I arrived at length at the city of Cairo…boundless in multitude of buildings, peerless in beauty and splendour, the meeting-place of comer and goer, the stopping-place of feeble and strong…she surges as the waves of the sea with her throngs of folk and can scarce contain them.
-Travels, Book I, Ibn Battuta, trans. H.A.R. Gibb
When Daoud and I arrived in Cairo by air in January 1984 we landed at night in a sprawling city, all lit up. It seemed like every electric light was neon or fluorescent. Nothing natural about it, a lot like the New York we had left behind ten hours earlier. Two months later we arrived again, this time from the South, eight hundred miles stride by camel stride, still blinking from the desert’s noonday glare and starlit dark. Cairo seemed to us a different city on a different planet. If KhairAllah could have spoken to Ibn Battuta, then at the beginning of his journey just as KhairAllah was at the end of his, what might he have said? Go back home, there is nothing more in the world worth seeing.