Into Thick Air (12 page)

An hour later I wake to the stirrings of a sandstorm. The Red Pyramid softens and vanishes, as if seen through a camera while twisting the lens
out of focus. The nearby military radar installation vanishes. Out of the swelling murk comes Abd's twelve-year-old daughter, Hebey, and the three of us hustle into the single room of the guard shelter, ducking under blankets and clothes hung from wires.

A ten-foot-square room, three humans, one bike, and $10,000 worth of electronics that I'd like to remain hidden for reasons of modesty. Abd and Hebey listen to a tiny radio while they work. They're turning palm trees into sleeping mats. Working with only a sliver of light from a window on the lee side of the shelter, they loop palm-leaf fibers around a toe, then twist them into one strand by deftly rolling them between their palms. Each cord is woven into a mat. Every hour they brew up some tea to share, and together we peek outside and agree: big wind.

The sandstorm won't quit. And, glancing at my watch, I realize that my editor in Washington can't wait—I've got to finish my Cairo dispatch. With a sheepish grin I pull out the computer. It elicits little more than raised eyebrows, and I get the feeling they'd expected an expensive toy in my bags all along.

When the sandstorm ebbs and the valley emerges from the gloom, I give Hebey a postcard of Tucson and a pencil, slip Abd a few bucks, and trundle down the dune back into the valley palms. In the village of Dahshur there are oranges and bananas at fruit stands where old vendors whisper their thanks, bow slightly, and bring their hand to their breast. I ask for bread, and a man volunteers to guide me to the bakery.

My tour of main street is along an irrigation canal that looks like a trench through a landfill, then down an alley of homes collapsing into rubble and mud. They aren't abandoned—not in a place where even a sheet of corrugated steel tilted up against a palm is inhabited. Egypt is 94 percent hard desert, leaving 6 percent for everyone and their crops. In 1900, “everyone” meant 10 million people; in 1960, 26 million; at the time of my visit it is approaching 70 million.

Most are kids, it seems; by the time we reach the bakery there are forty children crowded around me. My guide shoos them off while I buy a pita, then takes me clear back across town so I can buy boiled eggs and visit a tea shop. I provide a pleasant diversion from dominoes. When
the sun sinks weakly into a veil of dust, I'm directed to a hotel ten miles out of town.

Waving good-bye forever, I bump off along a dirt road. Very white egrets take flight from the canals and bank sharply into the wind, dangling absurdly skinny legs. Everywhere, people are toiling in the fields. I spring for a hotel room with a marble bathroom. Out in the courtyard, a pair of six-foot-tall Ninja Turtles are teaching the dance craze La Macarena to some lucky birthday kids.

 

TWELVE SEAMLESS HOURS of sleep, then it's my birthday, too. I'm forty, but feel only thirty-nine. My fever's ebbed, my lungs work, and the road to recovery leads past villages a cut above the misery of yesterday's landfill. The slender, vigorous farmers no longer seem to be toiling amid rows of corn and carrots, but merely working, and occasionally chanting. When school's out the kids still swarm around me, and now I see why they scream
Hello!
—it's the title of their English primer.

The cultivated valley is only ten miles across, yet I never see the Nile, only the canals. Herons spear frogs in the slow water. A kingfisher with a Zorro black mask and a stiletto bill hovers like an enormous hummingbird, waiting for the moment to dive. I watch, pedaling slowly and feeling sneaky on my noiseless bicycle.

There are beggars, too. It's usually a broken old man, head wound with turban, waiting, waiting. If I stop he'll say,
Peace upon you
, then extend his hand for alms. Such people do not pursue you and spin tales of sudden bad fortune. It is simply a matter of your paths crossing, as God willed, and the wealthier are expected to help the less fortunate.

When the sun is setting I'm still short of my destination, the city of Beni Suef. Honking, crumpled taxis whiz by in the failing light, prompting me to figure the odds. Better, I decide, to be inside a taxi than to be creamed by one.

