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CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
late afternoon when we arrived, but there were few pedestrians, mostly old people. Roadblocks, sandbags, dragon's
teeth were everywhere, and barbed wire coated with rust.
Most of the homes were deserted, the shops boarded up.
Tommies in khaki, wearing berets with red pompoms,
prowled in armored cars. They searched and questioned everyone crossing from one zone to another; after that, Jewish and
Arab vigilantes took over. Overturned trucks lay rusting,
stripped of tires and movable gear. Dynamited buildings were
everywhere. The dark red pool in the middle of the street
might be the spot where a horse had bled to death, or a man
was shot. The ripped-up sidewalk marked the explosion of
a mortar.
Cities, I thought, are like human beings. Dressed in brick,
mortar, stone and steel, they beat with a pulse that is the collective soul of their people. They live, breathe, and die like
humans. There are ghost cities; cities of sin or sorrow, hard
and harsh and masculine like New York; reckless and free
cities; tradition-bound cities; hectic cities; sleepy cities; or gay
and feminine cities, like Paris. When they are living, cities have
souls of their own. But when the creeping paralysis of terror
comes, they die inside like human beings.
The little things that make the world come alive—a woman
with a shopping basket, gossipping; a man waiting for a bus,
smoking; an exasperated mother spanking her bawling child;
a busy grocery, a coffee shop, a traffic policeman—all these
were now gone from Jerusalem. Fear and death were in the
air you breathed, in every step you took. There was the terror
of the unseen trigger-hand—English, Arab, Jew, depending
on which side you stood—in the whine of every bullet, the
crash of every shell. The poisons of hatred, long simmering,
were now erupting and spilling over on every side of the once
Holy City. A sense of impending calamity hung in the air; a
dread vacuum was the new spirit, and desolation the "new
look" of the tomb city.