The main reason that writers of tourist guidebooks are so cheesed off at Alexandria is that no vestige of the first library remains - not even a plaque stating "The Library of Alexandria was here." If you want to visit the site, you have to do a bit of straightforward detective work. Ancient Alexandria was laid out on a neat, regular grid pattern - just the kind of thing you would expect of a place populated by people like Euclid. The main east-west street was called the Canopic Way, and the main north-south street, running from the waterfront toward the Sahara Desert, was called the Street of the Soma. The library is thought to have stood just south of their intersection.
Though no buildings of that era remain, the streets still do, and so does their intersection. Currently, the Canopic Way is called El Horreya Avenue, and the Soma is called El Nabi Daniel Street, though if you don't hurry, they may be called something else when you arrive.
We stayed at the Cecil Hotel, where Nabi Daniel hits the waterfront. The Cecil is one of those British imperial-era hotels fraught with romance and history, sort of like the entire J. Peterman catalog rolled into one building. British Intelligence was headquartered there during the war, and there the Battle of El Alamein was planned.
Living as they do, however, in a country choked with old stuff, the Egyptians have adopted a philosophy toward architecture that is best summed up by the phrase: "What have you done for me lately?'' From this point of view, the Cecil is just another old building, and it's not even particularly old. As if to emphasize this, the side of the hotel where we stayed was covered with a rude scaffolding (sticks lashed together with hemp) aswarm with workers armed with sledgehammers, crowbars, chisels, and the like, who spent all day, every day, bellowing cheerfully at each other (demolition workers are the jolliest men in every country), bashing huge chunks of masonry off the top floor and simply dropping them - occasionally crushing an air conditioner on some guest's balcony. It was a useful reminder that Egyptians feel no great compulsion to tailor their cities to the specifications of guidebook writers.
This fact can be further driven home by walking south on Nabi Daniel and looking for the site of the Library of Alexandria. It is now occupied by office buildings probably not more than 100, nor less than 50, years old. Their openings are covered with roll-up steel doors, and their walls decorated with faded signs. One of them advertises courses in DOS, Lotus, dBase, COBOL, and others. Not far away is a movie theater showing Forbidden Arsenal: In the Line of Duty 6, starring Cynthia Khan.
The largest and nicest building in the area is used by an insurance company and surrounded by an iron fence. The narrow sidewalk out front is blocked by a few street vendors who have set up their wares in such a way as to force pedestrians out into the street. One of them is selling pictures of adorable kittens tangled up in yarn, and another is peddling used books. This is the closest thing to a library that remains here, so I spent a while examining his wares: a promising volume called Bit by Bit turned out to be an English primer. There were quite a few medical textbooks, as if a doctor had just passed away, and Agatha Christie and Mickey Mouse books presumably left behind by tourists. The closest thing I saw to a classic was a worn-out copy of Oliver Twist.
31° 10.916' N29° 53.784' EPompey's Pillar
The site of Cleopatra's library, precisely 1 mile away by my GPS, is viewed with cautious approval by guidebook writers because it is an actual ruin with a wall around it, a ticket booth, old stuff, and guides. It is right next to an active Muslim cemetery, so it is difficult to reach the place without excusing your way past crowds of women in voluminous black garments, wailing and sobbing heartrendingly, which all goes to make the Western tourist feel like even more of a penis than usual.
The site used to be the city's acropolis. It is a rounded hill of extremely modest altitude with a huge granite pillar on the top. To quote Shelley's "Ozymandias": "Nothing beside remains." A few sphinxes are scattered around the place, but they were obviously dragged in to give tourists something to look at. Several brutally impoverished gray concrete apartment buildings loom up on the other side of the wall, festooned with washing, crammed with children who entertain themselves by raining catcalls down upon the few tourists who straggle out this far. The granite pillar honors the Roman emperor Diocletian, who was a very bad emperor, a major Christian-killer, but who gave Alexandria a big tax break. The citizenry, apparently just as dimwitted as modern day Americans, decided that he was a great guy and erected this pillar. Originally there was a statue of Diocletian himself on the top, riding a horse, which is why the Egyptians call it, in Arabic, The man on horseback. The statue is gone now, which makes this a completely mystifying name. Westerners call it Pompey's Pillar because that's the moniker the clueless Crusaders slapped on it; of course, it has absolutely nothing to do with Pompey.
