Big Brass gathered for the Cairo Conference were concerned mostly with world-wide strategy. But they also wanted to hear testimony on the war raging right there in the Mediterranean… so Gen Marshall dispatched a special C-54 to bring the star witness. Instead of flying over in lonely pomp, Gen Eisenhower made a characteristic gesture. He invited about a dozen of his lower-rank staff members to go along : There’s no use wasting all the space in this big plane, he explained. Besides, it may be the only chance you’ll ever get to visit the Middle East.
Chapter 9
Everyone except the naval aide took him up on the offer. Butch said he’d seen all the celebrities and could use the time to better advantage by going to Italy to set up our new Advance CP. I accepted quickly, before the General could change his mind; so did Ruth Briggs, and Louise Anderson, one of the five original WAC officers and now secretary to the AFHQ Deputy Chief of Staff, General “Jock” Whitely. Even Tex abandoned his office worries.
We left late at night. The trip proved to be smooth and, after a few rubbers of the usual Eisenhower bridge, the plane turned into a snoring dormitory.
Awakening to daylight and humming chatter, I looked out the window to see one of the world’s most memorable sights : sunrise over the pyramids. The massive monuments looked ridiculously small from the air, but a scholarly member of the party reminded us that the pyramids, which stretch some sixty miles along the Nile, date back into dim antiquity. Some were built, he added with sobering emphasis, two or three thousand years before Christ.
The rest of his lecture was lost in the excitement of landing at Cairo’s Payne Field and the shock of stepping into staggering, merciless heat. Our winter-weight skirts and jackets immediately felt like suffocating blankets, contrasting sharply with the smart sun-tan uniforms of the welcoming party. Heat rose from the airfield in shimmering, celluloid-like waves. Clouds of dust and sand churned through the air.
Riding into the city, we forgot the heat and the dirt, ogling like tourists the world over. Cairo was an oasis of prewar memories, filled with smart, well-fed people and civilian motor cars. Look ! I cried, almost jumping out the window, Bananas ! They were my number one postwar dream, the first I’d seen since war began. Ruth and Louise quickly drew my attention to other sights : We can get all kinds of fruit this afternoon, Ruth chided in maternal tones.
Everything we saw, through the car windows added up to one overall impression : peacetime luxury. After the shabby, empty shops of London and the chic but ghostlike stores of Algiers and the rubbled debris throughout North Africa, all the way up to Bizerte Cairo was a fabulous city of peace. Our fingers itched to browse through her well-stocked shelves.
The ride ended before a large villa reserved for Gen Eisenhower : Big, isn’t it ? he said sheepishly as we looked around. Then he seemed to realize we were excess baggage for the official entourage, with no assigned quarters. Where are you girls going to stay ? he asked. Don’t worry about us, Sir, Louise said. We’re used to taking care of ourselves. We’ll find a place.
The General insisted we remain in his villa : Butch isn’t here and I’ll be lonely in this little palace, he emphasized. And I’ll be away at meetings most of the time, so you can have the house pretty much to yourselves.
It was irregular, but well-appreciated. We had found a home in Cairo. An officer in charge of the General’s arrangements moved three beds into a room on the ground floor section which had the added attraction of a private bath.
We had assumed that our visit to Cairo, sudden and unofficial as it was, would include hours of work at the conference. But it developed we were pure excess baggage; for the first time in months we had absolute leisure. The first stop, of course, was Shepheard’s cocktail lounge, for the traditional coffee. Like many another visitor to the Middle East, we learned Turkish coffee requires an acquired taste. This was thick and syrupy, so much so that it held a spoon aloft. We used several tinkling highballs to wash away the taste. Then, although without much money, we went shopping.
Cairo was both deafening and wilting. The bazaar people shrieked in half a dozen languages, adding to the din set up by a constant thunder of motor horns pounded by Egyptian motorists with a zeal even greater than that of Parisian drivers. The heat was stupefying; it sucked at our energy, soaked our wool uniforms, pulled curls from our hair. But it was foreign, and fun.
All Egyptians, in contrast to Algiers’ stringy Arabs, looked as though they had been living on the proverbial fat of the land, despite the war-parched landscape so near by. The fat, dully-clad women seemed to worship bright baubles even more than their sisters on Fifth Avenue, Bond Street, and the Rue de la Paix; their pudgy bodies sparkled with giant gilt earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and rings. Some carried earthen jugs on their heads, picture-book style, giving even the stoutest an enviable, graceful, proud carriage. Many of the men in this quarter wore Western costume, the tight European business suit, with an incongruous fez. We accepted the hordes of begging children as part of the Mediterranean scenery.
Most of our shopping consisted of window-shopping, if it could be called that in this madhouse of open-air shops. But we couldn’t sympathize with prices as much as sixteen dollars, for example, for a pair of silk stockings. Our only purchases consisted of fruit, piles and piles of fruit, mostly bananas.
Gen Eisenhower, at a Presidential dinner tilt night, was surprised by the presentation of the Legion of Merit.
