Cairo’s Pyramid Scheme

I was a prisoner in the Basha Flower Extract Palace.

It was my first free night in Cairo, and I was walking home from dinner through the central district that honks, scrapes, teems, fumes and chatters about 10 miles northeast of the most famous pyramids on the planet.

Just as I had been told to expect, a gregarious young Egyptian fell in step with me. Explained that he was a student of English. Issued an invitation, verging on demand, that I visit his family’s business just a block away. Wouldn’t take no.

Soon my new friend had deposited me in a small room off a back alley and fled, leaving me to face four walls full of delicately wrought glass perfume bottles. In came the server with tea on a tray. Then Abdullah. The closer. Introduced as brother of the tout who steered me in, he settled his bulk into a seat and looked me over.

“This is my Egyptian hospitality,” said Abdullah, beginning his pitch. “Will you not sit and have a cup of tea? I will show my Egyptian hospitality in this way, whether you are interested in buying or not, and hope that someday there might be such hospitality for me in your country.”

Despite global efforts to reconcile East and West, Cairo from many angles looks like a place that wants the West to stay away. From where we Americans usually sit, we see a Third World city of epic disorder, 15 million souls jostling among buildings that predate Christ. Here is a mostly Muslim capital that in this century ejected first the Turks (with English help) and then the English (with German help); a battleground of ideas where a secular government struggles to suppress a minority of Islamic extremists. So it can be a surprise when, once you land in its midst, the city attaches itself to you with ceaseless invitations and transactions.

Outside Abdullah’s salesroom, I knew, spotlights danced on pyramid walls, feluccas slid along the Nile, sleeping camels curled into fetal contortions, belly dancers shimmied, dervishes whirled. The moon had risen between a tall minaret and a neon Sanyo sign. I rose with apologies. Abdullah hectored me back into my seat, and the pitch began in earnest.

We were lucky, Abdullah explained. He, the producer of perfume essences from plantings in the rich Nile delta, and I, the consumer, had found each other directly, with no man in the middle. I surely had a girlfriend or wife or mother, or some combination of those, who would prize a priceless gift of Egyptian scent. And here was just such a priceless sample. Seventy-five grams. No? Well, then, perhaps 50, certainly 25 at least.

When he found a scent to which I could formulate no objection and I had begun to anticipate freedom, a whole new sales process began, now concerning the container, which would carry a price of its own. The pinkish hue? The blue? The green? All curiosity and courtesy drained from my voice and manner, but in a display of psychological bullying more deadly than I’ve encountered in any American car lot, jewelry shop or garage sale, he wore me down. I sat there among the tiny bottles and helplessly agreed on a price for a scent I knew my wife would never wear.

Three months later, on assignment in Florida, I would spend five hours in the clutches of a high-pressure time-share sales staff, yet emerge poker-faced, unsold, exhilarated. Why? Because on this October night in Cairo, Abdullah had inoculated me for life.

It cost me 75 Egyptian pounds, roughly $25. And when I staggered out into the Cairo night an hour later, four ounces of bitter tea in my belly and a small twined box in hand, the adventure was not quite complete. Every half-block on the half-mile walk back to my hotel, another Cairene stole up to my side.

“Nice beard, nice mustache,” one said, sidling up.

“Nice shoes,” said another.

“Where are you are from?” demanded a third. They saw my twined box; their imaginations were swollen with visions of what they might sell me. But I had made my deal for the evening.

Like desert dust, the spirit of negotiation defines and envelopes Cairo. The city is not merely the emporium of Africa and the political crossroads of the Middle East, it is home to the sly grin of the tout on the street; the taxi fare renegotiated upon arrival; the pre-purchase haggle; the post-purchase gratuity; the baksheesh to the tomb sentry who leads you to a room off the beaten path; the modeling fee demanded by the professional poser who crowds his way into your landscape photo at the last moment.

And in the background of all this haggling, on the fringe of Cairo’s suburbs, New World development creeps closer and closer to the Great Pyramid, the last remaining monument among classical antiquity’s Seven Wonders of the World. This is yet another sort of transaction: The old world and the new, skirmishing over territory.

I wanted to hear the Old World speak first. On my first morning in town, I joined guide and Egyptologist Afifi Shimy and headed for the Cairo Museum, better known as the Egyptian Museum. It was barely 9, but already tour buses clogged the parking lot. (Despite the qualms raised in America by Egypt’s battles with Muslim activists, the nation’s tourism office counted 154,851 American visitors to the country in 1995, a 23% increase from the year before.)

Inside, we shuffled from dim room to dim room. To highlight their talks, museum guides directed their flashlights from marvel to marvel: an ancient stone face, elaborate hieroglyphic, a wall full of miniature sarcophagi, an inscrutable sculpted cat, twin inscriptions of the papyrus stalk and the lotus flower, symbols of perpetuity and rebirth. On the second floor, I briefly joined the throngs surrounding the museum’s great hit: King Tutankhamen’s wide-eyed, gold-and-blue funerary mask, back on familiar territory after its American museum-tour in the 1970s.

