story. His observation that ‘all the donkeys in Christendom and most of the boys in Egypt, I think, are at its door’ is more credible. Whatever its state when Twain visited in 1868, during the 1870s it became the hotel to which the British firm Thomas Cook and Son sent their tourists. In the same year that the hotel had opened, Thomas Cook had organized an excursion by a chartered train from Leicester to Loughborough to attend a temperance meeting, and so gave rise to the modern travel industry. The hotel prospered greatly through this association, expanded, modernized and refurbished in ‘Eighteenth Dynasty Edwardian’. By the 1920s, when trips to Egypt became all the rage in the wake of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, it was simply the grandest hotel in Cairo, a landmark in its own right and a base from which to visit other parts of the Middle East.
In the late afternoon the hotel’s shady terrace was the place to meet. The terrace was raised up to head-height above the level of Ibrahim Pasha Street, and partly covered by a balcony supported on cast iron pillars. Waiters in tarbushes and long white tunics moved between the wicker chairs and tables. A pianist played an upright in a self-absorbed manner. If the weather was too hot, or too cold, mixed company could gather below the dome of coloured glass in the Moorish Hall; the Long Bar was an all-male preserve. In the evening the hotel’s dress code was strictly enforced and male diners had to wear dinner jackets. On nights when the Pharaonic ballroom was opened up, white tie was required. Yet for all its formality the parties held there could become very raucous, and then more often than not the pair of bare-breasted caryatids that flanked the grand staircase would fall victim to some puerile outrage.
For the young officers of a cavalry regiment, the social season gathered pace in February and March as the polo season reached its climax. The whirl of cocktail parties and balls also coincided with the preparations for brigade manoeuvres. The lack of sleep began to take its toll on Shan and as the heat began to mount the regimental exercises became torturous. He recalled ‘days spent in a blind sweating fury of galloping drill’, how he ‘sat on a burning hilltop and watched unfortunate men crawling over sharp rocks’. He continued to do his job ‘almost right, but wrong enough to get cursed for it’. Shan’s youth and energy carried him through, and he even found time to play polo, maintain a considerable correspondence, read Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and D.H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (written only eight years before), and begin learning Arabic.
Hackett chose a comfortable spot from which to reflect on his first three months in the Cairo Cavalry Brigade – a deck-chair aboard the SS Aquitania as she crossed the Mediterranean. It was the beginning of April. He was going off on leave, to Italy for a holiday before returning to England, and the limbo of transit afforded him the opportunity to recall such moments as the morning after the 12th Lancers’ Ball, riding out at six ‘full of champagne and exalted to the verge of immortality’.
It is a commonplace to say that Egypt is the Nile. The truth thus obscured by cliché might be better expressed as: Egypt depends on the management of the Nile. Flood control and irrigation enabled the kingdoms of the Pharaohs to rise and remain the keys to the country’s prosperity. But dependence on the Nile has also limited Egypt’s development upstream of the delta, to the river valley, the narrow fertile strip closed in by rocky hills and desert: 99 per cent of the population lives on 5 per cent of the land. Travel but a short distance east or west from the life-giving watercourse and an uncompromising wilderness starts abruptly at the point where the irrigation pipes end. From outer space the thin green ribbon is merely the boundary between the Libyan Desert, part of the Sahara, and the ‘Eastern Desert’, the Sahara al-Sharqiya that borders the Red Sea. From the air, approaching Cairo airport from the south and looking east, there is very little on the ground to suggest proximity to a city of seventeen million people. A drab empty plain stretched out under a blanket of yellowish cloud, the plains on which the 8th Hussars had trained. The RAF aerodrome has grown into the busiest airport in Africa.
The taxi driver wiped the dust off the back seat. Turning the key in the ignition activated a robotic voice somewhere behind the dashboard: ‘bism illah ar-rahman ar-rahim’, ‘in the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate’, an appeal for protection before entering the Cairo traffic that was not unwarranted. The driver raced to catch up with the nearest traffic jam only to decide it was not moving slowly enough, so he raced off to find a worse one. Just as the traffic looked as though it might be moving again, he decided he had been better off before and did another U-turn from the nearside lane in order to rejoin the first queue. It was a game of inches, who could get just far enough ahead to cut into another lane, who could get closest to his neighbour. A large medallion hung from the rear-view mirror, the name of Allah on one side and Muhammad on the other, angular gold letters on a black ground. It fretted against a string of blood-stone beads. The driver was not worried about the delay, even though he was not on the meter. He saw it as an opportunity to talk up his Lovely-Jubbly Pyramid Tour. After all, everyone who came to Cairo visited the Pyramids, so why not straightaway? ‘First the Biramid – the Great Biramid, the Sfiks, rider camel, lovely-jubbly – then to the hotel, no?’ His eyes inquired in the mirror. It was the only time he used it, even after the blockage was behind him and the taxi was speeding past blocks of flats, under grimy flyovers blackened by diesel fumes from the buses and lorries that were as slalom gates to any Cairene car driver. On curves, the beads and the medallion hanging plumb measured the increment of the vehicle’s list. It seemed to be a matter of honour among young male pedestrians to step off the curb without looking. There was no question of waiting for a gap in the traffic – as if there were one. They followed the theory that every road was crossable at the precise moment that they wanted to cross it and set out to test that belief at every opportunity. Their bravado was sometimes breathtaking, their timing immaculate, finding fleeting spaces between the cars. Some crossed with the insouciance of a sleepwalker in a silent movie, others, like matadors, stood side-on between lanes, sighting along the left shoulder at the charging black and white taxis, swaying out of the way of wing mirrors that would gore them through. The high-rise apartment blocks gave way to the once-elegant avenues of Khedive Ismail’s European quarter, the Cairo that Hackett knew. Turning into a side street off what was once Fuad I Avenue, clogged with cars parked two deep at the curb, the taxi pulled up outside the Windsor Hotel. ‘Biramid tomorrow?’
The chief appeal of the Windsor Hotel is claimed to be its old-fashioned atmosphere. It is said to have preserved the charm of the British era, but anyone who took the hotel to be representative of that time would be convinced that the past was a scruffy place. It has more in common with a dilapidated south-coast boarding house than the grandeur and luxe of Shepheard’s, the Meena House or the Continental. Rather than being old-fashioned it is merely old; the dark wood panelling and scuffed reception desk, the antique cage lift that is started and stopped by well-judged use of the resistor lever, the door-lock so worn it had to be picked with its own key, the lumpy bedstead, the plumbing. The dining-room smelled of over-boiled vegetables. The sheets piled on the landing were grey. Even the metal detector, a detached portal standing a little inside the front door as a sop to those guests who remembered the bombing of a tour-bus outside the Egyptian Museum and the massacre of fifty-eight tourists at Luxor in 1997, even this was old. Only the room rates showed signs of renovation. After the British withdrew to their bases on the Suez Canal in 1946, the building continued to be used as a club for non-commissioned officers. The bar on the first floor has retained the homely gentility of a pub lounge, a brass foot-rail and high-stools, settles upholstered in velveteen, stools fashioned from beer barrels, old travel posters on the walls. An Egyptian TV crew was using it as the location for a scene of a period drama and was blocking all access to its exceptionally cold beer.
In the postwar years negotiations between the British and Egyptian governments dragged on and failed to produce mutually acceptable terms for Egypt’s independence. The situation for the occupiers changed during the course of one day in January 1952. Egyptian frustration had led to increasingly frequent guerrilla attacks against the British positions in the Canal Zone.
