It rained in Cairo, Egypt on this day — a brief and not very satisfying shower — which passes for precipitation in the great desert. It was less than usual, barely enough to make splotches in the dust covering the neighborhood automobiles. As in most Cairo rains you had to be alert or you would have missed the whole event. The raindrops would have evaporated. The sun would have broken through the clouds above the tall buildings. The garage men would be out with their rags wiping things down; the shine man would be back polishing shoes on the corner and the fruit vendors would be back at work, probably without having bothered to cover their merchandise. Last month came the once-in-a-century exception. We had two gutter-washing cloudbursts. You could hear water roar and pound down through the seven-story vestibule in our building. No one I asked had ever seen such a thing, even middle-aged lifelong residents. A week before that it snowed in Baghdad. There too, sixty-year-old Iraqis reported they had seen nothing like it in their lifetime.