As I prepare to enter the historic Gamaleya district in Cairo, I realise that Amir Al Gyosh Al Goani street is blocked by a donkey cart. The cart seems at first to be carrying a mountain of large, unusually shaped bread loaves. But they are luffas, skeletons of a vegetable that in the Nile Delta grows to gargantuan size, used as sponges for everything from bathing to car washing.
You can see why every Cairo governor has tried to ban these road-blocking carts, but they experienced a bit of a comeback after the Egyptian pound suffered a steep devaluation in March and the cost of fuel went up. One governor in the city of Giza is said to have refused to ban donkey carts while they continue to adorn the 20 pound note. Donkey carts on a money note? I pull one note from my pocket.
The drawing is of a pharaonic military chariot, the light-weight vehicle that once revolutionised warfare, enabling the Egyptian pharaohs to build a vast empire. Dominated by its mediaeval mosques and minarets, poor, often squalid, Gamaleya has the reputation of being its own world, separate from the rest of the universe. The novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who was born here, built his novels like a dreamscape, immune to some extent to the changes of modern life: a testament, he once said, to “the past beauty of the well-civilised centuries.
” Perhaps there is something to that. One young woman working on a local project to revive the old Islamic crafts of the district tells me she has never been to the pyrami.