori, powerful then, had been something of a scourge and a nationalist, but he was from a tribe that straddled the Kenyan border, where even the politics overlapped: Awori’s brother was a minister in the Kenyan government.

‘Awori is running for president.’

‘Does he have a chance?’

Mushana shrugged. ‘Museveni will get another term.’

‘I had some good friends — really funny ones. My best friend was a guy called Apolo Nsibambi. We shared an office at the Extra Mural Department at Makerere, and then I got a promotion — became Acting Director — and I was his boss! I used to tease him for calling himself “Doctor” — he had a Ph. D. in political science. I mocked him for wearing a tie and carrying a briefcase and being pompous. I went to his wedding. He came to my wedding. And then I completely lost touch with him. I wonder what happened to him.’

‘Doctor Nsibambi is the Prime Minister of Uganda.’

Perhaps the oldest inhabited street in the high-density city of Cairo, one thousand years of donkey droppings, hawkers’ wagons, barrow boys, veiled women, jostling camels, hand-holding men, and hubble-bubble smokers, among mosques and princes’ palaces, and a bazaar with shops selling trinkets, brass pots and sacks of beans, is Bayna al-Qasrayn, Between Two Palaces.

Through the lovely door of the mosque I could see the faithful at prayer in the posture of submission, kneeling, bowing low, forehead bumping the carpet, like a dog hugging a football.

Raymond Stock, biographer of Naguib Mahfouz, was my guide once again. He said, ‘All the goods and the glory that were the lifeblood of the great city, al-Qahirah’ — Cairo — ‘the Victorious.’

By chance I had bumped into Raymond at the Semiramis Hotel one afternoon. He was sitting with a big pink-cheeked man, very elegant in a pin-striped suit and silk tie, a matching silk hanky in his breast pocket.

‘He is the son of the Khedive!’ Raymond said, telling me his name. ‘He is a prince!’

The face of the big pink-cheeked man grew rosier and princelier at the mention of his pedigree, Turkish rather than Arab, with a dash of snobbery, for the Khedives were giggly Anglophiles.

‘His family used to run Egypt!’

The big pink-cheeked man fluffed his silk hanky and tut-tutted. The last Khedive, an Ottoman relic, was seen in Cairo in 1914, dumped by the British when Egypt became a British Protectorate.

‘Paul’s a writer,’ Raymond said.

The big pink-cheeked pin-striped prince smiled at my safari jacket and baggy pants and scuffed shoes.

‘I’ve just come from the Sudanese Embassy,’ I said, explaining the dust. ‘They’re renovating.’

‘Paul’s going to Africa,’ Raymond said.

‘People keep saying that, but isn’t this Africa?’

The prince’s chubby cheeks went pinker and pinker with mirth. He didn’t say much but he had a way of glowing that took the place of conversation. He finished his meal, dabbed at his lips, and left, murmuring a farewell in French.

‘Son of the Khedive!’ Raymond said.

I had last seen Raymond six years ago, when I had been traveling around the shores of the Mediterranean on my Pillars of Hercules trip and had docked in Alexandria, having sailed from Istanbul in a Turkish cruise ship, with 450 Turks, my genial mess-mates, Fikret, General Salih, and Onan among them.

Then, May 1994, Naguib Mahfouz had been in intensive care, after being stabbed in the neck by an Islamic zealot. Mahfouz was not expected to recover; yet he had, his stab wounds had healed, he coped with the nerve damage, he was back from the brink — had even resumed writing.

‘Naguib-bey shows up some nights around Cairo. He has a sort of salon,’ Raymond said. ‘I could show you where he was born and grew up.’

That was how it happened that we were strolling down Palace Walk, in the district of Gamaliyeh, which means ‘Place of Beauty,’ a noisy cluttered and crowded suburb, though its inaccurate name was part of its charm, like calling a frozen waste Greenland or a garbage truck a honey wagon.

But the people are the interest now, not the littered streets and alleys.

We went to Judge’s House Square, Midan Bayt al-Qadi, to see some beat-up and dusty trees, ‘Pasha’s beard’ trees — named for the furry shape of their blossoms, the Indian walnut, the scrupulous Raymond Stock informed me, Albizia lebbek. The center-piece of ‘this complex compact and nearly self-enclosed world.’

