‘W’illahi! Inti gayya min ’ailat bani sadr walla eh?’ shouted Mustafa at a big-chested woman going past in the street below. ‘By God, do you come from the Tribe of Big Chests or what?’ ‘ ’Arba’ dur!’ – this to a very tall woman – ‘Four storeys!’
After the remains of the takeaway had been scraped into the bin, Mustafa brought out his pièce de résistance, a treat he had secured through his father’s connections which he thought we would appreciate. It was a German porn video. We all squirmed in embarrassment: Mustafa had made a bad error of judgement and we left to the sound of simulated groans and gasps.
Years later – ten, to be precise – I came across Mustafa and Hamdi working at the reception of a smart hotel in the Saudi Gulf town of Al-Khobar. They seemed embarrassed to be found working there, but it spoke volumes about the lack of opportunities in Egypt at the time. With all their connections and expensive education they were still better off financially at the bottom end of the hotel-management scale in Saudi Arabia than trying to forge a career in their own country. I thought that was terribly sad.
At about the time I started teaching, Egypt became gripped by a fever of patriotic excitement. It was late 1982 and the Sinai Peninsula, that triangle of desert and mountain that sits on the map like a wedge between Africa and Asia, was coming home. According to the Camp David Treaty, Israel was due to hand it back to Egypt in stages. The western section had already been returned, and now Egypt was poised to regain control of the rest of the peninsula. Billboards were going up all over Cairo with the words ‘ ’Audat Sinaa’ – ‘The Return of the Sinai’. Peregrine and I decided it was time to give lectures a break and go and take a look at this much-fought-over piece of real estate.
From Cairo we took a bus eastwards to Suez, where several of the buildings were still pockmarked with bullet and shell holes from the fighting in 1973. It was the first time either of us had seen a ship pass through the Suez Canal and it was an awesome sight. From a hundred yards away all you could see was flat desert, then an enormous freighter would slide majestically forwards, seemingly cutting right through the sand, steaming southwards towards the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Looking up we could see the ship’s crew lining the decks high above us, waving before they vanished into the heat haze. An Egyptian captain, immaculate in naval whites, could just be seen stepping down from each ship, having piloted her safely through to the open sea from Port Said in the north.
In those days there was no car tunnel under the Suez Canal as there is today, so we took the ferry, chugging across the blue waters from the African to the Asian shore. There we joined a group of Egyptian labourers and managed to hitch a lift on the back of a military truck that happened to be heading all the way down the Sinai coast to Sharm El Sheikh. At first, things did not go well. The truck stopped in the middle of nowhere and an army officer came round the back to order everybody off.
‘Why?’ protested all the labourers in the back.
‘Because there is no driver.’ Strangely, we could hear the sound of someone revving up the engine in the cab.
‘He is an idiot,’ said a worker, pointing at the officer.
‘Who’s an idiot?’ countered the officer.
‘You are! There is a vehicle and a driver but still you tell us to get off.’
‘It is forbidden.’
Nobody moved, so the officer sighed, shrugged and the truck proceeded south.
It was not exactly comfortable rattling around in the open back of a lorry for ten hours between a consignment of heavy tyres and barrels of DDT insecticide. For all we knew, this truck was heading for a chemical-warfare unit, but the ride was free and we had an all-round view as night began to descend over the Sinai. In the gathering gloom we passed the shattered hulks of Russian-built tanks and anti-aircraft guns left over from the Yom Kippur War, their barrels jutting towards Israel like accusing fingers. Rusting signs in Arabic and English warned people not to leave the road for danger of mines. As we passed through the mountains a full moon rose, casting this biblical landscape in a ghostly silver light. We could see the recently vacated Israeli trenches clearly, which the Egyptian army was starting to occupy. Already somebody had laid out white stones to spell the Arabic words ‘Da’iman Misr’, ‘Always Egypt’. And then we came to our first checkpoint manned by US paratroopers. As part of the handover agreement an international monitoring force was put in place called the MFO, the Multinational Force and Observers. It consisted of nearly three thousand troops from the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand and a handful of other nations, but the bulk of the manpower came from the US Army’s 101st Airborne Paratroopers. And here they were in sand goggles and desert camouflage, essentially on traffic duty. It was the first time I had ever seen US troops in the Middle East, although the US military was just months away from getting a very bloody nose in Lebanon with the suicide bombing of their Marine Corps barracks at Beirut airport.
