Collection 2: "Cairo: My City, Our Revolution" by Ahdaf Soueif

My two nieces, Salma and Mariam, are on either side of me in the small
motor boat. As we get further from the shore our coughing and choking subsides.

We can draw breath, even though the breath burns. And we can open our eyes—To see an opaque dusk, heavy with tear gas.

The vehicle is reversing wildly, careering backwards east towards Downtown.

The Opera House looms dark on our right and we can barely make out the slender height of the Cairo Tower.

And that is why we—myself and two beautiful young women—appeared suddenly in the Qasr el-Nil underpass among the Central Security vehicles racing to get out of town and all the men leaning over the parapet above us with stones in their hands stopped in mid-throw and yelled ‘Run! Run!’ and held off with the stones so they wouldn’t hit us as we skittered through the screeching vehicles to a spot where we could scramble up the bank and join the people at the mouth of the bridge....

So we ran through the underpass, scrambled up the bank and found ourselves within, inside, and part of the masses.

Behind us was Qasr el-Nil Bridge, in front of us was Tahrir, and we were doing what we Egyptians do best, and what the regime ruling us had tried so hard to destroy: we had come together, as individuals, millions of us, in a great cooperative effort. And this time our project was to save and to reclaim our country.

But the city was there, close to me, looking over my shoulder, holding up the prism through which I understood the world, inserting herself into everything I wrote.

At the other end of the Midan, from the roof of the American University, the
snipers were watching us, too.

Everywhere there was a continuous thud of guns and from time to time a loud, intermittent rattling sound.

Eight months ago some young protestors from the 6 April Group had been arrested in Alexandria for singing the national anthem; it was ‘instigatory’ the prosecution said.

On 28 January, standing at that momentous crossroads, the Nile behind us, the Arab League building to our left, the old Ministry of Foreign Affairs to our right, seeing nothing up ahead except the gas so and smoke and fire that stood between us and our capital, we stood our ground and sang and chanted and placed our lives, with all trust and confidence, in each other’s hands.