IN Cairo, and especially in Cairo, you feel the past with real meaning. The present seems to be just some mistaken, melancholy remnant.

The past seems to be present, close, when you find shade from the exhausting June heat at El Urman park, beside the zoo at Al Jîzah. The past—but not the 120,000 artifacts 5,000 years old in the Egypt Museum, 4 kilometers east over the Nile. Nor the 80,000 objects in the Museum of Islamic Art. T