Having recently trod many of the trails blazed by this renowned Swiss citizen, I too felt I should drop by with my own modest remembrance. Locating a bouquet in this rough and tumble section of Cairo is a challenge. But just outside of the cemetery's boundary, beyond the hulking Bab al-Nasr, the "Gate of Victory" famous for discouraging Crusaders and impressing Napoleon Bonaparte; across the broken pavement that runs parallel to the 800-year-old walls through which the gate passes; and to the right of a guy selling scrap metal from atop a dirty beach towel; there are situated, one next to the other, two donkey carts stacked high with leafy bundles of flowers.
One strongly suspects these slightly-wilted buds have been cast off by more established florists. But since the cemetery containing Burckhardt's remains is also the northern outpost of the City of the Dead the sprawling settlement of the living that has come to engulf the tombs and monuments of Cairo's vast cemeteries the idea of resurrecting flowers from the trash heap has a certain metaphorical allure.
A little cluster of girls surrounds each cart girls with bright brown eyes and laughing smiles and for one half of an Egyptian pound (about 17 cents) a traveler can purchase from them a bouquet of colorful daisies and chrysanthemums, no haggling necessary.
"How much you like?" one of the girls said as she swept up a huge armload of flowers and thrust them forward. "This okay?" Her friends collapsed into hysterical giggles. A second customer, a sober man in a tattered black suit, scowled with purpose in their direction. The laughter stopped.
I made my selection, and walked along a row of machine shops perched atop the crest of the cemetery's outer boundary. After 100 yards or so I spotted a teenage boy, a silver tray heaped with flat bread balanced neatly on his head, make a right turn into the necropolis. I followed him.
With a population of close to 16 million, Cairo already ranks among the largest cities in the world. Yet each month thousands of failed farmers and unemployed rural laborers add to the city's throngs, each new arrival gravitating inevitably toward the already packed central districts. The result is a nightmare of congestion and confusion.
In part to escape from claustrophobic conditions, and in part because there is nowhere else to go, recent decades have witnessed a phenomenal growth in the development of illicit cemetery communities. The process is so far advanced, in fact, that what began as a tentative foray into forbidden territory living among the dead is not only illegal but is considered a sacrilege in the Islamic religion has now become a statement of upward mobility.
Residing in a graveyard summons up visions of Dickensian horror, but the reality is less stark. For most of the estimated 50,000 residents of Cairo's cemeteries, life among the tombs is a far cry better than the alternative a crowded slum apartment in one of the city's more traditional pockets of poverty. Tenement dwellings in Cairo are particularly grim. Those lucky enough to have some money are usually packed with their families into cheerless, one room concrete boxes; each box stacked atop the other in a shoddily constructed pile almost guaranteed to topple during the inevitable next earthquake.
Those without money, and these unfortunates number in the tens of thousands, often huddle in shanties thrown up in rubble-strewn lots or under filthy blankets piled up in alleys and doorways.
In the cemeteries, at least, almost everyone lives in a cement house, many with jury-rigged electrical lines connecting them to the city's power grid. Roads through the graveyards are pocked, narrow and generally inaccessible to heavy vehicular traffic; thus they are mercifully free of the blaring horns and carbon monoxide clouds so common along Cairo's downtown thoroughfares. Local entrepreneurs, along with fundamentalist Islamic organizations, have sprung up to fill many of the community's infrastructure needs. Water tankers, pick-ups selling propane tank refills, garbage haulers regularly ply the paths between tombs, while within the "arafa" (as the locals call it), there are now coffee shops and grocery stores; schools and clinics; tiny restaurants and video rentals.
For the sick and hungry it may be of little consolation, but compared to the chaos of the rest of this uniquely unruly city the cemetery offer its tenants a measure of quiet and calm. This is a luxury seldom available even to middle class residents of Cairo.
"It is okay, sure," said a girl who lives in the cemetery with her four brothers and two sisters. A passerby named Nasir interpreted. Like other residents I spoke with, she was reluctant to give a reporter her name. When I asked why, she gave a shy shrug and didn't answer. A curious crowd had gathered round us, and I assumed this might explain her reticence to go on the record. I slid my notebook into a book bag and plunged ahead with our conversation.
"What is okay about living here?" I asked.
"My father can work and my brother go to school. We have many things here that we didn't have in our village."
"What sort of things?"
"Television!" she said as she turned away. End of interview.
The presence of so many people living in such blatant disregard of Islamic tradition (not to mention standard zoning practice) is an embarrassment to the Egyptian government; like most governments they prefer not to discuss things that embarrass them. Don't expect to read about the northern cemetery in brochures provided by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism, and don't expect official cooperation when compiling a story.
Independent guidebooks are more forthcoming, but these often warn readers that visiting Cairo's cities of the dead can be dangerous. Perhaps I was lucky; I never felt in the least bit threatened. Quite the contrary, no less than one dozen cemetery dwellers came forward with sincere offers of assistance each time I took a wrong turn or ventured into the countless private areas of this supposedly public place. Without fail cups of sugary tea were consumed, neighbors were consulted, and children were offered as guides.
One of these children, a thin 11-year-old boy named Samir, was chosen to lead me to Burckhardt's grave. We walked quickly, mostly in silence. Samir wove his way expertly through the maze of houses and tombs, each dwelling and grave connected by braided strands of white laundry line. After about five minutes we arrived at a neat little house surrounded by headstones and grave slabs painted in a rainbow of cheerful pastels. Brushing back the explosion of hair that obscured his eyes, Samir knocked loudly on a metal door and shouted to the occupants. A few seconds passed and a women of middle age, her compact body as round as a basketball, appeared with a set of keys.
