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once he thought of grabbing her and standing with her in front of the train. But he could never bring himself to do that; he was too weak to commit suicide, He could see the lines of old age beginning to appear prematurely on her face, and a few thin hairs on her chin. When the ghee vendor picked him up, he let himself go, unafraid of anything. The fiendish thought that he might become the cause of another woman’s madness even occurred to him; he wished he would become the cause of all women’s madness, in all the villages. If only all the women all over the countryside would follow him, thoroughly besotted! It was as if Bahiya knew. She disappeared suddenly. The ghee vendor brazenly invited him to her house, and he went with her without fear, hoping to become the cause of her madness. He watched her introduce him to her father as a big merchant from Tanta who wanted to buy all their butter and ghee, all year long. He saw in her mother’s eyes slyness and greed and doubts about his story. He thought of turning her into a madwoman too. They prepared a room for him to sleep in, and he asked them to collect all the ghee, butter, and eggs from the village. He learned from the beautiful, rather buxom woman that she was a widow, whose husband had been run over by a car in Tanta. She came to his room every evening. He had no doubt that her parents knew. He realized what was being planned for him. But he was not made for marriage and family life. On the dawn of the seventh day he sneaked out. The whole village, with its black houses, was enveloped in fog. It was a sight he would not forget: black houses made gray by the white vapor that stretched to the edge of the universe. Could hell be any different from what he was seeing? The houses appeared to him like mythical beasts writhing in torment, in utter blindness. When his feet hit the railroad tracks, he headed for Tanta, not to his village. When he came to an underpass, he sat down to drink tea from a shack that served it. He wanted to wait until the fog lifted so he could see things more clearly.
    When it did lift, he saw in front of him a group of border guards on camelback dragging a group of peasants bound with along rope. He had no chance to escape. One of the guards got down from his camel, grabbed his arm, and calmly bound him with the others. He did not object, question, or scream. They marched him with the others to the governorate headquarters in Tanta and from there to the army camps in Cairo. The ‘Authority’ had kidnapped him to serve and fight, against his will, as corvée in the armies of England, which had declared Egypt a protectorate.

…feeling through the hot pavements the rhythms of
    Alexandria transmitted upwards into bodies which could
    only interpret them as famished kisses, or endearments
    uttered in voices hoarse with wonder.
    Lawrence Durrell
    5
    It seemed that everything was ready to accommodate Magd al-Din and Zahra. At night Bahi told them that the landlord, Khawaga Dimitri, was a good man who lived on the second floor in two rooms, next to which was a separate room that he could rent to them. They found out from him that a woman by the name of Lula lived with her husband in the room across the hall from his own. Bahi told them also that he would let them sleep in his room that night and that he would go out and sleep in the entryway of the house, where it was cooler and where he would be more likely to wake up early. Magd al-Din had to agree with him, even though he was surprised at his brother’s talk of getting up early. Then he told him to wake him up early too, so he could go out to look for work.
    They spent most of the night talking about the neighborhood and its inhabitants. Nothing said that night stuck in Magd al-Din’s mind, for he knew it already. Zahra, though, was surprised to hear about the tensions between Christians and Muslims and how they had subsided now, and that the real tensions now were between northern and southern