Nile Shadows

necessary. But Joe had guessed this might have to do with a natural shyness on Ahmad's part, and in fact Ahmad's manner changed completely, as Joe had hoped it would, when Joe leaned on the counter and mentioned in an offhand way that he had once heard many stories in Jerusalem about the masterly Egyptologist and revered black sage unknown to the world as Menelik Ziwar, dead now these many years.

Of course the fact that the mere mention of Menelik Ziwar's name could dramatically alter the nature of an afternoon, any afternoon, wasn't surprising. It was true that only a few people had ever heard of this fabled Cairene of the nineteenth century, even when he was still alive. But to those fortunate few he would forever remain an astounding man of unsurpassed accomplishments, a hero of legendary proportions.

And unforgettable in every respect. Joe only knew what he had been told about Menelik Ziwar a decade earlier in Jerusalem. But Ahmad's connection with old Menelik was much more personal, as it turned out, and inextricably entwined with his own most intimate concerns

***

Menelik Ziwar had begun life as a black slave named Boy, born in the Nile delta early in the nineteenth century. At the age of four he was tossed into a cottonfield and told to pick, and under normal conditions that is what he would have done for the rest of his days, about two decades at best, before dying of dysentery or cholera or typhoid. But somehow Boy managed to learn to write a few words, including Ziwar, the name of the rich cotton-fat family that owned him, and soon he was proudly inscribing this name as a kind of graffiti on every available surface on the plantation where he lived.

Before long one of the Ziwars took note of this ubiquitous salute to his name and was flattered by it. He had Boy transferred from the fields to his mansion, to service his opium pipe on a daily basis. Boy now had time to dream, and with his imagination fired by the rewards of literacy, he quickly went on to learn to read as well as to write. That accomplished, Boy felt he had earned the right to a better name and immediately chose Menelik for himself, after the mythical first emperor of Ethiopia, the only country in Africa not ruled by Europeans at the time.

When Menelik was freed his success was even more startling. He moved to Cairo as a young man and learned the European tongues in order to be able to support himself by working as a dragoman, while quietly launching his study of hieroglyphs between backstairs assignations with tourists. He then turned his attention to archeology, at the same time cornering the opium market in Cairo as a way to finance his expensive digs elsewhere, and soon became the leading Egyptologist of the century, a wizard of subterranean life.

Yet the habits of anonymity acquired in his youth stayed with him, and Menelik always allowed the dissolute young men of the Ziwar clan to take credit for his remarkable discoveries, preferring instead to remain invisibly in the background, sagely advising others where to dig and how much opium to smoke while doing so, the better to appreciate these splendid treasures hidden by the ages.

Menelik's career of unsurpassed brilliance continued until he was well into his nineties, but long before then he had gone underground completely to live out his days in even greater obscurity, choosing one of his own discoveries as his retirement home, a spacious ancient tomb now to be found beneath a busy public garden beside the Nile. There old Menelik had graciously held court until he died, royally entertaining the few people who knew he existed. And it was this same mausoleum beneath a public garden in Cairo that Ahmad now used as his secret workshop, forging spurious millions for the Monks, as Liffy said.

And thus had ended an astonishing life begun so simply in a child's graffiti of long ago, on that fateful day in the nineteenth century when a little black slave named Boy had dared to raise his eyes on the cotton plantation where he labored, thereby exuberantly defying law and order, and had dared to write on a wall those slashing bold words that were to set free the magic of his yearning soul forever.

HAY.

EYES TIE-ED DRAGIN COTTUN ROUN.

COTTUN AINT FAYROW,

EYE EM.

(s) ZIWAR UF DA DELTER. MI, ZATS ALL.

-10-

Ahmad

But it was only one tiny part of old Menelik's career that seemed to appeal to Ahmad, not his phenomenal life in general.

Ahmad's intense admiration for the old Egyptologist was focused entirely on that extremely brief period when the young Menelik had worked as a dragoman one winter in Cairo, in order to support himself while beginning his study of hieroglyphs. For it was during that long-ago winter that Menelik and Ahmad's father had conceived the idea for the first dragomen's benevolent society, a forerunner of twentieth-century Egyptian nationalism.

Such vision, said Ahmad to Joe. And what heroic battles they had to fight to get the struggle out of the cafes and into the streets. In those days a dragoman could only find work during the winter tourist season. The rest of the year he had to do without, as did his neglected suffering children, the poor little waifs. For a dragoman in those days, it was rut or perish. During the winter, rich Europeans clamored for a dragoman's services and were willing to pay almost any price to get their hands on him. And then?

What did happen then? asked Joe.

Spring, thundered Ahmad. The crudest season. And not only spring, but spring and summer and autumn.

The tourists stopped coming to Cairo because it was too hot, and those same dragomen who had been the hottest items in town were suddenly rendered cold. Whereas before, a world-weary dragoman had hardly been able to set foot on the veranda of a tourist hotel without being pounced upon by wealthy Europeans in search of the rumored depravities of the Levant, now these same poor slaves to the lusts of foreign exploiters were summarily scorned. Jeered at. Made the butt of rude Italian gestures and abruptly tossed off hotel verandas as if they had become so much superfluous hanky-panky.

But they changed all that, boomed Ahmad. And if you think Trotsky and Lenin set the world on its head, you should have seen what old Menelik and my father did right here in Cairo decades earlier. Fearlessly they went from cafe to cafe, convincing their fellow dragomen the time had come to stand up, to shriek, to speak out against these intolerable forced vacations that stretched on from spring through summer to autumn. Oh it was a time of fervor, all right. A time when there was electricity in the air.

I'm beginning to feel it, said Joe. It sounds like a regular spring thundersquall bursting over Cairo, with intellectual lightning just everywhere.

Ahmad whirled on him, his eyes afire, his voice crackling with emotion.

Ram it, he thundered. Up until then dragomen had always been mere rams for hire during the winter season, while being scorned during all other seasons. But no longer. Not after old Menelik and my father launched the Movement. And how did the idea for this great revolutionary crusade begin? This secular jihad to free the toiling masses of dragomandom?

Small, I bet, said Joe. That always seems to be the way.

Ahmad was somber, thoughtful.

Would you believe me if I told you it began in a small way? But always my father was passionately hammering away at the same inspiring theme. . . . You have to get out of the cafes and into the streets, he said. If you want your power to be felt, organize. If you want to make them listen to you, organize.

There's only one way to change history. Organize.

Straight ahead through the centuries, said Joe. But was old Menelik really so interested in politics as a young man? I'd always heard he was only a dragoman for a winter or so, to make ends meet while he was getting his hieroglyphs together. Do I have it wrong?

Abruptly Ahmad's face darkened.

Menelik went underground, that's all. Down into tombs. But he continued the struggle there.

Oh I see.

And his heart was always aboveground with my father and the cause, said Ahmad, who then began offering up a host of elaborate excuses to explain Menelik's speedy departure from the Movement which made it clear Joe hadn't been wrong at all.

In fact although the idea for a dragomen's benevolent society had originally been Menelik's, the black scholar