WELCOME AT CAIRO, said the sign on the airport—an unwelcome signal to an English teacher who had to teach his first class the following morning. It was midnight, Egyptian time, when I arrived in my new apartment and fell dead asleep, only to wake up two hours later, jet-lagged and bewildered. I wandered around the apartment and listened to the traffic and the pentatonic melodies of the doorman’s transistor radio.
At seven a small, wiry man, with a distinguished face that reminded me of the actor Claude Rains, came into my apartment. He had his own key. He was carrying a shopping bag of groceries, and he introduced himself as Shaffei Mohammed Helal, my servant. “What you like for breakfast, mister?” he demanded.
Shaffei had learned to cook in the British army, a wretched school for chefs. In prerevolutionary days he had been a butler, which was a more suitable position for his aide-de-camp manner and military bearing. On that first morning he was in a grumpy mood, and he made breakfast into a noisy production. Later I learned that he was planning to have breakfast prepared before I awoke, as servants in Egypt were expected to do. The following morning he arrived half an hour earlier, but I was still on American time and wired on Arab coffee I had brewed myself. Every morning for the next two weeks he came in earlier and grumpier, trying to catch me asleep—but how could he? I was dropping from exhaustion right after dinner and often was asleep before the sun went down. One morning Shaffei arrived at four, haggard but determined, and found me making eggs. He slumped against the door and cried, “Mister, when you sleep?”
I did not relish the idea of having a servant. I still thought of myself as a radical; also, I was twenty-two and Shaffei was in his middle fifties, so our relationship was bound to be oddly balanced. As the months passed and our friendship grew, Shaffei became more and more the affectionate, if ever fussy, housewife. We would go shopping together, along the stalls of vegetable stands, past the butcher shops with the bleeding carcasses hung out for the flies, and Shaffei would take my hand, in the Arab fashion, and complain about prices.
As much as I loved him, I never grew to love his cooking. He did have a flair for presentation. A salad would be laid out with carrot spokes around a tomato hub, a banana pie would be garnished with concentric coins of fruit; it was all very pretty but emotionally uninvolving. Once I decided to upgrade his culinary skills by translating a recipe out of a Julia Child cookbook into the pidgin English we used to communicate. It was for a lamb roast. Shaffei sat in the kitchen with an intent look as I spoke about the marinade, “like wine soup” with thirty-five bay leaves—
“What is bay leave?”
“Add the onions, carrots, celery, never mind the juniper berries, two cups of vermouth, garlic, bouillon, cook in olive oil, season with—”
But now Shaffei was laughing. “Excuse me, mister, this is for one person?”
“Eight or ten.”
“For the cost of this dinner I can feed two hundred.”
And of course it did seem preposterous in revolutionary Egypt to dream of French cooking, so I laughed as well. Wasn’t I a revolutionary too? And yet there was a grudging imperialist inside me who was dying for a first-class meal.
The street life of Cairo reminded me of a coral reef, a flamboyant but fragile ecology of vendors and beggars and entrepreneurs who raced about in shoals among the taxis and pedestrians. Every stop-light supported a jasmine seller and a windshield cleaner. On the sidewalks a family of three generations made a living selling baked yams and mint tea. Sometimes outside my apartment on Mahad Swissri fire-eaters and sword swallowers would appear, or a man with a dancing baboon, or a clown in a Charlie Chaplin suit, twirling his cane and tipping his derby. In the late afternoon the little daughter of a blind peanut vendor would lead her father by the hand. He wore a black gallabiya and a white turban, which was wrapped across his eyes. On his arm he carried a basket of unshelled peanuts, called sudani in Arabic. His daughter was no more than five years old, and she walked barefoot, and as they moved past my apartment her little voice shouted “Sudani! Sudani!” and he would echo “Sudani!” in a deep, echoing cry like a train whistle.
I lived on the island of Zamalek in the middle of the Nile, one island downriver from Roda, where Moses was found in the bull-rushes. Each morning on my way to the university I passed a public school, where children in coffee-colored uniforms lined up to sing “B’ladi, B’ladi” (“My Country, My Country”) at the top of their lungs while a xylophone and a drum inexpertly clanged and boomed after the tune, and the schoolmaster circulated among them with a short-handled whip. For a moment the entire street paused; the policeman in his wooden hut stood at attention, the doormen playing a game like checkers with bottle caps looked up and smiled, showing their gorgeous Nubian teeth, the harelipped beggar boy added the sound of his own sad voice, and then the song ended and the doormen resumed their game and the boy raced after taxis and the policeman took a nap.
