The airport is in the Western desert. (Here one speaks of the Eastern and the Western desert, as in Paris of the Eastern and Western banlieues.) As the plane tilts to align itself with the runway, I lose my bearings and have the disagreeable sensation that the wings are about to smash into the dunes.


Egypt is making an effort to win back tourists discouraged by the Suez Crisis. The arrivals hall at the airport is embellished with mummies arranged symmetrically in glass cases. I'm welcomed by a hostess from the Ministry of Information who has been notified that I'm here as a journalist. She gets priority clearance through passport control and tells me that the revolutionary government has just abolished bakshish. This must be a scoop as all the taxi drivers, guides, bell-hops, shoe-shine boys and beggars that I meet during the course of my stay don't seem to have been informed of it yet.


On the way to the Hilton, I rediscover the city I visited once before, in 1952, after the anti-British riots. There are not many new constructions to be seen. The buildings need repainting, the cars seem to be missing parts: bodywork gets fixed with wire, windows replaced by cardboard.


On the other hand, this Hilton is brand new. It stands between the main square, the Nile and the Egyptian Museum, on the site of the old British barracks. The bathrooms have three taps, like in the United States: one for cold, one for hot and the other for iced water. Girls in uniform attend the lifts and big moustachioed beys transact business on the terrace of the thé dansant. One can only speculate just how much it must have cost Mr Hilton in terms of dollars and nervous energy expended by his specialists to get this slice of America to work here. What is certain is that the water from the three taps does indeed flow at the temperatures indicated, that room service is impeccable and that the club-sandwiches are excellent.


From my window I have a view on the Nile. It's a vast, muddy river strewn with islands, studded with bridges, plied by sailing boats just like the ones on the ancient bas-reliefs. On winter mornings like this, it is shrouded in cold fog that irritates the throat. But within an hour the sun will return and the black silhouettes of diving children will again be visible. Apparently they stand a nine in ten chance of catching the bilharzia worm which wriggles through the skin and proliferates in the flesh.


History enthusiasts will visit the Egyptian Museum, the Citadel, the El Azar University and the numerous mosques. Of course the main attractions are the Pyramids and the Sphynx, situated some six miles from the city centre, in what used to be a desert and has now been transformed into a suburb dotted with hotels and night-clubs. I felt obliged to attend a son et lumière show which, luckily for me, was in Arabic that night: when you can't understand the language, the grandiloquent style is more bearable. Even so, I didn't have the patience to stay till the end.


My second encounter with the Pyramids was quite unexpected. It happened one night when I had a bit too much to drink and let myself be persuaded by a taxi driver into visiting a certain belly-dance joint which he praised to the skies. As we came around the dune, the Great Pyramid suddenly loomed ahead of us: blocks of granite a yard across, forming a mountain which stretched off to the right, the left, upward, and the summit of which was lost in mist. This was well worth the price of the ride, and made up for the belly-dance (which was a wash-out).


There is an area of Cairo known as European, with buildings 10 stories high, tramways, shopping areas and cafés. All these businesses once belonged to Greek or Italian entrepreneurs whose families had lived in Egypt for generations, but who were then forced to emigrate by the revolution. Harassed no doubt by socialistic bureaucracy and hampered by a shortage of spare parts, the new owners let them fall into disrepair.


What today's traveller will miss even more than spare parts are feminine smiles. I'm not referring to those frequently one-eyed creatures wrapped in black, who are generally too fat, too thin or else too old, who ride about the bazaar on donkeys or haggle interminably at vegetable stalls. One can do without their smiles. But I thought I glimpsed some young dark-skinned girls with slightly semitic looks, dressed in western style blouses and skirts and sporting fashionable hair-cuts. The only problem was I could never capture their expressions: they glide along the pavements without ever dawdling, always self-effacing, constrained in their movements, relegated to a minimal presence.


