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1798, when Napoleon arrived in Egypt with his team of savants, and it has developed since under a series of foreign influences and interferences. Today, truly independent at last, it is a city so sophisticated and well equipped that all the other Arab capitals pale into provincialism. The Republic of Egypt is the self-appointed leader of the Arab world, and there is no denying the dynamism and assurance of its capital. A company of tall new buildings has burgeoned beside the river: two great hotels, all glass plate and high tariffs; a tower with a revolving restaurant on top; vast new official offices, immaculate outside, raggle-taggle within; expensive apartment blocks and sprawling housing estates. A splendid new corniche runs along the waterfront, from one side of the city to the other. A spanking new bridge spans the river. It is not a stylish city, contemporary Cairo, and its sense of dignity comes almost entirely from its river and its past, but it has undeniable punch and power.
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    It is the very opposite of a backwater. It is a fermenting city, often bombastic, always on the move. Fielding tells the story of a blind man, asked to convey his impression of the colour red, who replied that it had always seemed to him ‘somewhat like the sound of a trumpet’. Cairo is not silvery: but something similarly blatant and penetrating is the image that should be summoned for you, when it leaps into the headlines again. Something is always happening here. It may be some great economist flying patiently in, or a statesman flying philosophically out, or a new démarche from Moscow, or a British economic mission, or a fulmination against Israel, or a reconciliation with Iraq, or the arrival of a Russian dam-builder, or a meeting of the Arab League – a threat, a parade, or simply the President of Egypt sweeping by, with a roar of his convoying motor cycles and a scream of sirens, in his big black bullet-proof car.
    It is a blazing place. It blazes with heat. It blazes with a confrontation of opposites, the clash of the modern and the traditional. Above all it blazes with the glare of contemporary history. Pause on a bridge in Cairo, amid the blare of the traffic and the shove of the citizenry, and you can almost hear the balance of the powers shifting about you, as the black, brown and yellow peoples come storming into their own. In Cairo is distilled the essence of the Afro-Asian risorgimento. It is fertile in ideas and bold ambitions – often undistinguished, sometimes positively childish, but always intensely vigorous, brassy, combative and opportunist. Its corporate tastes run to the belly-dancer, the dirty story, overeating, heartybadinage. It loves fireworks and big-bosomed singers. Its newspapers are clever. Its cartoonists are brilliantly mordant. Its radio programmes, laced with propaganda, shriek from every coffee-house. It is a city with an incipient fever, always swelling towards the moment when the sweat will break out at last.
    All the material amenities of Western life are available in Cairo, but it never feels remotely like a Western city. It welcomes you kindly, and guides you helpfully across the streets, and engages you in cordial conversation – only to do something distinctly queer at the end of the lane. Sometimes these things are frightening (when a mob streams down the back streets, or the great tanks rumble by). Sometimes they are very charming (when you share a bowl of beans with a jolly family in a park). Sometimes they are baffling (when you wake in the morning to learn of some totally unpredictable about-face of national policies). Sometimes they are marvellously encouraging (when some young upstart politician expresses a truth so clear, so clean, so free of inherited trammels that all our horny conjectures seem out of date). The particular forces of history and conflict that have moulded our Western societies have had little share in the making of Cairo. It is a city sui generis, sustained by all