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ALEXANDRIA

The Chinese sage Lao Tzu remarked centuries ago that the longest journey commences with a single step. But on this particular trip, I’d be hard-pressed to pinpoint when my foot first hit the pavement. I had been thinking about the project for years and arranging visas, travel permissions and transportation for six months. Yet these were mere preludes, stumbles toward the starting block: Alexandria.

Arriving in Athens at 10:30 PM, I learned that the flight to Alexandria had been postponed until 2:30 AM. If we had no further delays, I’d reach my hotel at daybreak; not the most propitious start, but good practice for the vagaries of North Africa.

My fellow passengers all appeared to be Egyptians, returning from Europe with curios and souvenirs in string bags and cardboard boxes. Like me, they seemed frazzled and exhausted as they shuffled through the gauntlet of metal detectors, passport controls and X-ray machines, juggling hand luggage, boarding cards, tickets, loose change and shoes. The security guards in Athens were an officious bunch, testy to a man and contemptuous of the Egyptians, whom they frisked and interrogated, shoved and assaulted with sword-length electronic wands.

I’ll concede that in the squinty eyes of a prejudiced airport profiler, this might look like a planeload of terrorists. Most men were turbaned and bearded, their foreheads darkened by zebibahs, or prayer bumps, from pressing their brows to the ground five times a day. The guards treated the women as if their ample burnooses and veils were designed to conceal a machine gun or belt of Semtex. While it was true that the passengers displayed a bewilderment that might have been mistaken for truculence, and they had names that must have set the computerized watch list shrilling, the guards overdid it with their rough hands and sneering disdain.

Then it was my turn to be patted down, chided for not having removed my watch and grilled about my destination. As the conveyor belt trundled my carry-on through the X-ray machine, a guard ordered me to open the bag and empty every zippered compartment. No point in protesting that I had already done this three times today. I showed him my transparent sack of liquid containers, then waited while he pawed through my shaving kit.

“What’s this?” he demanded in English.

“A nail clipper.”

He fingered the tip of the tiny file and said, “Knife.”

He was about to chuck it into the discard bin when I stopped him and snapped off the file. “Okay?” I asked.

His brow furrowed in disappointment. He dropped the nail clipper into my shaving kit, resumed pawing, then broke into a smile and again said, “Knife.” Now he held up a pair of scissors with plastic handles and flimsy blades less than an inch long. I had bought them expressly because they met international security standards. They had passed screenings in the U.S., Europe, Africa and Asia. They had passed Italian security in Rome just hours ago. But the man insisted they violated European Union regulations and had to be confiscated.

Was it the late hour? The long flights and the delay? The abuse I had watched him heap on the Egyptians? I knew I should have shrugged and let the man have his bumptious way. But I also knew I was right and he was wrong. And I imagined that dozens of cowed passengers were watching and waiting to see whether petty tyranny or the rule of law would prevail.

“I’d like to speak to a supervisor,” I said.

The supervisor was a schoolmarmish lady with a name tag on her bosom and a bun in her hair. She stood by her man, supporting him 110 percent. While she conceded that the scissors didn’t violate EU regulations, she maintained that Athens airport followed a stricter code. I was free to take it or leave it. That is, take my scissors and leave the airport. Or leave my scissors and take the plane to Alexandria. I left the scissors, but before moving on, I leaned close, scribbling her name and employee number on my ticket.

As I proceeded down the chute that funneled us onto the plane, somebody shouted, “Meester, meester, one minute.”

It was the supervisor, her heels hammering the metal floor. For an instant I thought she meant to apologize and give me back my scissors. Then I noticed a guard at her side, armed with a rifle.

“I need your name and passport number,” she said.

“Why?”

“When there’s an incident, we take the passenger’s name.”

“What incident?”

“The argument about the scissors. You took my name. Now I take yours.”

“There was no argument. No incident.” Abjectly, I surrendered my passport. “What does this mean? I’ll be on a no-fly list?”

“That’s not my decision. I just keep the records.” She jabbed the passport back into my hand and clattered up the chute in her high heels.

After that, I’d like to say that my flight to Alexandria went smoothly. But even in the absence of air turbulence, I had a bumpy ride. I made the mistake of reading the Lonely Planet guide to Egypt, and it began with a discouraging general assessment of the national situation. After twenty-five years of President Hosni Mubarak’s rule, the guidebook declared, “Egypt is in a pretty bad state. Unemployment is rife (some analysts put it as high as 25 percent, the government bandies around the figure of 9.9 percent), the economy is of the basket-case variety and terrorist attacks are starting to occur with worrying regularity.”

As for Mubarak’s “lousy human rights record,” Lonely Planet noted that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch “excoriate Egypt year after year, asserting that the media and judiciary are allowed no real independence and that police regularly abuse their legislative right to unlimited powers of search and arrest ... Egyptian police regularly torture and ill-treat prisoners in detention ... and scores of members of Islamist opposition groups are regularly imprisoned without charge or trial.”

The guidebook added that Mubarak, in defense of his regime, had pointed out that the United States held hundreds of Islamic detainees at Guantanamo and at secret prisons or black sites in compliant countries around the world. While not acknowledging that his country was one of those black sites and that his security forces were alleged to have tortured suspected terrorists at the behest of the Americans, Mubarak said, “We were right from the beginning in using all means, including military tribunals, to combat terrorism.”

Mubarak demanded whether Egyptians would prefer that their “moderate democracy” (sic on both scores) go the way of Lebanon, Gaza or, God forbid, Algeria. In this region, Algeria was everybody’s bogeyman.

Under U.S. pressure to open up the political process, Mubarak allowed a slightly fairer election in 2005. But when eighty-eight members of the Muslim Brotherhood won seats in Parliament, America ratcheted back its rhetoric about the virtues of democracy. As critics remarked, the United States tended to lose interest in free elections when the “wrong” candidates prevailed.

Switching from the Lonely Planet to that day’s New York Times, I read an article headlined “Day of Angry Protests Stuns Egypt.” It described a country in turmoil—abandoned roads, shuttered businesses and brigades of riot police mobilized to stamp out a nationwide strike. Many Egyptians had stayed away from work and school to protest the rising price of bread and basic foodstuffs. Hardly limited to the working class, this movement had spread to doctors, lawyers, journalists. According to reports, the protests had nothing to do with religious fanaticism or regime change. Egyptians didn’t demand democracy or human rights. They had had little experience of either. They were simply desperate for economic survival in a society where professionals with twenty years of experience earned 80 U.S. dollars a month.

My plane smacked down at 4 AM, and as it taxied at high speed across the runway, passengers bounded to their feet and fumbled their belongings from the overhead racks. Nothing the flight attendant or the pilot said could persuade them to sit down and buckle up. It was something I would witness again and again-the indomitable spirit of Egyptians, their cheerful disregard for any authority figure not carrying a gun. I admired their exuberance but didn’t have the energy to emulate it. Sleepwalking, I collected my luggage, collapsed into a taxi and headed through the inky desert night toward town.

A sprawling conurbation with a population estimated at five million, Alexandria seemed to be under a wartime blackout. Cars blundered along with low beams or none at all. There were lampposts but no bulbs, neon signs but no fizz. Amid the blur of dun-colored apartment buildings, no window shined. I wondered if the cabbie had followed a fast track through a neighborhood that had been evacuated. Chunks of concrete and piles of debris dotted the streets, as if they were under construction. Or were they being demolished?

We swept to a stop at the celebrated Cecil Hotel on Midan Saad Zaghloul, a main square, the epicenter of Durrell’s literary depiction of the city, The Alexandria Quartet. The hotel lobby and its potted palms lay beyond a metal detector, unmanned at this hour, perhaps on the assumption that terrorists sleep too. The snoozing desk clerk raised his head from the counter only long enough for me to register.

I was in my room unpacking when day broke, the muezzin called faithful Muslims to prayer and sunlight fell like a gold bar through the window onto a table topped by a paper arrow angled toward Mecca. I was soon lulled to sleep by the tide surging against rocks four stories below. Durrell had written that the sea with its “dim momentum in the mind is the fugue upon which this writing is made.” For me the Mediterranean was amniotic ftuid—no, a mild narcotic—that I trusted to sedate me for hours.

But all too early, the phone rang, and a perky voice asked, “Did I wake you?” It was a secretary at the American Center reminding me that I was scheduled to give a lecture tomorrow. “I also thought you might be interested in today’s program at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Ibrahim Abdel Meguid—I’m sure you know his novels—is speaking to a group from the States. If you’d like to attend, please feel free.”

I told her I’d be there and tried to get back to sleep. But the lullaby of the sea had been supplanted by the hotel’s grumbling to life, groaning and creaking as guests flushed toilets, showered and rode the lumbering caged elevators down to breakfast. I didn’t join them at the buffet. I was eager to explore the city.

Durrell had poetically evoked it, preserved it so lovingly in the sweet aspic of his purple prose, that droves of undergraduates still prowled the streets toting the Quartet as their guide. As a twenty-year-old I had read the four novels—Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea-and liberally cadged lines for letters I sent to impressionable coeds. Rereading Justine recently, I was stunned by the number of paragraphs that had remained lodged in my memory after forty-five years:

“Capitally, what is this city of ours? What is resumed in the word Alexandria? Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbor bar. But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them. The sexual provender which lies to hand is staggering in its variety and profusion ... Alexandria was the great winepress of love.

“Long sequences of tempura. Light filtered through the essence of lemons. An air full of brick-dust—sweet-smelling brick-dust and the odor of hot pavements slaked with water.”

Passing through the hotel’s metal detector and out the revolving door, I had no illusion that a winepress of love awaited me. Durrell’s Alexandria didn’t exist even in his day. As he described the place in a letter to his friend Henry Miller, it was a “steaming humid ftatness—not a hill or mound anywhere—choking to the bursting point with bones and the crummy deposits of wiped out cultures. Then this smashed up broken down shabby Neapolitan town with its Levantine mounds of houses peeling in the sun ... no music, no art, no real gaiety. A saturated middle European boredom laced with drink and Packards and beach cabins. No Subject of Conversation Except Money.”

Three decades earlier, E.M. Forster had written even more dismissively of the contemporary city. In a preface to the 1922 edition of his Alexandria: A History and a Guide, he characterized the thousand years of the Arab Period as “of no importance.” As for his own day, “the ‘sights’ of Alexandria are in themselves not interesting, but they fascinate when we approach them through the past. Alas! The modern city calls for no enthusiastic comment.”

This made me want to defend Alexandria, to love it as a cockroach loves its ugly offspring. Seediness, shabbiness, loud crowds and pandemonium can have their appeal. The world would be poorer if every corner of the globe aped the orderliness of the United States and Europe. So what if the city’s legendary past had disappeared under asphalt and broken bricks? You had to admire its survival instincts. Didn’t you?

I was too preoccupied with my own survival to consider the question. On the Corniche, the coastal road and its waterfront walkway, I confronted eight lanes of hurtling, horn-blowing traffic. Billboards proclaimed Alexandria the CULTURAL CAPITAL OF THE ARAB WORLD IN 2008, and Durrell had written of “horse-drawn cabs (‘carriages of love’) which dawdled up and down the sea.” But these days dawdling lovers would be crushed or asphyxiated by carbon monoxide.

According to urban legend four people are killed every day on this curving east-west drag strip. I could believe it. Crowds lined the curb in both directions, poised like hurdlers prepared to dart out and leap over fenders and bumpers whenever the cars and trucks and buses and taxis choked to a stop.

