46
CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
Despite my fears, there were rooms available at the Continental, a long-ranging hotel with a terrace fronting on one of
the city's main streets. We each drew a long, bare, high-ceilinged room, its furniture consisting of a bureau with flyspecked mirror, a mat, a washbasin, and a high, squeaky ironposter bed. We ordered a midnight snack, served by a
white-robed Sudanese waiter wearing a high red fez. As we
ate, my Armenian friend spoke bitterly of his experiences.
Had the police, he wondered, seized his mother, perhaps tortured her to learn his whereabouts? Was she even alive at this
moment? He was eating the good, rich food of Cairo: had his
mother even a hard crust of bread?
"Asvadez medz eh," I said to him in Armenian. "God is
merciful."
Then we separated and went to our rooms.
Tired as I was, I lay for a long time, thinking, before sleep
came. My plans, for the moment, were not too clear. One
man I had to see: Ahmed Hussein, leader of the Green Shirts
of Egypt, who I knew had been in the United States lecturing
and organizing as an Arab agent. I counted on him to introduce me to the undercover world of Egypt. But I felt, intuitively, that I must not be overcager. First, I must get the feel
of Cairo; learn something of the customs, habits, peculiarities,
even smells, of Egypt and its people. So far as anyone was
concerned, I was no longer Charles Morey. He now vanished and I became myself, using my real name—an American
of Armenian descent, a Christian sympathizer with all things
Egyptian and Arabic.
And on that thought, I fell asleep.
I was awakened, it seemed only a few hours later, by the
braying of a donkey. I looked at my wrist watch. Six a.m.!
At first I thought this a novel, even romantic way to be
aroused, but that fiendish animal awoke me punctually at
the same unearthly hour every morning of the twenty-nine
days I stayed at the Continental. I devised wild schemes to
silence it. I thought of threatening its master, of hurling a