From the balconies of the Hilton one can see the minarets of the Citadel high up the hill to the North-East of the city. If one walks in that direction, following the tramlines and crossing the ever dustier neighbourhoods, one reaches the Grand Bazaar. It's the ideal stroll for tourists who dream of getting away from Europe, the Mediterranean, the twentieth century. Men wearing what look like long striped nightshirts glare at you suspiciously, beggars and flies harry you, dogs and chickens chase between your legs, big bearded fellows in fezzes proffer their merchandise. Without the TV screens and the posters advertising Coca-Cola, the exoticism would be complete.


But the omnipresence of poverty ends up getting under your skin as insidiously as the bilharzia worm. Flies swarm on the white sheets with which the more scrupulous butchers drape the carcasses suspended in front of their stalls: a visual counterpoint to the black veils of the women. Yet more flies stick to the eyes of babes-in-arms suckled by their mothers right in the street. (Suddenly the black tent which is a woman opens half-way and out comes a breast shaped like a snub-nosed warhead whose nipple is immediately snaffled up by a little mouth.) Is it the flies which spread trachoma? At every step one follows a different stage of this disease, starting with inflamed conjunctiva, progressing to dull blue-green corneas and ending in empty eye-sockets beneath gluey eyelids.


At a busy crossroads, I saw a naked baby on the pavement; the woman who seemed to be its mother was involved in a brawl. She had one of the few beautiful faces that I can remember seeing, but her left leg was bare to the buttock and eaten away by some disease. (She was no doubt a beggar and her affliction must have entitled her to such a lack of modesty.) She was angry with a man and heaping him with insults, hurling herself at him again and again, but held back each time by passers-by. After a while she resigned herself to squatting on the pavement and sobbing, all the while neglecting the child. I did not dare point the camera at her.


Besides, taking photographs in the street is not easy. When I'm only obstructed by children who insist on posing in front of my lens, I can keep them happy by pretending to click the shutter or, at worst, I can ask a policeman to move them on. (There are policemen everywhere, apparently under orders to be helpful to tourists). What bothers me more is the touchy patriotism of adults: they prevent me from photographing beggars, or veiled women, or small donkeys, or jam-packed trams, or bearded men, or even ragamuffins. These patriots surround me (often in a very kindly manner) and the spokesman of the group, usually a student or a retired civil servant, addresses me in good English, telling me that I should not sully the reputation of his country. So what am I to photograph? One morning, believing myself to be within limits, I took some photos of a residential complex in the suburbs-but I came up against the same objections. (In the event, my censors were not so wrong: the state of the buildings did not make good propaganda for the regime.) On another occasion, I tried to photograph the approach to a school but was prevented by the Principal who ran up in haste to explain that I needed written authorisation from the Ministry.


Needless to say, this doesn't stop me from taking photographs. I melt in by making myself look as if I'm in need of a few spare parts too: I avoid shaving, I let my shirt trail out of my jeans, I swap the Nikon for my old Leica wrapped in black tape. (In any case, centring the composition and focusing is too time-consuming on the Nikon: Egyptians are lively people, it only takes a fraction of a second for the children to stand between me and whatever interests me, or for the adults to wave prohibitively.) I set the aperture to 16 and the distance to two yards: this way, I can view and snap very fast, sometimes before being noticed. In any case I don't look so very different from them, I must only avoid betraying myself by my gait. So I try to walk slowly, without stopping to look about, without responding to their glances-or then only with an absent smile, as if my mind were elsewhere. Above all, I avoid looking as though I'm seeking anything in particular.


It doesn't always work. The children are constantly on the look-out: all it takes is for one of them to notice me and place himself before the lens, and 20 more flock to his side straight away. They're not hostile to start with and if I smile at them, they readily smile back.


But I haven't come here for public relations: I have to bring back some images. So I disengage and wander off, searching for other subjects, forcing myself above all to disguise my irritation. Because these kids are sensitive to the slightest negative vibration: as if by echo, their hostility can suddenly explode, and then they yell their war cry at me: "Yaoud! Yaoud!" (Jew! Jew!).


