An Ethiopian Bar Tab of Half a Million

“Half a million in silver, did you say?” “In Maria Theresa dollars. Worth a hundred thou’ in quids.” He held up a gleaming coin, broad as a crown, with the old girl double-chinned on one side and the Austrian arms on t’other. “Dam’ disinheritin’ old bitch, what? Mind, they say she was a plum in her youth, blonde, buxom, just your sort, Flashy- ” “Ne’er mind my sort. The cash must reach this place in Africa within four weeks?”…Aye, it’s an interesting country, Abyssinia.

-Flashman on the March, George MacDonald Fraser

The tour had not gone well. My group was composed of complainers and laggards. A volatile mix. Some worse than others. Plus the travel agency had not done its job. Our local guide had never been to where we were going, and he did not speak the language. In the Horn of Africa, you need more than one. And either French or English is the lingua franca, depending on the country. Few Ethiopians speak French. Why would they ever go to Djibouti anyway?

On the last evening when we flew into Addis from Hargeisa, with rooms booked at a hotel until our flight home at 3am, the guide had already left us, we had not been met by anyone else, I didn’t know what hotel we were booked into, and the agency’s telephone was not picking up. The complainers complained, the laggards lagged. It was getting later and later. We finally sorted it out and got to the hotel, where we had no reservations after all and I had to promise that the agency would be good for it.

Drinks on the house, said I. I was angry, the trip had been a bust, and I wanted someone to pay for it. For two weeks of hell.

I admit that I did most of the drinking, me and the 80 year old Texan (see April 29). Johnnie Walker Blue. I told the ladies to have the French champagne. The barman gladly poured away, no one was signing any chits, and it got closer to 3am. Finally the local agency’s owner showed, full of smiles and best wishes for a safe flight home. I told him that we’d left a bill at the bar for him to pay, since we hadn’t taken our rooms, and they were included in what the trip cost. OK said he.

Once back home I got an irate call from the US travel agency owner, who before leaving had told me how great his Ethiopian counterpart was, that he would handle everything, that he knew what you needed before being asked. He told me I’d left behind a one thousand dollar bar bill for the local guy to pay, and he was passing it on to the US guy. What was I thinking, the US guy asked me. How much drinking can eight retired Americans do after 10pm?

Ihab, I replied, it sounds like you got took by the oldest Ethiopian bar scam there is. And I bet your friend the local agent was in on it too. Aye, an interesting country, especially when someone else picks up the tab.

A Cape Like Any Other

Cape Girardeau is situated on a hillside and makes a handsome Appearance…Uncle Mumford [Twain’s boatmate] said that Cape Girardeau was the Athens of Missouri…Partialities often make people see more than really Exists.

-Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain

I first met Mahdi in Omdurman in 1988. He was dressed like most Sudanese there so I greeted him in Arabic. He returned my greeting in American-accented English. He asked me where I was from and I said USA. He said, I can tell. Whereabouts in the States? I said St. Louis. He said, Ya, I know St. Louis. So I asked him where he was from and he said, the Cape.

My mind started working…The Cape? Which cape? Cape of Good Hope. Cape Verde. Cape Town. Those I knew but all seemed unlikely. Maybe he was translating from Arabic the word “ra’s”, meaning “head”, which Arabs use to mean cape. I only knew Ra’s Muhammad, at the end of the Sinai Penninsula, but that was in Egypt. In Sudan there is Ra’s Abu Shagara, Cape of the Father of the Tree, but nothing else is there. The tip of the Horn of Africa has Ra’s Guardafui, what Strabo the Geographer called Aromata Promontorium for its incense trade, which got its later name from Italian mariners saying “Guarda!”, Look Out!, and “Fui!”, Get Away!, but that is in Somalia, now the breakaway Republic of Puntland.

So I asked him. Which Cape? He said, Cape Girardeau, I go to school there. Wow, I thought. Leaving Omdurman to go to school in the Cape, that Cape. So Mark Twain’s boatmate was right. The Athens of Missouri. But being Rush Limbaugh’s hometown, if you ask me it should be renamed Cape Look Out! Get Away!

