LITMIR.BIZ

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       Chapter Three

      It is a commonplace to say that Egypt is the Nile. The truth thus obscured by cliché might be better expressed as: Egypt depends on the management of the Nile. Flood control and irrigation enabled the kingdoms of the Pharaohs to rise and remain the keys to the country’s prosperity. But dependence on the Nile has also limited Egypt’s development upstream of the delta, to the river valley, the narrow fertile strip closed in by rocky hills and desert: 99 per cent of the population lives on 5 per cent of the land. Travel but a short distance east or west from the life-giving watercourse and an uncompromising wilderness starts abruptly at the point where the irrigation pipes end. From outer space the thin green ribbon is merely the boundary between the Libyan Desert, part of the Sahara, and the ‘Eastern Desert’, the Sahara al-Sharqiya that borders the Red Sea. From the air, approaching Cairo airport from the south and looking east, there is very little on the ground to suggest proximity to a city of seventeen million people. A drab empty plain stretched out under a blanket of yellowish cloud, the plains on which the 8th Hussars had trained. The RAF aerodrome has grown into the busiest airport in Africa.

      The taxi driver wiped the dust off the back seat. Turning the key in the ignition activated a robotic voice somewhere behind the dashboard: ‘bism illah ar-rahman ar-rahim’, ‘in the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate’, an appeal for protection before entering the Cairo traffic that was not unwarranted. The driver raced to catch up with the nearest traffic jam only to decide it was not moving slowly enough, so he raced off to find a worse one. Just as the traffic looked as though it might be moving again, he decided he had been better off before and did another U-turn from the nearside lane in order to rejoin the first queue. It was a game of inches, who could get just far enough ahead to cut into another lane, who could get closest to his neighbour. A large medallion hung from the rear-view mirror, the name of Allah on one side and Muhammad on the other, angular gold letters on a black ground. It fretted against a string of blood-stone beads. The driver was not worried about the delay, even though he was not on the meter. He saw it as an opportunity to talk up his Lovely-Jubbly Pyramid Tour. After all, everyone who came to Cairo visited the Pyramids, so why not straightaway? ‘First the Biramid – the Great Biramid, the Sfiks, rider camel, lovely-jubbly – then to the hotel, no?’ His eyes inquired in the mirror. It was the only time he used it, even after the blockage was behind him and the taxi was speeding past blocks of flats, under grimy flyovers blackened by diesel fumes from the buses and lorries that were as slalom gates to any Cairene car driver. On curves, the beads and the medallion hanging plumb measured the increment of the vehicle’s list. It seemed to be a matter of honour among young male pedestrians to step off the curb without looking. There was no question of waiting for a gap in the traffic – as if there were one. They followed the theory that every road was crossable at the precise moment that they wanted to cross it and set out to test that belief at every opportunity. Their bravado was sometimes breathtaking, their timing immaculate, finding fleeting spaces between the cars. Some crossed with the insouciance of a sleepwalker in a silent movie, others, like matadors, stood side-on between lanes, sighting along the left shoulder at the charging black and white taxis, swaying out of the way of wing mirrors that would gore them through. The high-rise apartment blocks gave way to the once-elegant avenues of Khedive Ismail’s European quarter, the Cairo that Hackett knew. Turning into a side street off what was once Fuad I Avenue, clogged with cars parked two deep at the curb, the taxi pulled up outside the Windsor Hotel. ‘Biramid tomorrow?’

      The chief appeal of the Windsor Hotel is claimed to be its old-fashioned atmosphere. It is said to have preserved the charm of the British era, but anyone who took the hotel to be representative of that time would be convinced that the past was a scruffy place. It has more in common with a dilapidated south-coast boarding house than the grandeur and luxe of Shepheard’s, the Meena House or the Continental. Rather than being old-fashioned it is merely old; the dark wood panelling and scuffed reception desk, the antique cage lift that is started and stopped by well-judged use of the resistor lever, the door-lock so worn it had to be picked with its own key, the lumpy bedstead, the plumbing. The dining-room smelled of over-boiled vegetables. The sheets piled on the landing were grey. Even the metal detector, a detached portal standing a little inside the front door as a sop to those guests who remembered the bombing of a tour-bus outside the Egyptian Museum and the massacre of fifty-eight tourists at Luxor in 1997, even this was old. Only the room rates showed signs of renovation. After the British withdrew to their bases on the Suez Canal in 1946, the building continued to be used as a club for non-commissioned officers. The bar on the first floor has retained the homely gentility of a pub lounge, a brass foot-rail and high-stools, settles upholstered in velveteen, stools fashioned from beer barrels, old travel posters on the walls. An Egyptian TV crew was using it as the location for a scene of a period drama and was blocking all access to its exceptionally cold beer.

      In the postwar years negotiations between the British and Egyptian governments dragged on and failed to produce mutually acceptable terms for Egypt’s independence. The situation for the occupiers changed during the course of one day in January 1952. Egyptian frustration had led to increasingly frequent guerrilla attacks against the British positions in the Canal Zone. Local policemen were involved in the sabotage. The British responded to one particular incident by surrounding the police station in Ismailia and demanding the surrender of those inside. The minister of the interior ordered them to resist; fifty policemen and five British soldiers died when the building was stormed. Protests in Cairo the following day turned into riots by late morning. The mob set fire to many buildings in the European quarter, targeting especially British-owned and frequented property and establishments, though French, Italian, Greek, Armenian and Jewish businesses were also torched. The day came to be known as Black Saturday as a result of the clouds of smoke and ash that filled the air. The arsonists appeared to be well-organized in small groups, each of which had a list of targets and a supply of combustible materials. Plans for such an action must have long been in place. The day’s events were encouraged by government ministers and condoned by the police. The Turf Club, as a bastion of the British class and colonial systems, was high on the rioters’ list. Hackett described it as being ‘like one of the less exclusive bits of St James’s complete with stags’ heads’. It had been a club ‘to which no Egyptians were allowed in membership, though sometimes, greatly daring, some member might take one of the more distinguished Egyptians there with him. This wasn’t popular.…’ Neither was the club with the Cairenes and the mob showed particular savagery towards its members. Artemis Cooper in her book Cairo in the War describes what happened.

      Just after 1.30 the Turf Club was attacked. For the past few weeks, the Club had been protected by a police guard of some forty men, but this had mysteriously dwindled to four by the time the gang arrived. [T]hey broke down the front door, and immediately started smashing furniture and making piles of it on the ground floor, which were set alight with bundles of hessian …

      Of the forty-odd members who were in the Club at the time, most were on the ground floor and managed to get out by the back door. But several were prevented from escaping by the crowds outside, and were pushed back into the flames. Two Englishmen who were trapped on an upper storey jumped out of the windows. The first broke his back on the roof of a small shed beneath, and must have died soon after; but the second let himself down into a small courtyard on knotted sheets. He was kicked and beaten to death with iron bars. The bodies of the two men were then brought together, and a great pile of material was put on top of them to make a bonfire … While the Turf Club was under attack, a lorry full of police drove by. They did not stop, and the crowd cheered. Inside the building, a number of other Britons were savagely mutilated before being tossed onto bonfires.

      Shepheard’s Hotel went up in flames shortly afterwards, though with less loss of life. The offices of Thomas Cook and BOAC, Barclay’s Bank and W. H. Smith’s followed. Other groups organized by the Muslim Brotherhood attacked targets they considered immoral, such as bars, nightclubs and cinemas. Though much of Cairo’s ‘West End’ was on fire by nightfall, both the large synagogue on Sharia Adly Pasha and the Opera House were spared.

      ‘The Opera House didn’t burn down till years later,’

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