The hacker tourist does not bother with the pillar but rather with what is underneath it: a network of artificial caves, carved into the sandstone, resembling nothing so much as a D & D player's first dungeon. Because it's a hill and this is Egypt, the caverns are nice and dry and (with a little baksheesh in the right hands) can be well lit too - electrical conduit has been run in and light fixtures bolted to the ceiling. The walls of these caves have niches that are just the right size and shape to contain piles of scrolls, so this is thought to be the site of the Library of Cleopatra. This complex was called the Sarapeum, or Temple of Sarapis, who was a conflation of Osiris and Apis admired by the locals and loathed by monotheists, which explains why the whole complex was sacked and burned by Christians in 391.
It is all rather discouraging, when you use your imagination (which you must do constantly in Alexandria) and think of the brilliance that was here for a while. As convenient as it is for information to come to us, libraries do have a valuable side effect: they force all of the smart people to come together in one place where they can interact with one another. When the information goes up in flames, those people go their separate ways. The synergy that joined them - that created the lighthouse, for example - dies. The world loses something.
So the second library is some holes in a wall, and the first is an intersection. Holes and intersections are both absences, empty places, disappointing to tourists of both the regular and the hacker variety. But one can argue that the intersection's continued presence is arguably more interesting than some old pile that has been walled off and embalmed by a historical society. How can an intersection remain in one place for 2,500 years? Simply, both the roads that run through it must remain open and active. The intersection will cease to exist if sand drifts across it because it's never used, or if someone puts up a building there. In Egypt, where yesterday's wonders of the world are today's building materials, nothing is more obvious than that people have been avidly putting up buildings everywhere they possibly can for 5,000 years, so it is remarkable that no such thing has happened here. It means that every time some opportunist has gone out and tried to dig up the street or to start putting up a wall, he has been flattened by traffic, arrested by cops, chased away by outraged donkey-cart drivers, or otherwise put out of action. The existence of this intersection is proof that a certain pattern of human activity has endured in this exact place for 2,500 years.
When the hacker tourist has tired of contemplating the profound significance of intersections (which, frankly, doesn't take very long) he must turn his attention to - you guessed it - cable routes. This turns out to be a much richer vein.
30° 58.319' N, 29° 49.531' EAlexandria Tollbooth, the Desert Road, Sahara Desert, Egypt
As we speed across the Saharan night, the topic of conversation turns to Hong Kong. Our Egyptian driver, relaxed and content after stopping at a roadside rest area for a hubbly-bubbly session (smoking sweetened tobacco in a Middle Eastern bong), smacks the steering wheel gleefully. "Ha, ha, ha!" he roars. "Miserable Hong Kong people!"
Alexandria and Cairo are joined by two separate, roughly parallel highways called the Desert Road and the Agricultural Road. The latter runs through cu
ltivated parts of the Nile Delta. The Desert Road is a rather new, four-lane highway with a tollbooth at each end - tollbooths in the middle not being necessary, because if you get off in the middle you will die. It is lined for its entire length with billboards advertising tires, sunglasses, tires, tires, tires, bottled water, sunglasses, tires, and tires.
Perhaps because it is supported by tolls, the Desert Highway is a first-rate road all the way. This means not merely that the pavement is good but also that it has a system of ducts and manholes buried under its median strip, so that anyone wishing to run a cable from one end of the highway to the other - tollbooth to tollbooth - need only obtain a "permit" and ream out the ducts a little. Or at least that's what the Egyptians say. The Lan Tao Island crowd, who are quite discriminating when it comes to ducts and who share an abhorrence of all things Egyptian, claim that cheap PVC pipe was used and that the whole system is a tangled mess.
They would both agree, however, that beyond the tollbooths the duct situation is worse. The Alexandria Tollbooth is some 37 kilometers outside of the city center; you get there by driving along a free highway that has no ducts at all.
