The brother-in-law clicked away, then clucked with delight when he spotted a herd of goats gnawing weeds from the wall around Pompey’s Pillar. Leaving him to his antic amusement—I couldn’t imagine that his was a real job—I paid admission at a wooden shack. Beyond it, the pillar and a pair of sphinxes dominated a mound of potsherds and crushed bricks, crumbling walls and tunnels. A wooden staircase zigzagged uphill, punctuated by newel posts without hand railings. Yellow plastic tape, the kind that police string up at crime scenes, connected the posts.
A uniformed man bolted from the ticket shack and raced after me. He didn’t bother with the stairs. He chugged straight up the rubble heap, setting off explosions of sand. He wore an armband stenciled in English: TOURISM & ANTIQUITIES POLICE, which suggested that his job was to protect the site and its visitors. But he viewed his mission as that of cheerleader. “America! Number one!” he panted. “Pillar of Pompey, twenty-seven meters tall.”
From between the sphinxes, I surveyed the whelming desolation that stretched from the pillar to a Stonehenge of bleak modern apartment towers, with carpets flapping from balconies and TV antennas trembling on rooftops. A spring wind, the khamseen, swept the city, blowing cinders between my teeth and grating my nasal membranes.
“Pillar of Pompey, twenty-seven meters tall,” the man repeated. “Now we see library-temple Roman.”
Whatever he expected in the way of baksheesh, I would have paid double if he would have left me alone. But he urged me over footpaths and splintered bridges, down into a gopher hole whose sandstone walls had been hewn into shelves.
“Books all gone,” he said, “to Cairo Museum.”
I felt in my pockets, but found no change, only bills, frayed as old handkerchiefs. I was reluctant to drag out a wad of Egyptian pounds and inflame the man’s avarice. But he turned the tables and produced a sheaf of American dollars. Far from angling for a tip, he wanted to do a quick currency exchange. I was glad to oblige.
Back at the cab, the driver and his brother-in-law had their heads drooped in a catnap. But the instant I opened the door, they were good to go. “Where now?” the driver asked. “Kom es Chogafa catacombs?”
Forster declared that the catacombs were “odd rather than beautiful” and he cautioned “not [to] read too much into them.” I didn’t read anything into them at all; I simply let my eyes slide over the scene and catalogue the miscellany of chipped columns, shattered friezes, decapitated sphinxes, Corinthian capitals, mastabas and sarcophagi. On my first visit to the Cairo Museum decades ago, my initial impression of Egypt was of a pack rat’s paradise. People saved everything, all of it preserved for eternity by the arid climate. The whole country was a kind of reliquary of mummified remains-human, animal, mineral, emotional.
The catacombs’ ramp corkscrewed into the earth, down to cooler, humid layers of air, then to dim grottos. Stone banquettes lined alcoves where ancient mourners had reclined and eaten ritual meals after funerals. Glass cases, not unlike those at Cavafy’s apartment, displayed bones instead of poetry. Some of the bones weren’t from humans; the sadistic Roman emperor Caracalla had slaughtered horses here along with their riders.
Dozens of guides hectored tourists in a Babel of languages. Amid French, English, Italian and unknown tongues I recognized the names Cerebus and Anubis, Medusa, Isis and Osiris. Along with folks in sensible shoes and drip-dry safari suits, I squeezed into a burial chamber and attempted to make sense of the bearded serpents and ox heads and lion-shaped biers. A British woman read aloud from her guidebook that a married couple had been interred here. Her husband observed that there were three tombs in the chamber. “There must have been three in the marriage. Remember the trouble that caused Princess Di?”
That was my exit cue. I trudged up the ramp into the blisteringly dry air, glad to get back into the taxi with the cabbie and his shutterbug brother-in-law. On the way to the Cecil, it dawned on me that what I liked best about Alexandria wasn’t its mythic past or its literary associations. It was the tumultuous present and its good-natured citizens. Joining in the spirit of his enterprise, I pointed the brother-in-law to photo ops that he had overlooked—bloody carcasses dangling from chains in butcher’s shops, toilet fixtures for sale on the sidewalk, freelance grease monkeys repairing broken-down cars at intersections, burlap bags lying on the curb, plump with cotton.
On Friday Michael Nevadomski showed up at the Cecil to take me to a mosque. He dismissed the taxi drivers in front of the hotel as “rip-off artists” and flagged down a cab on the Corniche. We piled in with four other passengers. “It costs a pound—twenty cents—to go anywhere in the city,” he said.
Michael explained that he had chosen the mosque of Abou el Abbas Moursi with me in mind. Built by Algerians in 1766, it commemorated a thirteenth-century Andalusian saint and had become a pilgrimage site for those traveling to or from the Maghreb, generally the Atlas Mountain regions of Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. “Since that’s where you’re headed,” Michael said, “you qualify for spiritual protection.”
The mosque was an imposing structure of snow-white marble, a modern interpretation of the Islamic architectural idiom, with a minaret two hundred and fifty feet tall. Yet, as always, Alexandrians showed an unfailing talent for reducing such intimidating edifices to human dimensions. On its front steps, street merchants had spread their wares—underpants, socks, plastic toys and stuffed animals.
We removed our shoes and carried them with the soles pressed together. “Shoe soles, like the bottom of your feet, are considered impure,” Michael said.
In some Islamic countries, nonbelievers are banned from mosques. Here, we were free to roam around under the domed ceiling with its great waterfalls of faience and alphabet rivers of Kufic script. The carpeted floor was itself carpeted by Egyptians, some bent double in prayer, some supine in repose. “Mosque literally means ‘a place of prostration,”’ Michael said. “The Prophet was all for naps, and people come for that reason, among others.”
Men hung together, companionably chatting. A few hovered at a filigree screen, gazing in at the women and children who prayed separately. Some young fellows cupped cell phones to their ears and whispered. But the bulk of the congregation was lost in incantatory chanting, clustered at the tomb of Abou el Abbas. For a moment, I stood with them, a Catholic muttering a prayer for a safe trip.
A smiling man—he may have been a bit mad—cozied up and asked if I was Michael’s father. Then he asked for money. Michael chastised him in Arabic, and we left.
Across the square in a smaller mosque, we pried off our shoes again and entered a courtyard where a fountain quietly splashed. In the Mosque of Sidi Daoud, a center of Sufism, we heard men chanting the Burda, a song of praise whose aim was the annihilation of self in the presence of God.
The smiling man had followed us and Michael gave him money—which prompted another beggar to try his luck. I let Michael deal with them, while I cooled off under a slow ceiling fan. An old man on the carpet extended a hand to me. I thought that he, too, was begging, but he needed help standing up. “Shukran,” he said, then kissed his fingertips and touched his heart.
In the courtyard, a young woman smiled at Michael. In nunlike black robes that hung to her ankles and a hijab that cinched her face into a tight oval, she wasn’t another of his flirtatious admirers. She was from the University of Manchester and, like Michael, was in Alexandria to study Arabic for the year. They lived in the same housing complex.
He introduced her as Fidehla. No last name. With her caramel complexion, she could have passed for an Egyptian. But her parents had migrated