Cairo: The King's Jungle
43
light of early dawn. A giant sheath of awesome rock, it
leaped up from the depths of the earth to the heavens, a flame
of stone nearly three miles high. It seemed alive to my tortured eyes, like a Cyclops challenging our flight. It was the
most sinister peak in the glowering, snow-capped mountains
that reared their white crests on either side as we roared perilously between them at more than four miles a minute.
I had no recollection of the rest of the trip. I have no idea
of the route. I took neither food nor drink. I suffered nightmares. I writhed and tossed and broke out in wave after wave
of alternate hot fevers and cold sweats. ... It was symbolic.
I was leaving the West and plunging into the maelstrom of
the Middle East—a transition from one world to another
radically different. The Eastern world—the world of tomorrow's major revolution—was bathed in anarchy and in bloodletting, a mirror showing the face of man as no man would
wish to see it. . . .
I awoke to hear the hostess announce: "We are landing in
Cairo."
It was seven p.m., exactly on schedule. The day was March
2, 1948. "The month of March, the month of trouble,"
Mother used to say. By an odd coincidence it was on March
I, 1921, that we left the Old World to come to the New.
Now, exactly twenty-seven years later, I was returning to the
Middle East, that mysterious, often sinister part of the world
about which we really know so little, and that little so glamorized and distorted by partisans as to resemble fiction more
than truth.
THE KING'S JUNGLE
I ALIGHTED from the plane into the jungle of Almaza
Airport (where an advocate of "white supremacy" would certainly have had instant apoplexy). We were herded by a
dozen dark-skinned officials and plainclothesmen wearing