I made it to the median strip, bucked up my courage, then plunged on to the far side. The walkway was thick with pedestrians happy, like me, to have pulled through alive. But we had to watch where we stepped. The pavement had disintegrated into a checkerboard of cracked tiles, gravel pits, drains without grills and open ditches snaking with wires and pipes.

The wind and sea that Forster wrote were “as pure as when Menelaus ... landed here 3,000 years ago,” smelled now of sewers and rotting fish. Out in the harbor, under the gentle chocolate waves, lay the ruins of a metropolis designed by Alexander the Great and nourished to full glory by the Ptolemaic kings and queens. But seismic cataclysms had consigned that city to the deep in AD 365. This coast, like the rest of the littoral between Alexandria and Tangier, had always been a geological shatter zone, a landscape riven by fault lines and grinding tectonic plates. Over the millennia, earthquakes and tsunamis destroyed entire civilizations—and the remaking and unmaking of the region has continued to this day. Every so often, Atlas shrugged, mountains moved, and the sea reestablished itself where it pleased.

The Pharos, a lighthouse more than four hundred feet high and one of the Seven Wonders of the World, had served for seventeen centuries as the symbol of Alexandria and as a beacon for ships approaching the treacherous shores of Africa. It, too, had crumbled in stages, and now existed as shards on the seabed and as building blocks incorporated into the fifteenth-century Qait Bey fortress.

Two French archeologists, Jean-Yves Empereur and Franck Goddio, had vied in mapping and photographing a great trove of underwater treasures. Busts, statues, sphinxes and obelisks were dredged up and displayed. Entrepreneurial fishermen offered boat trips and diving expeditions to this ancient royal quarter and to what some scholars claim was Cleopatra’s castle. But I wasn’t tempted. I stayed on land and watched a team of brown fishermen in brown underpants drag empty nets out of the brown water. From what I’d read, harbor divers have to be disinfected to ward off skin diseases.

Braving the Corniche stampede again, I roved through neighborhoods where the clocks appeared to have stopped decades ago and the residents had regressed to village life in the dense mesh of the vast metropolis. In cafes, men without women smoked sheesha and played dominoes. In back lane shops women without men went about their daily rounds dressed in hijabs, or headscarves. Some wore the niqab, a veil that covered the face except for slits at the eyes. Children, dogs, cats and blowing plastic bags eddied around their feet.

On every corner a heap of rubble as high as a man’s head blocked the street. I had my choice of scrambling over it or crawling across the hoods of parked cars. Usually I climbed the rubble. The cars were blisteringly hot and scalded my palms. Also, I found the piles fascinating as archeological middens, layered with stucco and filigree, bits of balustrades and iron balconies that had snapped off of buildings. It was a rare facade that hadn’t shed its fretwork or patches of masonry, exposing raw bricks and spider webs of wiring. I now understood why Hollywood’s version of Justine had been filmed in Tunis.

Alexandria differs from Italy, where the view generally improves the higher you raise your eyes. Looking up in Rome, for example, you’ll catch glimpses of campaniles, graceful domes and palazzo ceilings that blaze with gold leaf angels gliding over famous mosaics. But in Alexandria, it was dangerous not to watch where you were going. You never knew when the sidewalk would yawn wide and swallow your shoe in a pothole or an uncovered sewer. Smart Egyptians sauntered down the center of the street where the footing was safer and there was nothing to dodge but traffic. I soon followed their example.

The unwritten rule-well, sometimes it’s written prescriptively by book reviewers-is that travel writers must never sound disappointed. They must remain resolutely upbeat. Negativity, any hint of whininess, must be suppressed. Unless, of course, the Bad Trip is presented humorously. The British are best at this. Lose a leg to an alligator, stagger through the jungle bled white by leeches, starve to the brink of death in the desert, and all is well as long as you leave everybody laughing.

Yet I’ll be honest. My first brush with Alexandria left me depressed. While I never expected to discover the sensual dream Durrell described, I had resisted the cynicism of a journalist friend who spoke of it as “strictly a twenty-four-hour town.” Now I wondered how I’d last there for the week I had reserved at the Cecil. Maybe longer if the Libyans didn’t hurry and grant me a visa.

At noon, men unscrolled carpets on the sidewalk, crouched and murmured their midday prayers. Careful not to step on their fingers, I backtracked to Midan Saad Zaghloul and traipsed past exhaust-spewing buses, taxis and trolleys to Café Trianon. A landmark in the city when it was a multicultural melting pot, not a poor Egyptian outpost, the Trianon had been one of C.P. Cavafy’s favorite haunts. I had come here less for lunch than for a lift to my spirits and a connection to literary history.

Cavafy was a member of the Greek diaspora, a poet who was born and died in Alexandria (1863-1933) and whose career spanned much of the Cosmopolitan Era from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. A deeply learned man in classical Greek, he integrated the demotic language of the streets into his verses. His themes were loneliness, the vertiginous passage of time, the quicksilver nature of love and the spiraling history of Alex, as its citizens affectionately called it, from its ancient gods to the young boys he brought home to his bed. In a city where the past was ever present and also an augur of the future, Cavafy had, in the words of critic and translator Daniel Mendelsohn, a perspective that “allowed him to see history with a lover’s eye, and desire with a historian’s eye.”

The Trianon today had a faded Art Deco interior, beige and brown walls, a stained wooden ceiling, four cobwebby chandeliers and a floor of scuffed grey linoleum. On the PA system, Louis Arm-strong sang “What a Wonderful World.” But I felt more in sync with Cavafy, who spent three decades of dreary employment in the Office of Public Works, plugging along in the Third Circle of Irrigation like a condemned soul out of Dante. Much as he might have yearned to travel to some other land, some other sea, he had no illusions of escaping. As one of his best known poems, “The City,” concluded: “Don’t bother to hope / for a ship, a route, to take you somewhere else; they don’t exist. / Just as you’ve destroyed your life, here in this / small corner, so you’ve wasted it through all the world.”

Then the waitress brought my food and the soundtrack switched to Jim Morrison’s “Light My Fire.” The coffee was strong, the yoghurt and honey delicious, the chicken sandwich fortifying. My blood sugar and spirits soared. When the bill arrived, with each item an Egyptian pound or two more expensive than listed on the menu, I didn’t protest. Grateful to be feeling better, I paid at the cash register, where one fellow dug my change out of the drawer and a second handed it to me. In Egypt, there were never enough jobs to go around, yet everybody has a role to play.

Reinvigorated, I went in search of Cavafy’s apartment. Like his drab professional life, it offered little indication of its owner’s lyrical intelligence. Located on rue Lepsius, it used to have a brothel beneath it, prompting Cavafy to joke, “Where could I live better? Under me is a house of ill-repute, which caters to the needs of the flesh. Over there is a church, where sins are forgiven. And beyond is the hospital, where we die.”

Though I always visit writers’ houses, they strike me as melancholy places. They’re like locust shells. The fragile shape endures, but the guts are gone, along with any sense of the singing, the cyclical sleep and joyous flight, the long underground burial followed by a short burst of brilliance. Now a museum, Cavafy’s flat was spacious and bright, with two rooms decorated as he had left them. A friend of Cavafy’s wrote that the place “reminded me of a secondhand furniture store,” a hodgepodge of overstuffed chairs, Bokhara carpets and “tasteless turn-of-the-century vases.” The other rooms were filled with random memorabilia, photos and portraits of the author, two death masks and photocopies of his manuscripts and editions of his books in glass display cases. On a nonstop tape, a husky female voice recited his poems in Greek.

All that appeared to be missing was ... everything. Still, Cavafy’s apartment had none of the bogusness of Karen Blixen’s house in Nairobi, which is decorated with stage dressings and posters from the film version of Out of Africa. Nor was it thick with tourists and docents chatting about six-toed cats as is the Hemingway house in Key West. A guard let me in, locked the door behind me, and sagged into an upright chair in the hallway. After listening to Cavafy’s verses day after day, he might have learned them by heart, but they no longer kept him awake. He nodded off and I had the museum to myself for an hour.

Much of that time I spent at a window surveying the ochre-colored neighborhood, the ant colony of activity on the street below and in the car park across the way. The car park’s corrugated roof might have been a postmodern installation, a puckish exhibition of urban debris—broken plates, bald tires and cardboard boxes spattered with seagull shit.

I didn’t need to wrack my mind for a suitable quote to mark the end of my visit. Cavafy’s work lay under glass all around me, and a translation of “The God Abandons Anthony” provided today’s text:

Turn to the open window and look down To drink past all deceiving Your last dark rapture from the mystical throng And say farewell, farewell to Alexandria leaving.

Late that afternoon I made my way to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina for the lecture by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, one of Egypt’s foremost novelists. The setting struck me as fitting for a writer of his stature, and I welcomed the chance to meet him and visit this contemporary riff on Alexandria’s “Mother” Library, built by Ptolemy I in the third century BC.

The original library contained a vast compendium of the world‘s—that is, the Greek world’s—corpus of knowledge. With more than three quarters of a million volumes, it had been the greatest center of classical learning of its time. Under the auspices of the Mouseion, its umbrella institution, the library supplied resources to Archimedes and Euclid, who dedicated themselves to geometry and physics; Aristarchus, who discovered that the earth revolved around the sun; and Eratosthenes, who calculated the circumference of the globe.

But in literature, as Forster fumed, “The palace provided the funds and called the tune ... Victory odes, Funeral dirges, Marriage hymns, jokes, genealogical trees, medical prescriptions, mechanical toys, maps, engines of war: whatever the Palace required it had only to inform the Mouseion, and the subsidized staff set to work at once. The poets and scientists there did nothing that would annoy the Royal family and not much that would puzzle it, for they knew that if they failed to give satisfaction they would be expelled from the enchanted area, and have to find another patron or starve.”

Gradually, the glory that was Greek classicism dwindled in Alexandria to work that Forster judged “had no lofty aims. It was not interested in ultimate problems nor even in problems of behavior, and it attempted none of the higher problems of art. To be graceful or pathetic or learned or amusing or indecent, and in any case loyal—this sufficed.”

The decline continued into the fourth century AD, when Christians began to shove the Pagans aside. Appalled by what they considered to be the library’s licentious contents, the Christians destroyed the building, burned its books and constructed a monastery on the site.

It was doubtful that these cautionary events dimly occurred to the UNESCO fundraisers and Egyptian cultural mavens who in 1987 decided to reincarnate the “Mother” Library. They viewed their project as a move to put Alexandria back on the cultural map, with the Bibliotheca as “the world’s window on Egypt and Egypt’s window on the world.” An impressive structure of glass and metal, it was shaped to resemble a radiant half-sun shimmering behind an infinity pool. As I approached, a team of men sidestepped up its slanted facade, pushing floor polishers that buffed the library to a handsome gleam.

Inside, the brilliance dimmed, the air was chill and the stacks had curiously few books. It opened in 2002 with shelf space for eight million volumes, but it held just 540,000, most of them in Arabic or English. Only 10 percent were in other languages and none in Hebrew. There were, however, plenty of computer terminals. One local expatriate characterized the Bibliotheca as “just a big Internet café, bloody elitist and too expensive for locals to get in.”¹

The conference room reserved for Ibrahim Abdel Meguid’s lecture looked out through blue-tinted glass to the greasy harbor and a crumble of biscuit-colored islands. It occurred to me that the metaphor about the library’s being a window on the world and vice versa was unfortunate. Whether you turned outward or inward, there wasn’t much to see.