Outside the school gates an old man in a white robe took piasters from the brown, groping hands poking through the rails and passed paper cones full of hot peanuts through the bars. His cart was an ancient baby carriage with a tin-can oven inside, and his paper cones were the homework papers given him by the schoolchildren. Every morning when he saw me coming he would call out, “Sabah il kher!” (May your morning be good.)
And I would respond, “Sabah il nur!” (May your morning be full of light.)
“Sabah il ishta!” he insisted, may your morning be as white as cream—or as fragrant as jasmine, as pure as honey; his formulations changed daily. It is a decorous and romantic language.
As soon as I passed the peanut vendor I was hailed by Samir the Artist, who stood outside his studio working on charcoal portraits of Omar Sharif, or Charlton Heston as Moses, or some iconic study of Gamal Abdel Nasser. “Good morning, my darling,” he called out in English. “Did you see the Phantoms today?” The Phantoms were the American-made jets used by the Israeli air force. They would often buzz the city at dawn, streaking down the Nile just above the bridge tops, shattering every pane of glass along the Corniche with their explosive supersonic screech.
During the two years I was in Egypt, from 1969 to 1971, the ancient war between the Arabs and the Jews had gone stale, but it continued to be fought in a languid fashion, like two fighters grown arm-weary in the late rounds. Many of the windows in public buildings were blued and crisscrossed with masking tape. Soldiers with antique British rifles patrolled the city’s bridges from sandbag turrets. At night you could see their shadows on the walls of the lantern-lit tents, reading, playing cards, sleeping in cots, their underwear drying on lines beside the busy bridge traffic.
The Nile itself was just another boulevard, crowded with water taxis speeding students to Cairo University, and feluccas that had to lower their masts to squeeze under the bridges, and houseboats constructed of reeds and cardboard, which drifted near the shoreline. Sheep on their way to slaughter took their final bath in the river, along with their naked shepherds. On holidays the Nile swarmed with rowboats, and sometimes a wedding party came along in several boats, followed by a band serenading the newlyweds. From every boat in the river came shouted congratulations, and young men would stand on the gunwales and dance as the band played some popular song everyone knew.
I liked to walk the length of the island, past the sidewalk café with its parti-colored chairs facing the water and the cats stalking about under the tables for scraps. Near the café is a mosque where Nasser and the Revolutionary Command Council plotted the coup against King Farouk in 1952, and beside that is the needle-shaped Cairo Tower, a silly-looking erection that was built with the three million dollars that the CIA gave Nasser as a bribe. The tower is spitefully placed directly across the Nile from the Hilton hotel.
Once I crossed the Kasr El Nil bridge, I stepped into Tahrir Square, the heart of Cairo, where traffic whirled about in a maelstrom and a million pedestrians flooded the sidewalks. It was always a relief to slip inside the gates of the American University and to leave the jostling, noisy crowd outside.
In 1969 there were no diplomatic relations between the United States and Egypt because of the Israeli war; the American embassy was closed down, and the business of citizens was conducted in a consular office tucked inside the grounds of the Spanish embassy. The only significant American presence in the country was the American University, and as a result the school had become a refuge for spies. The president of the university, Christopher Thoren, who has since died, was an elegant spook whose cover was blown by Philip Agee in CIA Diary, and there were other people in university administration who had important titles with no apparent duties. The young Americans like me who taught in the English Language Institute were always joking about being overheard in the privacy of our own apartments, but we were never certain who was listening, the Americans or the Egyptians or even the Russians, who lived across the street.
On my first morning in Cairo I entered a classroom filled with Egyptians, Palestinians, and Jordanians who constituted UG-14, the undergraduate class with the lowest level of achievement on the Michigan language exam. Many of them had already failed the test twice and had only one more opportunity to gain full admission to the university. Since I had no teaching experience at all, I had been given a class in which no one was expected to succeed. Most of them had learned English from teachers who didn’t speak it. They had spent years conjugating verbs wrongly and learning to say “blease” and “sank you.” When I came into the classroom I asked, “Does anyone here speak English?” and a voice in the back of the room said, “You do.”