The Nile from Omdurman

Profundum Aequor

Originally called the Profundum Aequor by Curtius Rufus Quintus, meaning deep water sea, the word desert comes…with the negative connotation of desertion, suggesting abandonment of the established order for a place set apart from the world. The idea of deprivation eventually pervaded the very concept of deserts, and it became associated with the ideas of extremes- extreme temperatures, winds, erosion, distances- and severe shortage of water. Over time it came to connote abstract ideas like solitude, emptiness, and nothingness.

-Mysteries of the Great Egyptian Desert, Pauline and Philippe de Flers

When you are past Day 20 on the Way of the Forty, you do not think much about the etymology and connotations of the word “desert”. Desertum, Sahraa’, Rimal…nothing captures the imagination as well as a simple drink of water in the shade of a lone tree. There I have found camel ticks and fennec fox tracks. Everybody and everything must get out of the sun when there is nothing but that sun’s full torrid sweep across the sky ahead of you.

But during the Bush Wars it was hard to avoid pundits quoting Tacitus on the subject of deserts- ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant, “where they make a desert they call it peace”. But does the Latin “solitudinem” here really mean desert? Secondary meanings as in English are “solitude”, “desolation”, and “loneliness”. Why didn’t Tacitus use the more specific Latin word “desertum”?

Tacitus was quoting the speech of a Celt warrior named Calgacus who had arrayed in battle against Tacitus’ father in law Agricola during the Roman conquest of Scotland. Calgacus was tryng to rally his troops in a hopeless cause. Think Mel Gibson in Braveheart. I doubt that a Celt in the north of Britain where 180 inches of rain can fall in a year could have had any idea what a desert might be like. I have been in a real desert and I have also felt solitude, desolation, and loneliness. I think Calgacus was talking about the latter.

Quintus Curtius Rufus’ full quote about the Egyptian desert in his Histories of Alexander the Great is, “but when plains covered with deep sand disclosed themselves, just as if they had entered a vast sea [profundum aequor], they looked in vain for land. Not a tree met the eye.”

Those pundits should have given their Tacitus quote a Quintus twist. His Calgacus should have said of the Romans, “they fill the sea and call it land”. Where not a tree meets the eye. Where not a tick, fennec fox, or camel driver finds shade.

A Desert Wife Helped by a Desert Father

“Another time too I found a comely woman wandering in the desert. And when I asked her why and how she had come into these parts, ‘Ask me nothing,’ said she, ‘nor question me for reason, that I am the wretchedest of women, but if it pleases thee to have a handmaid, take me where you wilt’. And when I heard this, I had pity for her and took her to the cave…and gave her three hundred solidi [the Roman coin the solidus, containing 4.5g of pure gold each].” As recorded by the 4th C. Egyptian anchorite St. Paphnutius the Ascetic

-The Desert Fathers: Translations from the Latin

The Way of the Forty was by and large a men’s way. My friend Lorraine and her friend Angela had ridden part of it and gotten themselves arrested by the Egyptian border police, but how much of their trouble was caused by them being women, and how much their eventual release was due to that very same thing, is not known.

In my experience, only a few women were to be found at watering stations and in goatherders’ tents. One even washed my hair and my clothes when we passed by. I doubt she had ever done that before. And I sure did not pay her a kilo of gold for her services.

By the way, St. Paphnutius’ account is not what it seems. He did not take her to his cave and pay then for her services. After all, he was called The Ascetic. The woman was wretched because her husband could not pay his taxes. And the goodly saint did not give her everything he had so she could bail him out of debtors’ prison. Instead, Paphnutius was quoting another man’s story, a man who said of himself that he was sinful and degraded. So it is not known what the saint himself would have done with a comely woman offering to be his handmaid in the desert. Maybe ask her to wash his hair.

Abu Sinna and Mina

Have I not said enough about Alexandria? Am I not to be reinfected once more by the dream of it and the memory of its inhabitants? Dreams I had thought safely locked up on paper, confided to the strong rooms of memory! You will think I am indulging myself. It is not so.

