from Between Terror and Tourism: An Overland Trip Across North Africa

The unwritten rule—well sometimes it’s written prescriptively by reviewers—is that a travel writer must never sound letdown or disappointed. He has to remain resolutely upbeat. Negative impressions, any hint of whininess, has to be suppressed. Unless of course the Bad Trip is presented humorously. The British are best at this. Lose a leg to an alligator, stagger through the jungle bled white by leeches, starve to the brink of death in the desert, and all is well as long as you leave everybody laughing.

Yet I’ll be honest. My first hours in Alexandria left me depressed. I wondered how I’d last there for a week. Maybe longer if the Libyans didn’t hurry and grant me a visa.

At noon, men unrolled carpets on the sidewalk, knelt down and murmured their midday prayers. Careful not to step on their fingers, I returned to Midan Saad Zaghloul and traipsed past exhaust-spewing buses, taxis and trolleys. Café Trianon, a landmark of the Cosmopolitan Era when the city was an international melting pot, not an Egyptian backwater, had been one of C.P. Cavafy’s favorite haunts. A Greek expatriate and lifelong resident of Alex, Cavafy was a poet remarkable for the variety of his subject matter and his vernacular style. Although a deeply learned man well versed in Classical Greek, he wrote in the living language of the streets. His themes were loneliness, the passage of time, the quicksilver nature of love and the spiraling history of the city from its ancient gods to the boys he brought home to his bed.

The Trianon had a faded Art Deco interior, with beige and brown walls, a stained wooden ceiling, four cobwebby chandeliers and a floor of scuffed grey linoleum. In the background Louis Armstrong sang “What a Wonderful World.” But I recalled the yearning words of Cavafy, desperate “to be gone / to some other land, some other sea / to a city lovelier far than this . . .” I didn’t care to dwell on the poem’s conclusion. “Just as you’ve ruined your life in this / One plot of ground you’ve ruined its worth / Everywhere now—over the whole earth?”

Fortunately, the waitress soon brought my food and the soundtrack switched to Jim Morrison’s “Light My Fire.” The coffee was strong, the yoghurt and honey delicious, the chicken sandwich fortifying. My blood sugar and spirits soared. When the bill arrived with each price higher by an Egyptian pound or two than listed on the menu, I didn’t protest. I was grateful to be feeling better. I paid at the cash register where one fellow dug my change out of the drawer and a second handed it to me. In Egypt where there were never enough jobs to go around, everybody got to play a role.

Cavafy’s apartment was around the corner from a Greek church and a hospital, and the building used to house a brothel on the ground floor. Cavafy liked to joke that he lived in the perfect location, one that provided for all his physical and spiritual and emotional needs. Now a museum, his flat is spacious and bright, with two rooms furnished as Cavafy left them. The rest of the rooms are filled with random pieces of memorabilia, photos and portraits of the author, two death masks and Xeroxes of his manuscripts and copies of his books in glass display cases. On a non-stop tape, a husky female voice recited Cavafy’s poems in Greek.

All that seemed missing was . . . everything. Though I always visit them, writer’s houses strike me as melancholy places. They’re like locust shells. The fragile shape endures, but the guts are gone, along with any sense of the singing, of the cyclical sleep and frenzied flight, the long underground burial followed by a short burst of brilliant adventure.

Still, Cavafy’s apartment had none of the bogusness of Karen Blixen’s house in Nairobi, which is decorated with stage dressings and posters from the film version of Out of Africa. Nor was it thronged with...