“Experience makes the man.” — H. W. Bryce
Blogging 101 – Man on Camel – Part Three (short version)
as told by Indie Herb
The police
Having discovered we’d been robbed, and having suffered endless traffic along the dusty excuse of a road to the canal where we were camped beside a bridge, we finally got some sleep. But the old man and his family came back one more time. He brought tea. So we drank tea. Eventually, all was really quiet, and we got a few snatches of more, although uneasy, sleep.
By 6:30 in the morning, we were packed up and leaving the campsite. We arrived in Girga, at the police station a little after seven. We actually had to wait for any officers to arrive. Meanwhile, a veterinarian grooming what I referred to in my writing later as six of the loveliest steeds we had ever seen. He took time out to play host. He ordered us coffe and some Arabic bread, oil, and seed, for breakfast. There are kind people wherever you go.
The entire morning was spent in telling our story, first to this officer, and then to that. Plus, each new face simply had to hear the whole story right “from the horse’s mouth.” Finally the officer charged with investigating the case arrived and wrote our story down. After considerable delay, Walt was driven back to the scene of the crime by a young lieutenant and some roughies.
Paula and I were instructed to write out our statements of events and to list each and every item that had been stolen, plus the value of each. The officers compensated by treating us to a good lunch of “fhoul (beans), Arab bread, and Arab paste made of a different bean, ground, and the like.” (Evidently, although I was a journalist, I didn’t exactly nail the food thing in my earlier story.)
When Walt returned, he said the police contingent had pushed the villagers very roughly around, and hadn’t hesitated to strike them. He said the police covered the area so fast and so forcibly that it could have been a war.
After more paper work and more delay, we decided to push on to the next town to see the tombs and to return the next day to see what had developed. We got about twenty minutes from the station when a small truck that had been trailing us for miles with horn blaring found a spot to overtake us. It braked to a skidding halt in a cloud of dust. We braced ourselves for an attack, gripping our pathetic little clubs, which we got after an earlier attack by a mob, and holding them under the dashboard.
It was the young lieutenant and his guerrillas (that’s what I called them in my story at the time). They were grinning ecstatically and shouting wildly as they waved our stolen belongings in the air.
Back at the station in Girga, the men dragged out the suspected culprits – five very ashamed, head-hanging young men, two of them very young.
“Well, what do you think of our police now?” the officers asked us. “Do the police do things that fast in America, ay?”
We were asked to examine the contents of the loot. Then make out a new list. Then sign it.
After that, the police ordered “a great feast,” and we had to sit with the officers and eat. The cruel part was that the door was open to the hallway – and there sat the five suspected culprits, on the floor, where they could watch us eat.
After the meal, the prisoners were brought in, and we were asked to identify them. Of course we could not.
“That’s all right,” the officer said, “we can.”
Walt and Paula asked what would happen to the young men. It was harvest time and being of farm stock, their presence would be needed by their family or tribe.
“Oh,” the officer said, tossing it off as nothing, “they’ll go to jail for three to six years.”
Walt and Paula pleaded for clemency, but the officer insisted that the case was closed and we could go on our way.
We drove away feeling despondent instead of jubilant that our things had been recovered, including all of my precious photographs – AND the $1,500 Zoomar lens.
—
Well, that was the Egypt as I experienced it in the 1960s.
Next: The man is on the camel.