Sharm El Sheikh in 1982 could not have been more different from the popular winter-sun package-holiday destination it is today. There was just one hotel and it was way beyond our budget, but arriving as we did after midnight we were allowed to sleep in the garden of a little mosque. We were woken when the first rays of a fierce desert sun crept over the blue ridge of mountains and lit up our faces. As we strolled into town and queued at the bakery for loaves of hot, flat bread, we heard a strange sound, a sort of chant that came welling up from the other side of a ridge.
‘I don’t know but it’s been said
Navy boots are made of lead.
Sound off! One two! Break it on down . . .’
Hoving into view came a squad of sweating, shaven-headed, sunburned American paratroopers, out for their morning run, their voices echoing off the rocks, the mountains of the Sinai rising up behind them. One of them wore a T-shirt with the logo ‘Pure Pain’. It was an incongruous sight in the land where Moses once walked.
Despite its majestic setting, the tiny beach resort of Sharm El Sheikh was not a pretty sight back then. The withdrawing Israelis had executed something of a scorched-earth policy, taking with them whatever they could and leaving the place ankle-deep in rubbish. Almost the only things left intact were the signposts calling it by its Hebrew name, ‘Ofira’, and signs printed in English, Hebrew and Arabic saying, ‘Security Forces in operation to detect any suspicious objects’. There were several deep security wells dug by the Israelis for the disposal of suspicious packages but these were now filling up fast with Egyptian litter. The only locals around were not ethnic Egyptians at all, they were lean-faced Arabs, Sinai Bedu from one of two distinct tribal groupings that live on the peninsula. Unlike the well-fed, round-faced Egyptians from Cairo, these men had strikingly sharp, hawk-like features and they spoke a much purer, classical Arabic. We befriended some of them and they gave us a lift on their pick-up truck, out to one of their encampments in the mountain valleys.
It was my first sight of a Bedu camp and it was not very inspiring. Instead of the black goats’-hair tents I had expected, there were scruffy corrugated-tin shacks, surrounded by coils of chicken wire. But the Bedu were hospitality personified, plying us with tea from pots that bubbled constantly on the glowing coals of a rudimentary fire. We sat on rugs in the shade, trying to follow their Arabic and sneaking glimpses at the gorgeous embroidered dresses and elaborate gold jewellery worn by their women, even as they went to milk their camels. We were allowed to watch one of them making gourds from goatskins. First a dye was boiled in a cauldron, using slivers of a reddish bark. The skins were thoroughly soaked in this to make them waterproof, then they were left in the sun to dry. We were told that the gourds would be used to carry water on the camels’ backs when the camp moved on. Like Wilfred Thesiger, I felt privileged to have had a glimpse of the south Sinai Bedu way of life before it disappeared and the character of this coast changed for ever. The Bedu spoke no English and they were completely unprepared for the wave of mass tourism that was about to sweep over their ancestral land. In the space
of two decades the indigenous Sinai Bedu have been all but driven out from where they used to fish and graze their camels along the coast. In their place has come an army of Egyptian labourers, hoteliers and shopkeepers selling gawdy souvenirs from Cairo. Nearly a quarter of a century later these Egyptians bore the brunt of the casualties when Islamist terrorists drove their truck bombs into Sharm El Sheikh on 21 July 2005.
One weekend in November we decided to do something different. ‘Let’s go overland to Jerusalem,’ suggested Peregrine. ‘Good idea,’ I replied. Egypt was still the only Arab country to have signed a peace deal with Israel, and at the expense of being briefly ostracized by the rest of the Arab world Cairo now had a regular bus service to Tel Aviv. Off we set, inching our way through the suburbs of Cairo then eastwards across the top of the Sinai Peninsula, until we found ourselves, several hours later, at the Israeli border-crossing point at Rafah. A spotless blue-and-white Israeli flag flew above a sandbagged watchtower whose occupants studied us closely. We were almost the last people to cross over that day, but the Israelis were certainly not going to let down their guard for us. The questions came thick and fast from a steely-eyed female lieutenant. ‘Who are you visiting in Israel?’ ‘Who sent you?’ ‘Do you know any Palestinians here?’ ‘Who packed your bag?’ Just in time we stopped the passport clerk from marking our passports with an Israeli stamp, which would have prevented us from getting into any Arab country apart from Egypt.
