The City of a Thousand Minarets
You tell yourself: ‘I’ll be gone To some other land, some other sea, To a city lovelier far than this Could ever have been or hoped to be— Where every step now tightens the noose: A heart in a body, buried and out of use…’ —Constantin Cavafy (trans. Lawrence Durrell) We waited morbidly in the Seven Heaven lounge, morbid because we were finally about to leave after a three week stay, and because the road to Cairo put us one step closer to inevitable separation. My arm still hurt from Richie of New Zealand's Tae Kwon Do twist. The lanky second-degree blackbelt, third in the world in the senior division before he discovered alcohol, had been drunk when he showed me some holds. He taught English in Leipzig and regularly patroned the English pub there for rugby matches up until a few months ago, when he came to Dahab and got a job in the Seven Heaven dive shop. “Glory?” scoffed the Kiwi, swinging his leg around in the air to show a power move. “There's no such thing as glory. It...