Pharos and Pharillon

In 1917, E.M. Forster arrived in Alexandria as a young man and fell desperately in love with Mohammed el Adl, an Egyptian bellhop. The city became his compass, his education, and his heartbreak, and this slender, luminous book is his answer to it. Part prose poem, part historical meditation, part love letter, Pharos and Pharillon maps the ancient harbor where Antony once stood watching Cleopatra's ships, the crumbling grandeur of a metropolis that was once the center of the world, and the quiet dignity of its modern Egyptian inhabitants. The first section, Pharos, conjures the city's legendary lighthouse and its myths. The second, Pharillon, turns to smaller, more intimate sketches, all leading to Forster's revelatory introduction of the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, whose work he brought to English readers for the first time. The book pulses with double consciousness: the colonial gaze and the colonized city, the ancient world and the wartime present, Forster's desire and the man who inspired it. This is a book for anyone who has loved a city they could not keep, or a person they could not name.