This problem is being remedied by FLAG, which has struck a deal with ARENTO (Arab Republic of Egypt National Telecommunications Organization - the PTT) that is roughly analogous to the one it made with the Communications Authority of Thailand. FLAG has no choice but to go overland across Egypt, just as in Thailand. The reasons for doing so here are entirely different, though.
By a freak of geography and global politics, Egypt possesses the same sort of choke point on Europe-to-Asia telecommunications as the Suez canal gives it in the shipping industry. Anyone who wants to run a cable from Europe to East Asia has severely limited choices. You can go south around Africa, but it's much too far. You can go overland across all of Russia, as U S West has recently talked about doing, but if even a 170-kilometers terrestrial route across Thailand gets your customers fumbling for their smelling salts, what will they say about one all the way across Russia? You could attempt a shorter terrestrial route from the Levant to the Indian Ocean, but given the countries it would have to pass through (Lebanon and Iraq, to name two), it would have about as much chance of survival as a strand of gossamer stretched across a kick-boxing ring. And you can't lay a cable down the Suez Canal, partly because it would catch hell from anchors and dredgers, and partly because cable-laying ships move very slowly and would create an enormous traffic jam.
The only solution that is even remotely acceptable is to land the cable on Egypt's Mediterranean coast (which in practice means either Alexandria or Port Said) and then go overland to Suez, where the canal joins the Gulf of Suez, which in turn joins the Red Sea. The Red Sea is so shallow and so heavily trafficked, by the way, that all cables running through it must be plowed into the seafloor, which is a hassle, but obviously preferable to running a terrestrial route through the likes of Sudan and Somalia, which border it.
In keeping with its practice of running two parallel routes on terrestrial sections, FLAG is landing at both Alexandria and Port Said. From these cities the cables converge on Suez. Alexandria is far more important than Port Said as a cable nexus for the simple reason that it is at the westernmost extreme of the Nile Delta, so you can reach it from Europe without having to contend with the Nile. European cables running to Port Said, by contrast, must pass across the mouths of the Nile, where they are subjected to currents.
Engineer Mustafa Musalam, general manager of transmission for ARENTO's Alexandria office, is a stocky, affable, silver-haired gent. Egypt is one of those places where Engineer is used as a title, like Doctor or Professor, and Engineer Musalam bears the title well. In his personality and bearing he has at least as much in common with other highly competent engineers around the world as he does with other Egyptians. In defiance of ARENTO rules, he drives himself around in his own vehicle, a tiny, beat-up, but perfectly functional subcompact. An engineer of his stature is supposed to be chauffeured around in a company car. Most Egyptian service-industry professionals are masters at laying passive-aggressive head trips on their employers. Half the time, when you compensate them, they make it clear that you have embarrassed them, and yourself, by grossly overdoing it - you have just gotten it totally wrong, really pissed down your leg, and placed them in a terribly awkward situation. The other half of the time, you have insulted them by being miserly. You never get it right. But Engineer Musalam, a logical and practical-minded sort, cannot abide the idea of a driver spending his entire day, every day, sitting in a car waiting for the boss to go somewhere. So he eventually threw up his hands and unleashed his driver on the job market.
Charitably, Engineer Musalam takes the view that the completion of the Aswøan High Dam tamed the Nile's current to the point where no one need worry about running cables to Port Said anymore. FLAG's surveyors obviously agree with him, because they chose Port Said as one of their landing points. On the other hand, FLAG's archenemy, SEA-ME-WE 3, will land only at Alexandria, because France Telecom's engineers refuse to lay cable across the Nile. SEA-ME-WE 3's redundant routes will run, instead, along the Desert Road and the Agricultural Road. Bandwidth buyers trying to choose between the two cables can presumably look forward to lurid sales presentations from FLAG marketers detailing the insane recklessness of SEA-ME-WE 3's approach, and vice versa.
At the dirt-and-duct level, the operation in Egypt is much like the one in Thailand. The work is being done by Consolidated Contractors, which is a fairly interesting multinational contracting firm that is based and funded in the Middle East but works all over the globe. Here it is laying six 100-mm ducts (10 inside Alexandria proper) as compared with only two in Thailand. These ducts are all PVC pipe, but FLAG's duct is made of a higher grade of PVC than the others - even than President Mubarak's duct.
