Demon Box

Three big trucks swarm out to service her, to see carefully to her comfort. In turn, this pampered porker spares no expense when it comes to the comfort of her clientele. We are lavished with it. Refreshments are served constantly by an ample staff of smiling nubilians. For entertainment you have stereo music, in-flight movies, and a free magazine. Passengers are invited to take this free piece of worthless printed crap home. Of course, there is the very latest in sanitation: everything that comes in human contact is incinerated afterwards.

What a difference when we deplane in Ankara, Turkey, and board the dowdy old DC-8 that will carry us on to Cairo. The plane is smelly as a subway, jammed to the gunwales with every sort of heavy-lidded heathen.

“No wonder the terminal search took so long,” Jacky whispers. “Everybody looks like a terrorist.”

He says he recognizes the tongues of Turks, Serbs, Kurds, Arabs, Berbers, and, he thinks, some Nurds-all flying to the climax of their month-long religious observance, all sweating and singing and noisily spattering each other with their various dialects and languages that sound, as Jack the language gourmet puts it, “like popcorn popping.”

We unload a bunch at Istanbul, more than half. Oddly enough, the plane gets even noisier, swarthier. The remaining passengers look Jack and me over with new respect. “You? You go to Cairo?” We tell them yes, we are going to Cairo. They roll their eyes.

“Ya latif! Ya latif!”

In the air again, I ask Jack what it means. “Ya latif is the Arab equivalent for Far Out. To the devout it means, ‘Nice Allah, making for me more surprises.’ “

As we cross the Suez we break from the clouds into open night. Out the window thunderheads stand like bored sentries, the shoulders of their rumpled uniforms laced round with rusty stars. They are rolling little balls of heat lightning back and forth, just to keep awake. They wave us on through…

Sunday midnight. Cairo. The turmoil at the airport is unbelievable, tumultuous, teeming—that’s the word: teeming—with pilgrims coming and going and relatives, waiting for pilgrims, coming and going. Porters wait on passengers; ragged runners wait on the porters. Customs officials bustle and soldiers in old earth-colored uniforms stroll and yawn. Hustlers of every age and ilk hit you up from every angle known to man. Jacky takes the action in suave stride.

“My year in the Near East,” he tells me, “I saw all the gimmicks.”

We work our way through, filling forms and getting stamped, moving our bags through a circle of hands—this guy hands the stuff to this next guy who wheels it to this next guy who unloads it by the desk of this next guy—all expecting tips—until we finally make it outside into the welcome desert wind.

The hustler’s runner’s porter who has attached himself to us runs down a taxi and hustles us in. He tells us, Do not worry, is great driver, and sends us careening terrifically down an unlit four-lane boulevard teeming from curb to curb with bicycles, tricycles, motorcycles, sidehackers, motorscooters, motorbikes, buses dribbling passengers from every hole and handhold, rigs, gigs, wheelchairs, biers, wheelbarrows, wagons, pushcarts, army troop trucks where smooth-chopped soldier boys giggle and goose each other with machine guns… rickshaws, buckboards, hacks both horse– and camel– and human-drawn, donkey-riders and -pullers and -drivers, oxcarts, fruitcarts, legless beggars in thighcarts, laundry ladies with balanced bundles, a brightblack farm lad in a patched nightshirt prodding a greatballed Holstein bull (into town at midnight to what? to butcher? to trade for beans?) plus a huge honking multitude of other taxis, all careening, all without head– or taillights ever showing except for the occasional blink-blink-honk-blink signal to let the dim mass rolling ahead know that, by the Eight Cylinders of Allah, this Great Driver is coming through!

Miraculously, we make it through the clotted city center and across the Nile to the steps of our hotel, the Omar Khayyam. The Omar Khayyam is now somewhat faded in splendor from its heyday, when its statues still had all their noses and nipples, and the lords and colonels and territorial governors still raised their lime squashes in terse toasts to the Empire that the bloody sun would never set on!

We are shown to our room and unpack. It’s after two in the morning but the incredible hubbub from across the river calls us back out into the night. As we walk through that obsolete colonial lobby, Jack fills me in on some of the other wonderful things the British did for the Egyptians.

“They introduced the rulers of Egypt to the idea of buying things on credit. Egypt as a result immediately went into stupendous debt, so the British were honorably obliged to come in and clear up their finances for them. This task took seventy years.