The next day featured more sightseeing and more shopping without buying, plus an off-the-record visit to Mena House, headquarters for the conference and vantage point for viewing the pyramids, the Sphinx, camels, and all the other items familiar from Egyptian postcards. We also attended a mass “tea fight” which managed to draw just about every Big Name from the conference; we went as females hungry for cocktail chatter, however insipid, as an antidote to the strictly military social life of the past year. One of the milling crowd I thought worth notice was Madame Chiang Kai-shek, of whom I caught fleeting glimpses; tiny, attractive, and well-poised, she was an outstanding personality. Looks as though she’d never miss a trick ! someone whispered.
All these incidents were more preliminaries to the real thrill of our visit, which came when Gen Marshall, alarmed at the haggard, harried look of his Mediterranean commander, directed Gen Eisenhower to take a few days’ rest before returning to the Italian campaign. The Chief of Staff, in fact, ordered General Ike to take three days for a complete holiday. Always the good soldier and well aware of his poor mental and physical health, Ike agreed but where could he go for absolute change, privacy and rest ?
Air Chief Marshal Tedder, long an Eisenhower intimate, came up with the perfect answer : Luxor. One of his personal friends was Major Emery, the noted archaeologist. Would the General be interested in a specially conducted tour of Luxor and the burial grounds of the Pharaohs ? He could retreat several thousand years from the nervous Present. As further bait, Tedder offered the use of his own plane.
General Ike, a lifelong student of history, leaped at the opportunity. And, ever unselfish, he invited along several of his party. Elliott Roosevelt, Tex, Ruth, Louise, and I accepted; I, for one, was frankly thrilled at this chance to see Luxor, Karnak, and a part of the past which had intrigued me since school days.
Tedder’s plane was equipped with a huge picture-window but few of us enjoyed the view, even though his pilot flew low to provide a close-up kaleidoscope of the countryside. We spent every ounce of energy fighting off nausea from the heat, which bounced off the desert and soaked into our oven-like cabin with all the devastating intensity of the fires of Hell itself. Bumpy air close to the ground added to our torrid discomfort.
Landing at Luxor in late afternoon, we found even the clouds of mosquitoes a welcome diversion from the roasting furnace which had been that plane. Nightfall brought a dry sort of coolness, together with misty moonlight; it was impossible to stay in the Luxor Hotel, with one of the world’s greatest outdoor museums just outside. Like other conference visitors (almost every high official at the Cairo meeting availed himself of at least a one-day trip to Luxor), we strolled around through the tottering mementos of Egyptian history.
Modern Luxor and Karnak are built on the dust of ancient Thebes, which was already a fabled city as much as four thousand years ago. We saw everything which defied the dust the broad, sprawling temples, the twenty-foot statues of Rameses II, the clumps of pillars and columns, some of them so thick it takes six persons to reach around their base, the remains of quays, the once sacred lakes, the courts, the obelisks, and the several avenues lined by dozens of crouching sphinxes. It was apparent even to me, who make no pretense at scholarly knowledge, that Thebes was a city fully as lovely as any in old Greece or Rome. When we returned to Luxor Hotel, unusually thoughtful and quiet, our learned guide promised real sightseeing during the day ahead. He kept his word.
Next morning we crossed the legendary Nile a disappointingly muddy, dirty little river and crowded into several ridiculous motor cars which apparently dated back to the invention of the first horseless carriage. Then we steamed, quite literally, out onto the road. The heat, even for December, was so intense the antique vehicles often boiled over; we waited patiently each time, and then got out to push, invariably assisted by mobs of urchins. The road at times was little more than a footpath, twisting up, down and around the bleak hills; at other times, a broad surface barely recognizable on the vast plains. Finally, we turned into a rough path leading straight into the hills. After a while the so-called roadway turned sharply. Before us were two desolate ravines.
This, our archaeologist announced dramatically, was the Valley of the Kings.
We spent the entire day there in the greatest cemetery in the world, the fabulous graves of bizarre Pharaohs who ruled Egypt a millennium or two before ever Christ appeared on earth. Dressed in our modern uniforms and accompanied by the Supreme Commander of a great war in the Mediterranean, we felt the atmosphere of history more than ever. It seemed impossible to realize that kings had been buried here over a period of ten centuries, that a surprisingly luxurious civilization had flourished in Egypt thousands of years before we even started counting the years of Christian time. Although looted thousands of years ago and stripped of their treasures, the tombs still commanded dignity and respect. None of us, not even the usually bombastic Tex or the irrepressible Elliott, ever wisecracked in those hallowed vaults. We walked and walked until our feet ached with pain, until our clothes steamed with heat, above ground, yet I could have remained for weeks; very few sights actually thrill one with a physical emotion, but these did.
The tombs, wrought from stone with superb mason ship and decorated with queer pictures representing everything from devils and demons to farmers and queens, would have been awe-inspiring to us even as normal, gawking tourists. But, with the wise and friendly major as our host, it was like walking right into those musty times. For one thing, the hieroglyphics, fascinating in their dumbness, were voices to him; it was exciting to hear him explain the background of a particular Pharaoh and his times. One, for example, probably ruled five thousand years before Christ, a literal god to whom all the lesser Brass of the world bowed fourteen times in the dust at his feet feet shod, incidentally, in exquisite golden sandals.