Down the hall stood the museum’s recently opened mummy rooms. For an extra $10 or so, a 20th-century stranger can steal through the cool darkness, peering at the clasped hands, the splayed toes and the taut cheeks of 11 swaddled brown corpses, including the long-reigning King Ramses II, who ruled for about 60 years in the 13th century BC.

Then we headed for the edge of town and the pyramids. Amid the honking and jostling of contemporary urban Cairo, almost certainly the loudest city on this earth, Afifi and I reviewed basics of the Old World.

Even before the ruler Menes united the upper and lower regions of Egypt 3,100 years before Christ, Egyptian thinkers and builders had produced a stark wonderland of inventions, discoveries and monuments--the world’s earliest known calendars, possibly the first writing on paper and some of the earliest seagoing ships.

The landscape of their kingdom was and is uncomplicated: a wide, flat series of deserts, with a great river running through its middle, supporting virtually all life. Because the Nile runs south to north--entering from Ethiopia, emptying into the Mediterranean Sea--southern Egypt, where Luxor and Aswa^n lie, is known as “Upper Egypt.” Northern Egypt, where Alexandria and Cairo lie, is “Lower Egypt.”

This geography is crucial to anyone trying to assess the risks of a trip to Egypt. When extremists four years ago launched their campaign to oust the secular government and establish a strict Islamic state, it was in Upper Egypt, 120 to 200 miles south of Cairo, that violence escalated most dramatically. Targeting tourists, terrorist snipers staged about 20 attacks on trains, buses and Nile cruise boats, killing eight foreigners, wounding about 50.

In turn, the government cracked down on the militants’ hide-outs, seized scores of suspects and went on to hang dozens. (The overall death figure for police, civilian victims and militants is estimated at more than 880.) By last spring, tourism-related attacks had dwindled dramatically and Nile cruises from Cairo to the south, suspended in the worst days of the campaign, had resumed. (In November, suspected Muslim militants staged four sniper attacks on trains in southern Egypt, killing one Egyptian man and wounding 24 people, among them two German tourists and one French. But Cairo has remained free of major incidents.)

“What we have here,” Afifi was saying, “is life and death. This is what Egypt is all about.”

This had nothing to do with politics or religion. We were in Memphis now, about 19 miles south of Cairo. Outside, date palms lined the Nile and its adjacent canals. Suddenly, the greenery ceased and the cream-colored desert began. Life and death.

Soon we were standing where another Ramses II rests. In this effigy, he is limestone, 40 feet long--about eight times the size of the mummy in the museum. Ramses II actually rests here and there throughout the country; historians say the leader was so eager to be remembered that he not only put up a staggering number of monuments but also had workers chisel his name on existing monuments, thereby effacing the legacies of previous rulers. This particular representation once stood nearby at the gates of the Sanctuary of Ptah.

Memphis is overshadowed by the pyramids at Giza, but it’s a logical to way to approach the pyramids. Memphis is the old capital, the point at which Upper and Lower Egypt are said to meet, and the living city that buried its royal dead in the necropolises of Giza and Saqqa^ra.

Historians estimate that most of the landmarks here, and elsewhere in Egypt, were in place by 2400 BC. The list includes about 100 known pyramids and a larger number of ruling-class tombs, many outside Cairo, many others in Upper Egypt’s Valley of the Kings.

These are the landscapes that seem only nominally earthly: the miles of sand, the sudden, unyielding geometry, the unimpeded sun revolving above, a stray camel out at the edge of the picture. But earthly habits and the Cairene spirit of negotiation live here, too. The first plunderers reached these monuments not long after their completion, thus inventing the global trade in Egyptian artifact sales and exports.

The arrival of Alexander the Great and the Greeks in 332 BC, followed about 300 years later by the Romans, only accelerated the process. By the time Napoleon and other European cultural raiders arrived to begin their well-documented spoil-seizing in the early 19th century, much of the most valuable loot was already missing.

From Memphis, we moved on to Saqqa^ra and the cool, dimly lit detail of Ptah-hotpe’s tomb, possibly the least-famous site I saw all day and, in its modest boxiness, the least impressive from a distance, too. (Ptah-hotpe, not a ruler, was a top management official, vizier in the 5th or 6th dynasty.) But I can already sense it intensifying in my memory while other Egyptian monuments fade. One reason could be scale: The pyramids are grand; this is intimate, about the size of a suburban home. Inside, golden morning light was leaking in through a long, narrow, deliberate opening in the exterior wall, throwing half-light on the mural work.

I always thought of Egyptian murals as static, decorous processions of royal family members with long necks and angled arms. But these murals, etched and inked about 2,400 years before Christ, had grit and vivid color and sudden violence--real life, in all its non-static disorder: workers bringing in the harvest, leopards mating, a lion mauling an ox, a jackal tearing at an antelope’s neck. The skin of the Nubians shone in rich brown pigment; their plaited hair was jet black. The stalks of the papyrus and lotus were vivid green--copper, Afifi explained, employed by an artist who knew that copper would oxidize green.

