EGYPT: Repose on a train

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The man rushed in and the doors closed behind him. He slid between passengers and found a place to stand in a crowded train car bound for downtown Cairo. He opened his Koran; the gold lettering on the cover fading, the pages worn. He recited verse. He was a slight man in an open collar shirt. He seemed a government clerk or someone like that, a man who worked for low wages, but kept an air of respectability with polished shoes and pressed trousers. His timbre soothed. It set the train’s clatter to the rhythm of prayer. The doors opened, feet shuffled, a hiss, the creak of metal and then the doors closed again as the train sped past alleys, crumbling walls and laundry blowing on rooftops.

The man prayed through nine stops. He did not call attention to himself, but his cadences beckoned like whispers in a dream. Passengers around him closed their eyes; in a city of 16 million they had found repose in a stranger’s voice. The desert air was not so hot. The press of flesh and sweat were bearable. All life’s annoyances, muffled. The train dipped into a tunnel and the man’s voice limned the dark, the prayers not ceasing until the doors opened and he shut his Koran and hurried out with the others toward the stairways to the clamor and the light.

— Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo