Letter from Cairo

{In 2008 I spent nine weeks in Africa, where I lived as a child. Here, the first of four articles written as letters to the hometown newspaper:}

CAIRO--Rocking and rolling aboard the first-class train between Aswan and Cairo, we relax a little. We are used by now to the dense tableau of beauty and filth that flies past us through the streaked window. We have been in Egypt for one week now, and our digestive systems are adjusting, along with our eyes. Somewhere between Qena and Tel el-Amarna, the wife relaxes also and gives me a kiss: "Thank you for bringing me."

We are near the start of a nine-week visit to Africa, where I lived for 10 years as a child and young man. For many Americans this would seem to be a trip into danger. Indeed, we are sharing the back of the compartment with several police in uniform and plain clothes, all packing side arms - here, apparently, for our security. The country we cross - Middle Egypt - is Egypt's hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism.

In 1997 a tour group of Americans and Europeans was gunned down outside the tomb of Hatshetsup, on the West Bank. But those terrorists have been hunted down and killed or driven to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the others are dormant. With security checkpoints at the door of every hotel, Egypt now is thought to be safe.

With that settled, it must be said that it is a place of compelling beauty and wonder, every frame of the visitor's view-finder loaded with exotic detail enough for an hour of reflection. Bananas and date palms in clumps and groves rise from tidy plots of sugarcane and rice to the horizon, tended by men in their gauzy gallibiyahs, all fed by irrigation canals from the Nile. Canal banks are piled with dredged mud and trash - a slurry of broken concrete, discarded plastic water bottles and bags, car parts and tin cans that finds its way into the fields without apparent damage to the legendary fertility of Misr ("the black land"), Egypt's own name for itself since ancient times.

As a metaphor that mix will do for Cairo as well. The present downtown, latest in a series, was erected by European architects and engineers 150 years ago for the Khedive Ismail, in a former marsh along the river. Ismail bankrupted the economy with the effort and so lost his country when Britain repossessed it for collateral.

Today the central district is a warren of once-elegant stone buildings, caked with smog (Cairo's air, like that of the Nile Valley entire is dirtier than LA in the 1970s), the richly ornamented cornices and balconies remain intact. But whole sections of many buildings have been abandoned. The cage elevators linking floors tend not to work, and the marble staircases that are the alternative are worn in center and smeared and littered with dirt; broken windows on interior open spaces reveal balconies and rickety fire stares draped with drying laundry, strung with fraying wires and piled with the detritus of years.

Many of the less expensive hotels ($25-$45 for a double) are found here. We left one such for another, newer, with a fifth floor terrace overlooking Cairo's fashion district, around the Talaat Harb Square; brightly lighted all night, it resembles Paris. But look again: The coffee (ahwa) and tea (shai) sippers at the sidewalk cafes are smoking sheesha, a sweetened tobacco, in water pipes; glazed eyes suggest it is laced with hashish. That skyscraper on the horizon is a mosque minaret. The street entrance to the building is marked with handprints in sheep's blood left by celebrants of the last Ramadan, after their fast-ending feast - said my guide, "to protect from (how you say?) envy."

The social system is, by American standards, archaic and insulting to womanhood; the women in our party were subject to a range of outrageous behavior, from constant marriage proposals to groping in the streets, especially when shoulders and heads were left uncovered. No, this isn't Kansas, or even Cottonwood. If "Westerners" (why are we called that?) were to find anything here to envy, it would be spirit of Egypt's people. The single word to describe it best is exuberance. The people you will meet, everywhere, smile and laugh a lot more than we do - however miserable their circumstances to our eyes - and they are almost unfailingly friendly. Most, because we are friendly too and tip well, unlike the Europeans on both counts, love Americans. They admire our stable democracy, if not always our permissive culture. (Intensely interested in the current presidential contest, they pry us for insight. Their own favorite was Barack Obama - his name means "blessing” in Arabic - until a statement pledging support to Israel. Now they don't know.

Except for three relatively quiet hours before dawn, the streets are choked with honking vehicles and dodging pedestrians from curb to curb, in defiance of lane striping and traffic lights, an organic stream like ants in movement. Yet we saw not a single collision or instance of "road rage."

Hurtling down the Giza road to the Pyramids, early one morning soon after our arrival in Egypt, our taxi driver put the pedal to the metal to catch a second taxi carrying others in our party of six. Edging to within inches of the car at 75 miles per hour, he reached out and give its rear fender a resounding slap. The startled look on the faces inside was beyond haggling over price."Welcome to Egypt!" he roared happily.