Cairo Egypt

"Cairo is very beautiful from above; I wish it were as beautiful from below," said little Mokhna, contemplating the glamour of the city's night life while standing on a hill on the outskirts. However, the lights, the posh facade, the glitter of urban modernity seen from the hilltop do not match the teenager's version of Cairo, where she and her family endure poverty, insecurity and abuse.

He's fast, pushing crooked wheels and a stack of newspapers through the bright Cairo night. They all know him and wave. Here comes Mahmoud Mohamed, ink-stained and dusty, sandals scuffing. Every evening, a few minutes past 10, when the bundles thunk, thunk near the old tram tracks, he sorts and loads and steers his cart down the boulevard, moving through traffic like a fish sliding past river stones. He starts his route amid clatter and bustle, but when he's done, he strolls home in the slumbering predawn of a city that in that moment as brief as a prayer can hear itself breathe.

The decades have done their work. Cavernous and crumbling, the Baron's Palace is the sort of place where dreams go to die and ghost stories linger. The nearly 100-year-old landmark mansion, a wild flight of architectural fancy, through the years has sunk into a pitiful state.

It was a simple, yet unsettling, question. "Is your passport American?" "Yes." "They've lost it." "Can they find it?" "God willing." The guard at the Saudi Embassy in Cairo said nothing else and wandered away. Behind thick glass, two men in the visa department -- one on his knees, the other hunched in a chair -- dumped out basket upon basket of passports that floated on the floor like a green sea around them. They were searching for a fleck of blue. Passports were tossed and scattered, a life-size, briskly shaken snow globe with ominous consequences.

It's sandstorm season in Cairo, one of those humbling days when the desert wind known as the khamsin seems determined to reclaim the city. A hot, mustard-colored haze engulfs the capital. Residents seal up their windows, and those who venture outside don surgical masks or clutch tissues to their faces against the tide of sand, flying garbage and urban grit. The same sandstorm blows outside Tarek Atia's suburban dream home.

His polished shoes have bronze tips, a rich man's trinkets on a poor man's feet. The shoes glow as he lords it over a stretch of sidewalk where, after paying off cops and other officials who sidle up to him with a wink and a smirk, he can earn $5 a day parking cars beneath the palms near the mall. Moving quickly through the traffic, Mounir Essawy co-opts public space and turns it into a sliver of private enterprise.

Cairo The lovers and the fishermen, the street kids and the cops, the veiled girls and the flower sellers, they all come at dusk to the bridge over the Nile, stealing kisses and tugging their lines, escaping the heat and hoping for magic, the boys whispering promises bigger than their pockets as moonlit boats glide beneath them. Hotel lights glow along the corniche in the distance and somehow Cairo's grit and poverty are gone; night makes everything pure.

Foreign ministers of the Arab League agreed to move the group's headquarters back to Cairo from Tunis, thus ending an arrangement that began in 1979 after Egypt was expelled from the league for making peace with Israel. According to Arab diplomatic sources, specialized economic and cultural agencies of the league will stay in Tunis. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had been campaigning for the Arab League's return to Cairo since his government regained full membership in the organization in

An agricultural engineer who survived 82 hours under the rubble of a collapsed apartment building was rescued Friday as thousands left homeless by this week's earthquake began gathering in angry crowds around police and municipal buildings. As huge crowds spilled into the streets from the city's mosques, officials appealed for calm. Religious leaders called for donations and pronounced martyrdom for the 519 known victims of the quake. "This earthquake fell on us in the blink of an eye . . .

He's fast, pushing crooked wheels and a stack of newspapers through the bright Cairo night. They all know him and wave. Here comes Mahmoud Mohamed, ink-stained and dusty, sandals scuffing. Every evening, a few minutes past 10, when the bundles thunk, thunk near the old tram tracks, he sorts and loads and steers his cart down the boulevard, moving through traffic like a fish sliding past river stones. He starts his route amid clatter and bustle, but when he's done, he strolls home in the slumbering predawn of a city that in that moment as brief as a prayer can hear itself breathe.

