Robin Cook: Sphinx

Erica was horrified. Alone in the crowded Cairo bazaar she stood clasping her bag, unable to comprehend that she had actually hit someone. She began to shake, certain the crowds would turn on her, but uncontrollable laughter erupted around her. Even the shopkeeper, whose wares were still rolling in spirals in the street, was chuckling away, holding his sides. The boy pulled himself from the debris, and with his hand to his face, managed a smile.

“ Maareish, ” said the shopkeeper, which Erica later learned meant “it can’t be helped” or “it doesn’t matter.” Feigning anger, he waved his ball-peen hammer and chased the boy away. Then, after giving Erica a warm smile, he started retrieving his belongings.

Erica moved on, her heart still beating quickly from the experience, but realizing that she had a lot to learn about Cairo and about modern Egypt. She was trained as an Egyptologist, but unfortunately that meant knowledge of the ancient civilization of Egypt, not the modern one. Her specialty of New Kingdom hieroglyphic writing afforded no preparation for the Cairo of 1980. Ever since her arrival twenty-four hours previously, her senses had been assaulted mercilessly. First it was the smell: a kind of cloying aroma of lamb that seemed to pervade every corner of the city. Then it was the noise; a constant sound of automobile horns mixed with discordant Arabic music blaring from innumerable portable radios. Finally it was the feel of dirt, dust, and sand, which covered the city like the patina of a medieval copper roof, accentuating the unremitting poverty.

The episode with the boy undermined Erica’s confidence. In her mind all the smiles of the men in their skullcaps and flowing galabias began to reflect prurient thoughts. It was worse than Rome. Boys not even in their teens followed her, giggling and asking her questions in a mixture of English, French, and Arabic. Cairo was alien, more alien than she had expected. Even the street signs were all written in the decorative but incomprehensible Arabic script. Looking back over her shoulder, up Shari el Muski toward the Nile, Erica thought about returning to the western area of the city. Perhaps the whole idea of coming to Egypt on her own was ridiculous. Richard Harvey, her lover for the last three years, even her mother, Janice, had said as much. She turned again, looking into the heart of the medieval city. The street narrowed, the press of people looked overwhelming.

“Baksheesh,” said a little girl no more than six years old. “Pencils for school.” The English was crisp and surprisingly clear.

Erica looked down at the child, whose hair was hidden by the same dust that covered the street. She wore a tattered orange print dress and no shoes. Erica bent to smile at her, and suddenly gasped. Clustered around the child’s eyelashes were numerous iridescent green house flies. The little girl made no attempt to shoo them away. She just stood there unblinking, holding out her hand. Erica was immobilized.

“ Safer! ” A white-uniformed policeman, wearing a blue badge that said TOURIST POLICE in bold authoritative letters, pushed his way into the street toward Erica. The child melted into the crowd. The jeering boys vanished. “May I be of assistance?” he said with a distinctive English accent. “You look like you might be lost.”

“I’m looking for the Khan el Khalili bazaar,” said Erica.

“ Tout à droite, ” said the policeman, gesturing ahead. Then he thumped his forehead with his palm. “Excuse. It is the heat. I’ve been mixing my languages. Straight ahead, as you’d say. This is El Muski street, and ahead you will cross the main thoroughfare of Shari Port Said. Then the Khan el Khalili bazaar will be on your left. I wish you good shopping, but remember to bargain. Here in Egypt it is a sport.”

Erica thanked him and pushed on through the crowd. The minute he was gone, the jeering boys miraculously reappeared and the innumerable street vendors accosted her with their wares. She passed an open-air butcher shop hung with a long row of recently slaughtered lambs, flayed except for the heads, and covered with splotches of pink ink representing government stamps. The carcasses were hung upside down, their unseeing eyes making her flinch and the smell of the offal forcing her lunch into her throat. The stench quickly merged with the decadent smell of overripe mangoes from a neighboring fruit cart and the odor of fresh donkey dung in the street. A few paces beyond, there was the reviving sharpness of herbs and spices and the aroma of freshly brewed Arabic coffee.

The dust from the densely packed narrow street rose and filtered the sun, bleaching the strip of cloudless sky a faint, faraway blue. The sand-colored buildings on each side of the street were shuttered against the blanket of afternoon heat.

As Erica advanced deeper into the bazaar, listening to the sound of ancient wooden wheels on granite cobblestones, she felt herself slipping back in time to medieval Cairo. She sensed the chaos, the poverty, and the harshness of life. She was simultaneously frightened and excited by the throbbing raw fertility, the universal mysteries which are so carefully camouflaged and hidden by Western culture. It was life stripped naked yet mitigated by human emotion; fate was greeted with resignation and even laughter.

“Cigarette?” demanded a boy of about ten. He was dressed in a gray shirt and baggy pants. One of his friends pushed him from behind so that he stumbled closer to Erica. “Cigarette?” he asked again, launching into a kind of Arabic jig and pretending to smoke a make-believe cigarette in exaggerated mime. A tailor, busy ironing with a charcoal-filled iron, grinned, and a row of men smoking intricately embossed water pipes stared at Erica with piercing, unblinking eyes.

Erica was sorry she had worn such obviously foreign clothes. Her cotton slacks and a simple knit blouse made it clear she was a tourist. The other women in Western clothes that Erica had seen had on dresses, not pants, and most of the women in the bazaar still wore the traditional black meliyas. Even Erica’s body was different from the local women’s. Although she was several pounds heavier than she would have liked, she was a good deal slimmer than Egyptian women. And her face was far more delicate than the round, heavy features crowding the bazaar. She had wide gray-green eyes, luxuriant chestnut hair, and a finely sculptured mouth with a full lower lip that gave her a faintly pouting expression. She knew she was pretty when she worked at it, and when she did, men responded.

Now, picking her way through the crowded bazaar, she regretted she had tried to look attractive. Her attire advertised that she was not protected by local street morality, and even more important, she was alone. She was the perfect catalyst for the fantasies of all the men who watched her.

Clutching her tote bag closer to her side, Erica hurried along as the street narrowed again to cluttered byways jammed with people engaged in every conceivable type of manufacture and commerce. Overhead, carpets and cloth stretched between the buildings to cover the market area, keeping out the sun but increasing the noise and the dust. Erica hesitated again, watching the widely varied faces. The fellahin were heavyboned, with wide mouths and thick lips, dressed in the traditional galabias and skull-caps. The bedouin were the pure Arabs, with sharp features and slim, wiry bodies. The Nubians were ebony, with tremendously powerful and muscular torsos, often naked to the waist.

The surge of the crowds pushed Erica forward and carried her deeper into the Khan el Khalili. She found herself pressed up against a wide variety of people. Someone pinched her backside, but when she turned around, she couldn’t be sure who had done it. She had a following now of five or six persistent boys. She was being hounded like a rabbit in a hunt.