The Pillars of Hercules

On this very slender possibility I made plans to take the two-hour train trip from Alexandria to Cairo. But there was nothing else I wished to do; the pyramids, the Sphinx, the bazaar, the museums—they could wait. One of the aspects of the classical Grand Tour that I had always found attractive was the way the traveler sought the wisdom of great men. Naguib Mahfouz was certainly one of those.

“I have been driving a taxi for twelve years, and this is the first time I have ever taken a tourist to the main railway station,” the taxi driver told me.

“I’m not a tourist,” I said.

“Why you take the train?”

“So I can look out the window.”

And, I thought, so that I can verify something I had read: “Alexandria Main Station … the noise of wheels cracking the slime slithering pavements. Yellow pools of phosphorous light, and corridors of darkness like tears in the dull brick façade of a stage set. Policemen in the shadows … the long pull of the train into the silver light … the giant sniffing of the engine blots out all sound … a final lurch and the train pours away down a tunnel, as if turned to liquid.”

That was Justine, and the nice image of “the giant sniffing of the engine” had to mean a steam locomotive. That was the only difference. If I had known what the station was like I could have answered him: I want to go to the railway station because I want to enter a time warp.

But this was true of many railway stations. The two main stations in Istanbul had hardly changed at all. Haydarpasa was a hundred years old but the only difference was that diesels had now replaced steam. The same had been true in Trieste and Split, even in Tirana and Messina and Palermo, in Valencia and Alicante and Marseilles. Railway stations are not timeless, but—too well-built to modernize, too large and dirty to purify; often elderly, sometimes venerable—they retain a sense of the past.

The three classes of tickets, the confusion at the ticket windows, the pushing and shoving and the queue-jumping men cutting ahead, the texture of the cardboard tickets, the very smudges of the printing, made it seem an experience from a former time, from a paragraph in a book written long ago. The torn advertisements fraying from the wall, the “Women’s Waiting Room,” the filthy platforms, the beggars, the sweet-vendors and newsboys, and the shafts of dusty sunlight slanting onto the rails, the clopping of horses in the courtyard; these details, part of the present, might be found on the same old page.

Assuming that the Egyptian Muslim fundamentalist gunmen traveled Third, and their victims were in First, I decided to buy a Second Class ticket to Cairo on a later train. This presented a difficulty which illustrated one of the dilemmas of Alexandrian life. Outside the station I was ambushed by men screaming at me, hectoring me to buy melons, or nuts, crocodile-skin shoes. Inside, at the ticket window, I found myself begging a clerk to sell me a train ticket. It was perhaps an Egyptian paradox: The things you don’t want are pushed in your face; the thing you want seems unobtainable. After some perseverance, and luck, I found the right ticket window. It was outside the station—not many people knew where the First and Second Class ticket windows were, which was perhaps a comment on how hard-up Alexandria had become. I bought a round-trip ticket.

Then, to kill time, and see the city, I took a tramcar ten stops, west, into the old Arab Quarter. Here and there I spotted Turks from the Akdeniz haggling with Egyptians over figs, or fruit, or candy; or tourist junk—plaster sphinxes, beads, brass plates, leather purses, stuffed toy camels, crocodile-skin belts. Turk and Arab, with no language in common, screamed at each other in broken English.

“Fie dallah!” cried the Egyptian hawker.

“Free dallah!” the Turk yelled.

“Fuh dallah!”

“Duh wanna.”

“Meester—best prass for you.”

“Free dallah!”

On the way back to the railway station my returning tram became jammed in traffic so dense I had to walk or else risk missing my train.

The problem was a dead cart-horse on the tracks a quarter of a mile away at the center of Alexandria. I chanced upon it after passing through the stopped traffic of honking cars and taxis, the trams, buggies, trucks, buses and motorbikes. At the head of all this traffic was the dead horse, still in its traces, its wagon overturned on the tramlines. It had been killed on the spot by being struck by the tramcar. One of the tram’s front panels was dented and smeared with blood. The horse was a gray nag, very skinny, tortured-looking eyes and wrung withers, with a big red gash on its hipbone and another on its leg. The death of this one miserable creature had brought the city of Alexandria to a halt.