-Balthazar, Book II of the Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell

I too thought I was done with Alexandria, and for that matter with Egyptian pulmonologists. In Cairo I’d had too close an encounter with Egyptian surgery and hospital stays, admitted twice for- diagnosis: spontaneous pneumothorax, aka collapsed lung, treatment: chest tube insertion, hospital: Agouza, time: the same day Pope John Paul I died, so the Italian nuns who ran the place were praying to God, not ministering to patients.

When I broke down in tears the second time Dr. Gamal Abu Sinna inserted the chest tube (the first time did not work as planned, despite him saying the bismillah before picking up the scalpel), he asked me if I were a soldier in the army. Why? I asked. Because, he said, The only men I have seen cry are Egyptian soldiers facing the Israeli enemy.

That was in 1978. Fast forward forty one years and I found myself in another hospital, this time in New York, with yet more lung trouble, and I was treated- successfully the first time!- by Dr. Bushra Mina, graduate of University of Alexandria School of Medicine. His expertise goes far beyond chest tubes. How about catheterization of the femoral vein aiming for bilateral submassive pulmonary emboli?

According to my guess as to their names spelled in Arabic, sinna means “pinprick” and mina means “port” (not to be confused with mani meaning “sperma genitale”- as per the Joseph Catafago dictionary of 1873). Either way, Cairo’s Agouza Hospital or Alexandria’s School of Medicine, I am glad to have seen their best.

Omdurman by Day

In 1907 in a tiny classroom in the small town of Rufa’a, seventeen young girls were reading and writing nonsense words. They belonged to the initial classs of the Rufa’a Girls School, a bold experiment to determine if formal education in reading, writing and arithmetic was appropriate for Sudanese girls. Because the students had no previous knowledge of the written alphabet, their headmaster Sheikh Babikr Bedri [a merchant and veteran of the Mahdi’s army] designed a primer that introduced groups of similar letters and combined them into “words”. When the girls had learned just eleven letters (out of 28 in the Arabic alphabet), Ernest Dickinson, governor of the province, paid the school a visit. The young students carefully and proudly recited what they had learned. Dickinson himself knew little Arabic. He wrote in amazement that after just a few weeks of schooling, the Rufa’a girls already knew how to read and write.

-Khartoum at Night- Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan, Marie Grace Brown

I wanted to show my film at Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman. I thought the women would like it even though the film is about men. Gasim Bedri, president of Ahfad, had arranged the screening in the library. Gasim is the grandson of Sheikh Babikr, and Ahfad University is the outcome of his experiment at Rufa’a Girls School.

Very few students were in attendance at screening time and I wanted a full house, so I walked out to the campus basketball court where a game was just ending. Come to a film screening, I said, You will like it. The women said, No, we are sweating and tired. We want to go to our dorm and study.

If Ernest Dickinson was easily fooled by the Rufa’a girls, I was even more easily fooled by the Ahfad women, because I knew even less about Arab co-education than did he. The women at Ahfad were studying psychology, business management, early childhood education and things like that. They did not care about men in the desert driving camels to market. I was amazed that they would pass on seeing a film about trails through the Sahara but they were more interested in finding their own ways through the modern world. After their basketball game.

Khartoum at Night

Central to this story is the tobe, a popular, modest form of dress that wrapped around a woman’s body and head…northern Sudanese women manipulated the tucks, folds, and social messages of the tobe to deftly negotiate the competing pulls of modernization and cultural authenticity.

-from the back cover of Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan

Compared to their neighbors, Sudanese women were relatively resistant to Western fashions…No matter what they wore underneath, in public women continued to wear the tobe- an entirely Sudanese fashion not shared by other women…The best quality tobes were white or very light pastel. Each new season brought subtle shifts in the pattern of dots, tufts, and borders. And each new style was matched with a creative name.

Khartoum at Night is…the name of a popular 1950s tobe…used to convey the sentiments of possibility, momentum, rupture, and danger.