By the time we got up to Jerusalem it was dark, bitterly cold and had started to snow. We walked through one of the many massive stone gateways that perforate the walls of the Old City and looked for a place to sleep. We knew from our guidebook that the walled city was divided into four quarters based on ethnicity: Arab, Christian, Jewish and Armenian. We plumped for the Arab quarter and a backstreet hostel popular with backpackers called the Lemon Tree Hostel. The place was friendly and had a warm glow about it and I was only mildly embarrassed when Peregrine saw fit to change into a pair of pressed English pyjamas, much to the amusement of the bearded Australians in this laid-back travellers’ crashpad.
We were within walking distance of the Wailing Wall, where black-clad Orthodox Jews intoned their prayers and nodded their heads back and forth; the Haram Al-Sharif, the third-holiest shrine in Islam and site of the famous gold-plated Dome of the Rock; and the Via Dolorosa, the street walked along by Jesus as he dragged his massive cross up to his own crucifixion. Here we could hear both the rich peel of Christian church bells and the Muslim call to prayer, and we breathed it all in as we strolled to and from our hostel. Jerusalem was a city that exuded religious history and for Peregrine, a devout Catholic, it was a moving experience. Never normally more than a few seconds away from a pithy witticism, he now fell silent and contemplative in the hushed reverence of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Over the course of that long weekend we met silent, Trappist monks in the monastery of Latroun, friendly Palestinian shopkeepers in Jericho and a Russian Jewish couple who had just immigrated from Moscow. On a whim, we hiked south from Jericho into the dried-up ravines and riverbeds or wadis, in search of the cave where the Dead Sea Scrolls had recently been discovered. Dwarfed by the great rocks that reared up around us, Peregrine and I got chatting about our respective families. His story was rather more interesting than mine: having sired several children, Peregrine’s father had then abandoned the family and never returned. He had an uncle who had behaved equally badly, amusing himself by taking potshots with an air rifle at his wife’s backside as she was gardening in a particularly thick leather skirt. I was just digesting this piece of information when we came across a Bedu shepherd, who was surprised to see us in the desert wadis so close to dusk. ‘Watch out for the nimr,’ he told us in Arabic before moving on. Nimr? The word sounded familiar but we just could not place it. Then we remembered it. ‘Leopards! Hell, let’s get out of here!’ In our panic we even flagged down a lift along the Dead Sea road with a heavily armed patrol from the IDF, the Israeli Defence Force, otherwise known as the Israeli Army.
We had only been away from Cairo for three days but on our return we found two things had changed. Leonid Brezhnev, the ursine Soviet leader, had died, and the long Egyptian summer was well and truly finished. Rain was emptying out of a leaden sky and not draining very successfully from the waterlogged streets. The city’s millions of pedestrians were trying to avoid walking under the filthy girder bridges where six months’ worth of summer grime was splashing down on to their crumpled suits and nylon dresses. One girl in high heels and smart stockings just managed to negotiate a street crossing without getting her feet wet when a bus roared past, drenching her in mud from the waist downwards. Cairo’s ubiquitous traffic policemen had changed out of their white cotton uniforms to dark bristly woollen ones. Bus conductors were now doing the rounds in bulbous, hairy jackets and heavy, clumpy shoes, giving everything an air of the 1950s.
Before long we began to miss the balmy heat we had grown so accustomed to, and when the Christmas break came round we decided to head south. We had friends out from Exeter: John, who never lost a game of backgammon provided we were playing for money, Emma, and Hamish, who frequently overdid it on the hubble-bubble and would sit up on his bed half the night, burping uncontrollably. Together with Peregrine and Peppy we all took the overnight train for Luxor and the far south. Riding donkeys and bicycles, we explored the pharaonic temples and tombs of Thebes, on one occasion coming across a recently excavated tomb where workmen proudly displayed an ancient skull that was quite probably several thousand years old. Christmas Day in Aswan was a memorable shambles. We stocked up with provisions then piled into a felucca, one of those graceful, tall-masted sailing boats that have been plying the Nile for centuries. Unfortunately Ali, our Nubian boatman, helped himself rather too liberally to our supplies of local Omar Khayyam wine, and before long we became wedged intractably between two huge boulders just south of the Old Cataract Hotel. We were there for hours until the currents moved round but it didn’t bother us – we just sat on the side of the boat, dangling our bare feet into the swirling waters of the Nile and singing out to every passing boat a recently learned Egyptian phrase: ‘Boolak eh . . . walla haaga!’, meaning ‘I tell you what . . . nothing at all!’ We were young, drunk and extremely happy to be living in Egypt.
