Dispirited by my lack of nerve on the throbbing train, yet unwilling to end my sojourn entirely, the next day, I dug some traveler’s checks out of my belt-pack and entered a travel agency not far from the Hilton. By Cairo standards, the agency was modern and had grey concrete and tinted glass and wide glass-topped desks with spacing created by large green plants in pots like banana plants, or small palm trees. 

 

I bought a ticket to Ammon, Jordan. Forty-eight dollars, American. The travel agent was an efficient, young Egyptian woman, skeptical at first that I could pay for the ticket and curious why I was going to Jordan. When I told her I wanted to visit Petra she was enlivened, as she clearly loved history. But when I said my final destination would be Israel, her face darkened, and she said she doubted I could get there from here. I said I thought I could make it. She displayed a certain sense of betrayal, and I was affected by this, as I considered myself a student of the world, that the Vietnam War had made me borderless, unnationalistic, and free, and I thought other people should be that way too. I was young, but it wasn’t a heck of a lot of time after this that Europe took down all the border checkpoints between their countries and, so, obviously, this was a model of international behavior that should be expanded, in my mind. It’s not too late for the world. One Earth; One World. I see eighty percent of you cringing. 

 

My next stage set, I wandered near the Nile. The true quiet charm of Cairo is the river, and with it the old-style feluccas sail boats and larger dahabiya boats; the sounds of the river expose the backbone of the country, its principal source of wealth – generator of commerce and agriculture. 

 

My research shows a number of Hiltons in Cairo today, but I am sure back in 1975 there was only one on the river and I entered the lobby and heard the city hush behind the rotary door. The lobby was open and library-like in its quietude and was rumored to be a place for spies and the transfer of information between East and West, Jew and Arab, Yank and Soviet. You could witness any national costume imaginable here, and I had a beer at the bar – one of the few establishments in the city serving alcohol. An African basketball team entered the lobby, I forget which country, but they were all dressed in blue uniforms and carried black travel satchels. I was astounded by their size. I had never seen a group of people who looked like that. They were like trees. Their confidence and presence buttressed each other as if the sum of their whole was much, much greater than the sum of their parts. They were like a new race, or the collected remnants of a bygone humanity found only in the heart of darkness. They moved through the lobby as a unit, as a core holding, and their force was overwhelming, as if they alone could change the world, and in those days, “sport” was an important element of rapprochement across the globe. The sentiment faded. The smaller Egyptians in the lobby moved out of their way as if bits of wood pushed aside by a wave of water.

 

It was early afternoon, and I left the bar and was walking the dusty back streets of shops and workshops and meandering my way through the life of the city. In front of a perfume shop, a proprietor engaged me in earnest conversation. He was a few years older than me and in good shape for a shopkeeper and his English was good. 

 

“Sir! May I speak to you for a minute? You are American, right? Please come here, please come in. Would you like a tea?” he said, trying with his arms to guide me inside his store.

 

Inured to the basking charms of shopkeepers, each with a story to tell, I set aside my suspicions of an urgent sales pitch and asked, “What?”

 

“Please,” he beseeched me, “Please read this letter. I must mail this letter soon. Tell me if the wording is correct.”

 

The small shop was full of perfume bottles and jars of essences and oils of all manner and from known and unknown species of flowers and plants, like an herbalist from the Middle Kingdom. The less he tried to sell me something, the more I trusted him.

 

We went to the back of the shop where he seated me at a small, heavy wooden table, thick of leg and top. 

 

“I am in love,” he proclaimed, “this is my letter to her. Will you read it?” He launched himself now, uncontrollably. He told me the whole story. 

 

She was American and he knew I was American, and so would I make sure he was not saying anything wrong or that might be misconstrued or that was simply bad English. He wanted everything perfect. He had met her here and she shopped in his store, and she stayed a long time, and he closed up the shop and she agreed to walk the Nile with him along the evening restaurant lights hanging like white Christmas lights from pole to pole between the open-air restaurants and they had that one evening. Then he mailed her the perfumes she had set aside, and she wrote back, and now he was writing this love letter. It had to be perfect.

 

The writing wasn’t bad, a bit Islamic flowery, or old Koran, I don’t know, not enough Beatles, from whom many Egyptians learned basic English. I corrected punctuation, changed a word here or there. The lover was very nervous, and I felt like a scribe from the old world, where on street corners scribes sat at wooden tables just like this one, and with sharp quills made from reeds from the Nile wrote in hieroglyphics as early as 4000 years BC. The world was illiterate, except for the scribes, and they were a class unto themselves and invented and perfected written language. Their services were in demand from royalty to shopkeepers and those who could write were seen in a way as magicians with secrets.

 

He was standing behind me now and I had a momentary relapse of assurance as I thought maybe he has shown this letter to dozens of Americans? Maybe this was all part of his complicated sales schtick? I quickened my response.

 

“It’s all right,” I said. “It will do fine. She will love it. She might even come here again,” I said hopefully. Then he asked me to take it to New York with me and mail it from inside New York and I said this I cannot do as I am not going to New York, I’m going to Ammon. I stood up. I grabbed my jacket with my airline ticket in the inside pocket.

 

 The lover shopkeeper tried to give me perfume to show his faith and thankfulness for my endeavor on his behalf and I refused all his gifts as my plan was not to  be near girls, but to get to Ammon and enter the desert and hitchhike to the ancient stone city of Petra. 

 

I was relieved to be back on the street.