Justin Siberell, the U.S. consul and director of the American Center, welcomed me to Alex and introduced me to Dr. Sahar Hamouda, deputy director of the Alexandria Mediterranean Center. She invited me to return to the library in two days to talk with her about the city’s Cosmopolitan Era. Then I joined a dozen people sitting at a varnished table, all of them Americans in Egypt on a lightning-like junket sponsored by a cultural initiative called the Big Read Program. Representing the South Dakota Council on World Affairs, Arts Midwest and similar not-for-profit organizations, they had landed in Cairo last Saturday, were spending thirty-six hours in Alexandria and would fly home this weekend.

Apologizing for my ignorance, I asked Regina G. Cooper of Alabama’s Huntsville-Madison County Public Library to explain the Big Read Program.

“We take a book each year,” she said, “and have everybody in the community read it and talk about it. We started off in Huntsville with The Great Gatsby. We figured it helped that Zelda Fitzgerald came from just up the road in Montgomery, Alabama. Second year we read To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s set in Alabama, and Harper Lee lives nearby.”

“So you keep things local.”

“Not at all. Last year we read The Maltese Falcon. There’s no Alabama connection. We thought a mystery might be more popular with men. Next year we’re doing Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner.”

“Why Mahfouz?”

“I don’t know. The National Endowment for the Arts chose the book, not us. That’s why we’re in Egypt.”

When Ibrahim Abdel Meguid entered the room, he didn’t stand on ceremony nor at a dais. He seated himself at the table with the rest of us. Big and fleshy, with curly silver hair, gold-rimmed glasses and an engaging smile, he was a man in his sixties, confident of his ability to win over strangers. Though his English was far from perfect, he never appeared frustrated not to be speaking his own language in his hometown. Friendly himself, he counted on the friendly attention of his audience.

He talked a bit about his best-known novel, No One Sleeps in Alexandria, and recited lines from the Federico Garcίa Lorca poem that was the source of its title. “No one sleeps in heaven/ No one sleeps in the world. / No one sleeps/ No one / No one.” Then he named the foreign writers who had influenced him. Among them he mentioned Durrell, which surprised me.

Set during roughly the same period as the Quartet, Meguid’s novel is generally regarded as a gritty corrective to Durrell’s lush, romantic vision of the city. Narrated from the point of view of poor Egyptians, No One Sleeps in Alexandria mixes realism and magic, religion and profanity, the folklore of northern and southern Egypt, rural and urban myths, Christian and Muslim theology. It quotes the Koran, the Bible, Durrell, Cavafy and Tagore, and in the style of John Dos Passos, it grounds the action in historical context by reprinting snippets from contemporary newspapers.

Inevitably, Meguid discussed the Cosmopolitan Era, which ended when Nasser seized power in 1956, nationalized the Suez Canal and expelled most foreigners. “The city was clean back then,” Meguid said, “and women wore Western fashions and there was café life and jazz music in the nightclubs. Now everything has changed. People come today and don’t find Alex; they don’t find a mythical city like Samarkand. It’s crowded with peasants from rural villages and people who return after working in the Persian Gulf and bring with them Wahhabi ideas. The city has lost its tolerance.”

When Justin Siberell announced that Meguid would answer questions, my instinct was to sink down in my seat. In my experience, Q&A sessions in North Africa can be skin-crawling embarrassments. Once, in Tunis, after I had lectured on Hemingway, a prim young woman in a headscarf stood up in front of a large audience of students and professors, and asked me, “Is it true in the United States, as I have read, that when a black woman has an orgasm she screams, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!’?”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know where to look. No Tunisian professor or U.S. Embassy official offered the mercy of intervention. I weakly muttered, “Where did you read that?”

“In a novel called Trailer Camp Women.”

“I’m not familiar with the book. Let’s talk about this later.”

At the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, however, the Big Read group tossed nothing but softball questions at Meguid, and once he grooved his swing, he could have gone on for hours had Justin Siberell not interrupted to say that a bus was waiting to take the Big Readers to the airport and back to Cairo. Profuse in their gratitude, they each gave Meguid a business card. This was a ritual popular throughout North Africa. Everybody handed out cards and expected them in return. When I apologized that I didn’t have a card, people looked at me as if I must be an imposter.

I invited Meguid to join me for tea and more talk about Egypt and literature. He suggested that we meet at the Cecil Hotel, and I assumed he was staying there too. But as we settled at a table in the lobby, he made it clear that he was registered at the Hilton in the Green Plaza Mall. “This place has good tradition,” he said of the Cecil. “But Green Plaza has more life.”

The city’s center of gravity was shifting in that direction, he said, out to the suburbs and the malls and gated communities. Although Meguid’s fiction has always been identified with Alexandria, he hasn’t lived there in decades. “When I publish my first short story,” he said, “I move right away to Cairo. I want to be at the center. I worked thirty years in the Culture Ministry because it gave me time to write.” Like many Egyptian artists, he had been a state employee until his retirement.

Did it rankle him, I asked, that Westerners, when they thought of Alexandria at all, knew the city through non-Arabic writers—Cavafy, Forster and Durrell.

“No, no.” His scorched cheeks creased in a smile. “The tradition here is to be open and tolerant to different views. You can find resentment, especially from the fundamentalists, about colonialism and foreign authors. But most writers appreciate other writers. I always look back to the era of Durrell and the other Europeans as a good time.”

“Better than now, when you have your own literature and identity as a nation?”

“In some ways, yes.” The waiter brought a plate of salted peanuts, and Meguid helped himself and poured more tea. “We had good schools back then. Small classes. Fifteen students. Now it’s seventy students. They taught English. They took us to the cinema. I saw Moby Dick and Gone With the Wind. Cinema was my guide. I read the novels afterward. I read Moby Dick as a Koran. The language is very deep. It has the taste of a religious book. I admire many American writers—Watt Whitman, Faulkner, Steinbeck. I read Tortilla Flat and it changed my life.”

Words spilled out of him, not wistfully, not ruefully, but with genuine pleasure at recollecting his youth and what, surprisingly, he regarded as the city’s golden age. His fondness for American and European mass culture, for even the kitschiest manifestations of colonial occupation, astonished me.

“Three magic things we had in Alex when I was a boy,” he said. “Cinema. Nightclubs for foreigners. And sailors coming into port. Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum were our heroes.”

“What about Nasser? What about Sayyid Qutb?” I asked about the godfather of modern Islamic radicalism.

Meguid gave a weary flick of the hand. “Nasser had Sayyid Qutb hanged in 1966 for subversion. That’s politics, not heroes. I used to be a good socialist. I was in the Communist Party. But when I went to Russia I saw it was a lie. This wasn’t the Soviet Union we dreamed of. It was corrupt. You couldn’t even find a photocopy machine. They thought it was a machine for spying.

“Then I lived eleven months in Saudi Arabia. I wrote a novel about it, The Other Place. I look on Saudi as a kind of hell. You can’t live in a city without music or art.”

“Do other Egyptians agree with that?”

“Some. The educated ones. In private they say what I do.”

“And the rest of the people?”

“We’re in crisis. We changed from socialism to capitalism. The government says they encourage capitalism, but it doesn’t want to accept capitalist practices like strikes and other freedoms. Our leaders don’t really believe in competition. They give one guy, a friend in politics, the import business. They give another friend the export business.”

A loud buzzer sounded. It might have been an alarm warning us that we were discussing forbidden topics. But no, it was Meguid’s cell phone. He pried it open and spoke in Arabic. He stood up and paced, listening and nodding. Then he shut it and said, “My wife. Where were we? I hope my ideas about Egypt don’t discourage you on your trip. There are good things all across North Africa. I even like Libya. I don’t feel like a stranger there. I like Morocco—Casablanca, Marrakech, Fez. I went there and it seemed like an open society.”

Out of courtesy I asked about his current writing projects, and his comments about our profession sounded sadly familiar. Does there exist a writer in the world who, regardless of his fame or fortune, doesn’t feel he’s been fucked over by editors, writers and reviewers?

“My publisher in Beirut steals from me,” Meguid said. “Every year he reprints my books, but says they’re still in the first printing. The American University in Cairo makes translations into English, but it has bad distribution.”

“I’m sorry. I admire your work and hope you have better luck with it.”

This elicited a chuckle. “You know what Hemingway said? He said, ‘If I was born in Africa, I would not be Hemingway.’ He had a big powerful country behind him. It’s hard when you don’t have that. It’s hard when you write in Arabic. But we go on, don’t we?”

He signed my copy of No One Sleeps in Alexandria and urged me to send him copies of my books. “I can’t buy them, I don’t have the money.”

The Cecil Hotel boasted a Chinese restaurant on its roof, but I had no appetite for anything quite so exotic as Alexandrine-Cantonese cuisine. I wanted ... not home cooking, but something vaguely familiar. I asked the concierge about the Greek Club, which was reputed to have excellent mezzes and seafood and exhilarating views of the harbor. Since Greeks had once formed a sizable minority in the city-they had numbered almost one hundred thousand—I imagined some expats had lingered on, congregating each night at the Club for ouzo, rembetike music and nostalgic conversation.

But the concierge discouraged me. He claimed the Greek Club was far away and overcrowded. “You’ll need a reservation and a taxi.”

“I thought it was on the Corniche.”

“Yes, but at the end, near the fort. You shouldn’t walk. After dark, the streets aren’t safe. I’ll call and book a table, and reserve a taxi to take you and bring you back.”

The price he quoted, fifty Egyptian pounds, about $ 10, was a princely sum in a country where half the population earned less than $2 a day. It occurred to me that the concierge might be hustling for his cab-driving brother. Still, I figured it was worth ten bucks not to get lost or mugged.

The taxi proved to be a rattletrap Lada left over from the ’60s, when the Russians made common cause with their Pan-Arabic socialist brothers and bestowed battalions of technical and military advisers on Egypt. A hole in the Lada’s floor allowed me to look down at the racing Corniche. It also allowed toxic gusts of carbon monoxide into the car. Coughing and spluttering, I groped for the window. The handle was missing. The driver noticed my distress and dug a window roller from the glove compartment and handed it back to me.

While I hung my head out for air, he bombed along as if in a demolition derby. Only when he spotted a traffic cop did he slow down and loosely drape the seat belt across his shoulder. For a couple of blocks we crept along at twenty mph. Then he discarded the belt and stomped on the gas. Nothing I said could slow him again. Cyclists, pedestrians, horse cart drivers all panicked as he zipped past. Even other cabbies were alarmed.

We barreled on through Anfushi, a poor neighborhood that Durrell had described as a nest of streets with a “tattered rotten supercargo of houses, breathing into each other’s mouths, keeling over. Shuttered balconies swarming with rats, and old women whose hair is full of the blood of ticks.”

A hammer-headed peninsula separated the eastern harbor from the western harbor, and at its point where the lighthouse once stood, Fort Qait Bey looked like a freshly baked pastry topped with towers of meringue. There the cabbie had no choice but to stop.

“Greek Club,” he declared.

“Where?”

He indicated a dilapidated building. “Upstairs,” he said. “I wait here.”

“Don’t bother.” Head swimming with exhaust fumes, I paid him in full and sent him off, figuring I’d rather risk walking than asphyxiation.

