74
CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
with my pictures of the parade, and also those of his daughters
Faith and Liberty, he insisted that I come along to a Green
Shirt rally to be held at nearby Damanhur. "In 1936 the people there almost killed me because I was anti-British. Now
they are begging me to come and speak to them. Come and
see—and bring your camera."
A GLIMPSE OF NATIVE LIFE
WE DROVE to Damanhur, a few hours distant, and the trip
was an education in itself. I saw graphic evidence of the curses
that have tortured Egypt since the days of the Pharaohs—
poverty, ignorance, disease, feudalism. I saw squat, sunbaked
villages with bleached mud huts, with streams of sewage flowing into side canals. Swarms of half-naked children, their skin
covered with running sores, raced in and out of the huts and
the filth. In the fields, the fellaheen worked in back-breaking,
dawn-to-dark toil for three hundred and fifty-five days of the
year, with only ten days off for feast days. The mode of living,
agriculture, and irrigation had changed but little in the last
five thousand years. Their life expectation was less than thirtyone years.2 There were seventeen million fellaheen in Egypt
—surely among the most miserable human beings on earth.
I saw these wretched subhuman Egyptians digging a ditch:
they were scooping the earth by hand and throwing it into
fiber baskets. I saw them irrigating a field: one fellah was
scooping water from the canal into an earthen pot, passing it
to a fellah above him, who poured it into the irrigation ditch.
I saw a young woman squat along the road and pass her water:
then she let her skirts fall, and resumed her walk. Men and
children used the walls of their pathetic homes as public latrines. The nauseating odor of human urine and excrement
2
1949.
According to the World Health Organization report of August
10,