Another post from colleague Tim Brookes, who this time writes of cabs and drivers in Cairo. I speak from experience: Although Tim does a good job here, it must be experienced to be truly believed:

Somehow, arriving back at Ramses Station in Cairo galvanized me beyond belief. I hoisted my two packs onto my shoulder and forged out onto the crowded platform and then through a side-exit to the drop-off-and-taxi enclosure which was, of course, mayhem. Two taxi touts each wanted 40 pounds for the journey to Zamalek, and I turned them down without a shred of conscience. I was perfectly capable of doing this thing by myself. A taxi would be cheaper on the ordinary streets. Working from my recollection of our approach to the station, I strode out into Ramses Square.

The night was hot, humid and alive. Even though it was nearly 9:30, the square was as crowded, possibly more so, than it had been during the day. Hawkers had laid out blankets or tables and were flogging shoes and sunglasses. Minibuses were pulled up here and there, with one young Egyptian yelling the destination over and over and others crowding around or waiting in clusters of twenty or thirty on the sidewalk, lapping over into the road. Scores, hundreds of others crossed the square, wandered in and out of the lighted shops, all of which were open, headed down into the underpass or up the steps to the flyover. This, I realized, was the Cairo I’d missed by being in taxis that took the flyover to the bridge. This was Cairo at night, at ground level. The darkness seemed to glow.

As I say, for some reason I’d lost my tiredness, my apprehensiveness, even my head/throat/chest symptoms. This was more exhilarating than anything else I’d seen since I arrived. Working through the crowd, I found a road heading in what I reckoned was the right direction, but it turned out to be a minibus-only loop; I hadn’t realized that the entire square was, in effect, a bus station. I flagged a taxi and asked if he’d go to Zamalek. He scowled and shook his head. The next road was heading the wrong way. The next was another minibus loop, the sidewalks becoming, if anything, even more crowded and alive. I had thought that Alexandria was the epitome of bustle, but this was the capital of bustle, the Mecca of bustle.

By now I was on the opposite side of the square from the railway station, and at last I saw a taxi skewed over by a sidewalk. I waved. He waved back. “Zamalek?” He nodded.

I got in, taking the financial bull by the horns. “Twenty pounds,” I said.

“Five twenty,” he said.

Well, I thought, it is night, and this apparently is going to be a harder job than I thought, so I agreed. I piled into the absurdly cramped space behind him, he waved me across to the other seat, I disentangled myself from my own feet, and we were off.

Within seconds it was clear that this was no ordinary Cairo taxi driver. This was the Xerxes of taxi drivers. He had refitted his horn with an echo control so that by touching it one he could produce a torrent of fifteen or twenty diminishing honks, and he headed into the massed traffic as if this neat piece of automotive technology gave him the power of a sonic icebreaker. The first road he tried was simply wedged shut with cars and taxis, so he turned into an alley—not a dark alley: everything in downtown Cairo was alight with shop window displays and car headlights—and shot at twenty or thirty miles an hour between rows of parked cars into gaps full of pedestrians with the unconcerned concentration of a racing driver punished by being sent back to Driver’s Ed and taking the cone slalom at the speed of sound.

The short cut took us to another main shopping street that was as solid with traffic and as overrun with people as the one we had left, possibly more so. Xerxes was delighted, though: right in front was a taxi-driver mate of his, whom I’ll call Darius. Darius had clearly not seen Xerxes since Xerxes had installed his Jimi Hendrix Model II Taxi Horn, and Xerxes was only to glad to demonstrate. He did the fast multiple echo. He turned the echo rate down and demonstrated again. He did the single blast, no echo. He was just about to move on to the fuzzbox echo and the wah-wah echo when the traffic at last shunted forward a little, and Xerxes was making gaps where none existed, getting quarts of traffic into pint roads, all the while calling to Darius and demonstrating his horn. In the front seat of Darius cab sat a young lady in a black burka, her pale face glowing in the fluorescent shop lights, staring straight ahead as if trying to pretend than none of this was happening around her, looking for all the world like a nun at a pro wrestling bout.

Cars began to move a little, and Xerxes continued carrying out traffic surgery, apparently paying little or no attention to the cars around him or the pedestrians stepping off the sidewalks like extras on Frogger. Instead, he maneuvered so as to be next to Darius and for the next two or three miles, utterly improbably, we kept going side by side, Xerxes calling a running series of jokes punctuated by effects on his horn, Darius laughing and calling back, the nun unmoved, unamused. At one point Darius leaned over and threw a cigarette from his car to Xerxes, who juggled it, grinned, waved, honked, and lit up.

We reached a large traffic circle, again completely locked down with traffic. It was now about ten o’clock: rush hour. Cairo had reached its peak, its essential identity.

Xerxes shot straight at the idling cars in front and inserted his front right wing just ahead of the left corner of a bus. The bus driver growled something at Xerxes, who responded with some kind of good-natured insult, calling the driver “Excellence.” Given that Arabic is said to have an unparalleled creativity in curses and insults, many of them involving mothers and camels, I was surprised at Xerxes’ tolerant mildness. Again—and Ahmed is still shaking his head at this as I tell him—I have yet to hear an Egyptian get seriously angry at another, or a parent abuse his or her child.

Finally, as we reached the approaches to the flyover and the bridge, the traffic began to break up, and now Xerxes revealed that he had not only extra features to his horn, but another seven gears in his gearbox. He shot up the ramp as if preparing a leap over 22 buses into Tunisia.

Years ago, I had a friend who volunteered as an ambulance driver for his college Rescue squad. “I tell you, man,” he said, chuckling, “when you hit that siren and you cut through a busy intersection at fifty, hey, it’s better than any video game.”

This seemed to me a strangely self-interested reason for being in a selfless profession, but I guessed I could see what he meant. Here in Cairo, Xerxes was now up on the bridge, which was bristling with late-night strollers, lovers and fishermen, racing toward Zamalek, leaving the turnoff until the last minute and downshifting into seventeenth. I had long decided that, for all his apparent insanity, he was either the world’s best urban driver or else protected by Horus, Seth, Isis, Osiris and every other figure of the Egyptian pantheon, and was sitting back in my seat loving it. He didn’t know Charia Ismail Mohamed, so I told him (all this by sign language) that I’d direct him, so we burst into the narrow, quieter, darker streets of Zamalek at only forty or fifty with him looking over his shoulder as I indicated right and left. He took an unexpected early turn, and from then on we kept on not being able to turn left because of no-left-turns and no-entries, but I figured out how to get us back on track and he kept on not killing people.

When we screeched into a space the size of a mousetrap right in front of the Horus, I gave him forty pounds. He was astonished. “Very. Very good,” he said. “Very, very good.” I couldn’t have agreed more. It had been the best way to see the city, it had been a wonderful exercise in trust, and it was better than any video game.