Swimming to Antarctica (11 page)

Later that year I received, because of my world-record Channel swim, an invitation from the Egyptian government to join a group of long-distance swimmers for a race in the Nile River. When Fahmy Attallah heard about the invitation, he encouraged me to go, and to have David accompany me as my coach. Fahmy told us that in Egypt long-distance swimmers are more revered than NFL quarterbacks. Streets are named for them, and parades are conducted in their honor throughout the city of Cairo. He said we would have a wonderful experience, and he romantically described how beautiful Cairo would be, and how well we would be taken care of. He said that Egyptians were very gracious and generous people; they would welcome us into their homes and would take good care of us. Fahmy gave us the names of his brothers and a cousin who lived in Cairo, in case we needed any help with anything.

A few months later, during spring vacation in 1974, when Dave and I stepped off the United Arab Airlines plane onto the unlit tarmac at Cairo airport, submachine guns were trained on us by Egyptian army troops. The Yom Kippur War between Egypt and Israel, which I had intently studied in my current affairs class, trying to figure out why they’d had to go to war at all, had recently ended, and we were witnessing its aftermath. We’d never expected to see so much devastation in Cairo.

As we fumbled through a black corridor lit only by handheld flashlights into the arrival area, dust clouds rose around us, illuminated by moonlight streaming through the mortar holes in the airport ceiling. The moonbeams spread out, and as people passed us to stand in line for customs, they cast ghostly shadows against the bullet-pocked walls.

On the way in the United Arab Airlines plane had nearly crashed twice, during landings in Zurich and Cairo. Somehow, the first time, the pilot misjudged our distance to the ground, and we bounced down the runway with so much force that the overhead compartments sprang open and the contents flew across the plane; one woman got banged on the head by a silver platter. The second time, as we landed in Cairo, the brakes failed. We overran the runway, stopping moments before we crashed into a metal fence.

Now a customs official who hadn’t taken a shower for days, and was wearing an old, torn, and faded uniform, was studying our passports. He leaned in close to Dave and whispered something that sounded like “baksheesh.”

At first, neither Dave nor I understood what he was saying, and then it occurred to us that he was demanding a bribe and wasn’t about to let us go unless we paid him off. He turned Dave’s bag over and dumped his clothes onto a table. Then he picked up each article of clothing piece by piece, opening the shirts, inspecting the seams, and turning the pants and underwear inside out. When he didn’t find anything of any value, he unzipped my travel bag, pushed my street clothes aside, and began fingering my underwear and leering at me.

“Jeez, I can’t believe this guy,” Dave said loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear us. The army officer who had led us into the terminal came into the room. He said something in Arabic to the customs official, who tried to wave the officer away. But the officer conferred with his men posted nearby and he turned to the customs officer and started shouting at him. Abruptly the customs official turned to us, his entire demeanor softening. “So sorry for the delay. Welcome to Cairo. I hope you enjoy your stay in our beautiful city.”

He led us into the lobby, where we were supposed to meet with an
official from the Egyptian Swimming Federation. It was three a.m., and the arrival area was completely deserted. We didn’t know what to do; we didn’t know where we were supposed to stay. We couldn’t speak Arabic so we couldn’t talk to anyone outside the terminal, and we couldn’t exchange our travelers’ checks, since the bank was closed.

We had been traveling for thirty-six hours, with a brief stopover in London. Not only was I exhausted, but I suddenly felt very far from home, in a place I didn’t think I wanted to be. Sinking down onto the floor, I tried to hold back the tears. I knew crying wouldn’t help, but this seemed like a strange and scary place, and I had no idea what to do.

“Don’t worry, they’ll find us here in a couple of days,” Dave joked to make light of our predicament. He had no better idea of what to do. He was only nineteen, and he had never traveled outside the States. So we sat for a couple hours and waited.

Fortunately, a man who owned a car-rental agency saw us looking very forlorn. He spoke a little English, and he offered to call Fahmy’s brother Nassief. I felt bad that we were calling him at five in the morning, but we didn’t know what else to do.

Nassief immediately offered to put us up in his apartment until everything was sorted out. The car-rental-agency man told us to wait for a minute while he called us a cab. The cab that pulled up a few minutes later had barely survived the war: the hood was tied to the bumper, the tires were completely bald, and the trunk had been so smashed forward that we would have to hold our luggage on our laps.