Nothing identified the building—no number, no sign. Through an open door, a room was visible, along with several men who lounged on folding chairs, fingering worry beads, mesmerized by a television. Wearing striped galabiyyas, long, loose robes, they might have been in pajamas, settling down for the night. Much as I hated to invade their privacy, I asked, “Restaurant?”

One fellow cocked his thumb toward some stairs. I started climbing, though I had little faith that I’d find food. But then on the third floor, the walls brightened with murals of islands and blue skies and whitewashed villages, and I arrived at a reasonable facsimile of a Greek taverna. Not a lively establishment-there were very few customers and none who appeared to be Greek-but at least it was open for business.

I took a table on the terrace, caressed by a breeze. Lanterns necklaced the harbor, and painted boats floated like confetti. Through a long lens and in flattering light, this was the optimal view of Alexandria’s charms. I might have been gazing at an aging movie star filmed through gauze. I marveled, as I would many times in the next few months, at how, depending on the hour or the air density, the North African light changed and in the process altered your very understanding of light and how it could scramble a landscape and your head.

I ordered hummus, tahini, tabouli and grilled calamari, and washed it all down with cold Omar Khayyam white wine. Say what you will about the quality of Egyptian vintages, but the exotic labels—not just Omar Khayyam but Obelisk and Sheharazad—were wonderfully evocative. After a few sips, the day’s glum start was forgotten, and I veered toward full-blown, manic sentimentality. When the waiter brought a honeyed wedge of baklava for dessert and said that he loved America and would like to live there, I exclaimed, “But it’s so beautiful in Alexandria!”

This wasn’t what he wanted to hear. I suppose he was hoping for help with a visa.

Though well fed and fortified by Omar Khayyam, I left the restaurant feeling skittish. This wasn’t Baghdad or Beirut; it wasn’t even East London or Brooklyn. But it was Egypt at night, a Muslim city, and I was a white-haired, white-faced American walking the crowded streets alone.

From two previous trips to Egypt, I recalled hordes of hotel touts, scheming shopkeepers, anti-Israeli agitators and boys who professed to be students but offered their services as guides, pimps or sexual partners. But this night was blessedly free of that hands-on, full-court press. Nobody badgered me to buy. No one called out, “Hello, America,” or cursed me as a khawaga, a foreigner, or as a nasrani, a Christian.

Along the stone waterfront of the eastern harbor, boys played soccer under street lamps. On the seawall, young couples—girls in hijabs and boys in blue jeans—sat watching them. At the western harbor, whole families from infants to grandfathers luxuriated in the bracing April air. Cafés had set out tables where people drank tea and smoked hubbly-bubblies. A waiter invited me to have a seat, but nobody else noticed my presence. Kids whooshed by on scooters and bikes. Laughing teenagers dared one another to dart to the end of the quay where waves crashed over the jetty in a frigid spray. Middle-aged married folks lugged plastic chairs from the cafés out to protected coves and watched the stars.

Heading back toward the center of town, I walked on and on, telling myself I’d catch a cab at the first sign of trouble, the first time anyone got too friendly. Or too hostile. But block after block, I felt nothing from the crowd except benign indifference.

On the Corniche my late-night ramble turned into a contact sport, a kind of body surfing, as Egyptians flowed around me, into me, over me. To a claustrophobe, this might seem menacing, but I didn’t mind, and gradually the realization came to me that within the chaos of an Arab mob there was an intrinsic order, within the apparent irrationality there was a logic.

Still, I thought my good luck couldn’t last. If not in Egypt, then in Libya or Algeria, I’d be assailed on all sides by a boisterousness indistinguishable from mayhem or misdemeanor. There’d be murderous anti-Americanism, palpable danger, places I dared not go.

But for the moment I gloried in a feeling that American author Eleanor Clark best expressed when she wrote that Mediterranean streets constitute a great warm “withinness,” an inclusion that permits people to believe that to go out into a city is to go home.

The next day, I reviewed my notes for the lecture on travel, travel writing and travel literature that I had agreed to give at the American Center. Justin Siberell had read a similar paper I’d presented four years ago at a Modern Language Association meeting in New Orleans, and he assured me it was appropriate to the audience he expected in Alexandria. Typically, he said, such talks attracted a large turnout of Egyptians and a smattering of expats. Since there would be a simultaneous translation, his only warning was to speak slowly and distinctly so that the interpreter could keep pace.

Yet I felt a growing uneasiness, not so much premature stage fright as topic regret. In the context of Egypt and the Muslim world, in view of the life-and-death conflict within Arab countries, and between them and the West, it struck me as lightweight and elitist for an American to breeze into Alexandria and discuss his personal hobbyhorse. Okay, I could argue that travel is crucial to political and religious understanding. I could quote the eleventh-century Sufi Imam Qushayri, who declared that the objective of travel was “to discover inner ethical values.” I could cite Robert Byron, widely regarded as the best travel writer in English, who blamed the failure of British colonialism on “insufficient, or insufficiently imaginative, travel.” Still, I feared I’d sound like another self-indulgent foreigner larking around North Africa, another Orientalist presuming to lecture the natives.

Siberell swung by the Cecil to pick me up in a tanklike American SUV whose door shut with the solid thunk of a safe deposit box. It sounded armor-plated. A chauffeur steered us through the evening rush hour, and a powerful AC system screened out the heat, grit and smells of Alexandria. Yet Siberell seemed as tense as I was—and with much better reason. His assignment here was drawing to a close, and within days he would depart for Baghdad. He’d done a previous tour in the Green Zone. Now he was married and had kids, and he would be away from his family for a year.

“Shows you how smart I was to study Arabic,” he joked. It was a lament that I would hear from Foreign Service officers all across North Africa. Their hard-won fluency had sentenced them to the worst posting in the world. Sooner or later they would have to serve in Iraq, and while no American diplomat I met openly criticized the war, none defended it, either.

The American Center occupied the former private mansion of a wealthy Alexandrian family. In 1967, during the Six Day War, Egyptians had overrun and ransacked the building, and it had remained shut until Egypt and the United States resumed diplomatic relations, in 1974. Now it was surrounded by walls and wrought iron fences and flanked by armed guards. At the front gate, eyed by U.S. Marines, I stepped through a metal detector, traded my passport for a clip-on badge and crossed through a garden, following Siberell to a side entrance. There another squad of security guards scrutinized us.

From the American Center’s foyer we climbed a marble staircase to a loggia where locked doors of bulletproof Mylar lined the hall. Behind them, offices were accessible by computer code. Egyptians crouched on the carpet, as though begging for admission. They were reciting their evening prayers.

After they finished, we proceeded into a conference room where a crowd of seventy or so was divided between those in Western and Egyptian garb. But even men wearing suits and ties had prayer bumps on their foreheads, and all the women wore headscarves. One was in full niqab, staring out through slits. Lacy black gloves covered her hands and arms up to her elbows. Not a centimeter of her skin was visible. Beside her a man in a knit cap combed his fingers through a beard as broad as a broom.

Siberell introduced me in Arabic. The only words I understood were “Sharon Stone.” She had starred in a movie made from Year of the Gun, a novel I had written about terrorism in Italy. Mention of her name drew scattered laughs.

There were one or two American or European faces in the crowd, but I didn’t focus on them. As I spoke I tried to maintain friendly eye contact with the Egyptians, who listened through earphones. I couldn’t read anything from their reactions, and it disconcerted me to stare out at a sea of beards and prayer bumps and dark eyes with no idea how the lecture was going. Just one line prompted smiles and a brief outburst of applause—criticized George Bush for having lumped together Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an Axis of Evil.

The Q&A session lasted longer than the lecture. Each questioner stood up, introduced himself or herself by name and profession, gave a formal ritual greeting, welcomed me to Alexandria, praised my past accomplishments, expressed fascination for my current project, then lashed me for a multitude of intellectual shortcomings and cultural misapprehensions.

One gentleman complained that he had looked me up online and read the same lecture I had just inflicted on the audience: “It’s four years old. Have you learned nothing since you first gave this talk?”

Siberell interrupted, explaining that he had invited me to give this particular address.

“Shukran, shukran,” said my interrogator. “Thank you, thank you,” said the interpreter. The man sat down and a lady in a floral headscarf stood up and repeated the ritual greeting and gratitude and fulsome praise, then laid into me. “How can you come to our country and expect to understand anything when you don’t speak Arabic?”

With deep apologies for my ignorance, I attempted to make a case, just as I had in my lecture, that language was not the lone means of understanding and that words weren’t always the best links between people. Human beings had other means of perception, and sometimes words got in the way. For me, I said, one of the delights of travel was that it brought my dormant senses alive. Suddenly in foreign surroundings, I could see and hear and smell again. And afterward, if I was lucky, I could write. Blank pages, I pointed out, were like blank spaces on a map. In both cases I was eager to fill them up.

“Egypt is not a blank space,” someone shouted.

“Of course not,” I apologized. “A poor figure of speech. I realize I’m bound to make mistakes and misunderstand your history and religion. But I’m traveling in good faith to see things for myself and to learn. I’ve read the Koran and I ...”

“You read it in English. That’s not the Koran. Only in Arabic is it the Koran.”

For more than an hour, their cavils crashed over me. Though nobody asked about orgasms and black women, I almost wished someone had. That would have been preferable to their accusations that travel was a species of colonialism, an exploitation of poor countries by privileged people like me. Wasn’t I aware that Egypt had been invaded in 1798 by Napoleon and subjected to cruel dissection by squadrons of French scientists? Had I never heard that the British bombarded Alexandria in 1882 and ruled the country afterward like a royal fiefdom?

To my astonishment, this rough and tumble Q&A ended with the audience surging forward for an up-close-and-personal rapprochement that made me suspect that their harsh questions had been as formulaic as their greetings. Like other academics I would meet, they seemed to believe that giving a speaker a severe going-over was a sign of respect. But now there came a laying on of hands, a kind of benediction, heartfelt invitations to tea, promises of hospitality, requests for my e-mail address.

Although they had listened to me in translation and posed their public challenges in Arabic, they spoke to me privately in excellent English. A bespectacled young woman in a hijab asked, “Are you a feminist?” and when I said I supported equal rights for women, she exclaimed, “So do I. Everything I do is for feminism.” To her, she said, the hijab was a symbol of female empowerment.

A pale man in a dark suit, starched white shirt and black tie patiently waited his turn and introduced himself as a professor of literature at a university in the Nile delta. He had read online that forty years ago I had lived in France on a Fulbright Fellowship. He was in contention for a teaching Fulbright to the United States, and it appeared that he would have his pick between a college in St. Paul, Minnesota, and one in Walla Walla, Washington. “Which city is most like Alexandria?” he asked.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing in America like Alexandria.”

“Okay, but which one is warmer? I’ve never seen snow.”

“They both have snowy winters.”

“Okay, but where won’t I need a car?”

“I think you’ll have to drive wherever you go.”

“Yes, America is so big,” he fretted. “My field is science fiction, but they want me to teach Arabic and comparative literature. What I would like to do is work on my own novel. Do you think I’ll be permitted to take a creative writing course?”

“I’m sure you can arrange that.”

“What I’d really like is to write for the movies,” he said.

“Sorry, that’s not my field.” Someone gripped my elbow and steered me toward the exit. I assumed it was Siberell rescuing me.

“But one of your books became a movie.”

