EGYPT: The Djinni in the Bedroom

The new Shepheard’s Hotel glimmered palely in the Cairo night, and its veranda lights were reflected in the Nile. In a fifth-floor suite three-year-old Prince Nawaf of Saudi Arabia lay fast asleep. In the bedroom of a similar suite three floors below dozed the Begum Aga Khan, 52, a handsome Frenchwoman who was “Miss France of 1932” and is the widow of the wealthy Aga Khan, who lies buried 500 miles upriver at Aswan.

Well past midnight a strapping Negro named Salim al Abdullah, one of Prince Nawaf’s two bodyguards, returned to the hotel. He was carrying a small black bag and had an un-Moslem smell of alcohol about him. A hotel porter took the black bag, accompanied Abdullah to his room, where he put his nightclothes into the bag; then both headed for the prince’s suite, where Abdullah was to take up his guard duties. Unhappily they went to the wrong floor. Abdullah’s key would not open the door, so the porter got a passkey from the floor manager that did.

Abdullah tiptoed through the drawing room to make sure that his small charge was safely asleep. As he opened the bedroom door, a light flashed on and Abdullah found himself face to face not with the little prince but with a woman. Shouting, “Fein sidi! Fein sidi!” (Where is my master?), Abdullah leaped on the Begum, tried to choke the truth from her.

Struggling free, the Begum screamed for help, began throwing anything handy at the frenzied bodyguard. In turn, Abdullah hurled a heavy glass ashtray at the Begum, missed, and then was at her again, still shrieking: “Fein sidi!” The uproar brought the Begum’s Swiss secretary from next door, and the hotel porter and the chef d’étage came stumbling into the bedroom, pulled Abdullah off the nearly strangled Begum, hustled him outside. A doctor was summoned, and the police.

The doctor attended the bruises on the Begum’s neck, face and arms, and next day, still shaken by the “terrible experience,” she flew off to her villa on the French Riviera, followed by flowers and apologies from Shepheard’s. the Egyptian tourist office and the Saudis. Abdullah haltingly explained his mistake: “I thought she was a djinni. I thought she must have hidden my master somewhere. I was panicky.” And from the heart he added: “The King would chop my neck if my master was injured in any way.”