Reaching through broken windows, we opened the doors and climbed in. There were no seat belts, but that didn’t matter, since there really weren’t seats. The driver turned the ignition key at least a couple of times before the engine started, and then he stomped on the accelerator. He drove like an Indy race-car driver on an obstacle course. Dave and I held on to whatever we could, laughing uncontrollably as we sped around corners, tires squealing, the car launching over innumerable bumps and potholes.

We flew through the sleeping city, tears streaming down our cheeks, past stark concrete buildings, going the wrong way down
ancient one-way cobblestoned streets and through a city that was unlit except for the stoplights, which, to our driver, were mere decorations. At one police checkpoint, he sped through without hesitation even as the policemen blew their whistles and waved angrily at him to stop. A few minutes later, we arrived at an apartment complex.

Nassief Attallah, a tall, broad-shouldered man in his sixties, trotted downstairs wearing long striped pajamas and a red nightcap over his thick silver hair. Phillippe, his younger brother, followed, walking with a limp. Phillippe looked very much like Fahmy He said, “Welcome, welcome, welcome.” It was Fahmy’s voice. One phrase connected the families a world away, and everything suddenly seemed so much better.

Lena, Nassief’s wife, led us to our room, where Dave and I slept deeply on mattresses filled with sweet straw. In the midafternoon, I awoke to the exotic sounds of donkeys braying, car horns blaring, and a muezzin in a minaret calling Muslims to prayer over a loudspeaker. Still exhausted, I tried to turn over and fall back to sleep, but searing white desert light was streaming through sheer curtains beside my bed, so I got up and looked outside.

The world below was swirling with humanity. The men were dressed in Western-style clothes and long cotton shirts that looked like pajamas; some of the women were dressed in Western clothes too, but many wore long, heavy black chadors. Immediately below the window, women and children were selling pita bread stacked in open wagons, the children shooing off the flies with a straw brush. Cars were everywhere, completely disregarding traffic signals and people attempting to cross the street.

While we ate a delicious breakfast of warm, chewy pita bread, salty feta cheese, and homemade sweet date jam, Phillippe arrived and told us he had phoned the Egyptian Swimming Federation. There had been a mistake in our telex, and we had arrived a day earlier than expected. We were instructed to take a cab to the Continental Hotel, where we would be staying with the other foreign swimmers for twelve days. This would give us time to get over the jet lag and prepare for the race.

At the hotel, a throng of journalists and television crews greeted Dave and me as if we were rock stars. The press thought we had been avoiding them, and one journalist in particular was annoyed at me. He was a short man with a thick black mustache and greasy black hair plastered to his head. He said his name was William Amen and he was a journalist for the largest newspaper in Egypt. He started following me around, asking me a number of questions over and over again. At first I thought he didn’t understand English very well, and since I was the only American who had been invited to the race, I wanted to represent my country to the best of my ability. I wanted to make sure that he understood me, so I politely answered his questions over and over again. Finally, I broke away to deposit my luggage in the room Dave and I would be sharing.

A few minutes later, Fahmy’s cousin Morad Luca, a very wide, bald, and friendly man, arrived. He was one of the top defense attorneys in Egypt and he spoke a little English. Phillippe had called him and told him that we needed his help, so he’d arrived to take us to the Egyptian Swimming Federation’s old steamboat, anchored on the Nile River. It doubled as the federation’s offices and sports club. While I went back to the room to change into my swimsuit and sweats, Morad phoned ahead and organized a guide and a rowboat for us. While Dave, Morad, and the boat captain discussed the Nile River currents, I took off my sweatsuit apprehensively and looked across the river. Fahmy had described the Nile as the river of life and the birthplace of the world’s ancient civilization. With dreamy eyes, he had said, “The Nile is very, very beautiful. It has its very own shade of blue.” Sixteen years had passed since Fahmy had lived in Egypt, and much had changed. The river was not any shade of blue; it was dark brown, thick, and opaque, and it stank like something old and dying.

Stalling, trying to psych myself up to dive into the water, I slowly pushed my short, chlorine-bleached blond hair into my yellow swim cap. I wondered if I was going to get sick if I swam in that water. Never had I swum in any water as filthy.

