Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (6 page)

Mohammad offered to help me mount the horse, but I didn’t need it. He mounted his own and we set out into the street alongside automobile traffic.

This was a stupid way to travel in Cairo.

“Watch your legs!” he shouted as a filthy bus roared past.

A driver rounded a corner too quickly and clipped my foot with his mirror.

“Watch your legs!” Mohammad said again.

After riding a few blocks, we reached the gateway to the pyramids. I saw then why we needed horses. The area around the pyramids was
huge
, much larger than I had expected. And it was all sand. There was no road to drive on. It would not have been possible to walk around and see everything in under four hours, let alone two.

I paid my admission, and as we passed the gate, a policeman carrying a horse whip and a gun walked up to us.

The officer screamed something at Mohammad in Arabic. Mohammad screamed something back at him. The policeman then cracked his horse whip on the sand and narrowed his eyes at us.

Having no idea what the problem was, I pretended to be a perfectly happy and oblivious idiot, hoping it might tone down the temperature by a degree or so.

Mohammad said something nasty to the policeman in Arabic and then led our horses away as the officer’s face flushed with hatred and rage.

“Asshole,” Mohammad said. I acted as though I hadn’t heard that.

Mohammad led his horse and mine away from the abusive policeman and toward the base of the pyramids of Giza.

“Welcome to the beginning of the great Sahara Desert,” Mohammad said.

I have climbed to the top of the Maya pyramids in the Petén Jungle of the Guatemalan Yucatán. Spectacular as they are, their life size is smaller than I had expected before I arrived. The pyramids at Giza are much bigger. They’re impossibly large monuments that seemed the size of small moons. No doubt they’ll still be standing thousands of years after we all are gone. Egypt one day may no longer be Egypt, but the pyramids will remain as though they belong to eternity. They will weather as slowly as great mountains.

Some of the more deranged Islamists have threatened to destroy them, as the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddha statues at Bamiyan with ack-ack guns, but now that I was looking at them in person, I had to laugh. The pharaoh’s tombs at Giza aren’t going anywhere unless someone detonates a nuclear weapon on top of them. Even then I wouldn’t count on their being destroyed. They would probably have to be nuked a second or third time.

“Are you a Yankee?” Mohammad said. “Or are you Southern?”

“I’m a Yank,” I said. From Oregon.

“Can you believe you are here?” he said.

I didn’t know what he meant, and he read that on my face.

“Every day people tell me they can’t believe they are here after flying thousands of miles.”

“I came here from Beirut,” I said.

“Ah,” he said. “Okay. You live in the Middle East. You know where you are then.”

He and I rode our horses at a full gallop until we reached the first pyramid, then we slowed to a trot. A man dressed in Bedouin garb ambled by selling warm bottles of Coke. I bought one for 50 cents and offered Mohammad a sip.

“Can we climb to the top?” I asked, not really sure I actually wanted to.

“No,” Mohammad said. “A tourist recently tried it. He fell and lost himself. It is no longer allowed.”

He led me to a lookout point where all three pyramids were visible in a line, the perfect place for a photo. I suddenly wished I had come in late afternoon, when the light was better for pictures. Glare from the afternoon sun washed out all color and left no shadows for contrast.

Mohammad had been right earlier. The pyramids really are the beginning of the great Sahara Desert. The suburb of Giza was barely visible in the haze on one side while sand stretched to the horizon in the other direction. Metropolitan Cairo had reached its absolute physical limit and could sprawl no more. I wondered where on earth jobs and food would come from as the city grew ever larger. The place would turn into a Malthusian death trap if it didn’t get its economic house in order.

Two uniformed police officers rode on horseback to where we were standing. They exchanged pleasantries with Mohammad as he handed them several Egyptian pounds. Then they left. The entire meeting took less than 10 seconds.

“Why did you just do that?” I said, feeling defensive on his behalf as I narrowed my eyes at the officers’ backs.

“They are poor, and good people,” he said. “The state does not pay them. Look after the poor, and God will look after you.”

