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Whenever Nasser finds time to join his family these days, he takes the youngsters swimming at an Alexandria beach called Borg el Arab (top temperature in Cairo last week: 108°). He also finds an outlet for his pent-up tensions by lining up empty Coca-Cola bottles in the sand and shooting them up with his service revolver. Though President of his country, and wandering hero to the Arab world, Nasser has lost none of his old field soldier's disdain for luxury. This summer, while an extra room is being added to his family's five-room bungalow, he works and sleeps in one room at his old revolutionary headquarters on Cairo's Gezira Island.
What Says the Sphinx? One hot night last week the dictator turned his back on his telephones and Teletype messages to ride out from Cairo to the Pyramids. There, where Napoleon cheered his troops into action with the words: "Forty centuries look down upon you!", Gamal Abdel Nasser walked alone in the moonlight. By week's end he had still not acted. The counterpuncher was still waiting. He had never been in so tight a spot. His consolation was that others were in a spot too, and might find it to their own interests to propose a compromise in a way that he might accept−as a gesture volunteered rather than extorted from him.
But even if such an accommodation should be reached between Nasser and the West, giving this proud man what looks to the Arab world like a victory (since he would still own the canal), he had already lost something precious and irreplaceable. No longer were the British and French insisting that he be brought to heel publicly : they would settle for the fact rather than the admission. But whether Nasser knows it or not, he has. by his duplicity and by his tearing of the fabric of international agreements, forfeited the indispensable good will of the West that alone could help build a strong, new Egypt.
He may seem to be "getting away with it" for the moment, for if he proves amenable, the Western nations are ready to let him off for now: they have no wish to make a martyr of him. Or he may, desperate and defiant, go further to make himself dependent on the Communists−who, by reason of his policies, are now for the first time a force in the Middle East. The West is anxious to save him from that too.
But when Britain and France apply to a head of state such words as liar and fascist, it means that they have made a fundamental decision about him. They may find it impossible or impolitic to push him out. But they will not lift a finger to help Nasser if he totters; they will not mourn him if he falls.
This is the tragedy of a man who in many respects has given Egypt the most effective, certainly the most honest government in years; a man sincere in devotion to the improvement of his impoverished land and desperate people. He had, and has, immense capabilities, however much they have been flawed by the workings of his ambition. The tragedy is that he does not see that it is not Arab strength which the West has reason to fear, so much as Arab weakness.