By Susan Hack

updated 11:37 a.m. ET Jan. 11, 2008

One day last February, near Cairo International Airport, I saw hundreds of people gathered around a tree beside an army watchtower. The crowd spilled into the road, stopping traffic, and drivers got out of vehicles to ask one another what was happening. "Has there been an accident?" I called out from my car to a man on the curb. "No," he answered. "It's something strange. They say a tree is talking."

I was surprised but not very, for many Egyptians embrace the supernatural. A thirst for miracles first sprang from the Nile; its annual flood enabled civilization to take root in the desert. The river's gift was not entirely reliable, and years of either low or excessive flooding could lead to famine, military weakness, and the collapse of dynasties. The completion of the Aswan High Dam and Lake Nasser reservoir, in 1970, finally guaranteed Egypt year-round water, agriculture, and electricity. Yet life in the thirteen-hundred-year-old capital remains far from secure.

Sprawling east and west from the Nile's green banks, Cairo today is a city on the verge, both megalopolis and village—a patchwork of modern high-rises, nineteenth-century palaces, garbage piles, shopping malls, herds of sheep, thousands of mosques, pharaonic ruins, and mile upon mile of informal brick housing seemingly held together with wire and string. Swelled by immigrants from the countryside, Cairo's population has tripled three times in the past half century and now exceeds 16 million, the largest urban agglomeration in Africa. Cars park three deep on streets, and daily traffic jams tangle drivers of school buses, taxis, and camel-carrying pickup trucks with commuters driving SUVs from new American-style suburbs and djellaba-clad farmers who grow crops and transport them to market by painted donkey cart as they have always done in the shadow of the Pyramids.

The extremes, especially the gulf between rich and poor, appall and overwhelm. Yet Egypt has a reputation for stability, the hallmark of Hosni Mubarak's presidency, according to his supporters. Mubarak, a pharaonic figure, is now serving his 25th year in office—the third-longest reign in Egypt's 6,000-year history. The 79-year-old president has indicated that he will not seek a sixth term in 2011. He has amended the constitution to allow for multiparty elections and has positioned his 44-year-old son Gamal to run for president, if he and Mubarak's military backers should so decide. However, the coming transition is uncertain. There is no vice president, and people are nervous about the future, wondering whether change will occur because of an election, a military coup, or a heart attack. In the past year, judges, teachers, train drivers, and other union workers have been striking, an unusual occurrence and a sign that stability has regressed into stagnation and dissatisfaction in almost every aspect of life. In this climate of malaise and in jealous contrast to Dubai's futuristic rise, many Cairenes look with nostalgia toward their glorious past, though they are divided over which past: the cosmopolitan Cairo of the early twentieth century and its polyglot, Western-influenced elite or the Caliphate—the pan-Arab rule of the Prophet Muhammad's associates and relatives, whose reign of military conquest and scientific discovery (and political rivalry) now seems Islam's golden age.

In Cairo, collective yearning for miracles tends to coincide with periods of political and economic stress. Egypt's population is ten percent Christian. Not long after the country's crushing defeat in the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War of 1967, people began to see visions of the Virgin Mary nightly on the roof of a church in the neighborhood of Zaytoun, appearing first as a bright light, then as a dove. Her apparitions during the course of a year attracted millions, both Copts and Muslims, a phenomenon that drew the notice of the New York Times and which to this day remains one of the Arab world's biggest spontaneous civilian gatherings.

West of the airport, near Ain Shams University, Zaytoun is far from the city center and the tourist trail. I took the Cairo Metro, a miracle of efficiency that circumvents the city's horrendous traffic, to see St. Virgin Mary's Church, whose central dome features a huge portrait of the Blessed Mother smiling soothingly down on pews of worshippers. From there, I walked to a covered market where Muslim fruit vendors and Christian fishmongers work side by side under hand-painted murals of buxom women while cassette players broadcast tinny recordings of Koranic recitation; the market is one of Cairo's most convivial, an example of the city's famous but now diminishing miracle of tolerance.

Brigitte Lacombe / CondeNast Traveler A sunset felucca sail is the best way to end the day. There's a rental dock near the Four Seasons at Nile Plaza, and two hours will set you back ten dollars.

Trees and shrubs that communicate with humans are, of course, famously Egyptian. A burning bush spoke to Moses. A pharaonic love song, preserved on papyrus, refers to a talking pomegranate tree that compares a woman's breasts to its ripe fruit. In Matariyya, across the Metro track from Zaytoun, I made a pilgrimage to see an ancient sycamore fig believed to have sheltered the Holy Family on their flight into Egypt. Reputed to have healing powers, it is protected within a walled compound in a working-class neighborhood of dirt alleys and squat apartment blocks, its enormous, vinelike branches supported by wooden crutches under the watchful eye of a veiled woman, an employee of the Antiquities Department, who sits in its shade and passes time by reading the Koran. The tree is next to an old well associated with Atum, the ancient Egyptian god of genesis, and some say Mary's sycamore is the original Tree of Life, on whose leaves Atum wrote down the names of his creations after bathing. In April, fat black bees buzz in the branches, and on the day I went, an orange tabby cat curled contentedly on a bole beneath green leaves coated with fine desert dust.

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