They reminded me of American high schoolers in the 1950s, with their innocent antics and dateless school dances and their apparent complacency. It was months later, after I had become a part of them, and they a part of me, that I realized they were not complacent, they were simply not alienated. They did not feel estranged from their countries or their religions, although few of them were especially patriotic or devout. They believed in progress; they had that same faith in the goodness of technology that my father’s generation had had, but as a corollary they had absolutely no interest in the past. They were heirs to one of the oldest civilizations in the world, but they knew nothing about Ramses or Hatshepsut, and everything about the desalination of seawater or the construction of the Aswan Dam. They needed me because I was an instrument of progress; Egypt was building a technocratic society, and the language of technology was English. For most of them I was the last hope that they would be a part of that future.
Only one of my students was a troublemaker. His name was Medhet; he was a Jordanian from the West Bank. When he was a child an Israeli patrol had come through his village and shot a man to death in front of him. Some of the man’s brains had splattered on him. Since then he had not been able to speak confidently. He stuttered terribly, and when the other students kidded him he would blow up in a tongue-tied tantrum. His great interest, he confided one day, was in Russian history. I gave him a book on Trotsky that was far too difficult for him, and yet he read it doggedly, week after week, all semester long. Just before he took the Michigan exam for his final time, he said he had dreamed last night in English. It was not my accomplishment; he was the one who read the book, he was the one who passed the test, but I was prouder of Medhet’s success than of anything I had ever done.
It was strange that the Egyptians could be so cordial to Americans when Phantom jets were bombing their country. I think it was a relationship that only Americans can have with other peoples, in part because of our good qualities—we like children, we mix with the help—and in part because of our unfathomable democracy. Often my students would apologize to me for the actions of my own country. They did not hold me responsible for selling jets to Israel or refusing to assist the Arab cause. Their genuine feeling for the goodness of the American people was formed by Hollywood, which casts a spell over the entire world. The America of the movies is a land of such innocence and beauty that my students were predisposed toward forgiveness. They wanted to be on our side. Some of them had been born in villages in the Nile delta, or in Palestinian camps on the bloody West Bank, but they had grown up watching Doris Day driving carpool through the suburbs of the new world and Fred MacMurray smoking his pipe and telling bedtime stories. America had insinuated itself into their imaginations. They thought about it all the time, and they were bound to love it—but also hate it, because they knew that America did not love them; indeed, America scarcely thought about them at all.
In my students’ minds, my country was in a state of cinematic timelessness. Chicago was still trapped in Prohibition and ruled by mobsters in double-breasted suits. When they learned I was from Texas, they imagined the Texas of a John Wayne Western—in other words, some Arizona parkland where the secrets of internal combustion had not yet been discovered. This proved a hazardous misconception for me when I went horseback riding with them in Giza, near the pyramids. My students insisted that I be given the very fastest Arabian stallion, and the owner produced a rearing, untamed beast that nearly rode me to Libya.
I often took my class to the movie theater, especially during Ramadan, the fasting period, when nothing is supposed to pass the lips between sunrise and sunset. We met each midnight for the special Ramadan features that helped keep people awake for the two A.M. meal. Once we watched Barbarella, Jane Fonda’s science fiction sex epic, with the Russian national tennis team sitting in front of us, howling and pretending to cover their eyes. Another time we went to see Midnight Cowboy, which presented such a grimy picture of American urban life that my students came out of it feeling disoriented and glum. They couldn’t believe America was like that. America was not just a place, it was an ideal, it was the promise of progress. America was what awaited their own countries if they worked hard and Allah smiled on them.
I wondered how my students could maintain their conceits about America given the Americans they had come to know. The teachers at the university fell into two camps, depending, I decided, on their attitude toward dirt. When the wind blows out of the desert nothing is clean, and for Americans the consequences can be demoralizing and even traumatic. Either they retreated to their shuttered apartments into mean little covens of snobbery and bigotry as the dust accumulated on their coffee tables like a Minnesota snowfall, or they forged ahead blithely behind a handshake and a smile, not minding the smell or the noise or the grit. I fell into this latter group; I was the American nincompoop in his most endearing incarnation, always popping up to help the servant get the dishes, and thanking thanking thanking and tipping tipping tipping—who could fail to love him and pity him and wonder at the waste of wealth and power that produced such a creature?
