44
CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
fezzes— in Egypt called a tarboosh—into an enclosure. To call
it barnlike is to dignify that square-shaped factorylike warehouse with its low ceiling, its sickly yellow lighting and its
wild melange of milling, sweating men. We were lined up
against a counter under a huge photograph of King Farouk,
while a slovenly official in blue serge and tarboosh took his
place behind a rough wooden table and began to check our
names twice against what was evidently a blacklist. Ahead of
me in the line was a passenger whom I recognized by his name
as Armenian. I struck up a conversation with him. He was a
well-to-do merchant who had escaped from Rumania a step
ahead of the satellite police. Eventually he hoped to reach
Brazil.
"The Turks killed my father and brother and burned our
home. The Nazis killed my other brother. Only my mother is
alive in Rumania. She begged me to leave in hopes that I
could keep alive the family name."
The bureaucracy at Almaza Airport was appalling. Passports were tossed from hand to hand; baggage was examined
and re-examined; orders were shouted and replies shouted
back; every official managed to interfere with the work another
had done or was trying to do—and all this amid an ear-splitting babble of screaming and hysterical, gesticulating argument. A horde of porters, idlers, and hotel agents streamed
through an exit to my left. Every few minutes, when the
clamor grew unbearable, an official would literally howl above
the tumult. There would be a momentary silence and then the
noise began again.
The porters were a far cry from what I had been accustomed to in the United States. They were dressed in catch-ascatch-can clothing—some in European dress or parts thereof;
others in the traditional costume of the Egyptian fellah, or
everyday laborer, consisting principally of a long-sleeved cotton nightshirt called a gallabiya, which came almost to the
ankles. It was open at the neck and revealed cither a vest or
naked skin. The feet were bare, or sometimes encased in