A Writer's World by Jan Morris Read Free Book Online

festivities.
    Liberation Province, like many other projects of the regime, is a courageous and imaginative conception, but if this government is in many ways reasonable, it is also despotic. The Press is muzzled; laws of profound effect are issued suddenly and unpredictably; foreign issues are shamelessly exploited for purely political ends; opponents of the regime are removed without ceremony. So at a whisper from the cheer-leaders at Bai-el-’Arab there is a roar of approval and a chorus of ‘Long Live Major Magdi Hassanein!’
    Inside the school some of the candidates for Liberation Province are lined up for visitors to see, like material for some new master race. ‘They must all be under 30, and literate, and of good appearance. See how intelligent they look! They will wear a fine new gabardine uniform in Liberation Province. They will be examined by psychologists to see if they are suitable. Come and see them taking their written examination.’
    There they sit at a wooden table, these new Egyptians, each in a spotless white galabiya , each fingering a newly sharpened pencil, each with a virgin question sheet in front of him. ‘They will start in a moment. It is a very stringent test. Watch them prepare for it! No, no, certainly they have not been chosen already. They are about to begin. Wait!’ But here the candidates rise as one man, with a look of ineffable piety upon their faces, and bawl a few more ‘Long Lives!’ before resuming their academic duties.
    *
    So despotism applies itself to the humanities, and it may be that an iron hand is necessary for the rebuilding of Egypt, together with regular infusions of compulsory pride and loyalty. On balance, despite the scepticism of the financiers, the odium of the intellectuals, the misgivings of the liberals, the fears of the Jewish minority and the growing alienation of the Arab world, al-Gumhuria seems to be good for Egypt. But who can foresee whether the thrusting young men of the junta, with their examinations and their big battalions, will be able to last the course; or whether they will be outlived, like so many before them, by the flies, the mud houses and the old tin cans?
    On the other side of Cairo is the oasis of Kharga, on the west bank of the Nile, a group of small desert villages which has been traditionally a place of exile. Nestorius, who was of the opinion that the Virgin Mary could not really be called the Mother of God, was banished there after propounding this revolutionary doctrine in the fifth century, and so, it is said, was Athanasius of the Creed. Under President Nasser it was a place of incarceration for political opponents, mostly members of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, one of several detention camps into which it was very easy for a man to disappear without warning or appeal. I went there for The Times hoping to meet some of the prisoners.
    It is the perfect place for exile. It lies in a wide declivity in the western desert, about 140 miles west of the Nile, overlooked by burning bluffs and surrounded on every side by waterless sands. So unfriendly is the desert, so brooding of appearance, that it feels as though at any moment the sands may reach some momentous decision, and engulf the whole oasis, palm groves, villages, detention camp and all. A rough road, once the route of slave caravans from the Sudan, runs away north-east to the Nile; but the easiest way to get to Kharga is to take a diesel rail-car from a place on the river called Nag Hamadi. This endearing little vehicle (the locals say its father was a steam train, its mother a bus) starts very early in the morning and arrives in the shallow bowl of the oasis just as the terrible heat of the sun is at its most blistering. The passenger thus disembarks feeling rather as though he too has been fostering schisms.
    I spent a couple of days learning something of Kharga’s curious character. It had a hushed, swathed quality to it, I thought, well befitting a collection of