Mo'men's explanation for the mysterious grayish wall finally came when our van passed a monument made out of an old Mig-21 fighter jet standing guard in front of a gate in the wall. “Those are the barracks of the Second Army”, he said simply. “Where is the Third Army?” I asked, half expecting Mo'men to pick up a topic about that army unit, infamous for getting surrounded by the Israelis at Suez during the October War of 1973 but famous for allegedly refusing Mubarak's order to fire on demonstrators in Tahrir Square. “They are stationed further to the east, more on the Red Sea side”, said Mo'men. “We would have scored a much bigger victory during the Ramadan War but for U.S. support of the Israelis, you know. The Americans are just way too pro-Israel”, Mo'men, head shaking, went on to say. Maybe because we were from the States and were his guests at the moment, and maybe because hatred for American foreign policy in that part of the world is always tinged with a love for American culture and technology, a complex the jeans on Mo’men and the iPhone in his hands testified loudly to, he did not launch into an anti-US rant, as one might have expected.
Three and a half hours and a dearth of attractive view offered Mo'men the opportunity to cover many topics. We found ourselves in Egypt just when the newly elected Egyptian president, Morsi, was being challenged for being too much of a Islamist in his policies. Mo'men opined that Morsi was a good man and should be given more time to straighten out the country’s affairs. If Mo'men's narration about Egypt gave us broad hints at his political inclination, his comments on world affairs confirmed our inklings. He announced to us, for example, that 9/11 was no more than a CIA conspiracy and that Obama's Middle East policies were solely geared toward protecting Israeli interests. I would not explain Mo'men's being so loose-tongued by our group’s being all Chinese; he knew we all presently lived in the States. In fact, I'm convinced that, intentionally or unintentionally, Mo'men said what he said to influence us, to do a bit of brainwashing, if you will. This was made especially clear when, later on, he gave us a most adulating version of Muhammad (ibn Abdullah)'s love life during our visit to the Alabaster Mosque.
Remember Mo'men's announcement that there wouldn't be any stop on the way had sent me to the bathroom three times？ Well, it turned out that Mo'men wasn't being truthful: we made a stop on our way to Cairo at a fully functional rest area, when both the driver and Mo'men felt the need to go take a leak. What about the security concerns, about the convoy, you ask? I'll say more about the traffic condition on Egyptian highways later on; let's just say for now that the traffic was such that our long snake of a procession was soon dissected and slaughtered by wildly driven beasts of vehicles so that the buses and the vans so neatly woven into the convoy soon had to survive on their own. No sooner did the tour vehicles left the harbor than their drivers started concentrating on threading their own way out of Port Said and stopped paying any attention to keeping the convoy in formation.
Long story short, we arrived in Cairo safely and began a new chapter of our Egypt adventure.
