In a garbage-strewn block at the borders of the City of the Dead, it was eerily quiet as I wandered amid domes of old tombs, darkened by tottering high-rises. A whistle rang sharp overhead.
I could make out a hand waving a flag high over the alley. Hurrying back down the path, I climbed up some rubble to the top of a crumbling wall. There were two of them, just boys, leaned up over the fence at the edge of a rickety tower, affixed to the narrow brick building by long wooden poles like the hundreds of similar bird towers dotted all over Cairo. As the whistling continued, a pigeon cloud shot over the alley and I caught one boy’s eye. He waved back, and I motioned to the tower, inviting myself up. Shouting back, he said to let myself in.
At the top of the climb up the barely lit stairwell, I was greeted with the boy’s smiling face. He held up a hatch through the roof as I joined him at the base of a ladder that led to the tower, where I was greeted as warmly by his brother – and a breathtaking view of the twin mosques at the foot of the Citadel.
The boys said that their father had passed on the art of pigeon rearing, and their father’s fathers before him. Far from ‘rats with wings,’ pigeons here have long been prized for their tender meat—hamam mahshi (pigeon stuffed with spiced rice, spit-roasted) remains a cherished dish, perhaps tracing back to the pharaohs. Long a pastime of the richest, pigeon rearing, racing and trading now looks something nearer to a lifeline for Cairo’s poorest. Countless rickety wooden towers now cap the concrete high-rises surrounding the city.
As the older boy busied himself waving the flag, the younger was opening a series of hatches. With each feeding cell opened, the pigeons would scurry out at once, shooting into the air in a burst. Hatches emptied, the two boys looked out over the fence with big smiles and affectionate eyes, whistling or pointing out birds in the flock, and affirming that yes, they knew each one by name.
From a dozen more frail, stilted towers all around were more boys and men waving their flags, competing. After emerging at the bottom of the stairwell, I could hear their strange whistles on the walk down to the mosques.
