The Nomadic Alternative – Page 65

passengers on an elevator stuck between floors, hollering to be let out.

THE CITY - a gilded fragment of Heaven or Hell on Earth? Civilized people have never been able to make up their minds. Twelve years ago the University of Chicago held a symposium on the development of urban society. Distinguished academic figures gave papers and the university published their deliberations under the title "The City Invincible". This was before the fires lit up Washington and Detroit, and they would scarcely use the same title today, except from perversity. The City Invincible had become the City Combustible.

For why - despite the care, the calculation, the rational thought - are the foundations of the Pyramid as unstable as dust? They are unstable because a ghost is haunting the Pyramid, moving through its mortarless interstices. It was an ancient custom to bury a man under the foundations of a new building - a human sacrifice thought to ensure the stability of the structure. But violence always meets its due reward and the ghost of man, crushed by the Pyramid, will not rest till he has rumpled the foundations.

At the end of the 19th Century Cairo and Alexandria uneasily awaited the arrival of the Mahdi, a religious fanatic from the Sudan, whose invasion of Egypt at the head of barbarian hordes was imminent. The Alexandrian poet, C.P. Cavafy, was, like Gibbon, fascinated by the fall of the Roman Empire, but unlike Gibbon he wanted it to fall - and he anticipated the annihilation of Mediterranean values at the expense of the rising spirit of Africa. But the English forestalled the Mahdi by sending troops to the rescue, and one day in Alexandria Cavafy watched the healthy young soldiers at drill, and heard the "[illegible] ... [illegible]" of the brass band. Then he returned home to write his poem "Waiting for the Barbarians" which ended,

And what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

When the fruit is over-ripe, the barbarians - as adored invaders - are given the benefit of the doubt.