Back in Cairo I found it hard to concentrate on our lectures when I felt there were so many places to explore. The trip to the south had whetted my appetite, and with the spring break approaching I wanted to press on further into Sudan. I was keen to see what lay beyond the great Aswan High Dam, built with Russian help in the 1960s to stop the annual Nile floods and harness the power of this awesome river to hydroelectric turbines. I knew that to the south of the dam – upstream, in fact – were crocodiles and enormous Nile perch, the Nubian desert and the largest country in Africa: Sudan. In short, it was a place that smacked of untamed wilderness and adventure and I yearned to visit it. Peregrine was not remotely tempted; he announced he would be spending the holiday in the local patisserie in Cairo, where a Coptic Christian girl had taken a shine to him and was sneaking him free cakes when her boss wasn’t looking. So, armed with a tiny rucksack and a hard-won Sudanese visa, I set out alone to travel overland to Khartoum. It was to be one of the best journeys I have ever embarked on.
At six p.m. precisely the overnight train to Aswan slid slowly out of Cairo’s Ramses station and crossed the girder bridge of Imbaba with a long and mournful blast on its horn before turning south towards the moonlit villages of southern Egypt. The carriage was crowded with rural families returning home, all of whom had brought their own packed suppers, and within minutes the floor was carpeted with the broken shells of monkey nuts and pumpkin seeds and the discarded stalks of spring onions. The amiable chatter of Egyptian conversation rose and fell, then eventually subsided as the night wore on, lulled into silence by the rhythmic sway of the train. I settled as best I could into my bolt-upright seat with a copy of Alan Moorehead’s The White N
ile, an account of a nineteenth-century journey of exploration that I could hardly hope to emulate in three weeks but which helped remind me which continent I was on.
I awoke to see verdant fields of green sugarcane drifting past the window, the brilliant blue waters of the Nile beyond, and then, with a frightening inevitability, the Sahara desert. A decade later these sugarcane fields would provide cover for Islamist gunmen waiting to ambush police patrols during the anti-government insurgency of the 1990s. But now they were harmless, and I sat on my rucksack in the open doorway of the train, taking in the scenery. Farm workers in pale-blue gellabiya robes and tight-wrapped turbans looked up from the cane fields and waved, black-swathed women tottered along village paths with three-foot jars balanced on their heads, and bands of laughing, barefoot children fell over each other trying to keep pace with the train, calling out to me ‘Hello Miss You’, meaning ‘Hello Monsieur’. I wondered idly if their ancestors had greeted the French writer Gustave Flaubert the same way when he passed through on his own libidinous journey of exploration a century ago.
In Aswan I stayed on the floor of a hut belonging to a family of grocers I had met on our earlier trip at Christmas. The eldest son was nicknamed Ahmed El Fil, Ahmed the Elephant, because he was vast. But he seemed quite comfortable with both his size and his moniker, and whenever there was a lull in the conversation his brothers would nudge him in his well-covered ribs and shout ‘El Fil! El Fil!’ The place smelled strongly of overripe fruit but I was just glad of a roof over my head.
In the morning I went down to the dock on the shores of Lake Nasser, the huge artificial lake created by the High Dam which straddles the border between Egypt and Sudan. There was the boat – in reality three barges lashed together – that was to make the twenty-four-hour crossing to the Sudanese dock at Wadi Halfa. There was pandemonium as hundreds pushed and jostled to get on. Returning Sudanese families and visiting Egyptian teachers alike struggled with baggage gathered up with flimsy netting. Several people were clutching an ’oud, a traditional Arab instrument similar to a lute, and every single adult male was chain-smoking, which only bothered me when I got to my cabin later on. The fare was so cheap I had thought I might as well do this in style and go first class, but I found myself sharing with three Egyptian teachers who devoted their evening to generating an acrid blue fug in the tiny enclosed space. Too tired to speak Arabic I muttered some whinge about their incessant smoking. They looked at me blankly, then one said to the others, ‘Al-Ustaaz mish kwayyis’, literally ‘the professor is no good’. I could not resist letting him know I understood by replying in Arabic that ‘the professor’ didn’t smoke. He was mortified and after that the cigarettes were put away and we all became friends.
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