Desert interlude.

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Haytham’s rallied me from my moping around the hostel on this, my last weekend in Cairo. He’s done an admirable job these past few weeks of shepherding me around the city. An intelligent, thoughtful student of American government, he shows a tender appreciation for some of the country’s bedrock ideals. A trip to a bustling Zamalek café on a mild weeknight, for example, suggests a reverence for coeds in tight jeans and snug sweaters that would do any American proud. In a strange coincidence that seems - in this country of contradictions - oddly Egyptian, his older brother is a staunch conservative. Grave, religious, his forehead bruised from prayer, he’s kept his wife veiled throughout the ten years of their marriage. When Haytham’s father demanded to see her face on the eve of their wedding, her family’s refusal threatened to provoke a war. To this day, Haytham’s seen no more of his sister-in-law than the narrow slits of her eyes. “I hear she’s very nice,” he says, offering as proof the appraisal his father was finally allowed to give.

It’s not surprising, given his sentiments, that Haytham should’ve fallen in with a large pack of ex-pats. They meet each Friday as part of the Cairo Hash, a group that’s unofficially dubbed itself “a drinking club with a running problem.” One of more than 1,700 Hashes around the globe - an “international disorganization,” as the website claims - they meet to walk, wheeze and wind their way through a looping desert track, working up a friendly sweat before getting down to the grave business of binge drinking. It’s a way to meet, to bond, to blow off some steam after the daily frustrations of life in Cairo. Haytham’s huffing his way through his twenty-sixth Hash in the past two years. Since its founding in 1980, the Cairo chapter has organized more than 1,400 gatherings.

We meet in Maadi, an upscale suburb that’s a favorite of the city’s ex-pat community. Along its broad, leafy, palm-lined streets is the quiet contentment of stable jobs paying American dollars. SUVs idle beside the curb, as if soccer practice is winding down; gardeners clip at the shrubbery. When the group’s gathered - some forty strong, mostly chattering with American or British accents - we pile into a caravan and turn single-file into the rush of traffic. Even in manicured Maadi, though, Cairo chaos reigns supreme: we’ve hardly gone five minutes before realizing that the rest of the group turned off the road a few streets back.

It’s an inauspicious start to an inauspicious journey. Barreling toward the desert at the city’s doorstep, we snake through grim files of Stalinist high-rises: laundry flapping from the balconies, thousands of satellite dishes tilted upward, like wildflowers turning their faces toward the sun. On the city’s outskirts a broad, colorless landscape of telephone towers and processing plants stretches out like an industrial wasteland. It’s exactly the sort of place where unspeakable evil might be born. There are five of us in the car, hitching along with a cheerful young Brit who’s Hashing for the first time. The conversation is awkward, proceeding in fits and starts. I’m doing my best not to draw attention to the fact that the gas tank is hovering on empty.

We catch sight of a small white pennant tied to a stick in the sand. The Hashers mark their route into the desert so stragglers can catch up, and it’s about the only reason on earth I can imagine turning off the highway - its smooth pavement an urgent symbol of modernity - onto this perilous, rock-strewn path of prehistoric origin. The car takes a serious beating. After a quarter of a mile we see another pennant flapping. It almost seems like a grim joke, some mischievous Hasher marking a turn-off at the precise point where you’re most inclined to turn back. A pile of rubble, a heap of trash, a carcass of the luckless Hasher who failed to follow the signs last time around (my invention). We drive through a sprawling work site where a new city is being built from the ground up. Though the concrete housing blocks and brick high-rises might someday house bright-eyed kids and happy Egyptian families, their empty husks right now suggest an American bombing campaign getting lost on its way to Baghdad.

We reach the starting line just in time to catch the last bright pairs of running shorts scampering off. Luckily, the Hash takes seriously its non-competitive claim (according to the website, racing is considered a “serious Hash crime”), and it isn’t long before we’ve caught up to the sizable walking contingent. There are middle-aged American men with muscular calves and expensive hiking shoes, a trio of trilling French girls, an elderly British woman with a scarf jauntily knotted around her neck. We trudge along slowly, Haytham dabbing at his forehead, an old Austrian guy looking like he’ll need a triple-bypass before the day is through. When we reach our first scenic overlook, high above a dusty valley, there are weary complaints that this is the toughest Hash yet. On the path below, three American girls in matching gray T-shirts are jogging briskly, provoking at least one novice Hasher to mentally send a few boulders crashing down on their heels.

It’s not long before certain Hash realities become apparent. First, the desert is really no place for an afternoon stroll. Second, after a few weeks in buttoned-up Egypt, a bunch of young girls in running shorts will do strange things to a guy’s constitution. Third, if you multiply those weeks by a number of years, you can start to understand why so many older guys are drawn to the Cairo Hash. Lastly, and most importantly, there’s a certain species of middle-aged man who might accurately be described as “a walking hard-on.”

The predatory intent of some of my fellow Hashers is easy to gauge. While the rest of us make light conversation and pause now and then to admire the views, they circle hungrily around the edges, searching for the straggling newcomer who’s easiest to pick off. A pretty student from Chicago who shared our ride from Maadi is quickly shanghaied by Steve, a ruddy Virginian who hides his mischievous eyes behind a pair of cheap plastic shades. He exchanges a few pleasantries with Haytham, then pumps my hand with dubious interest, before suddenly unleashing a charm barrage on our unsuspecting friend. As they walk off, Haytham grumbles a few unmentionables under his breath. “He does that every week,” he says. “If he sees you talking to a girl, he’ll come over and say hello and not leave her alone.”

It becomes a fun game, as we try to break the walk’s laboring monotony, to See Which Girl Steve’s Hitting On Now. His stamina is impressive, no doubt honed by hundreds of Hashes and countless rejections. At the finish line, as we line up for plates of rice and beans and ice-cold beers, he surveys the spent bodies that litter the parking lot. There are wheels turning behind those knock-off shades, mental calculations that undoubtedly take into account how a 4k hike and a tall bottle of Sakara might impair a young girl’s judgment. When Wesley, the wise-cracking Hash leader, rallies us to make a Circle, Steve smartly positions himself just inches away from a pair of taut, exposed midriffs.

It’s in the Circle that the spirit of the Hash - brash, sex-charged, mercilessly mirthful - hits its stride. The etiquette seems to recall all your worst nights in college, where the innuendo is overt, the inhibitions are loosened, and the most dubious reasons are fished up for you to chug a beer. Wesley leads a round of song that plays heavily on themes of sagging breasts, turgid erections and massive foreskins. Richard - two plastic bull’s horns strapped to his head - works on a routine of cheap gags that might’ve once played well in the Catskills. With little provocation a few people are pulled into the Circle - typically on some trumped-up charges of a “Hash crime” - and then compelled to down a cup of beer while we serenade them with bawdy tunes.

Not surprisingly, it’s the young girls who attract the most attention. One luckless newcomer gets dubbed The Hot Chick from Boston, and quickly becomes the butt of every second joke. Others are endlessly urged to shed their shirts. It must be a jarring moment for first-timers, when they realize they’ve fled the harassment of a typical day on the streets of Cairo only to be ogled and harassed by hard-up Americans. But the strongest bond between Hashers seems to be a reverence for inappropriate humor, and even as their cheeks turn red while a feisty fifty-something humps their legs, the girls seem to take everything in stride. They’re laughing loudly as we roar through the climax - a dubious version of “Swing Low” that’s rife with innuendo - thrusting their hips and making lewd overtures toward their crotches, sowing their imaginary seed over the dusty desert plains.

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