The archaeologist explained the human side of old Egypt, too. Slaves may have carried out the heavy labor on the big pyramids, he said, but they were workers with certain inalienable rights. There is evidence that they often resorted to a supposedly recent union device : strikes. Also, the masons worked with bronze saws taller than a man, saws which had jeweled cutting edges; both these and the jewel-pointed drills cut with smoothness unequaled by the finest modern tools. The Major told us of one obelisk higher than Cleopatra’s Needle; it was quarried out of pure granite, in one piece, without seam or joining. He mentioned a blue paint, a special secret of those days, which, along with many other colors on the tombs’ walls, remains just as bright and fresh as a contemporary painting.
We had lunch in a tiny inn perched on a dreary hillside, surrounded by sheep, goats, curious fellahin, and that ponderous sense of history. Then we went back into the stone pages of that history, strolling through long galleries, chambers, and hallways which stretched without end through the barren valley.
I was particularly interested in the tomb of King Tutankhamen, first of the Pharaohs’ burial crypts to be found untouched, with a wealth of priceless treasure so vast that it still is being sorted and cataloged and studied. But I was surprised to learn that his actual coffin is small, that he apparently was a boy-king, that he reigned in a backwater phase of Egyptian history, for a brief time only, and that he was a very minor Pharaoh. It also was a trifle startling to find his tomb lighted by electricity.
If the Major was pleased at our rapt attention to his intriguing explanations, he was astonished at the historical knowledge of one of our party : Dwight D. Eisenhower. The two of them frequently wandered off alone in pursuit of some dim fact; other times, we looked around to find them far back in a distant chamber, discussing a point of ancient life as compared to one of today. General Ike was as happy as a kid, making no attempt to hide his natural enjoyment, protesting frequently that we moved along too quickly.
Our guide, however, who knew every blessed inch of the ground, was determined we should see it all so it was a tired, footsore, dirty party which returned to Luxor that night. But a happy crew. I, for instance, knew the day had given me a treasure chest of memories, I loved every minute of those hours. Everyone felt the same. The General was a different person, tired but mentally refreshed by the sights.
When we got back to Cairo next morning, Gen Marshall knew at once that his idea of a holiday for the Supreme Commander had been a corker. In fact, General Ike looked so rested and energetic that his Boss insisted upon another tour, if only a quick one.
What are you girls going to do today ? Ike asked us in the villa after his session at the conference with Gen Marshall. We’re going shopping, I said. And maybe go slumming, see the real Cairo. He smiled. Well, you can go shopping if you want to. Or you can come with me … to Palestine !
The choice was obvious as well as welcome. We were in the Holy Land within about two hours after taking off from Cairo. But the car ride from the Palestine airport into Jerusalem took ninety minutes, almost as long as the Cairo-Jerusalem flight itself.
This bad omen keynoted the entire visit. Bethlehem and Jerusalem were a complete let-down after the tingling atmosphere of Luxor. At the monastery in Jerusalem, American monks came trooping out as noisily as school boys; one of the brown-robed men, because he was from Kansas, hung onto the General’s arm as though they were fraternity brothers at a class reunion. Every beggar in Jerusalem joined in the crowd which followed at our heels, demanding tribute. I was shocked to find most of Christianity’s holiest shrines no longer Christian, but disgustingly commercialized tourist monuments exploited by the Moslems. This was true even at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where they hawked post cards and other items with all the blatant fervor of football game salesmen. We asked after the Mount of Calvary, thinking it would be several miles away and impossible to include in our hurried tour. But the guide dragged us to a spot close by, pointed to a circular hole, and said one could touch the rocks of the Mount by reaching down. It seemed as crassly sensationalized as our own Blarney Stone in Ireland. In Bethlehem, the Holy Manger turned out to be a marble, overly ornate monument wholly out of tune with the facts and one’s dreams. Throughout all our tour, the General was plied with so many crosses, beads, post cards, and other objects that, despite his deep religious conviction, he whispered : Guess I’ve got a free ticket to Heaven !
There was one charming modern Christian church in Bethlehem, which was beautifully maintained. I was especially enchanted by the mosaic above its tall doors; the colors were alive, almost blinding in their beauty. Also, the Garden of Gethsemane proved to be as lovely and conducive to meditation as I expected; entrance was forbidden, but the General’s stars secured us special permission for a stroll in its peaceful paths.
All in all, though, I couldn’t help comparing the difference between Palestine and the Valley of the Kings. And in all conscience, even as a good Christian and an Irish Catholic, I couldn’t convince myself that Christianity’s home had even a touch of the dignity, art, impressive air, and downright excitement of the burial grounds of old Egypt’s pagan Pharaoh gods.
Lunch at the ill-fated King David Hotel failed to lift my spirits. And the topper came when I borrowed enough money to pay twenty dollars for a full-length sheepskin coat… which had such a vile odor that I’ve never worn it since. It’s a good, appropriate souvenir of that trip.
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