Directly across the street from me was the Novosti Press Agency, the Russian news service. I often watched a pair of blond children playing hide-and-seek behind a thick-waisted banyan tree and the tanklike Volga sedans parked in the drive. The Russians lived in partial quarantine. Unlike other foreigners, they had no servants; they moved in small groups through the food shops in Zamalek, inspecting things too closely, bargaining in gruff, rudimentary Arabic. It was said that their embassy forbade them to speak to Egyptians except to shop. You never saw them enjoying themselves in restaurants or nightclubs. Every other Friday night Novosti gave a party for their correspondents. I discovered that if I lay on the balcony outside my bedroom I could just see into their parlor, where the Russians were gathered around, sullenly drinking and playing old Teresa Brewer records on the phonograph. At two o’clock in the morning they would spill out into the street, smashed, and singing “Put another nickel in! In the nickelodeon!” I honestly could not decide if they were making fun of American culture or if they really admired Teresa Brewer.
One afternoon as I was walking to the Ghezira Sporting Club with my tennis racquet, a Russian offered me a lift in his Volga. His English was quite good. We played doubles together on several occasions thereafter. I thought this was quite humorous; I called us the “Big Powers” after we had teamed up to beat several European pairs. After a match Aleksei would buy us a couple of Stella beers and we would sit in the shade and talk about tennis, or he would quiz me about fine points of English grammar. Occasionally we would talk about Vietnam or American politics. He was not aggressively friendly, but he was often around. He spoke very little about Russia; he would shrug in a way that indicated I really shouldn’t probe. “But life is very nice here, I think,” he would say, indicating the bowlers rolling ninepins on the grass and the ponies coursing down the polo field and the weight lifters sunning their muscles in the garden.
After I met Aleksei I noticed that I became a subject of interest among people in the university administration. On several occasions I was invited to play tennis with an assistant to the president, who invited me to his apartment for tea and flattered me into talking about my views on the war, or the relative merits of Communism versus capitalism, or the responsible position of America in the world. I cleared my throat and said that capitalism was all right for America, but it couldn’t solve the problems of the developing world. Socialism might. Or else Chinese Communism, but that didn’t seem like much fun. And on and on in this vein, the reactionary leftist politics of the day, while the president’s assistant nodded and said “Um-hm” and “I see what you mean.” I think now how excruciating it must have been, both for the KGB and the CIA, to spend their time wrestling over this naive idealist. After a while they both lost interest and I found myself looking for new tennis partners.
One winter night in 1969, while I was camping in the desert, I was awakened by a series of explosions. I wrapped a blanket around me and stepped out of the tent into the chill desert air. On the horizon appeared great bulbing orange flashes. I counted the seconds between the burst and the rumbling sound of the explosion and figured them to be coming from Helwan, the industrial district. The light from the bombs silhouetted the city skyline and glinted off the pyramids. I could just see the black images of the Israeli jets like angry bees diving into the glow of the fires. It was splendid.
In the morning I returned my camel to its owner, and asked if the man had seen the bombing. He turned away and kicked at the sand. “The bombs!” I said. “Didn’t you see the bombs in Helwan last night?”
He continued to study the sand as if he hadn’t heard me. Finally he said, “No bombs in Helwan last night.”
The war was always just offstage. Sometimes the Israelis would race over the city in the middle of the day, for the hell of it, and fifteen minutes later the empty sky would be filled with antiaircraft shells as the defenders reached their posts. All across the city Cairenes would flock to the rooftops to view the fireworks. An American girl I knew was hospitalized with hepatitis near a district that was frequently bombed at night. In the morning the nuns would gather the shrapnel and use it to mulch the roses.
The newspapers seldom reported the raids at all. They concentrated their attention on the successes, real or imagined, at the Suez Canal. Few days passed without the announcement of another Israeli jet downed, sometimes with a photo but usually “seen crashing across the Canal.” Most of my students listened to the BBC for news about the war. The Israelis seemed invulnerable to them, like wizards, and they felt diffident; they thought the whole world was laughing at the Egyptians, who were too backward to operate the machines of modern warfare, who had picked a war with Israel and lost it in six days.