From the steamboat’s deck, I watched Dave, Morad, and the row-boat captain discuss the positioning of the boat. Morad explained
that the racecourse would be around two islands in the middle of the river, in the center of Cairo. The swimmers would travel a figure-eight course twice; each figure eight would be ten miles long. And there were to be two races held concurrently: an amateur race for men and women (the race I had entered because I wanted to maintain my amateur status in case I decided to swim in college) and a professional race for men and women.

The steamboat and the start of the race were located in the Big Nile; on the other side of the two islands was an area known as the Little Nile. Later that day another swimmer would tell me that the Big Nile was where all the chemical sewage was discharged, and the Little Nile was where all the raw sewage was dumped.

Dave motioned for me to get into the water. Holding my hand over my face so water wouldn’t shoot up my nose and possibly infect my sinuses, I jumped in. The water smelled like a sewer, and the stench was so strong I felt my stomach turn.

Once you start swimming,
I told myself,
you’ll feel better. You always do.
But this time I didn’t.

Swimming with my head up, I moved toward the boat through an oil slick about a hundred yards wide. My swimsuit filled with goo. It never occurred to me that I was the only swimmer training in the Nile River; I just kept swimming until my right hand hit something rubbery. It was a dead Nile perch, floating belly-up. I shuddered and kept swimming.

Some four hundred yards down river my hand hit something else. Instinctively, I turned to see what it was: it was a dead rat with one eye missing. A sudden current had carried it down, and soon there were a dozen dead rats bobbing around me, eyes missing, heads gnawed away. This river of life that Fahmy remembered was a river of death, and I wanted to run out of the water. But I couldn’t; I had to train, so I forced myself to stay focused. I sprinted forward, leery of what lay ahead.

Off to my left was a large drain the width of a truck. Here the water became warmer and thicker, and the upper inches were covered with a crust of frothy brown scum. Trying to avoid smelling it, I
breathed late and was suddenly choking on a mouthful. I felt my resolve begin to crumble. Dave was just as disgusted with the water conditions as I was, and so after only an hour of training, I climbed out, back onto the steamboat. I wasn’t keen about ever getting into the Nile again. But I knew that I had to, to be in the race.

Dave and I discussed it on the deck. He thought I needed to work out at least twice more in the river so we could figure out our best course. I was wiping brown slime off my face when I noticed a group of male swimmers—mostly teenagers and some that looked as if they were college age. They were wearing the Egyptian team’s green-and-white sweats and were listening to one of the older swimmers, who had his back turned to me. He was taller than his teammates and had dark, wavy hair and the perfect V shape of a swimmer in top condition. Speaking excitedly in Arabic, using animated gestures, he held the entire group’s attention. A boy sprang up, grabbed his hand, and held on to it, and he laughed so delightedly that I started laughing too. The young man spun around. He had large, dark brown eyes and a wonderful smile. He extended his hand and said his name was Monir. He was the captain of the Egyptian team. I introduced myself, but he already knew who I was. He had heard that I was training in the Nile. He introduced me to his team, and the young boys stared at me as if I had just arrived from another planet.

“They are surprised to see that you are not a man. They didn’t believe me when I told them that you held the record for the English Channel. They expected only a man could swim that fast. I told them to come and see you for themselves,” Monir said.

I said hello to them and shook hands. Monir told me that there was a better place to train. It was called the Gizara Club. The club had once catered to the British elite, but now it was where the Egyptians trained, with an American coach named Rick Field. Monir said that he thought the girls on the team would like to meet me too, and perhaps I could come by during the afternoon workout and encourage them. I said I’d be very happy to meet them.

That afternoon I convinced Dave to accompany me to the Gizara Club instead of returning to the Nile. By the time we arrived, Monir
was already in the pool, so we introduced ourselves to Rick Field. I watched Monir train. He was a strong swimmer, and each time he took a stroke, the water flowed down his biceps and deltoids, then rippled past his lats and along his streamlined bronze torso. He looked as if he was about the same speed as me. I was eager to get into the pool and have someone to pace with, but Rick asked if I would talk to the girls on the team. He made a point of telling me that there was an equal number of girls and boys on the team. Only two girls had qualified for the Nile race, though. Most Middle Eastern teams, he explained, had few female swimmers. Rick had me talk to the girls about my swims and training. And they shyly told me a little about themselves.