During a Greek holiday interlude, two California graduates flew to Cairo. After three days of exhaust and exhaustion, one decided to escape back to "civilisation", while the other is still here 22 years later.

Then, as now, their views on what makes a city attractive could not have been more opposed. And thus, welcome to Cairo, a city stark with contrasts but no apparent geometry.

For sure, much of the contrast is in the mind. If on the one hand weary, media-prone tourists wonder whether a bomb might be hidden on a bus, others who have lived here long enough, confidently wander off into its grimy streets past midnight without fear of mugging, foul play or being run over. For a city the size of Cairo (population: 16m), the crime rate is surprisingly low.

Surrounded for most of this century by a collection of rag-tag military camps, collectively nicknamed "the khaki belt", the burgeoning capital has had one way to go. Hopelessly vertical. The result is that where the Nile dissects the nation's capital into two sister cities - Giza and Cairo, each with its own governor - there is now a virtual canyon of glass and aluminium.

While from their minaret-studded citadels or pyramid-shaped mausoleums, the potentates of the past gazed across the sleepy valley at a timeless desert searching for caravans or invaders, now the same vantage points afford a view across miles of ragged concrete soaked in static brown "smaze" (smog and haze).

Yet, to simply focus on Cairo's degradation is to miss out on its many achievements.

Because of a surfeit of upmarket river-front constructions, inner city dwellers that are severed from the father of all rivers can now travel beneath it. The second country to introduce rail travel in the 19th century, Egypt recently inaugurated the third phase of its Cairo metro transit system, the only one of its kind in Africa and the Middle East.

Any diehard soil engineer will confirm that constructing Cairo's underground railway was no small feat. The city not only straddles a rising water table but it also rests on top of what is considered to be one of the world's largest treasure trove of undiscovered antiquities.

Just as ambitious ancient Egyptian dynasties maligned their immediate predecessors, defacing their monuments, latter day regimes are prone to doing the same. The "Pharaoh Complex", we call it.

Which is perhaps why Cairo should be treated as an urban history catalogue, a city authored by several mighty pharaohs, and not as a city which was built up through a process of civic evolution.

A short trek through the city's Old Quarter takes you past Coptic, Jewish, Fatimid, Mamluk, Ottoman and Khedival eras, most of them on top of one another. Children digging for clots of camel dung are just as likely to come across a Maria Teresa, a Venetian Ducat or the foundations of a 4,000-year-old working class quarter. Never a dull scavenge.

And never a dull sound, in a city where construction equipment is as much an integral part of the landscape as are the salacious billboards featuring local starlets of the silver screen, a muezzin's prayer call - heard five times a day - has to compete with digitised jingles, techno-Arab music, deafening car horns and street vendor's shrieks.

Cairenes unanimously agree, however, that the only antidote to this never-ending Cairophony is the soothing voice of Oum Kelthoum. At 5pm every afternoon, her songs can be heard from almost every taxi and coffee house radio. Egypt's Diva - who died in 1974 - is as much adored today as she was in her heyday, when even former President Nasser took time off to listen to her.

To all Egyptians, Oum Kelthoum still represents everything that is good and pure about the nation. It came as no surprise when her public condemned the state for having sanctioned the destruction of her house to build a huge tower in the fashionable district of Zamalek.

Ecological threats aside, destruction and construction have become Cairo's catch-all. Structural adjustment and big money are invariably threatening Cairo's fragile architectural heritage.

And even though the city is also expanding horizontally, as new satellite cities and fancy gated communities replace the khaki belt, construction and development persist within the city's old boundaries.

Not far behind, and despite efforts to the contrary, squalid squatter settlements are also on the rise, stifling the city and causing an ecological and demographic time bomb. Under the crush of population growth and the perennial disparity of incomes, Cairo seems to be going in different directions. But will they ever meet? Will they mystify coming archeologists when they uncover the shards of Cairo 2000 AD?

"Unlike other megacities and despite several Cairos living side by side, one is never lonely here," says the Californian who remained behind 22 years ago and subsequently became a photographer.

"Cairo is where vitality, chaos, history, art, corruption and unplanned opportunities meet head on. I intend to be here in 2022."

Samir Raafat is a journalist and author of Maadi 1904-62: Society and History in a Cairo Suburb


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