The woman was apparently the caretaker of Burckhardt's tomb I say apparently because she marched out of the door and by me so abruptly that I was unable to strike up a conversation. She obviously had some experience with foreigners appearing unannounced on her doorstep; having spotted my flowers, didn't need to ask what I was there to do.
Though he died in obscurity, Burckhardt was destined to take his place among the Victorian era's most admired explorers. By the mid-1800s his fame grew so widespread and the European mania for Middle East adventure travel so pronounced that, like me, visitors to Egypt were beating a decidedly self-conscious path to his tomb.
Born in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1784, Burckhardt grew up in a household of wealth and privilege. Educated by a private tutor hired by his father, he eventually studied under the faculties of law, philosophy and history at universities in Leipzig and Gottingen. Expected by his family to pursue a career as a lawyer or diplomat, upon matriculation the 22-year-old Burckhardt instead took a radically different course.
Armed with a pocketful of letters of introduction, Burckhardt moved to London, where he hoped to secure a position with the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa. The Africa Association, formed in 1788 by Sir Joseph Banks, sought to capitalize on Europe's growing interest in things "oriental" an enthusiasm soon to be fired to an even greater degree by Napoleon's short-lived occupation of Egypt.
Burckhardt's travels for the Africa Association are now the stuff of legend. He began by going to Aleppo, Syria where he immersed himself in Arab language and culture. Three years later he emerged transformed, claiming a new religion, Islam, and a new identity, Sheikh Ibrahim Bin 'Abd Allah, trader from an Islamic region of India.
By the time of his death, Burckhardt had journeyed, alone and often at great personal risk, to both Mecca and Medina; to Upper Egypt, Sinai and Nubia; and throughout the Levant. His notes on the people, topography, environment and history of these places were unparalleled in his day, and remain among the most thorough and objective accounts of the nineteenth century Near East. He is most famous for his rediscovery of the ancient Nabatean capital of Petra (unvisited by any Western traveler for six centuries) and as the first European to see the great Pharonic temple at Abu Simbel.
During the fall of 1817 Burckhardt resided in Cairo while waiting to accompany a desert caravan traveling from the Nile to the Niger River, a journey never before accomplished by a European. Death intervened. After ingesting a meal of fish from the Nile he contracted a particularly severe case of dysentery and died days later. He was 33 years old.
The little entourage accompanying me and the caretaker to Burckhardt's tomb Samir, two girls I assumed to be the caretaker's daughters and a scruffy little boy that emerged from behind a smoking petrol barrel paused respectfully outside the door as I was ushered inside.
The current monument is not original. It was installed in 1871 after Rogers Bey, the British Counsel in Cairo, collected contributions from the city's European community to replace the simple marker that previously stood at the spot. The earlier tomb was the one most often visited by 19th century travelers. The writer and adventurer Richard Burton, himself among the most famous European visitors to the Near East, related an odd account of Burckhardt's death that was current among Egyptians in the mid-1800s.
"Only hear the Egyptian account of his death," Burton wrote. "After returning from the al-Hijaz [where he made the ritual pilgrimage to Mecca] he taught Tajwid (Koran chanting) in the Azhar Mosque, where the learned, suspecting him at heart to be an infidel, examined his person and found the formula of the Mohammedan faith written in token of abhorrence on the soles of his feet. Thereupon, the principal of the mosque, in a transport of holy indignation, did decapitate him with one blow of the sword." Burton goes on to say that "nothing could be more ridiculous than this popular belief."
That there would have been some confusion concerning Burckhardt's allegiance to Islam is understandable; was his conversion sincere or only part of his elaborate and necessary traveling disguise? Scholars believe it was most likely a true conversion, but no one will ever know for sure.
Inside the hut, a white, Italian-marble sarcophagus is surmounted by a narrow headstone. This, in turn, is topped by a rather silly-looking carved turban. The headstone's Arabic inscription is noteworthy for its welcome religious inclusiveness. "God is the only constant One," it begins. "This is the tomb of the blessed and received in God's mercy Sublime be He deceased Sheikh Ibrahim, the righteously guided son of Abd Allah Burckhardt of Lausanne..."
I laid the flowers on the center of the tomb, stepped out into the bright sunshine of the Cairo afternoon, and offered profuse thanks all around. "You are welcome," said the caretaker as she turned to go. Samir and the other children graciously lingered, all of them anxious to lead me back and collect their reward (a pound note for Samir, a candy bar's worth of coins for the rest).
Winding our way toward the city walls, I couldn't help but wonder at the irony of the children's situation how in this teeming capital city they can hardly imagine any higher manifestation of God's mercy than reliable access to the basics of life: food, clothing, and shelter. That Samir and so many others appear to have found these in a cemetery is, in its way, as an amazing discovery as the rosy ruins of ancient Petra; a discovery, to my way of thinking, in every way worthy of the righteously guided Sheikh Ibrahim; a.k.a. Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, traveler on commission with the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa.
Charles Reineke, a freelance journalist from Columbia, Mo., spent the last few months completing a research fellowship at the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, Jordan. This is the last of his exclusive reports for Flagpole.
