64
PARTISAN REVIEW
first night, the soul will experience the tension and anguish of their ques–
tioning, and is consequently called
Lilat al Wahda
or Night of Solitude.
Then, after the interrogation is complete, it will fly to the home of the
just or the sinful to await the final judgment. According to other popu–
lar beliefs, the nomadic soul will wander throughout forty days, at the
end of which mourning may be bid a definitive farewell on the occasion
of the
Gumaa al Arbaain.
On Fridays, the City of the Dead presents a striking spectacle of life
and movement. A good number of Cairenes come to pray for their
relatives and eat and rest in the pantheons. The sepulchres of those who
have recently died are decorated with flowers or palm fronds. Some
families set up a kind of canvas awning in the street, where the men
receive condolences from their friends and drink a leisurely glass of tea.
Whilst the bourgeoisie, in shirt and tie or bejewelled, take refuge inside
their mausolea, poor people usually spread themselves, their tableclothes,
and tea pots out by the side or on top of the tombs, welcoming
inquisitive strangers and eager for distraction.
If the angels evoked by Ahmed show themselves only to the de–
ceased, the goblins and demons that populate the cemetery do not
al–
ways scorn the company of the living. One of my guides pointed out
their wandering nocturnal presence in the area around Sayida Nafisa:
they touched and even embraced the solitary walker, but vanished imme–
diately God's name was invoked aloud. In the precinct of the pantheon
looked after by his father, he added to convince me, one had taken up
residence in the depths of a well. As I showed an interest in seeing the
hiding-place, he took me to see its keeper. Leaning on his crook, the old
man hobbled up to the outer gate with a weighty bunch of keys. He
was in his seventies and had an extraordinarily expressive face: his eyes
shone astonishingly brightly and, after stunning the body of his
interlocutor, seemed to disappear into infinity. Once informed of my
whim - I confess that the idea of an exclusive interview with his demon
was extremely attractive - he led me into a dirty poky corner, where a
collection of objects was piled up; on the stone bench there was a cir–
cular hole covered over with a metal lid. He lifted it up and shouted
down, the din echoed and resounded in the well for almost a minute.
After making sure of the impact of this, he covered over the hole and,
before taking me inside the mausoleum, locked the door to the cubby–
hole inhabited by the
aafrit.
By night, he told me, he also closed the
pantheon from the inside, to stop the demon from slipping through and
disturbing his sleep. After a long struggle with his keys, the entrance was
opened and we were in a kind of spacious, vaulted chapel in the center
of which was a large marble slab bare of decoration. The old man