In the square, we passed the mosque school of Al-Mithqal (‘The Sequinned One’ — a sort of Ottoman Sparkle Plenty), Harat Qirmiz (Crimson Alley) to house number eight, Mahfouz’s childhood home. He was born in this ancient tenement with its tall cracked edifice and named after the doctor who delivered him on 10 December 1911, and growing up in that house (‘He used to stare out of that window’), he wrote about his early passions — for a certain revolutionary, and Charlie Chaplin, and a neighborhood girl whom he idolized.

‘Harat Qirmiz has a high stone wall,’ Mahfouz wrote in Raymond’s translation.

Its doors are locked upon its secrets; there is no revealing of its mysteries without seeing them from within. There one sees a quarter for the poor folk and beggars gathered in the spot for their housework and to take care of their daily needs; and one sees a paradise singing with gardens, with a hall to receive visitors, and hareem for the ladies. And from the little high window just before the ‘qabw’ sometimes appears a face luminous like the moon; I see it from the window of my little house which looks out over the harah and I wander, despite my infancy, in the magic of its beauty. I hear its melodious voice while it banters greetings with my mother when she passes out of the alley, and perhaps this is what impressed on my soul the love of song. Fatimah, al Umri, the unknown dream of childhood.

He also wrote about the afreets, the demons, that lurked in the tunnel that linked Judge’s House Square to Palace Walk. Clapping our hands to disperse the afreets, we crawled through the tunnel and alley, which were so littered we were knee-deep in household rubbish and trash and garbage, more demonic to me than any afreet.

‘I’d like to see Mahfouz again.’

‘He might be somewhere tonight.’

Cairo had a very old-fashioned literary culture, with cliques and salons. The city’s most endearing characteristic was that all this socializing was accomplished through word-of-mouth. Raymond made a call and found out that at a certain time Mahfouz would be in a certain hotel in a certain district near the Nile.

We arrived at the place at the same time as Mahfouz, who was being guided, a burly man on each side of him, steering him to an upstairs lounge, for he is somewhat enfeebled, and almost blind, and nearly deaf; he is sallow and diabetic, yet looked much healthier than the last time I had seen him, supine in the intensive care unit of the Military Hospital. Looking like a head of state, he wore a heavy overcoat because of the February chill of nighttime Cairo.

‘I feel better now,’ he said, when I complimented him on his recovery from the stab wound.

He kissed Raymond in the Egyptian way, and groped for my hand and shook it. Then he seated himself on a red plush sofa, and held court — silent court, for he said almost nothing. Men took turns sitting beside him, shouting into his left ear, his reasonably good ear, and because he is so deaf they seemed to rant. They monologued to Mahfouz and to the room at large, they engaged in debate, they read articles they had recently published. And Mahfouz simply listened and smoked cigarettes and looked Sphinx-like.

Mahfouz held these audiences as majlis ceremonies, like a pasha on a divan, to lift his spirits, Raymond said. He had been very low after his stabbing and made a deliberate effort to get out of the house, as a way of sending a message to the fanatics that they had not put him out of business.

One man took a seat next to Mahfouz and shouted the contents of a whole long article he had written, rattling the pages of the morning paper, while Mahfouz puffed his cigarette and sat staring through his thick lenses with a stern concentrated gaze. His expression hardly changed as he listened but when he responded he did so with a crooked-toothed smile of jeering triumph.

The United States and Britain had just bombed Iraq, claiming that Iraqi planes had fired on their planes in a ‘no-fly zone.’ The view of Mahfouz’s audience was that although Iraq was an unfriendly country still it seemed like Anglo-American provocation to declare portions of it forbidden zones and then arbitrarily to strafe it, inviting the sort of attack as a pretext to justify a severe bombing. In other words, Iraq was being bombed for defending itself against the humiliation of hostile fighter planes in its skies. I refrained from saying that to call the bluff of the United States Iraq had, early on, actually agreed in writing to the no-fly zones.

Reflecting on the bombing, Mahfouz murmured a sentence in Arabic and then laughed and lit another cigarette.

‘He says, “The attack on Iraq is like the random attack in Camus’s The Stranger.” ’

The sun-dazed Meursault in the novel shoots the shadowy Arab on the beach for no logical reason.

‘As usual, America is simply trying to appease Israel,’ one man said.

‘Israel is part of America,’ another man said.

‘Yes. We say Israel is America’s fifty-first state,’ a woman said. ‘What do you think, Mr Theroux?’

