but didn’t have the energy to emulate it. Sleepwalking, I collected my luggage, collapsed into a taxi and headed through the inky desert night toward town.
A sprawling conurbation with a population estimated at five million, Alexandria seemed to be under a wartime blackout. Cars blundered along with low beams or none at all. There were lampposts but no bulbs, neon signs but no fizz. Amid the blur of dun-colored apartment buildings, no window shined. I wondered if the cabbie had followed a fast track through a neighborhood that had been evacuated. Chunks of concrete and piles of debris dotted the streets, as if they were under construction. Or were they being demolished?
We swept to a stop at the celebrated Cecil Hotel on Midan Saad Zaghloul, a main square, the epicenter of Durrell’s literary depiction of the city, The Alexandria Quartet. The hotel lobby and its potted palms lay beyond a metal detector, unmanned at this hour, perhaps on the assumption that terrorists sleep too. The snoozing desk clerk raised his head from the counter only long enough for me to register.
I was in my room unpacking when day broke, the muezzin called faithful Muslims to prayer and sunlight fell like a gold bar through the window onto a table topped by a paper arrow angled toward Mecca. I was soon lulled to sleep by the tide surging against rocks four stories below. Durrell had written that the sea with its “dim momentum in the mind is the fugue upon which this writing is made.” For me the Mediterranean was amniotic ftuid—no, a mild narcotic—that I trusted to sedate me for hours.
But all too early, the phone rang, and a perky voice asked, “Did I wake you?” It was a secretary at the American Center reminding me that I was scheduled to give a lecture tomorrow. “I also thought you might be interested in today’s program at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Ibrahim Abdel Meguid—I’m sure you know his novels—is speaking to a group from the States. If you’d like to attend, please feel free.”
I told her I’d be there and tried to get back to sleep. But the lullaby of the sea had been supplanted by the hotel’s grumbling to life, groaning and creaking as guests flushed toilets, showered and rode the lumbering caged elevators down to breakfast. I didn’t join them at the buffet. I was eager to explore the city.
Durrell had poetically evoked it, preserved it so lovingly in the sweet aspic of his purple prose, that droves of undergraduates still prowled the streets toting the Quartet as their guide. As a twenty-year-old I had read the four novels—Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea-and liberally cadged lines for letters I sent to impressionable coeds. Rereading Justine recently, I was stunned by the number of paragraphs that had remained lodged in my memory after forty-five years:
“Capitally, what is this city of ours? What is resumed in the word Alexandria? Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbor bar. But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them. The sexual provender which lies to hand is staggering in its variety and profusion ... Alexandria was the great winepress of love.
“Long sequences of tempura. Light filtered through the essence of lemons. An air full of brick-dust—sweet-smelling brick-dust and the odor of hot pavements slaked with water.”
Passing through the hotel’s metal detector and out the revolving door, I had no illusion that a winepress of love awaited me. Durrell’s Alexandria didn’t exist even in his day. As he described the place in a letter to his friend Henry Miller, it was a “steaming humid ftatness—not a hill or mound anywhere—choking to the bursting point with bones and the crummy deposits of wiped out cultures. Then this smashed up broken down shabby Neapolitan town with its Levantine mounds of houses peeling in the sun ... no music, no art, no real gaiety. A saturated middle European boredom laced with drink and Packards and beach cabins. No Subject of Conversation Except Money.”
Three decades earlier, E.M. Forster had written even more dismissively of the contemporary city. In a preface to the 1922 edition of his Alexandria: A History and a Guide, he characterized the thousand years of the Arab Period as “of no importance.” As for his own day, “the ‘sights’ of Alexandria are in themselves not interesting, but they fascinate when we approach them through the past. Alas! The modern city calls for no enthusiastic comment.”
This made me want to defend Alexandria, to love it as a cockroach loves its ugly offspring. Seediness, shabbiness, loud crowds and pandemonium can have their appeal. The world would be poorer if every corner of the globe aped the orderliness of the United States and Europe. So what if the city’s legendary past had disappeared under asphalt and broken bricks? You had to admire its survival instincts. Didn’t you?
I was too preoccupied with my own survival to consider the question. On the Corniche, the coastal road and its waterfront walkway, I confronted eight lanes of hurtling, horn-blowing traffic. Billboards proclaimed Alexandria the CULTURAL CAPITAL OF THE ARAB WORLD IN 2008, and Durrell had written of “horse-drawn cabs (‘carriages of love’) which dawdled up and down the sea.” But these days dawdling lovers would be crushed or asphyxiated by carbon monoxide.
According to urban legend four people are killed every day on this curving east-west drag strip. I could believe it. Crowds lined the curb in both directions, poised like hurdlers prepared to dart out and leap over fenders and bumpers whenever the cars and trucks and buses and taxis choked to a stop.
I made it to the median strip, bucked up my courage, then plunged on to the far side. The walkway was thick with pedestrians happy, like me, to have pulled through alive. But we had to watch where we stepped. The pavement had disintegrated into a checkerboard of cracked tiles, gravel pits, drains without grills and open ditches snaking with wires and pipes.
The wind and sea that Forster wrote were “as pure as when Menelaus ... landed here 3,000 years ago,” smelled now of sewers and rotting fish. Out in the harbor, under the gentle chocolate waves, lay the ruins of a metropolis designed by Alexander the Great and nourished to full glory by the Ptolemaic kings and queens. But seismic cataclysms had consigned that city to the deep in AD 365. This coast, like the rest of the littoral between Alexandria and Tangier, had always been a geological shatter zone, a landscape riven by fault lines and grinding tectonic plates. Over the millennia, earthquakes and tsunamis destroyed entire civilizations—and the remaking and unmaking of the region has continued to this day. Every so often, Atlas shrugged, mountains moved, and the sea reestablished itself where it pleased.
The Pharos, a lighthouse more than four hundred feet high and one of the Seven Wonders of the World, had served for seventeen centuries as the symbol of Alexandria and as a beacon for ships approaching the treacherous shores of Africa. It, too, had crumbled in stages, and now existed as shards on the seabed and as building blocks incorporated into the fifteenth-century Qait Bey fortress.
Two French archeologists, Jean-Yves Empereur and Franck Goddio, had vied in mapping and photographing a great trove of underwater treasures. Busts, statues, sphinxes and obelisks were dredged up and displayed. Entrepreneurial fishermen offered boat trips and diving expeditions to this ancient royal quarter and to what some scholars claim was Cleopatra’s castle. But I wasn’t tempted. I stayed on land and watched a team of brown fishermen in brown underpants drag empty nets out of the brown water. From what I’d read, harbor divers have to be disinfected to ward off skin diseases.
Braving the Corniche stampede again, I roved through neighborhoods where the clocks appeared to have stopped decades ago and the residents had regressed to village life in the dense mesh of the vast metropolis. In cafes, men without women smoked sheesha and played dominoes. In back lane shops women without men went about their daily rounds dressed in hijabs, or headscarves. Some wore the niqab, a veil that covered the face except for slits at the eyes. Children, dogs, cats and blowing plastic bags eddied around their feet.
On every corner a heap