He dances in the alley when the music's right, remembering the days when he made machine guns during the week and in his off hours slipped on a satin shirt and black-and-white shoes and gathered a band of horn blowers to play weddings along the Nile. He was the singer, a high-rise hairdo and a voice to match. The neighborhood knew him, but the neighborhood pretty much knew everybody; still, Saber Saad felt special, microphone in hand, his two-tones tapping in the lights, the wind carrying his music through marsh grass and out to the desert, dying somewhere beneath the stars.

Faces peek out through the wire mesh in the green trucks that rumble through the morning. They are not prisoners, but they seem so. A back door opens and they drop out one by one in their black uniforms, scuffed shoes and clumsily tilted berets. Their rifles clatter, they are on the beat. They yawn and stretch and meander through the neighborhood, a trickling dark sea beneath the jacaranda and magnolia.

Here we are in the coming winter of hard skies. Cairo. Men in tunics coil turbans, sniffles in their noses. Fires burn, garbage smokes. Stones grip the night's chill. Delivery boys pedal through morning and girls in white linen hijabs hurry over train tracks. Gruff dudes sell Christmas trees in the roundabout, but the silver tinsel and the pop-up cardboard Santa seem like misfits against the palms at the desert's edge. It's as if they fell off a truck on their way to someplace else.

It wasn't the kind of dawn a man relishes, but it came nonetheless, foggy and cold, a light wind blowing past the spoiled glamour of the Cleopatra Palace Hotel. Beneath the overpass, Mohammed Atteya, a father of two, sat in his minibus, angry about rising milk and gas prices and troubled by the way a life can turn out. Students, laborers and a few clerks clambered aboard and paid him a fare of 1.25 pounds (23 cents) each.

"Cairo is very beautiful from above; I wish it were as beautiful from below," said little Mokhna, contemplating the glamour of the city's night life while standing on a hill on the outskirts. However, the lights, the posh facade, the glitter of urban modernity seen from the hilltop do not match the teenager's version of Cairo, where she and her family endure poverty, insecurity and abuse.

She comes up the stairs slow and heavy, almost heaving; she steps on the roof past the surly dog and the man she married. He hasn't been right since the war, walking around slumped and lost, but what can she do up here on the roof, living in a hut made of scavenged wood, waving to the neighbor, the one perched on a higher rooftop who looks down with pity on the broken sinks and battered couch that long ago was brocaded and ornate, in the French style. Funny how lives end up.

It was a simple, yet unsettling, question. "Is your passport American?" "Yes." "They've lost it." "Can they find it?" "God willing." The guard at the Saudi Embassy in Cairo said nothing else and wandered away. Behind thick glass, two men in the visa department -- one on his knees, the other hunched in a chair -- dumped out basket upon basket of passports that floated on the floor like a green sea around them. They were searching for a fleck of blue. Passports were tossed and scattered, a life-size, briskly shaken snow globe with ominous consequences.

How do they honk? Let us count the ways. They honk to warn pedestrians to stand back, or to pass another car, or if another car is veering close to them. They toot defensively coming into intersections. They toot while stuck in traffic jams, which is most of the time. Drivers in this overcrowded city of century-old street mazes and three-abreast traffic down two-lane highways venture forth with their hands on the horn, engulfing Cairo in a never-ending cacophony.

His polished shoes have bronze tips, a rich man's trinkets on a poor man's feet. The shoes glow as he lords it over a stretch of sidewalk where, after paying off cops and other officials who sidle up to him with a wink and a smirk, he can earn $5 a day parking cars beneath the palms near the mall. Moving quickly through the traffic, Mounir Essawy co-opts public space and turns it into a sliver of private enterprise.

Cairo The lovers and the fishermen, the street kids and the cops, the veiled girls and the flower sellers, they all come at dusk to the bridge over the Nile, stealing kisses and tugging their lines, escaping the heat and hoping for magic, the boys whispering promises bigger than their pockets as moonlit boats glide beneath them. Hotel lights glow along the corniche in the distance and somehow Cairo's grit and poverty are gone; night makes everything pure.