Demon Box

“The British plan was to convert Egypt to a single-export economy—cotton. To encourage this they started building dams on the Nile. It bothered the British that the country got so flippin’ flooded every year.

“Without the yearly flood that had always brought new soil to replenish the land, the Egyptians were soon dependent on wonderful fertilizers. Also, now that they didn’t have to worry about those nasty floods, the British didn’t see any reason why they shouldn’t get two crops a year instead of one. Perhaps even three! The rulers, none of whom were Egyptian-born or even spoke Arabic, thought it was all wonderful. Albanians, I believe, and they were throwing incredible sums of money around, building Victorian-style mosques, importing things, and paying European creditors absurd rates of interest…

“What happened when there were three crops a year instead of one was that the farmers spent a lot more time standing around in the irrigation ditches. So there was a tremendous increase of bilharzia, a parasite that’s spread by a little water worm that starts at the foot, so to speak, of the ladder, and climbs to the eyes. It gave Egypt the highest rate of blindness in the world. Over seventy percent of the population had it at one point.

“Peculiarly enough, for all the modernization they were introducing to the Egyptians, the British never quite got around to building any hospitals. The mortality rate from birth to age five was about fifty percent. They have a proverb here, ‘Endurance is the best thing.’ The British helped emphasize this.”

We have reached the other side of the Nile, where Jacky’s history of recent Cairo is drowned out by the city’s stertorous present. Nowhere else have you heard or imagined anything like it! It has a flavor all its own. Mix in your mind the deep surging roar of a petroleum riptide with the strident squealing of a teenage basketball playoff; fold in air conditioners and sprinkle with vendors’ bells and police whistles; pour this into narrow streets greased liberally with people noisily eating sesame cakes fried in olive oil, bubbling huge hookahs, slurping Turkish coffees, playing backgammon as loud as the little markers can be slapped down without breaking them—thousands of people, coughing, spitting, muttering in the shadowy debris next to the buildings, singing, standing, sweeping along in dirty damask gellabias, arguing in the traffic—millions! and all jacked up loud on caffeine. Simmer this recipe at 80 degrees at two in the morning and you have a taste of the Cairo Cacophony.

After blocks with no sign of a letup we turn around. We’re tired. Ten thousand miles. On the bridge back, Jack is accosted by a pockmarked man with a tambourine and a purple-assed baboon on a rope.

“Money!” the man cries, holding the tambourine out and the baboon back with a cord ringed into the animal’s lower lip. “Money! For momkey pardon me sir, for mom-key!”

Jacky shakes his head. “No. Ana mish awez. Don’t want to see monkey dance.”

“Momkey not dance, pardon me sir. Not dance!” He has to shout against the traffic; the baboon responds to the shout by rearing hysterically and snarling out his long golden fangs. The man whacks the shrieking beast sharply across the ear with the edge of the tambourine. “Momkey get sick! Rabies! Money”—he whacks him again, jerking his leash—“to get momkey fixed.”

The baboon acts like his torment is all our fault. He is backing toward us, stretching the pierced lip as he tries to reach us with a hind hand. His claws are painted crimson. His ass looks like a brain tumor on the wrong end.

“Money for mom–key! Hurr-ee!”

Walking away, 50 piastres poorer, Jack admits that Cairo has come up with some new gimmicks since he was here ten years ago.

As we round the end of the bridge we surprise a young sentry pissing off the abutment of his command. Fumbling with embarrassment, he folds a big black overcoat over his uniform still hanging open-flied.

“Wel-come,” he says, shouldering his carbine. “Wel-come to Cairo… Hokay?”

October 14, Monday morning. Jack and I are out early to look up a Dr. Ragar that Enoch of Ohio sent me to see. We find him at last, set like a smoky stone in the wicker chair of his jewelry shop, a rheumy-eyed Egyptian businessman in a sincere serge suit and black tie. We try to explain our project but he doesn’t seem as interested in digging up an undiscovered temple as in putting down his assortment of already discovered stuff. He slams a door to a glass display case.

“Junk! I, Dr. Ragar, not lie to you. Most of it, junk! For the tourist who knows nothing, respects nothing, is this junk. But for those I see respect Egypt, I show for them the Egypt I respect. So. From what part of America you come from, my friend?”

I tell him I’m from Oregon. Near California.

“Yes, I know Oregon. So. From what part Oregon?”

I tell him I live in a town called Mt. Nebo.