The Pillars of Hercules

No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.

There were fleeting glimpses from certain books I had read, some aspects of dereliction, like a couple in tatters, and you think: That broken rag on her head was once a turban, and there were gaps on those shoes where there had once been jewels, and her shreds had once been silks. You could make out what it must have been from what it was, like the town auditorium in Crete that had once been a mosque, and the claustrophobic church in Siracusa that had been a Greek temple.

The hookahs, the so-called hubble bubbles, are still in Alexandria, and so are the cafes where the men sit sucking on these waterpipes, while cripples and flunkies fill them and keep them alight; the tottering buildings, the Cecil Hotel, the Corniche and its cooling breeze, and the children fishing from the edge, swallows crisscrossing the heaps of garbage, the jetty of the Corniche ending in the fort that was built with the rubble of the Pharos, the lighthouse that was one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the “clang of the trams shuddering in their metal veins.” The stalls of watermelon, and fish, or almonds, the men with pushcarts doling out the mucky fava bean mixture they called foul. The air full of brick dust, “sweet smelling brick dust and the odor of hot pavements slaked with water.” The city was physically recognizable; the way life is lived outdoors on its streets and pavements makes the city visible and tantalizing, too, for what else remains indoors and hidden? At the very least, with the well-turned phrase, “a thousand dust-tormented streets,” Durrell could be assured that in this respect his description of Alexandria would never be out of date.

Alexandria was a broken old hag that had once (every other writer had said so) been a great beauty; she was not dead, but fallen.

It was not quite true that no one had described the Alexandria that I saw. There was one man, Naguib Mahfouz. He wrote in Cairo, but his inspiration came from Alexandria, where he spent the summer months of each year. “Only twice in his life has he been abroad,” one of his translators wrote, “and after his second trip he vowed never to travel again.” He had won the Nobel Prize in 1988, the Arab world’s only Nobel laureate in literature. At the moment Mahfouz was in trouble.

Two weeks before I arrived in Alexandria, while I was still on the Seabourne, visiting Taormina, Mahfouz had been stabbed by a Muslim fanatic in front of his apartment house on Sharia Nil in Cairo. He had been in intensive care since then. Mahfouz had been denounced by the blind cleric, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, and just as he had inspired the bombers who had tried to bring down the World Trade Center, he had filled another poisonous little apostle in Cairo with the resolve to murder Mahfouz.

It was a sudden stabbing on the street and had left a deep wound in Mahfouz’s neck. Mahfouz was an old man, eighty-three, a diabetic, and he had been seriously injured. Blood pouring from his wound, he had been taken to the hospital, which was fortunately only a block away. He was still in the intensive-care ward of the Cairo hospital.

I decided to take the train to Cairo to see whether I could talk to him. It was either that or a visit to the pyramids with Samih Pasha, Fikret and Onan.

Meanwhile, Alexandria was having an odd effect on me, plunging me into dream states, in which I was a sort of Prospero figure in a big rambling estate, among all sorts of Eskimos and Indians and old friends; and even odder unrepeatable sexual dreams. Was it the bright light of early dawn blazing through my porthole, the stillness of the ship at its berth in the Western Harbor, the mutters and bells and clangs? All that, and the city itself, everything I had read about Alexandria was feeding my imagination, provoking desires.

The news was bad. Tourists were being shot by fundamentalists in Luxor and Giza. Some had died of their wounds. The body count was fifteen this year, two last week. Some of the victims had been on tourist buses, others on trains.

“They shoot into First Class—they know where the tourists are on the trains,” Raymond Stock told me.

Raymond, an American poet, essayist and teacher, was Mahfouz’s biographer. He was fluent in Arabic and had lived in Cairo for four years, keeping in daily contact with his subject, whose apartment was not far away. I called Raymond from a pay phone at the port of Alexandria soon after I arrived on the Akdeniz. He said that even though Mahfouz was in the hospital he had still been seeing the wounded man almost every day and that he was slightly improved.

“Is there any chance of my seeing him?”

“I’m just going to the hospital now,” he said. “They might move him out of intensive care and if they do we could visit him this afternoon.”