In Cairo, at the end of a reception given by an attaché at the French embassy on the occasion of his wife’s birthday and attended by about a hundred people who spent most of the evening talking about Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, which the host, after years of work, had translated into Egyptian, so many people were crowding in front of the elevator on the seventh floor, on which the attaché lived, that we, who had plenty of time, stepped back out of the way. When the door of the elevator had closed, the elevator—to the horror of those who had remained behind—crashed down the shaft and was smashed to pieces. Those who had remained behind were unable to move for several seconds; they stood speechless in the total silence that followed the explosion that the crash of the elevator had caused on the ground floor. Only after the first cries could be heard did they dare to venture out of their state of paralysis, but they were incapable of doing anything sensible. They did not want to go down right away, and they went back into the attaché’s apartment. We, too, had gone back into the attaché’s apartment because we were just as incapable as the others of going downstairs. It was not until three hours after the incident that we, along with the others, left the attaché’s apartment after being told that the bodies of all those killed in the elevator had been taken away. In the nature of things, we ask ourselves to this day why we didn’t push our way into the elevator and why we stepped back to let the others get on. We have heard that every year in Cairo several old elevators that are overloaded crash down the shaft.

Imagination

IMAGINATION

Near the Coptic quarter in Cairo we noticed whole rows of streets in whose four- and five-story houses thousands of chickens and goats and even pigs are kept. We tried to imagine what the noise would be like if these houses were to burn down.

Expedition

EXPEDITION