Cairo's haze of heat and odours

Scottish poet G. S. Fraser (1915-1980) was one of many Allied soldiers who visited Cairo during the Second World War. In his memoir A Stranger and Afraid (1983) he recalled his sojourn in olfactory fashion.

When I think of Cairo now, I think of something sick and dying; an old beggar, propped up against a wall, too palsied to raise a hand or supplicate alms; but in a passive way he can still enjoy the sun.... But who can possess a city? Who can possess it, as he possess his own body, so that a vague consciousness of its proportions is always in his mind?...

Cairo probably seemed to me a more confusing city than it really is because I saw it through a haze of heat and odours - the smells of spice, of cooking fat, of overripe fruit, of sun-dried sweat, of hot baked earth, of urine, of garlic, and, again and again, too sweet, of jasmine; a complex that, in the beginning of the hot weather, seemed to melt down to the general consistency of smouldering rubber ... a smell of the outskirts of hell. Ceasing, soon, consciously to notice all this, I would sometimes, in the Garden City near the Embassy, pass a lawn of thin, patchy grass that had just been watered through a sprinkler; and I would realize, for a moment, how parched and acrid my nostrils were. The smell of the Nile itself, of course, was different; by its banks, at night, there was a damp, vegetative coolness, that seemed to have, in a vague, evocative way, something almost sexual about it. And it was voluptuousness, in a cool large room, to bend over and sniff, in a glass bowl on a table, at a crisp red rose. But in such a room there would be European women; and their skins would have dried a little, in that cruel climate, and one would be aware of their powder, and their scent. Beauty, whether of body or character, lay, in that city, under a constant siege. In my memory, that hot baked smell prevails; that, and the grittiness - the dust gathering thickly on the glossy leaves of the evergreens, and the warm winds stinging eyes and nostrils with fine sand - and the breathlessness, the inner exhaustion. Under the glaring day, one seemed to see the human image sagging and wilting a little, and expected sallow fingers and faces to run and stretch, as if they were made of wax.

- G.S. Fraser, quoted in Peter Furtado (ed.), Great Cities Through Travellers' Eyes, London, 2019, p77-78.