That's right - in a nicely Pharaonic touch, one of the six ducts going into the ground here is the sole property of President Hosni Mubarak, or (presumably) whoever succeeds him as head of state. It is hard to envision why a head of state would want or need his own private tube full of air running underneath the Sahara. The obvious guess is that the duct might be used to create a secure communications system, independent of the civilian and military systems (the Egyptian military will own one of the six ducts, and ARENTO will own three). This, in and of itself, says something about the relationship between the military and the government in Egypt. It is hardly surprising when you consider that Mubarak's predecessor was murdered by the military during a parade.
Inside the city, where ten rather than six ducts are being prepared, they must occasionally sprout up out of the ground and run along the undersides of bridges and flyovers. In these sections it is easy to identify FLAG's duct because, unlike the others, it is galvanized steel instead of PVC. FLAG undoubtedly specified steel for its far greater protective value, but in so doing posed a challenge for Engineer Musalam, who knew that thieves would attack the system wherever they could reach it - not to take the cable but to get their hands on that tempting steel pipe. So, wherever the undersides of these bridges and flyovers are within 2 or 3 meters of ground level, Engineer Musalam has built in special measures to make it virtually impossible for thieves to get their hands on FLAG's pipe.
For the most part, the duct installation is a simple cut-and-cover operation, right down the median strip. But the median is crossed frequently by nicely paved, heavily trafficked U-turn routes. To cut or block one of these would be unthinkable, since no journey in Egypt is complete without numerous U-turns. It is therefore necessary to bore a horizontal tunnel under each one, run a 600-mm steel pipe down the tunnel, and finally thread the ducts through it. The tunnels are bored by laborers operating big manually powered augers. Under a sign reading Civil Works: Fiberoptic Link around the Globe, the men had left their street clothes carefully wrapped up in plastic bags, on the shoulder of the road. They had kicked off their shoes and changed into the traditional, loose, ankle-length garment. One by one, they disappeared into a
tunnel barely big enough to lie down in, carrying empty baskets, then returned a few minutes later with baskets full of dirt, looking like extras in some new Hollywood costume drama: The Ten Commandments Meets the Great Escape.
We blundered across Engineer Musalam's path one afternoon. This was sheer luck, but also kind of inevitable: other than ditch diggers, the only people in the median strip of this highway are hacker tourists and ARENTO engineers. He was here because one of the crews working on FLAG had, while enlarging a manhole excavation, plunged the blade of their backhoe right through the main communications cable connecting Egypt to Libya - a 960-circuit coaxial line buried, sans conduit, in the same median. Libya had dropped off the net for a while until Mu'ammar Gadhafi's eastbound traffic could be shunted to a microwave relay chain and an ARENTO repair crew had been mobilized. The quality of such an operation is not measured by how frequently cables get broken (usually they are broken by other people) but by how quickly they get fixed afterward, and by this standard Engineer Musalam runs a tight ship. The mishap occurred on a Friday afternoon - the Muslim sabbath - the first day of a three-day weekend and a national holiday to boot - 40 years to the day after the Suez Canal was handed over to Egypt. Nevertheless, the entire hierarchy was gathered around the manhole excavation, from ditch diggers hastily imported from another nearby site all the way up to Engineer Musalam.
The ditch diggers made the hole even larger, whittling out a place for one of the splicing technicians to sit. The technicians stood on the brink of the pit offering directions, and eventually they jumped into it and grabbed shovels; their toolboxes were lowered in after them on ropes, and their black dress trousers and crisp white shirts rapidly converged on the same color as the dust covered them. In the lee of an unburied concrete manhole nearby, a couple of men established a little refreshment center: one hubbly-bubbly and one portable stove, shooting flames like a miniature oil well fire, where they cranked out glass after glass of heavily sweetened tea. This struck me as more efficient than the American technique of sending a gofer down to the 7-Eleven for a brace of Super Big Gulps. Traffic swirled around the adjacent U-turn; motorists rolled their windows down and asked for directions, which were cheerfully given. Egyptian males are not afraid to hold hands with each other or to ask for directions, which does not mean that they should be confused with sensitive New Age males.
Mother Earth Mother Board Page 8