“I wasn’t involved. Good luck to you.”

On the carpeted loggia that had served as a prayer rug, a caterer had set out sweets and soft drinks. I noticed then that it was a young man, not Siberell, who’d been clutching my arm.

“Unless you want to be stuck answering questions all night, I’d suggest getting out of here,” he said.

His name was Michael Nevadomski, and he was an undergraduate from Middlebury College in Vermont, spending a year in Alexandria to improve his Arabic. He was already quite fluent and had translated some of Durrell into Arabic. The son of a Polish-American father and a mother from the island of Guam, he had been raised in Florida and looked like a preppy New Englander in his tweed jacket. But he was completely at home in Egypt.

At Michael’s suggestion, we went to Pastroudis, another Art Deco relic from the Cosmopolitan Era. Although we had the paneled dining room to ourselves, waiters scurried around as if we had arrived with an entourage. Mineral water and a bottle of Obelisk wine promptly appeared on the table. A booklike menu came inscribed with a quote in English from Durrell about “Alexandria, the Capital of memory” and paragraphs of commentary about Cavafy and Mahfouz and King Farouk, Egypt’s deposed monarch, whose immense girth might have qualified him as a food critic. All the dishes had French names and were described at length in that language-which was strange since none of the waiters spoke a word of it. Michael ordered for us in Arabic.

In the adjacent bar, a radio played Lionel Richie. “He’s the most popular singer in the Arab world,” Michael said. “A lot of people don’t know any English except for his songs.”

From pop culture, he moved to local lore and arcana. Michael seemed to have read every book and to know every bit of minutiae about Alexandria, Egypt and Islam. He discussed sects and sub-sects. Not just Sunnis and Shiites, but Sufis and Salafi’ists.

When I mentioned that I was headed for Libya, he warned me that the border was littered with mines—some left over from World War II, others from more recent conflicts. He hadn’t crossed the frontier and didn’t know anybody who had tried to. But he had traveled by bus throughout the western desert and he urged me not to miss the oasis at Siwa, where Alexander the Great had consulted the oracle and discovered that he was divine.

While I wondered when my Libyan visa might come through, Michael went on to say that he’d take me to a mosque this Friday where worshippers chanted Dhihr—a repetition of the ninety-nine names of God, or the repetition of one of his names ninety-nine times. Then, on Sunday, since we were both Catholics, we could attend a Sudanese Mass, with drumming, at Sacré Coeur cathedral.

I liked his eagerness and energy, his curiosity and intelligence, his sense of adventure. It occurred to me he might have friends who were fundamentalists, maybe members of the Muslim Brotherhood. If so, I wanted to meet them. Because I didn’t care to put him in danger, I didn’t mention that I actually wanted to interview a terrorist. Why travel all this distance and not meet the Beast everybody raved about?

“I know a few hard-core believers,” Michael said. “Let me ask around and get back to you.”

After dinner, he strolled with me toward the hotel. Actually, “strolled” is the wrong verb. We “vaulted” ditches. “Traversed” construction sites. “Clambered” up and down slag heaps. “Tiptoed” over a sidewalk inexplicably flooded with water. “Dodged” cars and trolleys. “Picked” our way past café tables where men smoked sheesha and played dominoes in the glaring light that splashed from open doors. And “swam” against the tide of pedestrians until we achieved the relative sanctuary of the Corniche.

Young couples perched on the seawall. The daring held hands. The brazen embraced and kissed. Not unnaturally, we wound up talking about women and love, but since we were both bookish guys, we thrashed out the subject through literature. Michael asked what I thought of Durrell’s Justine. Not the novel but the sexually predatory title character, the inscrutable beauty who leaves half the men of Alexandria panting in her fragrant wake.

World-weary and wise, I observed that I accepted Justine’s assessment of herself as “a tiresome hysterical Jewess.” But at his age Michael was alive to the mysteries of sexual allure. What impressed me, though, was the allure he exercised over young Egyptian girls, who gave him sidelong glances as they glided by.

Michael whispered, “The girls behind us are talking about us. They wonder whether you’re my father.”

This flattered me. I was closer to his grandfather’s age.

Arms linked, a trio of girls speeded up and pulled level with us. They wore tight jeans and tight sweaters, and although they had on headscarves, they didn’t hide their smiles. Surging ahead, they darted kohl-rimmed eyes over their shoulders at Michael, flirting outrageously.

Hands in pockets, wind tousling his hair, he called out to them in Arabic. I expected that to send them scampering. But the girls didn’t suddenly go silly and goosey. They stopped, and one of them, the cutest, told him in English, “You are very handsome.”

“Shukran,” he replied.

The three young buds showed no interest in me. So much for the respect Egyptians supposedly accord their elders. With eyes and ears for Michael alone, they were willing to linger there in the parade of pedestrians as long as he stayed too.

They were university students, they said. The prettiest one majored in geography and was about to take her end-of-term exams. She had finished cramming and needed a break tonight. What was Michael doing, she asked. Why was he in Alexandria? Did he like Egypt? Where did he learn Arabic?

It looked to me like Michael was about to get very lucky. All he needed to do was take his choice of Charlie’s Angels—or, what the hell, invite the three of them to a café. But a minute later, he blew them off. He did it suavely, with flourishes of Arabic as decorative as the fretwork on a harem screen. Still, there was no mistaking that he had sent them packing.

“What was that?” I asked.

“It happens to me all the time,” he said.

“Bullshit.”

“No, seriously, it does. Because I’m blond.”

“You’re not blond. You have brown hair.”

“Well, by comparison to an Arab I’m fair.”

“Why didn’t you ask them to have something to eat or drink? At least, ask for a phone number.”

He shook his head at my ignorance. “That’s not done here.”

“It looked to me like they were up for anything.”

“Ready for a marriage proposal, maybe,” Michael said. “But not a date. They were wearing hijabs. That’s what gave them away.”

“Gave what away? They couldn’t have come on any stronger.”

Slightly pedantic, yet never condescending, Michael attempted to educate me in the complexities and paradoxes of the headscarf. According to him, the University of Alexandria had almost eighty thousand female students, most of them enrolled in the College of Arts, which was disparaged as the College of High Heels. Girls were reputed to enroll there to pick up a degree and, at the same time, an educated husband with good job prospects.

“What’s that got to do with headscarves?” I broke in.

“I’m getting to that. For a lot of girls the hijab is a badge that says they don’t want to be bothered by boys. But it’s also a license to flirt because it’s clear they don’t intend to do anything.”

If I found this confusing, it was no fault of Michael’s. And no failure of my grey matter. Throughout the Mediterranean basin the issue of hijabs had provoked debate, anger, violence, even killing. In France, which had seven million Muslim immigrants, the controversy raged from schoolyards all the way to the Elysée Palace. Turkey had banned headscarves for decades to preserve itself as a secular society, yet it was confronted by a segment of the female population that persisted in wearing them. Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk’s finest novel, Snow, centered on the question of whether a headscarf is a symbol of liberation or repression. Of resistance to the government and its masculine hegemony? Or of submission to Islam and its masculine hegemony? In the end, the hijab seemed to mean whatever the individual woman said it did.

During the Cosmopolitan Era many Jewish families in Alexandria were wealthy, and in a city thronged with expatriates and displaced persons, they held positions of social prominence. Yet they had reason to feel insecure. In Out of Egypt, his beautifully evocative memoir about Jewish life, Andre Aciman looks back from exile in America and recalls a household of eccentric relatives who longed to escape Alex’s provinciality, then regretted it once they’d been banished by President Nasser. Although they viewed themselves as citizens of the world, they were attached to local customs. Like their Egyptian neighbors, they ate foul, a refried bean paste, for breakfast, and along with the rest of the privileged classes, they migrated with the seasons, moving to beach houses in summer. To Aciman’s shame, he discovered that his elderly grandmother treated the home bathroom as Muslims do, planting her feet on the porcelain bowl and squatting down. Aciman’s picaresque Uncle Vili complained, “It’s because of Jews like them that they hate Jews like us.”

But when Nasser confiscated their property, it was less from racial or religious prejudice than political expediency. Nasser needed an enemy, and he found one ready-made.

Now the synagogue in Alexandria didn’t even have ten men to make a minyan, the minimum number required by Jewish law to conduct a communal religious service. Constructed more than a century ago on Nabi Daniel Street, and renovated after the Germans bombed it during World War II, it stood forlornly behind locked gates guarded by Egyptian soldiers. With curt hand gestures, they directed me to a side entrance. It was difficult to guess whom they were protecting or guarding against. Terrorists? Tourists? Jews?

By telephone I had spoken earlier to Ben Yusuf Guon and arranged a tour of the synagogue. I pictured him as an ancient rabbi, a patriarchal figure with a long white beard. Instead I met a middle-aged man in designer jeans and a burgundy shirt, with a fashionable four-day growth of whiskers.

Ben Yusuf Guon identified himself as the vice-president of Alexandria’s Jewish community and as its youngest member. “I’m the baby,” he joked. “I’m fifty-three.”

Crossing a courtyard planted with palms and ficus trees, he told me there were twenty-three Jews left in the community, mostly women. “We have eighteen very poor ladies and two very rich ones. Cairo has thirty Jews, all women, no men.”

Among the buildings in the compound that still belonged to the synagogue, one had been a Yeshiva. Now the state rented it as an Egyptian girls’ school. “We have no rabbi,” he said. “One comes from Israel for Passover and stays until Yom Kippur. When he’s not here, we don’t have services. I light a candle for my mother and father. That’s all.”

Under the portico, well-fed dogs napped on the stairs. They didn’t stir as we stepped over them. Arabs consider dogs unclean, little better than vermin, and chase them away from mosques. But Ben Yusuf Guon laughingly referred to these as “Jewish dogs.”

“For security?” I asked.

“The Egyptians take care of that. No problems. We have good relations. All the police are very correct.”

“Now that Egypt and Israel have diplomatic relations is there any chance Jews will come back to Alexandria?”

We were in the rear of the synagogue putting on paper yarmulkes. “They return to visit,” Ben Yusuf said. “A woman was here today. A lady in her fifties, like me. She found her family pew and was happy.”

“I mean is there a chance Jews will resettle?”

He shook his head, saying, “There’s always a good smell here. It’s very clean.”

It was an olfactory theory of religious distinctions that I had first encountered in Beirut in 1969, and had heard since in a dozen countries and would hear again throughout North Africa. Arabs, Christians and Jews believed their own neighborhoods smelled sweet and other ethnic groups stank.

Ben Yusuf explained that the synagogue had been designed by an Italian architect in 1890. He invited me to admire the Corinthian columns that supported a gallery where women had once worshipped. Then he called to the custodian, an old black man, and had him unveil the Ten Commandments, chiseled in Hebrew.

Ben Yusuf’s cell phone cut him off in mid-sentence; its ring tone was “Dance with Me” by Dean Martin.

While Ben Yusuf spoke in French, the custodian introduced himself as Abdel Naby, which he said meant “Servant of the Prophet.” He came from Aswan, in the far south, and he saw nothing exceptional about a Muslim being employed in a synagogue. He said the Jews treated him well and had even taught him a little Hebrew.

Ben Yusuf snapped his phone shut and appeared eager to finish the tour. He had little interest in discussing why he had stayed on in Alexandria and how he had managed to do so. Only when pressed did he reveal that his father had been Nasser’s tailor. “Nasser used to send a car to bring my father to his villa for fittings.”