The identity they most longed for, then, was that of their enemy. Their admiration for the Israelis was heartbreaking; every time a Phantom flew overhead, unmolested, it was a refutation to their right to inhabit the modern world. When they struck a match, one of those perfidious Egyptian matches with a head that flies off, they would laugh self-consciously and call it an “Israeli match,” as if the clever Israelis had contrived a scheme to set Egyptians on fire. The Egyptians had lived in the desert for three thousand years, but they had not made it “bloom,” as they heard the Israelis had in a single generation. Civilization may have been born here, but it never grew; it stayed perpetually primitive. Indeed, the fellahin, the rural proletariat, were still plowing their fields with water buffalo and drawing water with the Archimedes screw; as soon as you left Cairo you shed two thousand years of progress. The city was a small bit of almost modern life set in a country that had not changed since the Ptolemys. Until Nasser dammed the Nile, Cairo was an electric island, and even now when you flew into Egypt at night what you saw was black, black, black, then Cairo like a bonfire. My students were mortified by their past, which surrounded them, which they could easily see from the vantage of any structure taller than five stories—the pyramids, that single great eruption of monument building, thinking, and art, then century after century of colonial occupation, which had kept them frozen in time at the beginning of history.
The Six-Day War of 1967 might have toppled the Nasser regime—that had been the object of the Israeli invasion—and yet the grossness of that defeat had had the opposite effect. When Nasser announced his resignation after losing the Sinai along with his entire air force, the country had rallied behind him and demanded that he stay in office—it was not an orchestrated display by a Third World strongman, it was a spontaneous national response. Nasser was the father of the revolution, the architect of modernizing Egypt. He had absurd dreams of uniting the entire Arab world into a single socialist empire; but it was not until the moment of his abject humiliation that he became a true symbol of proud, broken, resolute Egypt.
It was strange for me to have fled one war, only to find myself in another. Many of the American teachers, including me, were still waging an antiwar campaign against America in Vietnam on the campus of the American University. When Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia, we wore black armbands in protest. We held teach-ins. These actions were regarded with disbelief by the Egyptians and with alarm by the university administration. But we never lurched into the arena of the Middle East war; for most of us it was an abstraction, even though we speculated frequently about new hostilities. In the fall of 1970 there was a brief, mismatched war between Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and there was a great deal of talk about the evacuation of the American community from Egypt, should the war spread. And there was always the threat of another Israeli invasion. Everyone knew the Israelis could enter Cairo at will.
I knew that their war wasn’t my affair. On the other hand, I couldn’t stand the idea of seeing my students killed. I thought about how much love and effort are required to draw a single human being through the complexities of childhood and adolescence, and what a vessel of knowledge and experience each of us is, how valuable and filled with potential. My students might die in the service of History, but their own histories would be cut short in some miserable inconclusive exchange along the canal, or some heroic charge in the service of a misbegotten war. I had no investment in their wounded national pride, but I cared about my students and I fretted about their futures, and in that way their war became my enemy, along with my own.
I began to pester Shaffei about artichokes. I was dying for one. Roberta used to boil them and serve them whole with a vinaigrette dip. I couldn’t find the word in my English-Arabic dictionary, and when I tried to describe them to Shaffei his face became suspicious—he thought I was talking about pine cones. Finally I went on a patrol of vegetable stands and discovered a lovely bunch of artichokes hidden away with the turnips in the back of the store. I bought two of them and took them home to Shaffei. “Ah, mister, you buy karshuf.” It is actually the word from which “artichoke” is derived.
That night I had artichokes. And the next. And the next. Shaffei was demonstrating his remorse. After a week on this diet I realized it was not artichokes I was longing for, but Roberta. Compared with loneliness, marriage no longer seemed like such a dismal alternative.
And besides, I was entertaining the notion that we might get married under Moslem law, which would permit me three additional wives. This was ideal. Even in my greediest moments I knew I could be content with four wives at a time; moreover, the divorce laws were fantastically simple (“I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee”). There were obstacles to overcome—such as persuading Roberta to convert—but first she had to be willing to marry me and move to Egypt.
Our proposals crossed in the mail. I wrote begging her to come; she wrote that she was coming anyway. Negotiations began. The Moslem gambit did not even merit a response. Roberta demanded to be married in Athens. She was a classics major, after all.
The only man in Greece who could marry us was an ecumenical preacher who happened to be a former Nazi. He had been booted out of Egypt because he was suspected of spying for the Israelis. One can imagine how he responded to me, the conscientious objector. We spoke briefly about Egypt, and he recalled how much he loathed the Egyptians, who were always lounging about in their pajamas, spending their life in chatter, whereas the Israelis were such hard workers, so efficient, such great warriors. I admired the Israelis too, for many reasons, but hearing them so described by a former storm trooper made me sentimental about the gentleness and sociability of the Egyptians. I said I hoped the Egyptians would not come away from their long war with the Israelis more like them, in the way that the Jews had fled Europe with the stamp of Germany on their souls.
