by Jim Malusa
But what of the remaining destinations in my bottom-of-the-world scheme? They were no longer simply a list on my desk and dots in my beautiful atlas, a book that made every country inviting. I pored over the maps, considered my chances, and submitted my proposal to Discovery Online. I would go to Djibouti, Africa.
I was not brave. I knew nothing of Djibouti, and my imagination filled the void with fierce folk and slobbering carnivores. I was afraid, and in my mind it was best to get the African pit out of the way, finished, forever. The powers-that-be didn’t agree, however. A month later, the Queen Editor rang me and said: Africa, no. It’s not safe. We’re thinking a better choice is the Dead Sea.
I grumbled but gave in after realizing that nobody else had offered to pay me to ride my bike. My fate decided, I pulled out the atlas and flopped it open to Plate 35, Israel-Jordan. It was not remotely similar to the map of Australia. Lake Eyre is a broad splash of salt on a desert plain. The valley of the Dead Sea cleaves a high plateau with a gash as deep as the Grand Canyon. The little Jordan River twists and turns along the valley bottom, not much as rivers go, but enough to form the thirty-mile-long Dead Sea. The seashore is pegged by surveyors at minus 1,350 feet. That makes it the lowest point in Asia and the grand prize winner for the deepest depression on the surface of the globe.
East of the sea is Jordan. To the west, the map reads, “Israel Military Administration”—the Palestinian West Bank. It took me all of ten seconds to imagine a soldier, sweating under the moonlight, his finger on the trigger of an Uzi as he crept toward my camp.
That settled it: I would finish my ride on the Jordanian side. But where to begin? Jordan is only a third the size of Arizona, and I hankered to ride farther. To the north is Syria, and to the west, Iraq—more guns, more soldiers. To the southwest is Egypt, and there I found my route.
I would begin in Cairo and take the most topographically interesting route, which happened to be the same path blazed by Moses and crew during the Exodus 3,200 years ago. The convergence of our ways was a coincidence, but it made me suspect that Moses had more in mind than eluding Pharaoh’s army.
Some Exodus scholars have objected to the popularly accepted route of Moses on the grounds that it seems unnecessarily scenic. But making a beeline from the Nile to the Dead Sea would have been the biblical equivalent of taking the interstate, a straight shot across the most tedious landscape. Why not swing south to dip a toe in the Red Sea’s Gulf of Suez? Once there, Moses likely caught sight of the mountains of the Sinai Peninsula and headed east for the stupendous heap of granite 8,000 feet above the desert—surely there would be water and palms in the canyons, and a chance to consult with Yahweh at the top. From the summit of Mount Sinai, the remainder of the route was obvious: down to the eastern shore of the Sinai, the Gulf of Aqaba, then north to the great scarp rimming the Dead Sea. The Promised Land.
Moses had a little help with the parting of the Red Sea, but the best evidence that he was truly blessed is this: he pulled off the trip without a single permit from the Egyptian authorities. “The first documents that attest the existence of bureaucracy,” wrote Lewis Mumford, “belong to the Pyramid Age.” Mumford puts it at 2375 BC.
Nearly 4,400 years later, while I worked the phone in an effort to get official permission for my trip, an Egyptian minister of information explained to me, “When you go by bike, they cannot say where you go. There is rules in Egypt. No nudity. The officials are concerned—they cannot give their approval.”
They were concerned because they didn’t want me wandering the country unescorted on a bicycle loaded with spy equipment—a digital camera, a computer, and a Nera satellite telephone. The sat phone was a consequence of problems I’d had trying to get an internet connection in Australia. I assumed it would be impossible in Egypt without a satellite phone.
I called the journalists in the Egyptian Foreign Press Center in Washington, D.C. They gave me their gung ho support and forwarded my scheme to the proper state officials. Weeks later, the Foreign Press Center called me back to gloomily recite from the fax they’d received.
“ ‘To ensure that,’ blah, blah, blah, OK, here it is: ‘Because your equipment is worth $10,000 and the road is dangerous, we cannot guarantee your safety.’ ”
Who, I asked, cannot guarantee my safety? And I didn’t ask for a guarantee, just permission.