I said, and Raymond translated, ‘What I think is that Israel is the window through which America looks at the Middle East.’

‘Yes! Yes!’ said the man sitting next to Mahfouz.

And it is rather a small window,’ I said.

‘Say some more.’

‘The window is too small to see every country clearly — for example, Egypt is much larger and poorer and more harmless than it appears. But Israel insists that we see every country through its own window. And by the way, it is not an American window.’

While all this was translated for Mahfouz and the others, I felt that I was being drawn into a fruitless political debate. I was encouraged to elaborate, but what was the point?

‘It’s tribal warfare,’ I said. ‘I want to stay out of it. Anyway, what does Mahfouz think?’

‘No one cares what I think,’ Mahfouz said, and everyone laughed, including him.

More people arrived, some writers from Alexandria, a French journalist, a German woman, and the writer Ali Salem, a big man with a melon-like paunch and a bald head that seemed like part of his elongated and satirical face.

One man leaned over and said to me, ‘Israel is America’s baby.’

I said, ‘Many countries are America’s babies. Some good babies, some bad babies.’

‘We don’t like to fight,’ he said. ‘Egyptians want peace.’

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Ali Salem said, unfolding a large newspaper page. He smacked it with the flat of his hand and sat next to Mahfouz. ‘You must listen to these jewels.’

Declaiming rather than reading the article, he bugged out his eyes and went on smacking the sheet of newsprint. This was an article he had written about a trial of some Islamic fundamentalists who had attacked Mahfouz’s novels for their secularity. Mahfouz, who had made a career out of twitting and needling Muslims, just listened, staring into space, holding his burning cigarette sideways like a snack.

When Ali Salem finished another man took his place by Mahfouz’s good ear and began to shout into it in a very loud voice. Mahfouz, unmoved by the man’s screeching, went on puffing his cigarette.

This man was ranting about the state of writing in the Arab world, with the sort of loudness that seemed like self-parody, and yet it was possible, even likely, that he was not being ironical.

‘The Nobel Prize was given to Naguib Mahfouz, and in so doing it recognized traditional writing. When the prize was given to García Márquez many other Latin American writers were inspired to write books and publish them. But what has happened in the Arab world? Where is Arab literature? Nothing has happened!’

Hearing his name shouted over and over Mahfouz did not appear to be impressed. He remained impassive.

‘Naguib Mahfouz won the first and last Nobel Prize for Arab literature. He won it for all Arabs. But no other Arabs will get the prize.’

The shrillness of the man’s voice underlining this as a criticism also made the speech seem like a piece of buffoonery.

‘Why hasn’t the rest of Arab literature achieved any recognition?’ Now the man was glaring at me. ‘It is a conspiracy by the West!’

I had become the West. Well, I didn’t mind, as long as it kept these people talking, for nothing is more revealing of a person’s mind than a person’s anger. Mahfouz just shrugged. He seemed a worthy laureate — dignified, prolific, rebellious in his point of view, for in this Islamic country he refused to indulge in sanctimony or religion at all, and yet he was gentle, going against the political and religious grain with grace and humor.

There were more attacks on the West — that is, on me — but when I was asked to respond I changed the subject to Nubia. Mahfouz had set many stories in pharaonic times, so I asked him about that — whether he felt, as some historians did, that a complex culture had risen up in the Nile from East and Central Africa through Nubia and Kush to enrich Egypt.

He said, ‘Egyptians conquered Nubia, and Nubians turned around and conquered Egypt.’

‘But are the Nubians the genuine pharaonic people, as it is sometimes claimed?’

‘Everyone asks this question, especially Nubians.’

There was more talk, more shouting, everyone smoking and talking at once. ‘The next Arab — Israeli war will be different!’ a man yelled. I crept down to the bar and drank a beer and when I came back they were still shouting and the gathering around Mahfouz had grown to a small crowd. I had lost my seat. Three hours of this and they were still shouting. Mahfouz went through this five nights a week and found it a tonic.

‘He wants to know where you’re going,’ Raymond said, when I made my excuses and began to leave.

‘To Nubia,’ I said.

Mahfouz said something in Arabic and it was translated.

‘Nu bia is “The Gold Place.” Nub means “gold.” ’

Before I took the train to Aswan, and still awaiting a Sudanese visa, I decided to boost my spirits by getting an Ethiopian visa. That would be easy, I was told, because Ethiopia was still at war with its breakaway province of Eritrea, now a sovereign state — but a battle-scarred sovereign state littered with corpses, casualties of war. No one wanted to go to Ethiopia.

