The Pillars of Hercules

The train to Cairo passes through the heart of the Delta, through suburbs and Sidi Gaber, past the shantytown sprawl and the brick tenements hung with laundry, Arab boys kicking a football in a clearing between two vegetable patches, and then the railway line offers a panorama of the Delta’s agriculture—cotton fields, grape arbors, wheat fields, rice paddies, fields of leafy greens and bean stalks. Every foot of the Delta was cultivated, all the flatness demarcated into gardens and fields. The canals were so choked with hyacinths and papyrus that water traffic was unthinkable. Even in the heat of the day there were people in the cotton fields, picking the cotton, and hauling sacks. The animals sought shade, though. It was hot and dry, and goats were pressed against flat walls, their flanks against the brick, because that ribbon of shade offered the only relief against the sun overhead.

Only two branches of the Nile pass through the Delta. The Cairo train crosses both of them, the Rashid Branch at Kafr el Zaiyat, and nearer Cairo, at Benha, the Domyat Branch. I had never seen the Nile before, but here there was not much of it. There are so many dams upriver that a relatively small flow of the Nile penetrates this far. And the most recent one, the Aswan High Dam of 1970, so reduced the flow of alluvial soil that the northwest edges of the delta towns that had always been gaining land (because of the easterly flow of the Mediterranean current here) were now being eroded by the sea. The Nile Delta was shrinking.

Because they were so dusty and sunbaked and neglected, the towns of the Delta, even the larger ones like Tantra and Benha, were impossible to date. They seemed to exist in that Third World dimension of poverty and neglect that held them outside of time.

The mob at Cairo Station, people struggling to leave, people struggling to secure a taxi or board a bus, hustling, haggling, picking pockets, or simply standing and looking desperate, was the worst, most frenetic, I had seen anywhere in the Mediterranean. The taxi drivers were the most rapacious by far. It is no surprise to learn that a great proportion of New York’s taxi drivers began their careers here in Cairo, and many of these same men would soon be joining them. It was not that they were rapacious—rapacity becomes instinctual among the urban poor in the Third World, as a survival skill—but that the simplest transactions always turned into a tiresome bidding war, in which you were always cheated.

“Fifteen dollars,” a cabbie told me when I said where I wanted to go. This was nine times the normal fare. Just being quoted a fare in dollars in this far-off country irritated me.

But my efforts were rewarded. I met Raymond Stock at the Semiramis Hotel and he greeted me by saying “Mahfouz is expecting you.”

He explained the stabbing while we had coffee. Sheik Omar had issued the fatwa on Mahfouz in 1989 from his seedy little mosque in New Jersey. It resembled the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, and coming so soon after that well-publicized one, it seemed as though Sheik Omar was trying to upstage the Ayatollah Khomeini. Mahfouz, too, was being accused of writing a blasphemous book. Sheik Omar called him “an infidel.” The book was Children of the Alley (Aulad Haratina). In one reading it was just a neighborhood tale of life in Cairo, but it was poetic too, and much could be read into it. That was the problem—its allusiveness. It seemed to contain echoes of the Koran, and the Bible, too. This was not as strange as it seemed. Time had done very little to change the Arabic language or the structure of Egyptian life. The character Qasim was a familiar figure in Cairo, but he had certain qualities in common with the Prophet Mohammed (and his chapter abounded with Koranic parallels). Rifa’a somewhat resembled Jesus, as the character Gebel resembled Moses. It was the story of a delightful family, said its most recent translator (my brother, Peter Theroux), but within this was a deeper story, of the spiritual history of mankind. The novel has 114 chapters; the Koran has the same number. “It is not a history of God,” Mahfouz had said, “but rather a history of God the way Man has insisted on imagining Him.”

The stabbing came about in this way. Mahfouz had an informal weekly meeting with his pals in Cairo. They were mainly old men and called themselves “the vagabonds” (harafish). But a few weeks before, there had been a quarrel—a trifling matter but it kept Mahfouz at home the following week. When the dispute was patched up, Mahfouz was with his pals again—and that was the night the assassin came for him. He said he was an admirer. He was a member of Sheik Omar’s Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiya, the fundamentalist Islamic Group.

“If you come here tomorrow at five, you will find him,” Mrs. Mahfouz told them.