Cairo. Mother of the World. Part 1

My first day in Cairo, and I'm on my way to see the pyramids. The city is cloaked in haze, because this time of year winds blow fine sand in from the desert, turning everything—domed mosques with their slender minarets, arched bridges across the Nile, once modern high-rises, the occasional faded grande dame of the belle époque, the endless neighborhoods of 6-story apartment buildings with their mushroom forests of satellite dishes, groves of date palms and distant hills—all grow soft with distance into delicate layered silhouettes. This scene would be quite beautiful if it wasn't for the fact that every driver is constantly leaning on his horn. After driving for about 20 minutes on the elevated highway, traffic comes to a near standstill, and Mahmoud, my driver, manages to inch us towards and finally off an exit ramp and we suddenly drop into a netherworld of narrow streets, choked almost to a standstill with traffic escaping the blocked highway. Crowded minibuses are stopping anywhere and everywhere to pick up and drop off passengers, pedestrians weave between cars, some hawking wares, others just crossing, battered cars, van, cabs, push carts, donkey carts precariously over-loaded, and tuk tuks and boys on motorbikes blithely riding the wrong way, then insistently jostling a right of way through the intersection—all the while honking and shouting. It's a squalling, dusty road riot, a Cairo, of decrepit apartment buildings and their little shops lining the streets, their merchant's wares wrapped in plastic as protection from the constant dust and dirt. Cafes spill out onto the side walk, crowded with men chatting, drinking tea and smoking shish; fruit sellers, their shops adorned with hanging bags of oranges, serve customers lining up for freshly squeezed juice; boys on bicycles balancing large trays of bread on their heads; women covered head-to-toe doing their morning shopping, or delivering their children to school. The worst is the garbage. It's everywhere, in the gutters, on the footpath, and piled thigh high in any abandoned space and seemingly ignored by everyone. I see drivers casually tossing more garbage out of their cars as they drive, plastic bags swirl in the wind. We pass abandoned cars, pushed onto the battered median, they've been there for so many weeks or months they're becoming part of the street, completely embedded in their own piles of plastic and litter and covered with dust and grime. We are eventually forced onto a crowded road that runs along a canal whose banks are entirely lined with garbage, even my driver and guide haven't seen these streets or this appalling ditch. I have never seen anything like it and can't imagine that darkest Calcutta could possibly be any worse. After an hour we finally inch our way out of this maze and at the end of the street, Shaimaa, my guide, points out the top of the Great Pyramid in the dusty distance. Ten minutes later we're on a busy road in Giza, and the pyramid's stupendous symmetry rises only a few blocks away. Half an hour more and I'm standing, gawking, beside the 4,700 year old 5 ton shoulder-high stones that have been hewn from quarries then barged hundreds of miles down the Nile, somehow dragged high up onto the Giza plateau then laid with such precision to form this impossible behemoth. I look up, it rears over me, taking up the entire sky.




I have not changed the color of these photos.