Word: nile
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Midnight in Cairo on the last day of August. In the Revolutionary Command Council headquarters in ex-King Farouk's old pleasure house on the Nile, a phone rings. A big man with grizzled hair answers...
Nasser gathered a few like spirits together and led a protest against the bullying seniors. But World War II sent them all scurrying off to guard the numerous bridges over the Nile waterways...
...first river was the Jordan, symbol of the Palestine campaign. There, with Bible in hand, Johnston set out to find an answer to the question which he never really answers: What is the meaning of war? His second river was the "once deified and permanently sewage-laden Mother Nile." He saw the defeat of the Afrika Korps and recorded in harrowing detail "this confusing mixture of rascality and gallantry, of bloody murder and of common sense, of intolerable grimness and of surprising joviality" that was the desert war. When the R.A.F. bombed a port in Tunisia, Johnston went along...
Egypt's pleasure-sated ex-King Farouk, most feckless monarch of modern times, celebrated the third anniversary of his dethronement by calling in Paris newsmen and weeping like a Nile crocodile over the plight of his former subjects. Blubbered fat, foolish Farouk, while sipping unloaded mineral water (booze was never one of his vices): "The revolution has turned into a tyrannical dictatorship. The army officers, the so-called 'liberators,' have become small despots. Egypt is now a police state and the Egyptians are a captive people...
...left Alexandria with the change I had in my pocket." How much change? "A faithful secretary at the last moment slipped ?600 sterling into my pocket." On such a pittance, asked his interviewer, how had Farouk managed to live so high since getting the dirty end of the Nile in 1952? Replied Farouk: "A great chief of Islam came to my help with a noticeable sum . . . Unfortunately, that good man died two years ago and my situation has become extremely critical." Then Farouk asked his interviewer for introductions to be arranged with some Italian tycoons who might give...