They did seem like nice enough gents in the nine seconds I saw them in action, as long as I didn’t think about the fact that Mohammad, rather than the government that ostensibly employed them, paid their salary. Since they were armed men of the law, I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if Mohammad
hadn’t
given them any money, and I remembered the shouting match he had earlier with the enraged policeman with the gun and the whip.

We got back on our horses and rode leisurely toward the Sphinx. Mohammad rode silently, but he seemed to be in a pleasant enough mood.

“What do you think of the Muslim Brotherhood?” I said.

“Those are bad words, my friend,” he said.

“Bad words?” I said. “Why, exactly?”

“They are bad people who know nothing,” he said. “I have no school. But I know war is terrible and that we should take care of our country.” I hadn’t said anything about war, but it was the first thing he thought of when I mentioned Islamists. He wore a somber look on his face now.

He was a simple man and probably charged too much money to lead me around on a horse, but he seemed a decent enough fellow, and I did not get the sense he was jerking me around and telling me only what I wanted to hear. Some Middle Easterners in the tourism business say “I love America!” in the most unconvincing voice possible. It’s obvious fakery. I can tell when they do it just for form’s sake. Mohammad didn’t seem the type to pull that with me.

“What do you think about Hosni Mubarak then?” I said.

“He is a good man,” he said.

“Hmm,” I said.

“What?” he said, aware that I didn’t agree. “What do you want to say? Tell me what is in your heart.”

“He’s a dictator,” I said.
And an asshole
, I wanted to add. Mubarak had been in charge of Egypt for decades, and the place was in terrible shape. It wasn’t his fault that the country was not liberal, but he was certainly to blame for persecuting the liberal minority that did exist. It guaranteed his rule, sure, but it also guaranteed that the main opposition to his rule was the Muslim Brotherhood, since they could organize in mosques no matter what the state did. The liberals had no such sanctuary and couldn’t compete, couldn’t even attempt to convince their neighbors and fellow Egyptians that neither Mubarak nor the Brotherhood had the answers. He did it on purpose so he could tell his supposed friends in America that he was all that stood between the Islamists and an Iranian-style regime. He may have been right, but it was partly his fault.

“I understand what you mean,” Mohammad said and nodded. “In America you change presidents without fighting. Here if we change presidents we could have a war.”

“Maybe,” I said. “And maybe not. It’s awfully convenient for him that you think that.”

“Listen, my friend,” he said. “If we have a president who is not from the army, we will have another war. Only the officers know how to keep us at peace.” I presumed he meant only the officers know better than to humiliate Egypt by picking another losing battle with Israel. Perhaps that was true, but even Syria’s Bashar al-Assad knew better than to go full tilt against Israel. He fought Israel indirectly through Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The pyramids were much bigger than I had imagined, but the Sphinx was a great deal smaller. It looked especially tiny with the gargantuan pyramids as a backdrop. Only in close-up photos does it take on much size.

As we got near the Sphinx, the angry policeman from earlier returned on foot. He cracked his whip on the sand again and stared holes through Mohammad and me with his black eyes. He didn’t look like a starving policeman to me. He was fat, actually, and his rosy cheeks made him look like a boozer.

“This man will guide you to the Sphinx,” Mohammad said.

Oh, for God’s sake, I thought. The Sphinx was right there. Only a blind man would need a guide. Mohammad didn’t want to pay this jerk off, so now I had to do it? I suddenly liked him less, but it was hard to say how much pressure he was actually under. I had witnessed some of that pressure earlier, and it was a lot. There is no legal recourse at all when you’re abused by policemen in Egypt.

The menacing officer stared at me, whip in hand, with undisguised hatred as I dismounted my horse. I smiled at him as though I were the perfect American idiot, utterly clueless about what was happening and incapable of reading body language or hostile intent. What I really wanted to do was break his face with my fist. I’d be in deep shit if I didn’t pay him. That came across. He was mugging me, basically, and hardly even bothered to pretend otherwise.

“Do you speak English?” I said in the most genial voice I could muster as we walked together toward the Sphinx.

He actually smiled at me and shrugged his shoulders. Playing nice was paying off. What else could I do? I seethed inside even after he decided to cool it. He didn’t care at all about making a civilized impression on foreigners. I despised him for that on Egypt’s behalf as well as my own. The code of Arab hospitality was completely lost on this man.

