Along Nile, a Blizzard Means Sand

The wind picked up along the Nile early in the morning, and birds took to nervous flight. The sky darkened and the air thickened with the taste of sand. Soon, the call to prayer echoing from the mosques was drowned out by the howl of winter.

Here in the desert, though, winter storm warnings do not portend the icy misery of Europe or the northern United States. With February temperatures hovering in the 60s and rainfall measuring only one inch a year, the blizzards Cairo must endure are made of sand.

From mid-afternoon Thursday through the day Friday, the powder-fine sand swept off the Sahara in swirling clouds so dense that donkeys coughed instead of braying, and pedestrians scurried about with eyes squinted, shoulders hunched and heads pointed toward the ground. On the sidewalks, the sand mounted like snow drifts.

Legions of peasants, hired by the city in a vain attempt to keep Cairo’s streets clean, worked into the night, sweeping with homemade brooms to make piles of sand that were quickly destroyed by fearsome gusts of desert wind. Seeming unconcerned by the futility of their task, they set about with robot-like strokes to reconstruct their piles.

Desert Road Impassable

Waves 12 feet high battered Alexandria and authorities closed the port as ships headed into the Mediterranean to ride out the storm. The desert road that links Cairo and Alexandria was impassable, and Cairo’s international airport, the busiest in the Mideast, was shut down when the sand cut visibility to 500 yards.

Planes heading for Cairo were diverted to Cyprus and Saudi Arabia. President Hosni Mubarak was stranded in Aswan, and a Middle East Airlines jet on a nonstop Beirut to Cairo flight circled, then returned to the Lebanese capital.

One plane from the Egyptian carrier Egyptair, flying from Abu Dhabi in the Persian Gulf, was unable to land in Cairo and, short of fuel, was forced to set down at Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. That was only the second time an Egyptian airliner landed in Israel, the first being when the late President Anwar Sadat made his peace journey in 1977. This time, 47 disgruntled Muslim passengers, most of them carrying Pakistani and Libyan passports, refused to leave the jet and spend the night in Israel. So, after refueling, the Egyptair pilot finally flew them to Cyprus.

Forecasters said the storm should abate over the weekend. Mercifully, this will give residents of Cairo the opportunity to shovel out under clear skies and start rescuing the rooms of their apartments from the layers of sand-dust that sneaks through every tiny crack in each door and window and makes even the finest residences look filthy.

Because Cairo is constantly besieged by sand-dust, winter storms or not, residents will take the job in stride. Even those of modest means equip themselves with a heavy-duty industrial vacuum cleaner, specially fitted plastic covers for valuables such as stereos or cameras and servants whose sole task is to dust--four or five hours a day. Still, by afternoon, what had been cleaned in the morning will again be coated with chalk-like dust.

Asked recently what climatic forces caused Cairo’s sandstorms, a government meteorologist gave an explanation that, while lacking in scientific clarity, was brilliant in its irrefutability.

“It’s God’s will,” he said.