-Khartoum at Night, Marie Grace Brown

Arriving in Khartoum from Cairo was like the beginning of The Wizard of Oz. The world suddenly went from black and white to technicolor. Egyptian women then wore black outer wraps called malayyas, sheets. Sudanese women wore tobes, gowns, in electric colors. Egyptian men were also seemingly in black, always bellowing about something or other, whether a street altercation or a simple greeting. They answered the telephone by shouting into the receiver, Meen, Who? Sudanese men on the contrary were very, very chilled out even when they should have been heated up. As if they were living in pastels.

I remember arriving in Khartoum on a flight at 2am in the company of a Sudanese man. He said he would get us a taxi, me to my hotel, then on to his house. There was only one cab waiting at the airport and the driver wanted too much money, as my friend said. In Egypt this would have led to a horrific shouting match. In Khartoum at 2am it led to a silent stand-off, the driver and my friend facing opposite ways and calmly stating their prices, sotto voce, as if they were talking to other people. Finally their prices matched up and we got in the taxi.

There are frequent dust storms in Khartoum which turn everything the dun color of sand. Even the men’s galabiyyas, usually bright white cotton, turn dull. But ladies’ tobes keep their electric colors as bright as when new. When I was there the first time, in 1984, the taste must have been for deep, strong pastels, not light, because their strength of color amazed me. From a distance, when everything else was half masked by blown sand, a tobe stood out like a neon sign, flashing… Here. I. Am.

Alexandria as I Wanted to Find It But Never Did

What is resumed in the word Alexandria? In a flash of my mind’s eyes shows me a thousand dust-tormented streets. Flies and beggars own it today- and those who enjoy an intermediate existence between either.

Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbour bar. But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them. The sexual provender which lies to hand is staggering in its variety and profusion. You would never mistake it for a happy place.

-Justine, Book I of the Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell

I went to Alexandria from Cairo several times that year, always expecting to find a different city from what it had become under Nasser. No longer the Greek city of Palladas and Callimachus, or the Greco-Roman city of Forster in the first world war, or the mixed-up, cosmopolitan fin de siecle-feeling place of Durrell in the second, or the caved-in shell of its former self as it weighed upon Cavafy. By the time I was there, long before anyone thought of reviving its glory days by building the Bibliotheca Alexandrina as a pan-Mediterranean faux cultural capital and is now just another UN funded boondoggle, it had already been Egyptianized through and through.

I did go to the beach at Muntazah once, where women could still comfortably swim in a two piece suit, I was invited to someone’s private cabana but the sand was dirty and it smelled like raw sewage. I always liked the antique-looking street cars that turned around at Ramleh Station, and I especially liked the Gran Trianon with the screened-off area for men only, with the mural behind the bar of what I now half-remember as half-naked nymphs cavorting with satyrs, but probably I am mistaken and the scene was in fact entirely chaste.

Callimachus was an epigrammist and scribe in the Alexandria library. He liked Alexandria’s care-free life and liberties. Like Durrell, he appreciated the city’s five sexes but I do not think he was particularly happy there, even though no doubt he thought it superior to his birthplace in a Libyan backwater. He wrote the epitaph of Timon of Athens- “I, Timon, hater of men, inhabit here; but go thou by; Curse me as thou will, but go.”

Alexandria did not make me feel quite as bad as that, but I was happy not to go back when I finally realized it was not worth the trouble of getting there, even though the train ride was relatively nice and it is always nice to leave Cairo.

Ishal or Bust

Notes on the Bashgali Language consisted of a grammar and a collection of sentences. Reading the 1,744 sentences in their English equivalents, I began to form a disturbing impression of the waking life of the Bashgalis. “‘Shtal latta wos ba padre u prett tu nashtonti mrlosh.’ Do you know what that is?” “What?” “In Bashgali it’s ‘If you have had diarrhoea many days you will surely die.’” “That’s not much use,” he said. “What about this then, ‘Bilagh do na pi bilash.’ It means, ‘Don’t drink much water, otherwise you won’t be able to travel.’”

-A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, Eric Newby

I had several occasions to learn the Arabic word for diarrhoea, or as I spelled it, squitz. Ishal, the verbal noun of the fourth form of the verb ‘sahala’, meaning literally ‘easement’, is something that the camels suffered from depending on what they had been eating. If they were eating normally, it came out in dry pellets and could be burned in the camp fire. Otherwise you stayed away from it. I had heard that the best medicine for ishal among humans was bananas. Since there were no bananas to be found in the Sahara, drinking much water was second best, whether it stopped you from travelling or just plain stopped you, it didn’t matter when there was no choice. Yinbah al kalb wa maashi al jamal, The Dog Barks and the Camel Moves On. The caravan stops for no man, beast, or stomach trouble.

Rip Van Winkle in Cairo

At least 8% of female students are sexually harrassed on campus.

-American University in Cairo student newspaper, December 9, 2012

Two months ago on the first day she wore the niqab, Heba El-Shabrawi entered the gates of American University in Cairo and attempted to pass through security. The guards refused to let her on campus…Last week the AUC administration informed El-Shabrawi of their final decision, either she takes off the niqab or she feels free to attend another university.

-Al-Ahram Weekly, December 7, 2000

I would not believe how most young women dress today in Cairo at AUC and on the downtown streets. Forty years ago when I was a student, schoolmates on campus wore tight jeans, fitted t-shirts, and high heel sandals. Bouffant hair and lots of make up. Most were dropped off by their drivers at the campus gate so they did not have to walk the streets, but many did.

Heading up Tala’at Harb toward Groppi’s and Cafe Riche, you had to dodge throngs of women standing excitedly outside the shoe (sing. gizma, pl. gizam- you can see the sexual pun coming) store window displays. Gizma Gazing, as we gave new lyrics to the tune of Kung Fu Fighting, a song still popular at the time.

Then the new veiling started. A complicated concept of resistance to the male gaze, an armor-clad workplace uniform- the equivalent of a jacket’s absurdly big shoulder pads worn by New York female bankers (as in the movie Working Girl), the exact opposite message- an emphatic FY- sent to men by a woman who once might have worn those FMPs sold on Tala’at Harb Street.

The new veiling coincided with the economic necessity of women having to work outside the home and to go every day into the uncivilized side of Cairo. A leading indicator of the coming of the burka you could say, when Afghan widows, so many of them made so by the war, in order to feed the family had to work in public- still essentially a war zone, and wearing a burka was like having your own driver drop you off.

But even in Cairo, burka is not bullet proof. No one will forget the video of the girl in the blue bra having her hijab ripped off and beaten while protesting in the streets. My cousin when studying in Cairo the year of Mubarak’s downfall volunteered to ferry women, returning home tired from their office jobs, from one side of Midan Tahrir to the other when the square was full, to protect them from male jeers and hand grabs.

The old AUC campus was right there, but the dress code had changed long ago. A full niqab at the student center. Those AUC girls back in 1979 sure could have saved a lot on lipstick, if not mascara.

Male Gaze in the Harem

One of the rich natives was under some obligations to me and by way of testifying his gratitude invited me to his house. On account of my being a foreigner he thought he might allow his wife to be at the party and thus contribute to my entertainment. She was extremely fair and her hands uncommonly delicate. On my admiring them, she held them out to me. We had ever little to say to each other, and to make up for this silence, I kissed her hands which, as she was perplexed to know what she should do afterwards to interest me, she did not offer to withdraw. On my side I dared not let them go. I am at a loss to conjecture how this might have terminated if refreshments had not been brought.

-Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, 1803, Vivant Denon

Besides being Napoleon’s premier savant in his invasion of Egypt, Vivant Denon previously had been a pornographer of the French Revolution, during which he painted 27 views of unusual sexual congress based on recently discovered erotic Pompeiian frescoes and several portraits of a certain Mme. Mosion, nude from the waist up and “in positions of abandon from every body angle, all executed with the artist’s most playful stroke”, as a contemporary put it. His biography is subtitled “Hedonist and Scholar”. I knew none of this when I was reading his Travels to glean information on desert caravans.

The Dabouka Stops for No One

Each year these caravans in Egypt carried three or four hundred camel loads of elephant tusks, 2,000 rhinoceros horns, 20 or 30 kantars of ostrich feathers, 2,000 kantars of arabic gum, 1,000 of tamarind and as much natron as was gathered along the way, as well as food suppplies that are eaten...Every year, two caravans travel to Darfur, each comprised of four to five thousand camels; the trip to Assiut takes 40 days.