Like most tourists these days, I got my first glimpse of Giza’s pyramids during stop-and-go-traffic: There was the car beside us; there were some billboards for Singer and Coca-Cola, and there was the last remaining Wonder of the World, looming beside a second, somewhat smaller, pyramid, a third that was substantially smaller, and a lumpy, crumbling non-triangular thing about 240 feet long. The Sphinx. I paid my $3 and entered the complex.

I peered a few minutes at the fallen-away face of the Sphinx, whose nose has been missing for at least 190 years, and its perfect paws, rendered immaculate by recent reconstruction. No revelations. I tramped around the mid-sized pyramid of Khafre and the small pyramid of Menkaure, watched the hired camels carry their human cargo across the well-trodden plain, and finally approached the Pyramid of Khufu, also known as the Pyramid of Cheops, also known as the Great Pyramid of Giza.

In a landscape of absurdly big things, it is the biggest. It stands 449 feet high, covers 13 acres, includes an estimated 2.3 million limestone rocks weighing roughly 2.5 tons each. It throws a substantial shadow, in which camels crumple to sleep. In its 46 centuries, it has survived invasions, plagues, sandstorms, graffiti efforts dating to the 15th century (invisible now), government restoration and, in 1978, an adjacent concert by the Grateful Dead. It now endures the indignity of a nightly light-and-sound show.

Because I saw a line of other people waiting to do so, I, too, paid an extra $3 and crawled inside it, where I experienced uninteresting, dank darkness in the company of equally unintrigued German and Japanese tourists.

Eventually I found my way out, and back to the city and to Khan el Khalili, Cairo’s capital of haggling.

Since at least the 11th century, the Khan el Khalili area has served as a center for trade in Cairo. Thousands of tourists daily join the thousands of Cairenes doing business there among an estimated 900 merchants. During the 14th century, the costliest merchant counters held spices, gems and textiles, sugar, sheep, tobacco, ivory, ostrich feathers and slaves. Buyers and sellers came by camel caravan from Sudan, by ship and by foot from Persia.

I came by taxi from the Inter-Continental hotel, and found the following: Spices, gems, textiles. Fruits, vegetables, luggage. Kitchen utensils, garage utensils, enormous copper pots. Toy camels. T-shirts. Plate-glass windows. Hanging silks of a dozen colors. “I am number four,” said Mustafa Hamama, whom I paused to photograph, framed by the well-worn doorway of his tiny, copper-heavy shop.

His great-grandfather bought the spot in 1856, Hamama told me. His grandfather followed, then his father, now him, No. 4. He urged me inside to inspect his pots and plates more closely.

“Maybe you’ll find something,” he said, drawing on those generations of guile and good humor. “Then,” he added with a winning grin, “we’ll fight.”

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Guidebook / Dealing With Cairo

Telephone numbers and prices: Egypt’s country code is 20. Cairo’s city code is 2. All prices are approximate and computed at a rate of 3.4 Egyptian pounds to the dollar. Hotel rates are for a double room for one night, excluding 7% tax and 12% service charge. Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only.

Getting there: British Airways and Lufthansa flys daily to Cairo from Los Angeles International Airport via London or Frankfurt.

Where to stay: Hotel Semiramis Inter-Continental, Corniche el Nil, Garden City; telephone (800) 327-0200 or 355-7171; fax 356-3020. High-end, Nile-adjacent, some distance from city center. Rates: $170-$195. Ramses Hilton Hotel, 1115 Corniche el Nil, Cairo; tel. (800) HILTONS or 575-8000; fax 575-7152. Nile-adjacent, orderly refuge. Near popular shopping arcade. Rates: $160-$176. Mena House Oberoi Hotel and Casino, Pyramids Road, Giza; tel. (800) 562-3764 or 383-3222; fax 383-7777. Colonial holdover, host to countless heads of state, convenient to pyramids but not Cairo proper. Rates: $140-$218.

Where to eat: Felfela Garden, 15, Midan Huda Shaarawi, tel. 392-2751. Affordable Egyptian menu, casual atmosphere; $10-$20. Khan el Khalili Restaurant and Naguib Mahfouz Coffee Shop, 5 El Badistan Lane, Khan el Khalili, Cairo, tel. 590-3788. A cool, quiet, handsomely decorated retreat amid tumult of the bazaar. Falafels, sesame salads; meals for two, $20-$40. Nile Pharaoh and Gold Pharaoh, 31 El Nil St., Giza, tel. 570-1000. Touristy, but if you have little time and want to combine an evening Nile cruise, a buffet and belly-dancing and whirling-dervish performances, this is the way; cruise, entertainment and dinner for two, $45.

For more information: Egyptian Tourist Authority, 8383 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 215, Beverly Hills 90211; (213) 653-8815.