“So it was a personal relationship?”

“No. Professional.”

“And that’s why your family wasn’t expelled?”

“No. It was because we didn’t have dealings with Israel. The people who were expelled were in contact with Israel.”

I didn’t argue. The absurdity of the statement was its own rebuttal. Alexandria’s fifteen thousand Jews hadn’t been uniformly Zionist. Still, all except for a handful had had their property seized and been exiled.

We returned our paper yarmulkes to the table and stepped out over the dogs on the portico. I asked what would happen after the last Jew died. Ben Yusuf Guon chuckled. “When I die, it’s finished. They’ll turn the synagogue into a museum.”

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Christians were forbidden to ride horses in Egypt, Europeans reached Pompey’s Pillar on donkeyback. I doubt, though, that their buttock-bruising expeditions were any more unsettling than my taxi trip to one of the few monuments in Alexandria that have remained intact since antiquity. We hadn’t gone three blocks before the cabbie picked up a second passenger. “My brother-in-law,” he said.

“I assume we’ll be splitting the bill?”

The cabbie pretended I had exceeded his fluency. “I speak small English.” He held his thumb and index finger a millimeter apart.

“I am journalist,” the brother-in-law spoke up, “making pictures on tourism.” He swiveled around in the front seat and handed me his card. When I didn’t exchange the courtesy, he demanded his card back. He carried a camera and from time to time he told the driver to stop while he snapped shots through the windshield. He didn’t bother to climb out for a clearer view. But it wasn’t laziness that kept him in the car.

“My brother-in-law is a bad man,” the cabbie said. “He makes pictures of trash and other things the government doesn’t like to show. He has to hide.”

The guy did have a splendid eye for ugliness-and often the city appeared to be nothing but ugliness and oddities. Inch by inch the car advanced through a bazaar of intimate apparel. Brassieres were stacked shoulder high, smaller cups nestled in larger ones, like Russian dolls. Sherbet-colored panties fluttered in a breeze that kicked up dust and spicy odors. Then, on a street of furniture stores, there were sidewalk displays of brocade chairs as grand as pharaohs’ thrones. Chickens and cats roosted on them.

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 to England from India, and she had a British accent.

When Michael suggested we go to a café for orange juice, Fidehla readily agreed, and I began to suspect that this might not have been a coincidental meeting. Maybe she was one of his “hard-core” Muslim friends, a fundamentalist with radical leanings. But that was difficult to believe as she joshed and giggled.

We sat under an arcade thick with flies drawn by the aromas of a cooking brazier. A waiter waved sticks of incense to cut the smell and the smoke, but that didn’t disturb the flies that landed on our lips and eyelids. A blind man, hand in hand with his daughter, waited wordlessly at our table until I pulled a bill at random from my pocket. The daughter grabbed it and hurried her father away, and Fidehla and Michael broke into laughter. “You gave the guy six bucks,” said Michael, howling. “He can afford to retire.”

Suddenly, the café convulsed in frenzy; everybody shoved a palm out for baksheesh. The waiter rattled a sheet of paper claiming that he had serious medical ailments and needed money for an operation. I promised a big tip, which mollified him. He refolded the document and fetched our orange juice.

With minimal prompting, Fidehla recounted that she had been born into a devout Muslim family; all the women wore headscarves. She didn’t consider this extremist. To the contrary, she believed in dialogue between Christians and Muslims and planned to return to England to bridge the gap between communities.

I mentioned Martin Amis, one of England’s most prominent novelists and essayists, who currently taught at the University of Manchester. Fidehla had never heard of him or the controversy over his supposedly anti-Islamic sentiments. This was surprising, since some of the most strident accusations against Amis had been leveled by a fellow faculty member at the university.

I knew Martin Amis and considered him a friend. He was no racist or right-wing rabble-rouser. But he had made some ill-judged comments about Islam. In 2006, he told the London Times: “There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or Pakistan ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”

Fidehla promised to look up Amis online but said she thought she already understood his position: “Probably he wanted to provoke discussion.” She saw his comments in the context of the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings in London. The English referred to the attacks, which killed more than fifty commuters on the Underground and on a bus, as 7/7, a date that resonates in the UK as 9/11 does in the US. Fidehla said she understood why people were scared and why they lumped together everybody who appeared to be a Muslim. She had been scared herself, twice over because she was in jeopardy both from random terrorism and from indiscriminate reprisals against Asians.

I had been living in London at the time of the Tube bombings and remembered the tension—the sense that a lethal virus had invaded the city and might sicken and kill anybody, everybody. In the newly flat world, it wasn’t just goods and services, trade and opportunity, that circulated freely. Personal grievances and ideological conflicts festered in obscure corners and then insinuated themselves throughout the globe. Everyone with a gun, anybody with a bomb and a willingness to die for an idea, had the opportunity to make his point—even a point nobody could comprehend.

I confessed to Fidehla and Michael that in the aftermath of 7/7, I had eyed every Middle Easterner with suspicion. “I’d catch a bus with my wife and notice a brown person with a backpack and wonder whether it was racist of me to be afraid-and whether it would be worse, a terrible insult and sign of cowardice, if I got off the bus.”

“Well,” Fidehla said, “at least you didn’t force them to get off. I’m all for tolerance. I don’t support any type of prejudice or violence. Killing innocent people violates the Koran. So does suicide. You know, those men with bombs on their belts, that’s not Islam.”

The small circle of Fidehla’s face showed lively eyes, a prominent nose, a generous mouth without lipstick. She had a disarming smile and a warm, extroverted manner. She stressed that she didn’t subscribe to the concept of takfir, the conviction among jihadis that immoral acts, such as the killing of innocents, were permissible in defense of Islam. “I believe in being strict on myself, not on other people.”

She and Michael suggested that we get together again, with Muslims from their student residence. Fidehla had a roommate named Helima who was more devout than she. A Salafi’ist, the girl was part of a group dedicated to reestablishing the radical practices of early Islam. She had forsaken all idle amusement. No music, no movies, no videos, no photographs.

“Where shall we meet?” I asked.

“At a restaurant,” Michael suggested.

“Brilliant,” Fidehla said. “I haven’t had a good meal since I went to Fuddruckers at the Green Plaza Mall and got sick on a cheeseburger.”

Fuddruckers! The word, the concept, the image of an Anglo-Indian Muslim girl in a hijab eating fast food at an Egyptian mall was enough to give me the bends.

Later that day, with hours to kill, I toured the final resting place of thousands of foreigners who had died in what they regarded as Europa ad Aegyptum. In the neighborhood of Chatby, a series of graves, segregated according to national origin (British, Greek, Armenian) and religious affiliation (Orthodox Greek, Protestant, Jewish, Coptic Orthodox), lay in separate cemeteries along rue Anubis. While the street, named after the jackal-headed Egyptian god of the afterlife, might suggest that in death we’re all equal, the subdivided tombs showed how varied in life were the citizens of colonial Alexandria.

The Greek Orthodox graveyard was half botanical garden, half sculpture park, and a gardener-cum-guardian insisted on guiding me to its highlights. If he hadn’t, I might have overlooked the flat stone inscribed with Cavafy’s name, the date of his death (but not of his birth) and a single word, POET.

Nearby, nobody with a capacity for wonder could have missed the marble extravaganza commemorating la Famille Nader Chikkani. Rhapsodically described in Lucien Basch’s study Les jardins des Morts, the tomb featured a cascade of roses swirling around a beautiful couple who embraced “for eternity in a spiral without end; Eros and Thanatos forever inseparable.”

By comparison the grave of Victor Khouri was a monument of restraint. Khouri’s widow expressed her lapidary sorrow in French: “Mes larmes retombent en rosée rafraichissante sur ton âme, chéri” (“My tears fall down like refreshing dew on your soul, my darling”).

The Old British Protestant Cemetery also had an attendant. It was hard to guess, though, when he had last done any gardening much less any guarding. The entrance was a trash-strewn staircase leading to a desolation of brown grass and desiccated palms. Most gravestones had been leveled like a forest cross-cut by a giant scythe. Was this the work of vandals or of marble thieves?

Still one tomb stood tall, that of Knight Bachelor Henry Edward Barker, commander of the Orders of St. George and St. Michael, who was born in Alexandria in 1872 and died in 1942. Its English inscription sounded slightly hollow in these circumstances: “Proud of his country and a staunch believer in her destiny of service to the world, he spared no effort to bring to Egypt and specially to his birthplace, Alexandria, some measure of the blessings Great Britain herself enjoyed.”

The Coptic Christian cemetery offered no such grand sentiments. Nor did it have a gardener/guardian. Copts, who numbered more than eight million in Egypt, played important roles in the nation’s financial sector and Hosni Mubarak’s wife was said to be sympathetic to them. When Coptic pope Shenuda III was made to pass like a peon through security at Heathrow Airport, Mubarak’s government declared that all British officials, regardless of diplomatic rank, would henceforth be searched when entering Egyptian territory. But the power and wealth of the Copts were nowhere apparent here.

A pyramid of discarded bottles and wadded up plastic bags marked the entrance to a slum cemetery. Chairs, tables and benches barricaded the paths between tombs, and families lounged under shade trees eating a late lunch. Egyptians were on easy terms with the dead.

One mausoleum—or was it a gravedigger’s hut?-had a stove and a TV. At other mausoleums doors hung loose from their hinges, and buckets and wheelbarrows, picks and shovels, were tossed inside. A crude wooden ladder led to a cruder cinder block addition to a high-rise tomb. At the bottom of the ladder, as if outside a mosque, shoes and sandals lay scattered.

A parked motorcycle blocked my way. Did it belong to a grave-digger? Or was it a grave marker? And what about the rusty engine in front of the adjoining tomb?

A grizzled old man carrying groceries in a string bag called out, “What’s your name?” Before I could answer, he shouted his: “Nabil.”

I kicked at the rusty engine. “What do you suppose this is?”

The old man, wearing a woolly sweater on this sweltering day, regarded me as if I were the one suffering from heatstroke. “It’s a car motor.” What else? “You Amriki?” he asked, again not awaiting an answer. “I have brothers in Houston and Albany. One city hot, one city cold.”

“Where do you live?”

He motioned up the dusty path. “Once this road was big. Now small because of more dead.”

“You live in the cemetery?”

His face contorted in a bemused expression. Now he knew I was nuts. “No, no. I take shortcut to house.” Warily, he backed away, leaving me to the enigma of the engine.

As I returned to rue Anubis, I spotted a billboard rearing above the necropolis, another of the improbable sights that the city always seemed to drop in my path. Spilling over with photos of smiling babies, the sign advertised a fertility clinic.

In a packed communal minibus, I headed east on the Corniche from Chatby toward Montazah Palace. From the rear-view mirror swung an eclectic collection of sacred and profane objects—a miniature soccer ball, wooden rosary beads, a tiny striped soccer jersey and a Coptic holy card. To further confuse matters, the radio blasted Koranic chants and the dashboard was upholstered with what looked to be a wolf pelt. My fellow passengers helpfully passed my money to the driver, then returned the change hand to hand.

The Corniche curved along for miles, lined on one side by beaches and cabanas, and on the other by condos and hotels, including a Four Seasons with a Starbucks on its terrace. In the summer, before Nasser took over, in the ’50s, the king and his court and thousands of government officials used to decamp here to escape Cairo’s brutal heat, and Alex had served as the country’s seasonal capital. Today the city still swells by a million or more during the months when the coast is twenty or thirty degrees cooler than inland. But on this April afternoon, the beach season had yet to start, and lounge chairs were chained to the pavement outside boarded-up cafés.