Some consulates are so atmospheric — a certain quality of dust and old furnishings and the lingering odors of the national dish. The Ethiopian Consulate in Cairo gave me that impression: faded glory, high ceilings, beat-up sofas, unswept floors, the aromas of fasting food, the fermented smell of injera and spiced beans, the thick nutty fragrance of Abyssinian coffee, a slight stinkiness of old-fashioned men’s suits and stained neckties.

I was received warmly by the balding 34-year-old consul general, Mr Eshete Tilohun. He was small with an impressive head, a big bulging brow that would have suited an extra-terrestrial or a math whizz, and deep-set eyes. He told me that for seventy US dollars I could have a visa that would remain valid for two years.

‘Look!’ he said, a cry of anguish, lifting his eyes from my passport.

A large multicolored map of Ethiopia and the surrounding countries in the Horn of Africa covered part of the far wall of his office.

‘No outlet to the sea!’ he said in a lamenting voice. ‘Eritrea! Djibouti! Somalia! And we are land-locked. That is why we are poor!’

‘What about the war with Eritrea?’

‘Not our fault,’ he said. ‘It is those people. Bring an Eritrean here and you would see the difference in culture. Ha!’

He had rubber stamped my passport but he had not filled in any of the blanks. His pen was poised, but he was still clucking over the map.

‘Djibouti — so small! The soldiers of the Derg wrecked the country. Mengistu gave Djibouti away. The Eritreans made trouble. The Somalis are just bandit people.’

‘But things are quiet now?’

‘Very quiet!’ His eyes bulged when he emphasized a point. I liked his passion. He seemed to care that I wanted to go to Ethiopia. He reflected, ‘Of course the Emperor made his mistakes. The country was backward.’

‘In what way backward?’

‘Feudal,’ he said, and shrugged, and went on, ‘But go to Tana! See churches! Go to Gondar and Tigre. The women have tattooed faces there. They are good Christians — since AD 34 they have been Christians. They have been Jews for longer. Go to the southwest. See the Mursi people. The naked Mursi people. Your name is?’

‘Paul.’

‘Paul, the Mursi are the last naked people in the world.’

I disputed this and told him in detail about nudist camps in such places as the United States and Europe, how the campers might play bare-assed ping-pong, or eat or chitchat or swim, mother naked.

‘No! They go into the street like this?’ Mr Tilohun asked.

‘Just around their camp,’ I said.

‘Like the Mursi.’

‘For them it’s not sex. It’s health.’

‘Exactly like the Mursi! They say, “Why do you wear these clothes?” ’

Mr Tilohun tried to look shocked and indignant but you could see he found the whole idea of public nudity extravagantly funny. ‘One of my friends had his picture taken with a Mursi woman. She had no clothes on at all!’

Mr Tilohun’s eyes glittered at the thought of his decently clothed friend standing next to the naked woman — who, by the way, being a Mursi might not have been wearing a dress but would have worn a saucer-sized plug in her lower lip.

‘The Mursi are real Africans,’ Mr Tilohun said. ‘And there are others. The Oromo. The Galla. The Wolayta.’

‘I can’t wait,’ I said, and meant it.

At one point, speaking of my trip and the road south, Mr Tilohun said, ‘There is only one road going south in Ethiopia. It is the road to Johannesburg. The longest road in Africa. You just keep going.’

The weather had not changed, nor had the weather report. ‘Tomorrow — Dust’ was the forecast, and it occurred as predicted, but more dramatically than before, a high deep dust cloud approaching from the west, looking like a mountain range on the move, gray and dense, overwhelming the city, and at last the sun setting into it, turning into a dull disc. It was in fact a dust storm, with the appearance of fog but the texture of grit, covering everything, the pages of the book I was reading, blurring the windows of Cairo, getting into my teeth.

One last visit to the Sudanese. Mr Qurashi said, ‘Next week, inshallah.’

Ten days earlier, on my arrival in Cairo, inshallah had meant, ‘God willing’ and ‘Soon’ and then ‘Eventually’ and ‘In the fullness of time.’ Later it meant ‘We hope’ and ‘Don’t count on it.’ Now it meant, ‘You wish!’, ‘No way!’ and ‘Not bloody likely!’