Roberta and I were married on January 22, 1970, in a depressing ceremony. It seemed to me a bad omen to be married by a Nazi. But afterward my best man, Larry Gray, brought out a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, and we climbed to the top of the Acropolis. It was the first full moon of the decade. The Parthenon was before us, forbiddingly holy. We went inside its roofless sanctuary and knelt on the floor of broken limestone, and were baptized in champagne to the memory of old gods.
On September 28, 1970, at night, a ululating wail spread across Cairo. It was a terrifying sound, loud, ubiquitous, pulsing—you would expect to hear such a noise at Armageddon. Nasser was dead. The wailing continued all night. We heard stories the next week about mass suicides, people leaping out of windows from grief. Muezzins chanted from the mosques to comfort the people. The next morning it was as if Cairo itself had died. There were no cars in the streets. The city was hushed and afraid. Shaffei arrived, ashen and red-eyed. “The people are like sand in the streets,” he said.
After noon, bands of young men in flatbed trucks ranged through the city crying, “Gamal Abdel Nasser lives! We are all Gamal Abdel Nasser!” In Alexandria in 1952 an assassin had fired three shots at Nasser while he was making a speech. “Let them kill me!” he had said then. “Now you are all Gamal Abdel Nasser.”
Between the death and the funeral nothing transpired in the city. Without the fumes of automobiles and factories, the Cairo smog lifted; the air became pure and the stars vivid. There was no city smell, no traffic roar.
While Cairo remained breathless, the trains were bringing the fellahin from the countryside. They crammed into boxcars and rode on tops of buses. Millions simply walked. We knew they were coming, and yet the streets of the city remained vacant.
But on the morning of the funeral they suddenly appeared. I stood on my balcony and saw five million—ten million?—Egyptians standing on the bank of the ancient river, facing Zamalek. For as far as I could see there was not a single space of unoccupied pavement. I couldn’t even see the trees on the Corniche; they had become people-trees.
Finally the dignitaries were in place and the procession began its slow advance into the city. I had joined the other Americans on the roof. Of course I was remembering Kennedy’s funeral, and the assembly of the high and mighty half-stepping toward Arlington. When the cortege reached the Kasr El Nil bridge, the crowd on the mainland suddenly burst through the police line and rushed for the body. We could see the soldiers trying to beat their way through the mob with nightsticks and rifle butts. The bridge itself began to tremble. The vibration was visible to us a mile away. Many of the diplomats broke ranks and retreated; one could imagine their panic in the middle of such a convulsion. The horse drawing the caisson skittered as the flag was torn from the coffin and immediately shredded. Somehow the cortege crossed the bridge. It moved with awful force as the policemen beat a path through the mass.
I thought again about the mischief that great men cause. Who could know how many people died to make the new world Nasser foresaw for his country and the Arab nations? He had stirred up war and revolution across half of Africa and the Levant. He had freed his people from the corruption of royalty and colonialism. But he had oppressed them as well and squandered their meager resources on foreign adventures. The power of his will had been like the procession that now shoved his corpse through the grieving millions. How many were yet to die in his path? And yet this was a man his own people celebrated as their national savior.
Why do people struggle? I recognized how naive my question was, but as I watched the calamity below, and sensed the tragedies that must follow, I felt bewildered by the object of so much passion and death. What Nasser represented to the Egyptian people was a sense of their own worth in the world, a feeling of equality with the colonial powers that had oppressed them for so many centuries. I understood their resentments. I felt in smaller ways the same urgent desire for redress. I thought how much of my life existed in this tension of being between stops, between the person I was and the person I was struggling to be, although the distance I would have to travel was incomparably less than that of my students. I had grown up in the new world and looked toward the East with a sense of inadequacy and resentment and shame. Now I saw in the torment before me the measure of those same feelings in the Egyptian people. They were creating their own new world. The ultimate object of their resentments was the colossus of wealth and power that was my country. As I stood among the tanning, detached Americans on the roof, I felt a quick stab of despair. I imagined how we must look to the Egyptians below. How far they must feel from closing the distance between themselves and us. Equality, justice, freedom, pride—what a bloody struggle lay ahead.