During World War I, Forster had worked as a volunteer at Montazah Palace when the Spanish-style Mudejar castle had served as a military convalescent center. Its gardens were still a healing refuge, its trees and shrubs thoughtfully labeled—casuaria, oleander, date palm, tamarisk. On the quiet streets, husbands taught their wives and daughters to drive, safe from the maelstrom outside the wall. Everywhere on the grass, girls in hijabs paired off with boys. But the young here were definitely not in one another’s arms. They sat at a demure distance, separated by the leftovers of picnic lunches.

Then an extraordinary phenomenon electrified the air and focused all eyes. As a young European woman walked by, a prurient hush fell over paradise. Although she wore a modest shirtwaist dress, she radiated the erotic charge of a G-stringed pole dancer. Her hair was uncovered and hung in lustrous ringlets. A week in Alexandria had redefined my notions of sensuality. Like those red-eyed Biblical elders leering at Susannah in her bath, I felt my thin blood pulse.

On Sunday, a workday in Egypt, I returned to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina to see Sahar Hamouda, the Mediterranean Center’s deputy director. On the esplanade out front, university students milled around a pair of glinting sculptures. One was Prometheus Bearing Fire: Symbol of Knowledge. Synonymous with Creativity and Imagination. The other was a brushed aluminum bust of Alexander the Great. Over the door for paying customers, a sign proclaimed the current exhibition, “Bio-Vision Alexandria: New Life Sciences, From Promise to Practice.”

At Hamouda’s office, I discovered that we wouldn’t be having a one-on-one conversation about the Cosmopolitan Era. Seated on a couch, I confronted a panel of three that reminded me of my PhD oral exams. Along with the sweet, plump Hamouda, there was a middle-aged woman with melodramatic hair, highlighted by henna. She introduced herself as Mona Khlat, and said she was a writer and former teacher.

The third party, a man in a swivel chair, volunteered nothing about himself, not even his name. But when Hamouda referred to him as Professor Awad, I divined that this august eminence in slacks, open collar shirt and Top-Siders was Mohammed Awad. An architect educated in Alexandria and London, he was the center’s director and the founder of the city’s Preservation Trust. Awad embodied Alexandrian cosmopolitanism and was a ruling authority on the subject.

As I had with Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, I asked whether it bothered them that Alexandria was best known through European writers. Durrell, for instance.

Awad cut me off. Like the two women, he spoke English with a British accent: “Durrell writes badly of Alexandria. He’s not popular here. When I read Durrell I don’t think it’s about Alex. I don’t think he’s truthful.”

“Too romantic,” I suggested.

“No, romanticism isn’t the problem. The problem is factual accuracy. Not even the names in Durrell exist. I don’t know any Nessims or Justines. Only Clea means something to me because I knew the real Clea—Clea Bardero, the artist she was based on.”

I brought up André Aciman and his memoir, Ouf of Egypt, but Professor Awad wasn’t one to grant extra credit to a hometown boy. “Aciman is not very accurate. His own experience as an expelled Jew overwhelms his book. His was a quite particular experience at a time of crisis.”

“Particular?” I asked. “Certainly the crisis was personal and deeply felt. But Aciman’s family weren’t the only Jews expelled from Egypt.”

“I don’t know how much of a victim he was,” Awad said. “He talks about cruelty to him at school. I went to Victoria College with Aciman. The teacher he complains about was cruel to everybody. So it wasn’t because he was a Jew. Nobody knew or cared that he was Jewish.”

“We are a very open society,” Mona Khlat piped up.

“During the Cosmopolitan Era, Alex was like Shanghai or Thessalonika—multicultural, multilingual, multiracial,” the professor said. “Much more refined than New York City. We didn’t have discrimination against blacks and Jews and foreigners.”

“In many ways that’s still the case,” Khlat said, while Hamouda kept silent.

“You should attend my lecture tomorrow,” Awad told me. “It’s in French. Do you speak French?”

“Yes, I—”

“Three things contributed to our cosmopolitanism,” he powered forward, counting on his fingers. “The stock exchange, the port and our legal system. As early as 1870 we had institutionalized international law. What other country had that? Egyptians are quite civilized because they have had contact with other civilizations.”

“That remains the case,” Khlat insisted. “I’m a Christian. I’m married to a Muslim. My husband lived in the United States and became more and more Islamic. He went through various phases of fanaticism. But I wear a bikini.”

Awad reached over to a desk and retrieved some papers. They were old bordello licenses. “I’m looking for a license for a homosexual bordello. I know it exists, but I can’t find it.”

Khlat contributed another example of what she considered Egyptian tolerance. “Prostitutes used to sing a song when they came back clean from their medical checkups: ‘Safe I went. Safe I come.’ That’s a popular song we sing now whenever we return from a journey.”

Timidly, I asked how they reconciled Egyptian tolerance with the treatment of women who remained second-class citizens and more and more often wore headscarves.

“The hijab is a passport for women to do what they want,” Hamouda said. “When we were in school, nobody wore the hijab or the niqab. But you never saw couples holding hands. Now you see students at the university lying on top of each other. I ask what they’re doing and they say ‘Nothing.’”

“Youngsters are quite loose compared to our generation,” Awad agreed. “Women are in the streets at odd hours of the night. The veil is a mask. It’s no indication of moral attitudes. For some it’s to attract attention.”

“Mores have changed,” Khlat added, sweeping her hair out of her face with both hands. “My husband makes the hadj to Mecca. I go to the beach in a bikini.”

Awad smiled indulgently. “You’re not typical. It’s part of your exotic charm and appeal. But our young people are not integrated with the rest of the world. They go to Europe but—”

“The culture has become impoverished,” Khlat said.

“Students smoke sheesha, fool around on computers and watch videos, not the news,” Hamouda joined in.

“The quality in my time was different,” Awad said. “Even poor students at the university were interested in learning.”

“They were more cultured,” Hamouda suggested.

“Those were the people I mixed with,” Khlat said. “The intellectuals.”

“I remember going to Cairo to the book fair,” Professor Awad said, “just to buy one French architecture magazine.”

“The new rich—” Khlat started off, but Awad interrupted her. “It’s always the same. There’s no model to follow. My grandfather worked his ass, as they say, and made a small fortune. But he had models. Now there are no models. Society today doesn’t promote this kind of thing.”

I had the horrible, itchy, post-haircut feeling that I was trapped in Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians.” Trampling on one another’s lines, the trio continued to kvetch that the world had gone to hell in a handbasket, and that far worse was imminent. Snug in this glass and chrome office, sheltered by the Bibliotheca, surrounded by every known communications device, they nevertheless felt cut off and frightened. Some menace, some rough beast, some unimaginable horror advanced over the horizon. Or had it already done its damage and withdrawn into the desert?

They might have rattled on and on had a strange shape not lurched into the room. No, not a barbarian. It was a benighted one-legged man in a wheelchair. “Oh, god,” Khlat groaned. “He’s here for money, and I don’t have a penny.”

I dug a few bills from my pocket, and the man grabbed them and rolled away to the next office.

“Poor fellow,” Awad said.

“You know him?” I asked.

“Of course. He worked here for years. Then he developed diabetes and lost his leg.”

“Now he comes to the library to beg?”

“Where else? He knows us. We know him.”

I waited for one of them to say more. When nobody did, I asked whether they saw any significance in the incident. They shook their heads.

To me it seemed a caricature of conditions in Alexandria. While we sat in the Bibliotheca, bloviating about literary matters and deteriorating mores, people in the streets lived and died without basic medical care and social services. It was almost tragic. Almost grotesquely humorous. Almost worth mentioning. But what could I have said that wouldn’t sound judgmental and intolerant?

Awad broke the silence. He was having guests to his home tonight, and he invited me to join them and continue our conversation. But I begged off, and thanked him and the two women for their hospitality.

Before leaving the library, I toured the Awad Collection. Much of it had been drawn from the professor’s family’s heirlooms—maps, historical papers, paintings and photographs of Alexandria as generations of foreigners had seen it. Or at least as they had conceived it. From the instant the first colonialists arrived, there had always been this parallax between the factual place and the fanciful vision of it. Now, it seemed to me, even its own citizens couldn’t see it clearly.

That night I roamed the back lanes of Anfushi, where a street market thrummed until the late hours. It smelled of seafood and eastern spices, fresh meat and deliquescing vegetables. The stalls had radios tuned to a chaos of stations—classical Arabic, Koranic chanting, old albums of the long-dead popular singer Oum Kalthum, new covers of Lionel Richie hits. Lionel aside, the rest of the music sent up strange reverberations. To borrow from Saul Bellow, there were “winding, nasal, insinuating songs to the sounds of wire coat hangers moved back and forth, and drums, tambourines and mandolins and bagpipes.”

Some shops and all the cafés had TVs blasting soccer from Spain, South America and England. Despite the profusion of goods and the frenetic hawkers, few people bought anything. Like me, they were here for company, not commerce. School kids, niqabed women, married couples and oldsters on crutches congregated to see and be seen. Only I was out of place and unnoticed, able to watch without being looked at or spoken to. A definite advantage for a traveler, but one that was beginning to make me question whether I actually existed.

The next morning I slept through the alarm clock. Or rather, I heard it and incorporated it into a dream. A hurricane had smashed into Key West, and the emergency siren was shrieking. Frozen with fear I lay in bed in Florida, listening to shutters bang and the front door split into kindling.

I woke to find a mustachioed man in a blue smock beaming down at me: “Good morning. Ready to clean your room, sir.” He had started showing up earlier each day, inquiring whether I was happy with his services.

I dressed and went downstairs to the breakfast buffet. It was good food and plentiful-freshly squeezed fruit juices, cereals, eggs any style, beef sausage patties, croissants and sticky buns. But every mouthful reminded me that I was stuck in Alexandria another day waiting for my visa. I had been here a week now and was ready to hit the road.

When I phoned my contact in Libya, he counseled patience, he had things under control. He or one of his minions would meet me at the Egyptian border, and drive me along the coast, stopping at the battlefield in Tobruk and the Greek ruins at Cyrenaica, a region that he referred to as the Libyan Alps. He stressed that I had to accept the caprices of the Leader Moamar Qaddafi and his Great Socialist Peoples’ Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.

I reminded him that in prepayment for hotels and meals and a mandatory guide, I had already shelled out $3,000—and still my visa hadn’t cleared bureaucratic channels. But he promised me it was a dead-solid certainty. Soon he would fax a copy of my visa. Then, at the border, he or his man would produce the original.

The pressure of these contingencies—or was it the high calorie breakfast?-caused a queasiness in my stomach. My health had been fine so far. I hadn’t touched my stash of medications except for a daily antidepressant and a beta blocker three times a week to keep my heartbeat regular. But at the back of my mind—okay, occasionally at the forefront—there was a needling disquiet.

To counter it, I made myself move, setting off for an appointment with the curator of the Alexandrian Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), Bassim Baroni, whom Justin Siberell had urged me to contact. At an intersection, I climbed the usual slag heap and had started my cautious descent when the ground gave way beneath my feet and I tumbled into the street, like a turtle flipped on its shell. I realized then that Alexandrians are indeed a people of remarkable urbanity. To save me from embarrassment, they passed by without so much as a backward glance.