“The letterhead and signature are blacked out. Top secret stuff. It is possible that they just want to keep an eye on you. In Egypt, a non-Egyptian with a camera needs to meet all the requirements.”
I wasn’t granted permission, but neither was I denied. The Foreign Press Center recommended I bring as many official forms and letters as possible. “Everything must be original, not a copy. Better if it is stamped. Much better.”
I accumulated a fat portfolio for Egypt, then sought permission from Jordan. A pleasant man from the Ministry of Information said: “No problem. You do not need a permit for a telephone.” Disbelieving, I asked for a letter repeating these words in official form, but was told there is no such form. “Just bring your visa.”
I didn’t want to beg. Besides, I had to move on to Israel, a slender piece of which lies between Egypt and Jordan. An Israeli official first made clear that they were not a bunch of hayseeds living in the past. “Such telephones are common in Israel.” That’s wonderful, I said—can I bring one in? “Of course. But there can be new security concerns at any time.”
Meaning, it was a crap shoot. Forms were necessary but made no difference in the end. All that mattered was the moment I crossed the border.
I turned my energies to Arabic lessons. Sadly, I have trouble enough with English (I struggle to understand song lyrics on the radio), and Arabic has sonic nuances like the “voiceless pharyngeal fricative.” I learned little more than hello and good-bye, yes and no, how to give thanks to God, plead for water, and declare “I am lost.” My Egyptian-born tutor, stressing the primacy of the family in Arab lands, also taught me “Your children are very nice” and “My wife is pregnant.” In theory this was a form of life insurance, because it was not honorable to kill a defenseless family man. The theory was my own, invented to soothe my friends and family who worried about my safety whenever the news carried another story of an Arab who blew up himself and several Israelis.
Such desperate acts were hard to reconcile with the legendary hospitality of Arabs. The World Trade Center still stood, and I wasn’t venturing into a war zone, so it was more likely I’d be killed by a taxi than a terrorist. I assumed that although Arabs might despise the American government’s support of Israel, they would recognize that I was not the government. I was just a man who wanted to ride his bike to the Dead Sea.
Exactly one year after Lake Eyre, I was roused from bed by the spring chortle of a backyard mockingbird. Laid out on the dresser were my travel pants with the secret money pocket, proof that I was leaving. I paced the cool concrete floor and checked essentials: bike box securely taped, stapled sheaf of plane tickets, passport in a slender wallet that hung from my neck. Driving to the Tucson airport with Sonya, down Speedway Boulevard and past a billboard for Tuff-Sheds, I was glumly aware that we would have separate beds for the next forty days.
I felt better with a window at 30,000 feet, with free peanuts to boot. A flight attendant leaned over row 34 and confessed, “I was almost crying watching you two say good-bye.” It’s love and hormones, I said: my wife is pregnant with our first child.
This father-to-be looked out onto the slumping gravel heaps, frozen lava spills, and jump-off-and-die mesas of the American Southwest. It was certainly possible that the Dead Sea desert looked like this, but I’d scrupulously avoided photographs. Travel without surprise was merely an agenda.
THE MOMENT FLIGHT 346, Zurich to Cairo, lifted off the runway, every man in my row lit a cigarette. And they were all men, Arab men, sipping Cokes and enjoying our unveiled stewardesses. The fundamentalists were right: hair is sexy.
My neighbor, Ahmed, sucked on a Ma
rlboro and offered me a stick of gum. He was from Alexandria. “Cairo, big people,” he said. “Alexandria, little people.” Smoke leaked from his honest smile, and I realized that Ahmed and I shared the same gift for foreign language.
Another Egyptian explained, “He means Cairo has many people. Fifteen million. Why do you come to Egypt?”
Journalist, I said.
“I think you find it a very strange country. Very rich people, and very poor, with not many between.”
The very strange country was across a Mediterranean only an hour wide. The rim of Africa was wind-smoothed desert, and the delta of the Nile dense green and spotted with tight villages of white homes stacked like boxes. The desert was blank. There was no intermediate zone. It was the Nile or nothing. A hundred miles inland, the enormous triangle of river distributaries and farms came to an apex, and at that point was the city of Cairo.