My ride is a Peugeot wagon with a free-and-natural sandblasted finish. The desert preserves a taxi just as it does a mummy, for nothing rusts or rots where the yearly rainfall is less than half an inch. From my guest-of-honor front seat position I've a pop-eyed view of the rear bumper of
another taxi we tailgate and of the donkey that dumbly steps from a field of beans into the highway. There's just time enough to straight-arm brace myself against the dash for the squeal and smack and blossom of glass and steam. Nobody's hurt beyond some scrapes and bruises. The donkey escaped injury, but our taxi is hissing its final breath.

An instant audience materializes. People gesture and babble and by consensus deliver the verdict: the accident is the fault of our taxi. Because nobody is actually dead, there will be neither police nor lawyers.

Our driver pries up the hood and mutters what should be the last rites but proves to be closer to
I've got a pulse
. A cry goes out for a chain, a crowbar, and a bar of soap. Two hours later the radiator is mostly plugged, the doors work, and the fender is pulled back from the tire. Defying the scrap heap, the taxi heroically wobbles into town.

The kings left no monumental tombs in Beni Suef, but it's just as well. “As for the pyramids,” grumbled Henry David Thoreau, “there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby.” Thoreau could be a sourpuss (he heartily endorsed celibacy), but he'd be happy to discover that it wouldn't take a lifetime to build a pyramid in Beni Suef. There's a gigantic cement factory churning out over 8 million pounds a day.

Yet most of the homes are brick and mortar, clumsy dwellings that fairly shout
We built it ourselves
. The dirt streets are home to shy dogs shaped by natural selection. No toy schnauzers or lanky wolfhounds—all dogs are just large enough to tip over a garbage can, but not so big as to require buckets of food.

Beni Suef isn't pretty, but it's a beautiful place to get a glass of just-squeezed sugarcane juice on a downtown corner and watch the old bald men in barbershops get their heads buffed and ear hair clipped. I imagine they do it for the comfort of ritual. That would also explain the horse-drawn carriages, each with pinstriped wheels and a canopy hung with snazzy dingleballs and tin stencils of very small hands.

Downtown Beni Suef is middle-class dads in cardigan sweaters and moms with billowing black gowns and tattooed chins out for a evening
stroll. This city of several hundred thousand is undoubtedly safe, definitely polite, and probably dull. Teen boys, hungry for action, do the same thing in Beni Suef that teens do in Des Moines, Iowa: they pilot their fantastic bicycles to the video store and rent
Snake Eater III
and
Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman
.

I have friends here, or rather friends of a second cousin of my telephone-friend Amina, who works in Egypt's Washington embassy. In the morning, after “God Is Great” blasts from a klaxon outside my hotel window, Emad comes by my room. With his wire-rim glasses and button-down shirt, he looks like the budding librarian he is.

Emad checks out my bike and expresses mild amazement that I, no spring chicken, hope to ride to the Dead Sea.

“I'm twenty-four and I don't know if I would try that.”

As of yesterday, I brag, I'm forty.

He fans the air and gasps, “Whoa!” Outside awaits a red Fiat and his friends Hilal and Milad; we all scoot through the city to visit Saint Mary's Church. Together with Father Stephanos, whose cheerful beard and locks make him look like Mr. Natural, they take me to the nursery school. I've no idea why, until the waist-high students are lined up and sweetly singing “Happy Birthday.”

Milad is the painting teacher for the school, specializing in Walt Disney and primary colors. Hilal is an accountant for a taxi company. Only later will I notice the crosses tattooed on their right wrists, the mark given to Egypt's Christians when they are five or six years old. One in eleven Egyptians is Christian, and the figure is closer to 50 percent in Beni Suef.

The Vatican has no authority in Egypt. This is the Coptic Church, and they've been on their own since AD 451. The official breakup was theological—something about the “true” nature of Jesus—but mainly they wished to be left alone. Saint Mary's Church, says Father Stephanos, was built with timbers from Jerusalem—proof of its authenticity. He gladly gives me a tour of the church icons.

“Is Saint Paul. Is Saint George.”

And this one, I inject, is Gabriel.

“Oh, you read Arabic?”

No, I say, I just saw the angel wings.

Like all tours, it ends at a gift shop, where Father Stephanos slips some inspirational music into a cassette deck. There are weighty Christian tomes for the serious, toy cellular phones for the children, and Jesus wristwatches for all. Except for Father Stephanos, who wears a swank Seiko under his robe.

