Behind the Correspondent's Curtain
103
lived this life—each generation adding its contribution of filth
to the common store.
If you go to Cairo, remember Aishash el Tourgoman! A
guide won't take you. Officials will shunt you away. They will
tell you I am lying. Get a friend like Yusef, one who loves his
country to the extent of risking jail time and again in the hope
of banishing the Aishash el Tourgomans from the face of
Egypt
These slums beyond slums are not found in the big cities
alone. Egypt has hundreds of living graveyards to compare
with Aishash el Tourgoman. The thousands of men. women,
and children living in this particular district are but a segment
of the millions who live like them throughout Egypt. No
Egyptian will deny this to his fellow Egyptian.1 But he will
deny it to a foreigner, so deep is his guilt in knowing that
Aishash el Tourgoman is far more typical of Egypt than ate
the boulevards, hotels, shops, and residential areas that tourists frequent. The bar of Shcpheard's, the tea tables at Groppis
(a kind of Egyptian Schrafft's), the lounge of the Semiramis,
and the elaborate hotels at Luxor are not Egypt!
Yusef
looked
at
me
speculatively.
"I know another place," he said. "It is worse than this."
"Thank you," I said. "But I've had enough for one day."
We parted company and I took the trolley back to the
Continental. I asked the Sudanese steward to prepare a hot
tub bath for me. I soaked and soaped myself thoroughly, gave
myself a scalding hairwash, and made a complete change of
clothing. For days thereafter I thought that every itch and
every sign of fatigue was a souvenir acquired in Aishash el
Tourgoman.
1
An exceptionally frank book, candidly revealing the social conditions of
the Egyptian masses, is The Fellaheen, by Father Henry Habib-Ayrout, S.J.,
published by R. Schindler, Cairo.