It only took two minutes or so to reach the Sphinx. Other tourists were there, snapping the shutters on their digital cameras. I took several pictures and ignored the policeman completely, refusing to look at him or acknowledge that he even existed.

I walked around to look at the Sphinx from several different vantage points and stayed much longer than I would have if the bastard weren’t on my case. You want baksheesh? I thought. Then you’re gonna wait for it, pal.

I kept the policeman waiting for as long as I could stand, then started walking back toward Mohammad and our horses without looking back at him. Clandestinely I pulled one Egyptian pound (less than 20 cents) out of my pocket for the baksheesh he “earned” in no way whatsoever. I didn’t want him to ask for money and see me pull a big wad of cash out of my pocket and demand I give him one of my larger bills.

“Hello again, Mohammad,” I said as I approached.

“Hello, Mr. Michael,” he said. “How was the Sphinx?”

“Grand,” I said.

The policeman walked just behind me and to my right as I fantasized about cracking him in the nose with the back of my elbow. I mounted my horse and let the man wonder if I was actually going to give him baksheesh or not. Then, not wanting to start yet another furious incident, I handed him the Egyptian equivalent of 17 cents.

“
Shukran
,” I said—thank you—in the iciest tone I could manage.

No, fuck
you
, you son of a bitch, is what I was thinking. Would you treat my mother this way if she were here instead of me? Even tourists at the pyramids, of all places, get a taste of the petty humiliations people have to put up with every day in Third World police states. Imagine living in a country so messed up that it could be your job to roam around all day with a whip and a gun angrily extorting money from everybody you come across. No wonder Mohammad was fed up with this man and had the nerve to scream at him earlier.

This is what you have to put up with thanks to your pal Mubarak,
I wanted to say to Mohammad as we rode away, but I didn’t. He was a nice enough man, and he knew that already. He was shaken down by the cops every day when he went to work.

*  *  *

I went to a cozy restaurant and pub back in Zamalek and ordered a bowl of pasta. A 20-something Western woman sat alone at the next table reading an English-language newspaper. We smiled hello to each other.

“Are you a student here?” she asked in an Australian accent.

“No,” I said. “I’m a writer. You?”

“Just traveling,” she said.

“By yourself?” I said.

“I’ve been traveling alone for four months. I started in India and I’m working my way to Spain.”

“Did you go through Iran?” I said. I wanted to go to Iran but doubted they’d give me a visa. The regime didn’t like my job or my passport.

“I can’t go there,” she said.

“They’re blocking Australians, too, eh?”

“Well, not exactly. What I mean is
I
can’t go there.” I figured she must have been to Israel and that the Iranians wouldn’t let her in if she had the Zionist Entity stamp in her passport.

She whispered, “I work for the Department of Defense.”

It’s a good idea to whisper that sort of thing in the Middle East. Conspiracy theories are out of control, especially in Egypt.

If she and I had some privacy, I would have asked about her job. But I couldn’t expect her to tell me anything interesting where others could hear. Australia didn’t have sinister designs on Egypt, but neither did the United States. That didn’t stop Egyptians from hatching dark, elaborate fantasies.

The waiter brought my pasta. It was so undercooked I could barely eat it. I should have sent it back, but I didn’t want to be difficult. He, like many Egyptian waiters, was so embarrassingly friendly and charming, I didn’t have the heart to complain.

“What’s it like traveling by yourself in Egypt?” I asked her.

“Difficult,” she said. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“Is it difficult because you’re a woman?”

“This is the absolute worst place for a woman to travel alone,” she said. “Men harass me constantly. They hiss, stare and make kissy noises.”

“A Syrian friend told my wife if she ever goes there to carry a spare shoe in her purse. If any man gives her trouble and she whacks him with the bottom of the shoe, a mob will chase him down.”

She laughed. “Syria is wonderful. I mean, it’s much more oppressive than Egypt. But it’s also more modern. No man ever bothered me there. No men bothered me in Lebanon, either. I was surprised. Lebanese and Syrian men are more respectful even than European men. The worst part is that Egyptian men won’t back down when I tell them to leave me alone.”