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Halfway across the Gazirah Bridge, noise began to lap at us like waves against a shore. Arriving on the beledi side of the city, we were suddenly in the midst of it all: camels, carts, crowds, and an astonishing number of trucks and motorcars. Many were Fords, in considerably reduced condition. Stripped to their essentials, they made the kind of deafening racket that might have been produced by a thresher attempting to harvest a stone wall. Behind each ramshackle vehicle, a crowd of boys followed, “hoping for a breakdown or an entertaining collision,” as Herr Weilbacher put it. “Amazing how few parts a Ford needs,” he shouted when a particularly skeletal flatbed truck clattered past. “If something falls off, a Ford rolls right on—although it complains rather loudly.”
“No wonder people here yell all the time,” I remarked at the top of my voice. “Everyone in Cairo must be hard of hearing!” And I was thrilled when Herr Weilbacher produced a booming laugh, amused at my remark.
Engulfed by Cairo’s kaleidoscope of odors, Rosie dashed to the end of her leash in every direction, as eager to sample Cairo’s scents as I was to see its sights. Before long, however, her jaunty rolling trot slowed, and Herr Weilbacher scooped her up. “The world is very large for a sausage dog,” he observed. “It’s a short life but a hairy one, ja, Rosie?”
With humor and insight, he began to interpret the street life for me, giving meaning to yesterday’s exotic chaos. The ladies’ long black garments, he explained, were allowed to trail in the dust purposely, to erase the tracks of their bare feet—in which an evil spirit might read hieroglyphs that could bring their families bad luck.
“Look at that,” Herr Weilbacher murmured, speaking close to my ear. I followed his glance and was amazed by the sight of a woman balancing on her head a large chicken coop—complete with chickens! A man walked a step or two in front of her, carrying nothing more than a cigarette between his lips. “Probably her husband, or perhaps a brother,” Herr Weilbacher said. “Egypt is a man’s world. Women bear all the burdens of Cairene life. Clay jars, children, baskets of goods … You are lucky, Miss Shanklin, to be independent and free. What an extraordinary woman you are to come so far—all on your own!”
We turned down a side street. For a short time, the noise around us diminished to the crunch of discarded pistachio shells beneath our feet and the ka-lop, ka-lop of delicate donkey hooves, followed by the rumble of wooden wheels on cobbles when a little cart passed by, laden with oranges. Soon, however, we entered an enclosed passageway where shouts and cries echoed against ancient stone walls.
“I think we will not go farther inside. Just look from here,” Herr Weilbacher advised. “It is too dirty for your pretty shoes.” That was just the sort of thing Mumma might have warned against, but on Herr Weilbacher’s lips, the instruction seemed to convey concern for my welfare and carried no implication that my own judgment was inadequate to the situation.
The covered bazaar was called a souk, he told me, and it teemed with jostling shoppers haggling over sacks of spices and beans, and piles of melons and cucumbers. Each item was the occasion for the sort of shouting matches I’d observed the day before, and when I inquired, Herr Weilbacher explained, “The negotiation is designed to make every transaction take as long as possible. It is a form of sport and justifies the time men spend on it. When they are tired from their bargaining, they must sit and smoke, or play dominoes for a while—to recover their strength, naturally.”
Rosie wiggled in his arms, and he paused to set her on the pavement just as a gang of small boys gathered around us calling, “Baksheesh! Baksheesh!” Herr Weilbacher shook his head and waved the children off, but one of them noticed Rosie, who was backing up, circling. When she curled like a comma to deposit her own malodorous contribution to the bazaar’s collection of garbage, donkey droppings, and camel urine, the little boy alerted his friends. In an instant, the whole group doubled up with glee. Herr Weilbacher tossed a coin into the souk. The boys ran off to retrieve it and were quickly lost amid the hawkers’ wares.
“Baksheesh,” I said. I remembered the word from Lillie’s letters but couldn’t recall the meaning. “Is that a sort of fruit?”
“Yes, in a ma
“And how have you come to be in the Middle East, Herr Weilbacher?” I asked as we strolled onward.
He stopped walking and waited with a hurt expression for me to look back. “Please, must I beg?” he asked, sounding comically aggrieved. “Call me Karl.”
“Karl.” The word was soft in my mouth. “And you must call me Agnes, of course.”
“That’s better.” He had a smile like sunrise. “Before the war, I supervised the construction of a railway my government built for the Turks.”
“You are a civil engineer, then? My brother was an army engineer,” I said, delighted by the coincidence.
“An engineer?” He laughed, but kindly. “I’m afraid I have no head for such things. No, Agnes, I was—let us say—an observer. I reported on progress to my superiors. There was a considerable investment of money. Many important people were interested in the project.”
Toward noon we circled back toward an impressive square, which was, Karl told me, the very heart of Cairo. There, all the colors of humanity were in evidence. “Sudanese,” Karl whispered, indicating a family so dark as to be nearly purple. As we strolled, he nodded toward Greeks and Italians, Jews and Armenians, Syrians and Lebanese and Cypriots: all sallow and hirsute in varying degrees. “But look there!” Karl said quietly. A slim, square-shouldered youth passed by, slender brown limbs moving with fluid grace beneath his homespun cotton robe. “That is the true Egyptian, Agnes, just as he is depicted on the walls of ancient tombs.”
Together we gazed at the young man’s beauty until Karl was distracted from it by a pair of white-ski
I spoke of my sister’s co
“I’m sorry, Herr—Karl. No, I don’t believe you have the right man. Colonel Lawrence is a British army officer.”
“Among other things.” Karl smiled. “I have followed his career for many years, Agnes. We met near Baghdad before the war, when he was an ‘archaeologist’ at Carchemish.”
“You say ‘archaeologist’ as though it were some sort of joke.”
“Not a joke, but part of the truth, only. Lawrence was competent in his field and Carchemish was an important Hittite site, but there are many such sites. Why choose one and not another?” he asked playfully. “Because Carchemish was very near a bridge we were building for that new German railway, of course! Lawrence spent a good deal of time taking photographs and making notes that would be of use during the war we both knew was coming. I came to know him rather well …” Suddenly, a cloud seemed to pass over him. Karl shook his head sadly. “He was built like a young bull in those days—not tall, but great strength in the shoulders and chest.” The colonel had not struck me as robust, and I must have looked doubtful because Karl remarked, “It was a hard war for him, I fear.”
He brightened up as we approached the famed Egyptian Museum, an immense building of peony-pink stone. “They held an international competition for its design. Worthy of the splendors it contains but, like Egyptian history, it contains too much. I will remain outside with Rosie while you spend just forty-five minutes in the museum— no more or you will be overwhelmed, dear teacher! You can come back again and again, and you will look at the same objects with different eyes. Learn inside, learn outside, then learn more on your return!”