Free Around the World in 50 Years by Albert Podell Page A

percent of the country; the rest depended on the Nile, around which there was no space left for a campground.
    After blundering down mud lanes and floundering through streams in the dark, we reluctantly settled for sleeping on the wide shoulder of a dirt road beside a stand of date palms abutting a cotton field. The mosquitoes, the first we’d encountered in Africa, were fierce and noisy, and the air smelled of manure, but at least Alex’s crooks and con men were unlikely to find us.
    The police found us instead. Just as we had the camper set up and were about to turn in, three policemen popped out of the field and indicated they wanted us to move. They spoke no English, but kept pointing around and saying “klefti” and drew their fingers across their throats accompanied by a sscccchhhttt sound, giving us to understand that cutthroats abounded who would slit us as we slept. At that point, we’d have been willing to believe anything anyone told us about Alex, so we broke camp and let a cop climb into each car to show us to a safer spot. For half an hour, we drove along roads a few inches above the waterline, crept over creaky bridges, and skidded down muddy lanes until we reached a spot not much different or far removed from the one we’d left.
    We thanked the boys in blue for their help, and for being the first honest people we’d met in Alex. They were like friends in an enemy camp, and we missed them when they left.
    We also missed a flashlight, a light meter, a wrench, half a seat belt, and the dashboard ashtray.
    Early the next morning, one of the policemen was back, banging on the camper door. He gestured that he wanted us to give him a toothbrush, something he’d evidently forgotten to swipe the night before. We were so flabbergasted we gave him one.
    We left Alex and cut through the delta toward Cairo on a new, paved expressway. The traffic was fast and heavy. The desert was gone, drowned by the river. Irrigated fields, stands of trees, mosques, homes, factories, and restaurants lined the road. It was a wholly different Egypt, mechanized and modern.
    Cairo went by in a rush, a jumble of impressions, eight days of work and sightseeing and confusion. I remember isolated things: three days spent getting visas for Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, India, and Pakistan; crowded streets; repeatedly getting lost on the wrong side of the river; mosques and monuments; the Cairo Museum, where the world’s most vital collection of archaeological objects was stuck in a dark tomb of a building, stacked like flour sacks in a warehouse; Woodrow sick with dysentery, and Willy and Manu with mild cases of Cairo colon; the Continental Hotel, a relic of Old World elegance, with cavernous, thick-carpeted halls and spacious rooms, where we slept between sheets for the first time since Benghazi, only the second time in 77 days.
    I remember our toiling all week to get the cars and equipment in shape for the long, hot haul across the deserts of the Middle East; answering several dozen letters from friends and sponsors who, not hearing from us since Spain, had given us up for lazy or lost; and the meals at Rex, a wonderful bistro near the hotel where you could get a delicious bowl of spaghetti with salad and bread for ten cents. But most of all, when I think back to our days in Cairo, I remember the stunning women, the totalitarian atmosphere, and one very special camel driver.
    Cairo was a paradise of women, bronzed, graceful, alluring—and unattainable. They were the sultriest in the Moslem world, having shed the veil and adopted such Western fashions as short skirts, high heels, and low necklines. On our first day I developed a stiff neck from watching them walk by. As good Moslem women, they did not fraternize with foreigners, not even a foreigner like me who can pass for an Arab when he tries. And believe me, I was trying.
    But one of our group—let me call him X—thought he might overcome this problem