January 25, 2014.

Bombings, Clashes Sweep Egypt

VIII

They had done it, they had done it at last!

CAIRO----Hundreds of Egyptians were trickling into Tahrir Square on Saturday morning to mark the third anniversary of the Arab Spring revolt that has violently split the country, the day after a string of bombings and clashes killed at least 18 people.

The room they were standing in was long-shaped and softly lit. The telescreen was dimmed to a low murmur; the richness of the dark-blue carpet gave one the impression of treading on velvet. At the far end of the room O'Brien was sitting at a table under a green-shaded lamp, with a mass of papers on either side of him. He had not bothered to look up when the servant showed Julia and Winston in.

Saturday's festivities unfolded amid tight security under the threat of street-level riots and fresh terror attacks. Helicopters circled overhead as security personnel frisked revelers filing into the iconic protest center in downtown Cairo where a sound stage had been erected Friday evening.

Winston's heart was thumping so hard that he doubted whether he would be able to speak. They had done it, they had done it at last, was all he could think. It had been a rash act to come here at all, and sheer folly to arrive together; though it was true that they had come by different routes and only met on O'Brien's doorstep. But merely to walk into such a place needed an effort of the nerve. It was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling-places of the Inner Party, or even penetrated into the quarter of the town where they lived. The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of everything, the unfamiliar smells of good food and good tobacco, the silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed servants hurrying to and fro -- everything was intimidating. Although he had a good pretext for coming here, he was haunted at every step by the fear that a black-uniformed guard would suddenly appear from round the corner, demand his papers, and order him to get out. O'Brien's servant, however, had admitted the two of them without demur. He was a small, dark-haired man in a white jacket, with a diamond-shaped, completely expressionless face which might have been that of a Chinese. The passage down which he led them was softly carpeted, with cream-papered walls and white wainscoting, all exquisitely clean. That too was intimidating. Winston could not remember ever to have seen a passageway whose walls were not grimy from the contact of human bodies.

Celebrations were already marred by a small explosion in front of a police training center early on Saturday morning in the dense Cairo neighborhood of Ain Shams, according to Egyptian state media. No casualties were reported from the attack.