It is above all essential in such a journey to be sufficiently well mounted to keep up with the caravan, as this stops for no one, and he who goes slower than the rest is necessarily left behind.

-Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, During the Campaigns of General Bonaparte in that Country, Vivant Denon, 1803

A kantar is an Egyptian unit for weighing cotton, about 100 pounds, and a camel in a desert caravan would be packed at about 500 pounds of load at the upper limit, thus there might have been six to ten camels carrying feathers along the Way of the Forty at the time of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. I cannot imagine having to slow down for or catch up with or hang on to a camel carrying feathers.

On my first trip on the Way of the Forty I was fascinated with the many large pieces of petrified wood lying about. We often used them in threes in our camp fires for setting the cook pots above the flame. Sometimes I packed them up in my duffle. When KhairAllah saw this he thought I was crazy.

Why make a camel carry rocks to Egypt? he asked. There are plenty rocks there too, he said. But I want to take them back home with me, I said. Are there no rocks in America? he asked. These were once trees, I said. Then why don’t they burn like acacia wood? For that I would have had no answer, unless I went back to the jinns and Iblis and the shaytan, Satan, for which I saw no need, so instead I threw most of them away.

Jewels Fit for an Ass

“Perhaps there’s a woman in the case,” suggested someone. Fairclough, who was a lifelong bachelor, snorted and peered into his tumbler. “Unlikely,” said someone else. “The only female he lets get anywhere near him is that damned donkey of his.”

-The Mamur Zapt and the Men Behind, A Suspense Tale of Old Cairo, Michael Pearce

We learned in our Arabic class about the Islamic marriage law concept of mahr, a sum paid by the groom to the bride at the time of their wedding or at a future fixed date, either in cash or in kind, in which case as something easily monetized like jewelry. Jewelry was preferred because it could be personalized as belonging to the bride and to the bride alone, not something that could be mixed up as common household property and then stolen by the husband later, and its value would be obvious for all to see all the while the bride, even when eventually she became upstaged as surely she would be, could show it off as her fine every day adornment.

When times were tough for the whole family, or if she were to be left penniless in a divorce, she could sell it off piece by piece.

And I began to think how mahr might work for donkeys. Cairo’s working donkeys were often gaudily tacked with polished brass fittings, rings and chains and hooks and grommets and even a hamsa, or Hand of Fatima, dangling from the bridle’s browband or cheek pieces. I wondered if when times were tough for the donkey, it might pawn or sell a bit of brass to help make ends meet.

I saw plenty of donkeys pulled up in front of public bread bakeries where prices were so heavily subsidized that a loaf of ‘aysh baladi, literally meaning “village life”, because Egyptians use the same word, ‘aysh, for “bread” as they do for “life”- in Egypt both often being very coarse and containing more chaff than grain, cost less than a penny.

The donkey driver would buy ten or twenty loaves and throw them to the donkey to eat right there on the street. And I wondered if the donkey ever tired of ‘aysh baladi and wished instead to eat ‘aysh shami, a finer and more expensive bleached flour variety. And if his owner would not pay, if the donkey then wished he could just tear off a brass ring or chain from his bridle and pay for it with that. He was after all a city donkey, not a village donkey

Ezbekiyya Garden and Me

In Paris the khedive met Barrilet-Deschamps, who created the Bois de Boulogne and would design the Ezbekiyya Garden [on the model of the Parc Monceau, with small lakes, grottoes,and bridges]…Transforming the old city was out of the question…A European-style facade would instead be tacked on.

-Cairo, by Andre Raymond

The Ezbekiyya contained a number of houses of ill repute and was much frequented by British soldiers. Opposite the balconies from which scantily dressed ladies suggested their all were some very low class cafes in which yet insufficiently aroused clients could sit and gaze.