But Saint Mary's Church is only a farm operation, literally, for the Monastery of Saint Anthony. It's a hundred miles east of the Nile, smack in the desert, on my route to the Gulf of Suez. Saint Anthony, says Father Stephanos, “is beginning of monk system, is number one monk.”

Why, I ask, did Saint Anthony go to this place? “To be alone.”

Seventeen hundred years ago there were considerably fewer people in the Nile Valley, but apparently it wasn't lonesome enough for the Number One Monk. Anthony escaped the throb of humanity by trekking into the wilderness until he found an old fort with a reliable spring. He spent the next two decades alone.

It's safe to say that Anthony was on the fringe, but I can relate. The next morning, the minaret outside the hotel window comes alive with a hundred-watt call to prayer, reminding me that a quieter place is just beyond the Nile. I pack and leave for the desert.

At Beni Suef the river runs hard up against the eastern edge of the valley, and from the bridge I can see plainly the desert ahead. The river below is fat and slow. Rowboats pull across the current to reach little islands; these, too, are cultivated and grazed.

My tires are bulging under the weight of my stores and two gallons of water. I stop to give them a shot of air at an Olympic gas station at the road fork to the monastery and the Red Sea. The two attendants are full of advice on my route. Number one is leery but confident of success—if God wills it. Number two says it's not a matter of God—it's the wrong road.

There's no sign at the junction. The Arabic road map I prudently purchased for just this occasion is beautiful, but the men ignore it. With a hundred miles of desert before the next town, I wait for a third opinion to show up. It comes with a family on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, in a car with four official Mecca flags snapping in the wind. I lean over the driver's
window while he straightens his alligator-skin Kleenex box holder on the dash and ask where yonder road goes.

“To Minya. Where do you want to go?”

Zafarana.

“It go Zafarana.”

Not Minya?

“Go two. Minya, Zafarana.”

This neither jives with the map nor makes Cartesian sense: Minya is in the Nile Valley and Zafarana is on the Red Sea coast. Eventually everyone agrees that the road goes to Minya and Zafarana, but it is not the road to Zafarana. “This road dangerous road,” says attendant number two. Why? I ask. He draws his finger across his throat. “Bad people. Look! Here come truck that take you to good Zafarana road. You go?”

Absolutely. I hop on a truck carrying sixty tons of cement bags, and they soon drop me off on the real Zafarana road.

My timing is perfect: hardly any traffic, the wind and sun at my back, pale desert and the faint rise of a plateau many miles ahead. I'm so pleased I hardly notice that there are no pretty dunes, no wind-polished stones, no fantastic towers of rock. Back home in Arizona, the mesquite trees should be unfurling their April leaves, creating something called shade. Here there are only knee-high spheres of patient salt bush, rising from the cracks of dried mud in the watercourses.

Panting as much from excitement as from effort, I crest a rise and look back. The Nile Valley is gone. “Why,” asked Melville in
Moby Dick
, “upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land?” There's nothing mystical about the vibes: it's the thrill of leaving civilization behind. Desert or sea, it's the same feeling when you cross the threshold.

But then I see, in the distance, a few camels rocking along with a peculiar side-to-side gait. With my binoculars I can make out the robed Bedouin not far behind the big beasts. I don't wait. I ride on, gliding actually, shoved along by the wind until Hale-Bopp turns on and I turn in, hiding from the road behind a low ridge of gravels. Out here, fifty miles
from the nearest lightbulb, the comet's tail looks like the spray from an uncorked champagne bottle. Perhaps the Star of Bethlehem looked like this.

 

AFTER TWENTY YEARS of gazing at heaven, Saint Anthony could no longer ignore humanity. A colony of ascetics had formed outside the fort, and they begged Anthony to come out.

He came out. To everyone's surprise, twenty years behind the wall hadn't touched him. He looked the same, the story goes, as when he went in.

When I appear at the wall, I look like I've just pedaled up a thousand feet into a damp headwind.

“Sorry!” says the gate boy. “Monastery is closed.”