Sphinx Read Online Free Page B

lost.”
    â€œI’m looking for the Khan el Khalili bazaar,” said Erica.
    â€œ Tout à droite, ” said the policeman, gesturing ahead. Then he thumped his forehead with his palm. “Excuse. It is the heat. I’ve been mixing my languages. Straight ahead, as you’d say. This is El Muski street, and ahead you will cross the main thoroughfare of Shari Port Said. Then the Khan el Khalili bazaar will be on your left. I wish you good shopping, but remember to bargain. Here in Egypt it is a sport.”
    Erica thanked him and pushed on through the crowd. The minute he was gone, the jeering boys miraculously reappeared and the innumerable street vendors accosted her with their wares. She passed an open-air butcher shop hung with a long row of recently slaughtered lambs,flayed except for the heads, and covered with splotches of pink ink representing government stamps. The carcasses were hung upside down, their unseeing eyes making her flinch and the smell of the offal forcing her lunch into her throat. The stench quickly merged with the decadent smell of overripe mangoes from a neighboring fruit cart and the odor of fresh donkey dung in the street. A few paces beyond, there was the reviving sharpness of herbs and spices and the aroma of freshly brewed Arabic coffee.
    The dust from the densely packed narrow street rose and filtered the sun, bleaching the strip of cloudless sky a faint, faraway blue. The sand-colored buildings on each side of the street were shuttered against the blanket of afternoon heat.
    As Erica advanced deeper into the bazaar, listening to the sound of ancient wooden wheels on granite cobblestones, she felt herself slipping back in time to medieval Cairo. She sensed the chaos, the poverty, and the harshness of life. She was simultaneously frightened and excited by the throbbing raw fertility, the universal mysteries which are so carefully camouflaged and hidden by Western culture. It was life stripped naked yet mitigated by human emotion; fate was greeted with resignation and even laughter.
    â€œCigarette?” demanded a boy of about ten. He was dressed in a gray shirt and baggy pants. One of his friends pushed him from behind so that he stumbled closer to Erica. “Cigarette?” he asked again, launching into a kind of Arabic jig and pretending to smoke a make-believe cigarette in exaggerated mime. A tailor, busy ironing with a charcoal-filled iron, grinned, and a row of men smoking intricately embossed water pipes stared at Erica with piercing, unblinking eyes.
    Erica was sorry she had worn such obviously foreign clothes. Her cotton slacks and a simple knit blouse made it clear she was a tourist. The other women in Western clothes that Erica had seen had on dresses, not pants, and most of the women in the bazaar still wore the traditional black meliyas. Even Erica’s body was differentfrom the local women’s. Although she was several pounds heavier than she would have liked, she was a good deal slimmer than Egyptian women. And her face was far more delicate than the round, heavy features crowding the bazaar. She had wide gray-green eyes, luxuriant chestnut hair, and a finely sculptured mouth with a full lower lip that gave her a faintly pouting expression. She knew she was pretty when she worked at it, and when she did, men responded.
    Now, picking her way through the crowded bazaar, she regretted she had tried to look attractive. Her attire advertised that she was not protected by local street morality, and even more important, she was alone. She was the perfect catalyst for the fantasies of all the men who watched her.
    Clutching her tote bag closer to her side, Erica hurried along as the street narrowed again to cluttered byways jammed with people engaged in every conceivable type of manufacture and commerce. Overhead, carpets and cloth stretched between the buildings to cover the market area, keeping out the sun but increasing the noise and the dust. Erica