-The Mingrelian Conspiracy, A Mamur Zapt Mystery, Michael Pearce

I remember a strange thing happening to me early in my time in Cairo. I was sitting on a bench in Ezbekiyya Garden, I struck up a conversation with a man in a suit and tie. He was curious about me, my broken Arabic and my day of apparent leisure just like his. He said he lived nearby and I did something impulsive. I was in the dorm for the summer and wanted to break out of that bubble, so I asked him if I could live with him for a month or two, to practice my Arabic and learn Cairene customs. He looked at me as if I were crazy and quickly excused himself.

Later I told a fellow student what I had done, and he said that the man should not have been surprised. Foreigners had been coming to Egypt for thousands of years and settling down, often squatting in and often just plain stealing Egyptian real estate. I was like all of them. And there would be many more to follow after me.

A Donkey and Me

Arabeah, the city’s universal horse-drawn cab? Five miles? In this heat? The Effendi must be mocking. That left Cairo’s normal mode of transport, the donkey. Owen was not enthusiastic.

-The Fig Tree Murder, A Mamur Zapt Mystery, Michael Pearce

Downtown Cairo forty years ago was still full of donkey carts. They hauled trash and delivered milk. From their beds they sold watermelons piled into high pyramids and called out for glass bottles and metal refuse to be recycled. Some were driven by wild-eyed boys beating their galloping animals with sticks, others by patient old men with all day to get across town at a walk.

The fact that their donkeys were clogging the narrow roads and backing up motor traffic was only part of the reason it would take a donkey man all day to deliver greens from the Rawd al Faraj wholesale vegetable market, leaving Bulaq and passing Bab al-Hadid and Ezbekiyya and ‘Ataba, jamming way through the Muski’s retail shoppers and around al-Azhar’s milling prayerful up to the foot of the Muqattam Hills, and back again. What an urban planning lesson they could teach along that route.

Once late at night I was returning from Gamaliyya. Don’t ask why I was there past twelve. The streets were quiet and empty, strangely so, until I heard the clip clop of a donkey cart atrot coming from behind. I waved down the driver. To Garden City? Irkab, he said, Mount up- an imperative form of the verb I would learn very well later on the Way of the Forty. He took me home in silence. I always wondered what he must have thought, to have come across an Effendi at that hour, there.

Enter Ghadames, Not Far from Dorothea

There are two ways of describing the city of Dorothea: you can say that four aluminum towers rise from its walls flanking seven gates with spring operated drawbridges that span the moat whose water feeds four green canals that cross the city, dividing it into nine quarters, each with three hundred houses…Or else you can say, like the camel driver who took me there: “I arrived here in my first youth, one morning, many people were hurrying toward the market, the women had fine teeth and looked you straight in the eye, three soldiers on a platform played the trumpet, and all around wheels turned and colored banners fluttered in the wind. Before then I had known only the desert…

-Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, Cities and Desires I

Ghadames is one of those cities that should not exist, excepting in the mind or on a map. It is in Libya yet touches on Tunisia and Algeria, with sand all round. Its people are not of the desert and not of the coast. They speak their own language uncorrupted by those spoken nearby. The women are said to live in the open air on the terrace tops, and the men live apart and below them but also above ground, on the second stories over the bottom floor store rooms. No one’s feet ever touches terra firma.

I spent the night there with a Libyan driver and guide assigned to me on a visit just as Qaddafi was opening himself to the West, just after 9/11 when he feared he’d be next on Cheney’s list. We toured the old city, through its outer gate and winding through its seven family quarters and their small date orchards owned by each household and watered by green canals according to an ancient irrigation time keeper.

One house was open for visits. The others were mostly locked. Qaddafi had been trying to modernize his country into something new, therefore its old cities had to go. They had to be made invisible, except for an old house here and there made for newly arrived tourists. It was empty but richly furnished with pillows and bolsters and painted on its walls and ceiling with arabesque abstractions.

Ghadames was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site but is now threatened with delisting. The listing document is full of facts and figures- how many homes, how many miles of irrigation canals, how many square feet of habitable upper terraces, etc. Its delisting determination will be made because of war and mayhem, unrepaired rain damage and neglect. Would that Ghadames were immeasurable and invisible.