Read A Writer's World for Free Online

after a military coup in 1952, the independent republican capital of President Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Egypt
    Rolling grandly northward out of the African interior, at last the noble River Nile splits into the several streams of its Egyptian delta, and creates a region so rich, so old, so deep-rooted in constancy, that there is something almost obscene to its fecundity. At the head of this country, at the point where the river divides, there stands the city of Cairo. It is the capital of Egypt, the largest city in Africa, the metropolis of the Arab world, the intellectual centre of Islam, and for more than a millennium it has been one of the great places of the earth.
    *
    Nothing ever quite dies in Cairo, for the air is marvellously clear and dry, and the temper of the country astringently preservative. If you stand upon the Mokattam Hills, the bare-back ridge that commands the place, you can see the pyramids of Giza upon its outskirts. From here they look faintly pink and translucent, like alabaster pyramids. They stand upon the very edge of the desert, where the sands are abruptly disciplined by the passage of the river, and they look fearfully old, terribly mysterious and rather frightening. Years ago the traveller would find these monumentslonely and brooding in the sand, with a Sphinx to keep them company and an attendant priesthood of unscrupulous dragomen. Today the city has expanded upstream, and digested a little irrigated desert too, until a line of villas, night clubs, hotels and golf courses links the capital with the Pharaohs, and the pyramids have acquired a distinctly suburban flavour. They are to Cairo what the Tivoli Gardens are, perhaps, to Copenhagen.
    Another layer of the city’s life is darkly medieval, straight-descended from the times when the Arab conquerors, storming in from their Eastern deserts, seized Egypt in the name of Islam. Look westward from your eyrie on the hill, and you will see a mottled section of the city, brownish and confused, from which there seems to exude (if you are of an imaginative turn) a vapour of age, spice and squalor. This is the Cairo of the Middle Ages. A forest of incomparable minarets springs out of the crumbled hodge-podge of its streets: one with a spiral staircase, one with a bulbous top, some single, some double, some like pepper-pots, some like hollyhocks, some elegantly simple, some assertively ornate, some phallic, some demure, rising from the huddle of houses around them like so many variegated airshafts from an underground chamber. There is said to be a mosque for every day of the Cairo year, and around them there lingers, miraculously pickled, the spirit of mediaeval Islam, just emerging from the chaos of animism and pagan superstition. Among these narrow lanes and tottering houses the Evil Eye is still potent, and a hundred taboos and incantations restrict the course of daily life.
    At one of the great gates in the city wall you may still see dirty scraps of linen and paper pinned there in supplication to some misty saint of prehistory, and when there is a festival at a mosque, and the squeaky swings are erected for the children, and an endless crowd clamours through the night around the tomb of the local holy man, then all the gallery of medieval characters emerges into the street in the lamplight – the half-mad dervish, tattered and daemonic; the savage emaciated beggar, with long nails and gleaming eyes; the circumciser, preparing his instruments delicately at a trestle table; the saintly imam, bland and courteous; the comfortable merchant, distributing sweetmeats and largesse; the clowns and peddlers and pickpockets, and many a small company of women, identically dressed in coarse-grained black, squatting in circles at street corners, gossiping loudly or idly rapping tambourines.
    Two or three minutes in a wild-driven bus will whisk you from this enclave to the boulevards of modern Cairo, the power-house of theMiddle East. Westernized Cairo was born in