THE threat of summer heat already lies heavy over Cairo and the rest of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt. The city police have changed their blue flannel uniforms to summer whites. Jacaranda trees are blooming richly purple in suburban Heliopolis, remnants of the district's lost elegance. While the triple peaks of the pyramids of Giza shimmer on the horizon, stately feluccas sail down the Nile as silently as they have done for centuries. Overhead, hawks wheel lazily in gyres. The pace of the people in their flowing gallabia robes, never very fast, has grown a step or two slower.
Though much of Cairo's ancient rhythm is unchanged and unchanging, the city is in fact a capital at war, a war that rages daily along the Suez Canal, only 70 miles away. The war shows—in the shabby, weary, olive-drab ambiance of the city, in the preparations it has made against attack. Hundreds of brick blast walls stand on sidewalks in front of doorways. The entrances to a few public buildings are heavily sandbagged. Windows and car headlights are painted blue—the ancient color for warding off the evil eye—to conform to blackout regulations. In erratic fashion, street lights are out in various places. Soldiers slouch in the shade of girders on each of the Nile bridges, and guard the Cairo airport, the railroad terminal and key road junctions on the sprawling city's edges. Sonic booms occasionally rattle the windows of Cairenes as MIG fighters scramble daily on simulated interception missions. Through the clear air, as gun crews perfect their skills in the nearby desert, come the crump of artillery and the rhythmic tat too of antiaircraft fire.
Cairo and the rest of the Arab world are only three weeks away from a day that they would prefer to forget, June 5, the second anniversary of their crushing defeat by the Israelis in the Six-Day War. The war left Cairo shorn of part of its realm, ruling over a defeated people and a divided land. Lost in the war, the Sinai desert and Gaza remain in the hands of the conquering Israelis, who are solidly entrenched on the east bank of the Suez Canal.
Key to the Arab World
The occupation has burned deep into the Arab spirit and bred hatred, apprehension and frustration. The presence of the Israelis along the Canal is a constant reminder of the superiority of the Arabs' foe and — what is far harder for the Arabs to bear — of their own continuing inferiority and impotency despite their greater numbers of people, planes, tanks, guns and resources. All of this has fed a growing, fatalistic conviction within Egypt that the rapidly hardening status quo in the Middle East can be broken only by another war — even though most Egyptians do not want one, even though another war would almost certainly mean another defeat.
The man who must try somehow to find a way to bind up this hemorrhaging of Arab pride and self-respect by recovering Egypt's lost territory is Gamal Abdel Nasser. It may be true, as he now insists, that he was pushed by Syria into the showdown with Israel in 1967. But it was he, in his longtime self-appointed role as the leader of all Arabs, who led Egypt, Jordan and Iraq into the war, and his country was the heaviest loser in men, arms, land and prestige. Today Nasser is the one to whom most Arabs look to get back the land occupied by Israel. Among all the Arab rulers, he is the only