What amazes me is the speed with which a wave of sympathy can turn to its opposite. In a cul-de-sac I catch sight of an old bearded fellow with a big baby in his arms: a subject which should not give rise to objections. The old man seems happy and merely asks to settle his pose. But some old shrew darts out of a door, snatches up the infant and grabs my Leica. The entire population of the cul-de-sac runs up screaming. I smile as broadly as I can. I know two words of Arabic which mean "pretty child". I give the old man a friendly tap on the shoulder. Good humour returns, smiles spread-but only for a few seconds. The old shrew starts bawling again and a new wave of hostility is unleashed. Thus, in less than five minutes, four or five waves alternate before I am able to get back to the main road, the Leica in my hand and five piastres in the old woman's palm.


But all this will not do for my story. I'm not after the picturesque, and I don't even want to highlight poverty because I'm not counting on finding its archetype in Cairo. I'm looking for the aspect which will be most characteristic of this stage of my journey, that for which this city might be considered the most extreme example. I already have a little preconceived idea for which I am seeking confirmation.


(Here, I would like to offer a vindication of preconceived ideas: they have often served me as a compass and, on this journey, I am counting on them for guidance. I have often found that they correspond with some reality. And, even when they don't, they can make a good starting point, from which new bearings can be taken and course changed.)


Regarding Cairo, my preconceived idea boils down to just one word: propaganda. I already knew that, whenever there is a crisis in the Islamic world, agitation is stirred up and propagated by Nasser's "Voice of the Arabs". This radio station is the base for all the activists of the Arab League, as well as the opposition émigrés from Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia. It gives guidance to the Muslim missionaries trained at El Azar University as well as to the legions of indoctrinated lay teachers which Egypt sends to all the Islamic countries of Africa and Asia. It is well known that its broadcasts, which are translated in all the languages of these countries, are as numerous (and much more widely followed) as those of Radio Moscow.


On the other hand, Egyptian television, which is aimed mainly at internal propaganda, broadcasts on no less than three channels-more than any other state television in the world. Official subsidies allow Egyptians to buy their sets cheaply. The Palace of Television, which is not yet finished, is the most modern and imposing building in the city. So I decided to leave the bazaars and spend the rest of my stay in the television studios.


A CBS technician disembarking here from New York or Los Angeles would first notice the differences. Egyptian cameramen suspend work for prayers, spreading their little rugs and prostrating themselves towards Mecca. And they spend much of their remaining time in cobbling together makeshift solutions due-as ever-to the shortage of spare parts (even though their instituttion is provided with more foreign currency than the rest of the country).


But to the ignorant onlooker, an Egyptian television studio looks like a studio anywhere in the world, just as the Nile Hilton looks like all the Hiltons, or United Arab Airlines like TWA. In fact Cairo's Palace of Television seems much closer to Rockefeller Center than to the bazaar.


And yet Egyptian television is aimed at the bazaar. Most of the broadcasts even try to recreate its image albeit in prettified form, free from flies and beggars, peopled by plump, overly made-up young women who perform their dance routines gracefully whilst balancing pitchers on their heads and reciting folk songs. Some are disguised as boys (because mixing the sexes on stage is forbidden by Egyptian law) with pencilled eyebrows and painted moustaches.


The talk show that is being recorded during my visit presents the new society of the United Arab Republic before a backdrop showing the Palace of Television itself as it will look when completed. Seated outside a Parisian-style café are the heroes and heroines of the new era: the modern young woman, the revolutionary officer, the patriotic intellectual, the stakhanovite civil servant.


It would be too easy to poke fun at this facade-or at the way Egyptians prevent foreign visitors from photographing the reality of their bazaar while spending precious foreign currency to present a cosmetic version so touched up and idealised as to be unrecognisable.


They might counter that this is a projected image of their future, a model meant to nourish the dreams of all the stall-holders, the fellahs of the Nile Valley, the foreign students of El Azar, the teachers and the propagandists indoctrinated to take the good word to the mountains of Morocco and the shores of Yemen. And that, thanks to this propaganda, the dream will progressively come true.


If only these televised games and dance routines were really pointing to a credible future. The sceptical visitor may have his doubts, but viewers in the bazaar are glued to their screens and don't ask for more than to hold onto the dream.