I made it to the forum on time, but Baroni had visitors and asked me to wait. Shaking sand out of my shirtsleeves and pant legs, I sat in the hall, where I overheard a conference on “Art, Shelter, Visibility and Love?” The moderator explained that ACAF’s mission was to encourage “contemporary arts practices that have social implications. We hope to refresh the arts in Alexandria. A new generation is coming.”

This sounded all too much like the Bibliotheca’s boosterism. I had had a bellyful of that. But I didn’t leave, and once Baroni was free to talk, I was glad I hadn’t, because at last here was somebody with a sharp eye and a fresh take on the city.

“Whenever Alex is praised for its cultural renewal,” Baroni said, “the talk is always about the past, never the present. Every new idea is really an old idea about dredging antiquities out of the harbor or excavating ruins from under the modern city or recreating a library that burned down thousands of years ago. If you can believe it, there’s a proposal to rebuild the Pharos. I can’t change this tendency on a general level. But maybe ACAF can help break the constant habit of looking backward.

“The image of Alexandria is almost entirely literary,” he continued, in excellent English. “It’s not based on factual research. It’s based on novels and poetry, so there’s the illusion that the city can develop an economy around culture. But this effort is distorted by power struggles in the government and because of empty branding. The Bibliotheca is just another attempt to brand Alex as important for its heritage. The intention is good. How it functions is something else. The Bibliotheca attracts tourists, then has nothing to show them. They visit for a day, look at the library, maybe look at the city for an hour, eat fish in a restaurant, then jump on the bus to Cairo.”

I asked him to back up and explain how the problem reflected power struggles in the government.

“I work a lot with university students,” Baroni said. “On the surface they seem like students everywhere-the way they dress and watch MTV and use the Internet. But embedded in the educational system is a total lack of critical thinking. From the early grades on, schools fear analysis and criticism. Everything in Egypt-the government, the police—survives on this lack of criticism. Religious fundamentalism is another negative,” he added. “But it’s been caused by failed nationalism, by the whole baggage of untruthful socialism that started in 1952. As a result some students see fundamentalism as the only option. Islam gives them a magic potion—a way to express their criticism and dissatisfaction.”

Baroni swore he wasn’t naive. He had no messianic belief that he and ACAF could solve all of Egypt’s problems. Still he thought they had a role to play. “All hope is for the future,” he said. “Not the past. Not the present we have today. I do what I do because I believe that art helps and can offer an alternative education to the uncritical one they get at school.”

Back at the Cecil Hotel, the concierge passed me a note. I prayed it was news of my Libyan visa. Instead, it was a reminder from Michael Nevadomski that I had agreed to buy dinner tonight for Fidehla and a few friends. All part of my effort to touch base with Islamic terrorism.

Michael said we’d have to eat after the girls finished their evening prayers. They had chosen the old-fashioned supper club Santa Lucia, which had waiters in bow ties and bolero jackets and a menu heavy on Italian dishes. It had good wine, but Michael cautioned me not to drink alcohol, out of respect for the girls’ faith. What’s more, since Helima was a Salafi’ist, I shouldn’t touch her, not even to shake her hand.

I had to laugh at myself. In The Daily News Egypt, Riccardo Fabiani, from Exclusive Analysis, a British strategic intelligence firm, had warned that “worsening social and economic conditions in Egypt could fuel a reprisal of terrorist attacks on a large scale.” In his opinion the country was at risk for a “new kind of terrorism.” At the same time, a BBC World Service poll of more than 100 countries had revealed that Egypt was one of only two nations that didn’t have a negative impression of Al Qaeda. Yet here I was in this Muslim hotbed and the best I could manage was a rendezvous at a stuffy restaurant with an American undergrad and a few English girls in hijabs from the University of Manchester.

Despite Michael’s warning, I decided that I’d better arrive early at Santa Lucia and sneak a stiff drink. Our table was in a wood-paneled, beam-ceilinged nook. The place settings sported bone china, silverware, crystal goblets and starched napkins folded like origami birds. It seemed a shame to shake one out and plop it on my lap.

The restaurant had the aura of a men’s club on Ladies’ Nite. The scent of Shalimar overlay the tang of testosterone. Sedate yet seductive, the Santa Lucia was the kind of joint where a gent my age might wine and dine his much younger mistress. At nearby tables, grey-haired, brick-faced fellows appeared to be doing just that, and the soundtrack—Sade crooning “No Ordinary Love”—did what it could to help them get lucky.

Furtive as a relapsed alcoholic, I let the waiter spirit away my glass before the girls made an entrance with Michael. They created quite a stir. Fidehla and Helima, swaddled in black robes and hijabs, had brought along their roommate, Sarah. Born in Bahrain to a British father and a Filipina mother, she wore designer jeans and a pink Empire-line blouse that might have been a shortie pajama top.

I presided at the head of the table, like long-in-the-tooth King Lear among his three fractious daughters. Never have I wished so fervently for a second drink. I remembered not to shake hands with Helima. It required greater effort not to settle her onto my knee and cuddle her like a doll. Small and fine-boned, she had a lovely face—or sliver of a face—whose eyes appeared kohl-rimmed even without makeup. She handed me a brochure explaining Salafi’ism.

I said I’d read it later. Then I added, “Sorry about the music.”

She smiled sweetly. “It’s not your fault.”

The recorded soundtrack stopped and a live piano player struck up a medley of old torch songs—“September in the Rain,” “Stardust,” “The Summer Wind.”

“This is nice,” Sarah said. It was unclear whether she meant the music or the menu. The three girls ordered soft drinks, and Michael and I asked for fizzy mineral water.

“I Googled Martin Amis,” Fidehla told me. “I was wrong. He is a racist.”

“No,” I said. “He shot off his mouth and I’m sure he regrets it.”

“Who’s Martin Amis?” Sarah asked.

She and Helima, like Fidehla, hadn’t heard of him or the controversy he had sparked. And when Fidehla filled them in, they showed little enthusiasm for the subject. Food held far more interest. They were tired of cooking for themselves, they said, and were delighted to be eating out. But they weren’t very adventurous: They all ordered chicken.

I asked Helima about her family, and she said her parents had emigrated from Bangladesh. She had six sisters; all of them wore the hijab.

“How have you girls gotten along together as roommates?” I asked.

“Absolutely fantastic,” Fidehla spoke for the three of them.

“Will you room together back in Manchester?”

After an awkward pause, Helima said, “I’ll live with my family.”

“I’ll have my own apartment,” Sarah said.

“It never causes problems that Sarah doesn’t wear the hijab?” I asked.

“She’s not a Muslim,” Fidehla said. “But she respects our beliefs and we respect hers.”

“What if she were a Muslim and didn’t wear a headscarf?”

“You can be a good Muslim and not wear the hijab,” Helima insisted. But personally neither she nor Fidehla could conceive of doing that. It didn’t accord with their idea of Islam. They believed there would never come a time in their lives when they’d go without headscarves. Just as earnestly, they maintained that this didn’t mean they were intolerant of people who disagreed with them.

“I have a twenty-eight-year-old son,” I said. “Would you like to meet him? We can arrange a marriage.”

“That depends on what he looks like.” Fidehla caught the teasing tone in my voice and matched it.

I showed them a wallet snapshot of my younger boy, Marc.

“He’ll do fine,” Fidehla said. Helima giggled and agreed.

But when I reminded them that he wasn’t Muslim, Fidehla and Helima turned serious and said they wouldn’t marry a nonbeliever.

“Oh, he’s a believer,” Michael said. “He’s Catholic. Like his father. Like me.”

The two girls reiterated that their husbands had to be Muslims. In Helima’s case, he also had to be a Salafi’ist. For Fidehla it wasn’t an issue of a particular sect, but of sharing the same values. Sarah supported this sentiment. She wanted to move back to Bahrain and marry an Arab, because, “I like the values of Arab men.”

“Would you accept an arranged marriage?”

“No, no.” Sarah laughed. “I wouldn’t accept his having more than one wife either.”

Fidehla and Helima rejected polygamy, too, but had no compunctions about arranged marriages. “You can learn to love anybody,” Helima contended. “My sisters had arranged marriages, and they’re happy.”

“I don’t want to sound jaded,” I said. “But it’s been my experience that you can learn to hate someone you once loved.”

“How many times have you been married?” Fidehla asked.

“I’ve been married to the same woman for forty-one years.”

“That’s longer than my mother’s been alive,” Michael crowed.

But the girls were enchanted and asked how I’d met my wife, how old we had been and what our parents had thought. They listened intently to a PG-rated version of my first blind date with Linda when I was twenty-two and she twenty-one. Her parents hadn’t been thrilled that I was a grad student and planned to become a writer. But we married a year and a half later.

“That’s so romantic,” Sarah sighed.

“You were so poor and young,” Helima marveled. “You were brave and lucky.”

“And the way you met,” Fidehla said, “it wasn’t much different from an arranged marriage.”

“Sure it was,” I said. “Our families didn’t bring us together. We were free to choose.”

“We’re free too,” Helima said. “We don’t have to marry a man just because our parents introduce us.”

“But you don’t go out on dates and get to know each other in different situations. What possible basis,” I asked, “could you have for accepting or refusing a proposal?”

Helima giggled again. “The man has to be good looking.”

“To me,” Sarah said, “it’s more important to marry an Arab who has a British passport.”

Fidehla and Helima agreed that a British passport was crucial. Helima planned to move to Saudi Arabia after graduation and teach women or children. But she wouldn’t marry a Saudi unless he had U.K. citizenship.

After dinner the three girls moved over near the pianist to listen to the music. I stayed at the table with Michael, who was as surprised as I was that Helima had joined in this idle pleasure.

I liked all three girls, but the two Believers filled me with the kind of anxiety and sadness with which fatherhood had acquainted me. They seemed so naive, so unformed. During my teaching stints, I’d sometimes had the same reaction to American students. But with them, change and growth were inevitable. I could picture Michael, for instance, going in a dozen different directions. He might become a spy or a priest, a professor or a writer.

But Helima and Fidehla appeared forever fixed. Everything in their family history, everything in their psychological makeup suggested that they were now what they would always be. Maybe they’d claim that that was the point. In a world where whirl was king, they intended to follow the path their religious upbringing had laid for them. And who knew? They might be happier for that.

An hour later, as we filed out of Santa Lucia, past the doorman in gold livery, Sarah exclaimed, “Isn’t it amazing? Here we are still in Egypt.”

On my walk to the hotel, her words rang like a bell clapper in my skull. Still in Egypt. Still in Egypt. But then it struck me that I needn’t stay in Alexandria. The Libyan border lay four hundred miles to the west, a faint scribble in the sand near the town of Sallum. I could cover the distance in stages, stopping along the coast or at the oasis of Siwa. I could check in by telephone with my contact in Tripoli, then rush to meet him at the frontier once my visa was ready.

At the Cecil, digesting my meal and the evening’s religious discussion, I switched on the TV. CNN reporters were grilling Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the 2008 Democratic front-runners for president, about their Christian faith and the role it played in their lives and political beliefs. As they vied to replace George W. Bush, a born-again Christian whose favorite philosopher was Jesus Christ, they sounded less like citizens of a secular society based on the separation of church and state than like ... well, like Fidehla and Helima and hundreds of other fervent Muslims I would meet.