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Cairo is a kaleidoscope of light and color. From the air, as I arrived for the first time, the city looked wearily drab and very much like the desert it sits on, but Cairo is no desert. Instead, a thriving, throbbing, turbulent city of tremendous contrasts and contradictions awaits on the shores of the Nile. Called “The Mother of the World” by her citizens, Cairo works, plays, lives, and plans the future as she recalls a former glory that is still vigorously present.


The ancient monuments, Pharonic times, and the deep history of (Cairo) is the great attraction to which the world responds; the reason for the tourist industry and all its associated parts in Egypt. The Nile Valley, filled with treasures beyond our imaginations, is an amazing place, and I have many favorite sites: Karnak Temples and the Valley of the Kings, the obelisk quarry at Aswan, Sakarra and the Giza Plateau - especially the Sphinx - the Cairo Museum and the Roman aqueduct that runs through the city toward the Khan al Khalili - these are the greatly magnificent remnants of other worlds in other times, but my real love goes primarily to some of the lesser places that tourists don't often find, and are not written about in guide books.

I once found a very old building in downtown Cairo when I went to a tailor shop on its upper floor. The building was old, by my standards anyway, probably between 250 and 300 years. Much of its interior had fallen to ruin. The stair case, a graceful, beautiful curving thing that led gently toward the top, was so worn that the stone steps had grooves where more than two centuries of feet had climbed, and the banisters and ballustrades, missing some sections altogether, were of wood with no varnish remaining but were not splintered and rough. All the hands that had gripped them had worn them smooth.