The notarized forms for my gear emitted a glow of authority that impressed the customs men at the airport. The camera wasn’t a problem. Nobody asked if I was going to bicycle in the nude. But the satellite telephone caused a minor sensation. It looked like an office phone in a folding box the size of a laptop computer; the lid was the antenna. The device had power enough to talk to a satellite floating 24,000 miles above the equator. Warning stickers with lightning-bolt graphics suggested that the user shouldn’t point the antenna at children or reproductive organs or anything you hoped would last a long time.
There ensued much hand-waving and pleading on my behalf by Abraham, my special “expediter” from the airport Press Office. The customs men, crowded around the telephone, paid no attention. They opened the lid and uncoiled the antenna cable. I didn’t know what would happen if they hit the ON button while their faces were inches from the antenna, but I guessed singed eyebrows and the end of my assignment.
A customs man ejected the battery from the phone and gave it to Abraham. He kept the phone. We had lost. Abraham said, “I am sorry, Mr. James, but you must leave your satellite phone. You must go to the downtown Press Office tomorrow and get the papers for the phone. Then return to the airport to get the phone.” He rolled his eyes to the bank of fluorescent lights and the heavens beyond and added in Arabic, “God willing.”
God willing, I would at least reach my hotel, despite being unable to find the words to tell my taxi driver that he’d forgotten to turn on his headlights. This wouldn’t have worried me as much if the taxi were not painted, like all Cairo taxis, black with white fenders, distressingly similar to the checkered pattern on crash-test dummies.
I tried some English on Mohammed: No lights?
He smiled and patted the seat of the Peugeot wagon, which looked to be upholstered in tinsel and wool. “This Egypt. No problem.” He pointed to the streetlights. “Light.”
Because Mohammed’s horn was frequently in use, he reserved the headlights as a sort of second horn for running red lights. At first this was deeply alarming. But nobody in Cairo expected anybody to stop at a signal, a mutual understanding shared by the farting buses and the silent Mercedes, the blue-smoke motorbikes and the diesel tractors. Like blood cells jostling to fit into a capillary, this honking, headlight-blinking mass of steel, rubber, and flesh pushed into the clot of downtown Cairo.
IN THE MORNING I set off to retrieve the phone. Only a mile to the Press Office, so I walked, smiling at the teenage police toting Kalashnikovs. They grinned back. I resisted the lure of cafés hazed with the smoke of water pipes and slipped between the cars parked on the sidewalk. It was OK to double park so long as you left your car unlocked; the driver of the blocked car simply pushed yours out of the way.
The Press Office was sharp, with TV monitors and potted plants trembling in the blast of Power USA air conditioners. The brawl of traffic on the Corniche along the Nile was reduced to a subsonic rumble tweaked with horns and an occasional motorcycle buzz. The staff was appalled at the loss of my phone. Within an hour, the Press Office whipped up some handsomely stamped letters for me to bring to the Telephone Office, maybe one mile away.
With a neat man named Masoud from the Press Office as my guide, I was led into the maw of Egyptian bureaucracy. Behind the massive Corinthian columns of the telephone building was a warren of halls, crowded with government workers and fire extinguishers, with the latter just in case the former ignite with a cigarette the towering stacks of receipts.
Masoud was good-natured as we searched for the proper office through the main building and the first annex, but his smile waned in the second annex, and vanished when we were told to return to the first annex.
“I am angry!” He was sweating in his camel-hair sport coat. “These foolish people do not know anything!”
But they knew how to cheerfully give directions that led to more directions. The Telephone Building had offices with missing windows, offices with crank telephones, offices with people scribbling in tremendous ledgers, and one office with a man asleep with his head atop his phone. We did not disturb him, and after two hours we shambled into an office with an Immarsat satellite map and a man behind an impressive four-telephone desk. I thought: This is it.
It was. While we waited, Masoud explained why fans were superior to air-conditioning. “I like things natural. The fan moves air, and the air is from God.”
The air in Cairo was an eye-stinging blur of God’s dust and the unholy by-products of internal combustion. In search of something more divine, I asked Masoud to translate the ornate wall hanging.
“It is from the Koran. Only one God.”
But, I said, it looks like there’s more written.
“Only one God,” he repeated. Before disappearing behind a glass door, he snuck in the last word. “God not pregnant, have son you call Jesus. One God.” A minute later he returned with the news. “I think maybe you do this story without your phone. They say you must pay 220 pounds ($70), then wait for permission. Could be one week, two weeks, two months. Nobody knows such things.”
I had the money but not the time. Without the satellite phone I’d have to rely on Egyptian phones, a system presumably run by the people in this building. I cruelly concluded I’d have better luck using carrier pigeons.
Back at the Press Center, I was offered coffee and consolations and promises: the phone will be released. God willing. It’s my fault, I said—I should have declared on the customs form that it was a phone, not a satellite phone. Then they would have never known.
“Oh, give me a break,” said the big chief with the big desk, Mr. Agamy. “We’re not that naïve. They would know.” He glanced up at a row of six clocks, each set to a different world time zone. “What we must try is to go quickly to the end of the process. How long will you stay in Cairo?”
As long as it takes to get the phone, I said.
Outside the Press Office I was swallowed by the stunning clamor of the city. I had a deadline for reaching the Dead Sea, but I could always hitch a ride if I fell behind. The problem was surviving Cairo. It was an easy city to hate. Bawling boulevards trimmed with trash! Fifteen million people! Lawless drivers invading the sidewalks!
I headed out into the lunge of traffic, in the general direction of my hotel and the stupendously frank sign for Flit Insect Killer. But I was soon diverted by sidewalk booksellers hawking racy Egyptian romance novels and Victoria’s Secret lingerie catalogs wrapped in no-peek plastic and dog-eared English paperbacks ranging from The Catcher in the Rye to Body Armor 2000.
The sound of work drew me into a dim alley. It was blacksmiths and brass-smashers and metal-cutters. The alley was too narrow to allow even the midget trucks favored in the inner city. The afternoon sun, too, was excluded, and men pedaled cargo tricycles through shadows that still held the cool of the spring morning.
A peek into a tea shop led to a quiet seat among quiet men, a cup of tea and a water pipe of my own. Very sweet, the tea and the smoke, with honey-soaked tobacco kept burning by glowing coals atop the bowl. I was the only tourist, and I quickly exhausted my store of Arabic. Wh
en asked a question I might understand but didn’t know how to answer, I reflexively spoke the only foreign language I knew. “Si.” Nobody minded.
I left the tea shop and stuck to the little streets, wandering until the day faded and the lights came on over the meat market. Spastic chickens in wooden cages awaited the whack of cleavers. Most stands were simply a table of bloody meat dripping onto the sawdust floor, but from the ceiling of the Modern Flower Butcher Shop hung crystal chandeliers and sides of beef. From some hidden place came the strings of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
Women with scarves hiding their hair loaded up on liver and brains, taking care not to spill blood onto their surprisingly sleek pumps and fancy black ankle stockings. Children roamed freely into the evening. They were unescorted, but not unwatched. The sidewalk chatter was completely unintelligible, but unmistakably gossip among friends and relations. I’d been reading about such a place in Naguib Mahfouz’s novel, Midaq Alley, but it was set during World War II in a Cairo I’d assumed had vanished with television.
Midaq Alley was at my bedside in the Cosmopolitan Hotel, a relic with fifteen-foot ceilings and gothic armoires. In the morning I woke to birdsong and the clanging of metal. I rose from a mattress that felt as if stuffed with rags, and threw open the shutters to look down four floors to an alley. From a bicycle fitted with enormous cargo racks, a man unloaded propane cylinders the size of basset hounds. Blue and green parakeets sang from a wicker cage on a balcony opposite, where a woman stuffed grape leaves. A street sweeper whished past, and in his dusty wake men and women in gowns emerged and took their places in the alley, washing tea glasses in pails and dragging out display cases of sweets.