Dance of the plastic bags

The late morning light was of a heavy yellow, under a brooding purple sky, which promised rain or sand storms. Mumbling thunder rolled in the distance behind the sand dunes - those majestic marchers, whose century-long march has recently been obstructed, arrested almost. Most of them were 'raised' to the ground and flattened, or forced to stand so close together that Man could build ugly rows of tenement-style housing on top of them - with satellite dishes clinging to the south-facing walls by the hundreds - like locusts on anything green after a swarm's attack. Those dunes who still stand freely a little further into the desert, have - as if discouraged to march on by the terrible fate of their fellows - come to a halt by themselves. They are now scarcely covered in little knee-high bushes that have taken to dressing up in plastic bags, which they catch as the wind sweeps them past on a day like this one.
As I was whizzing past on the passenger's seat of a bright green ISIS delivery van, slowly descending towards a gloomy Cairo with the dunes on both sides of the desert road, I watched the distant sky-scraping blocks rise into an enormous smog-cloud, hovering over the swamp that is Cairo, like a thousand-legged moody monster preparing for the attack of the sand storm. A lonely man sat on the temporary concrete wall elements between the two lanes of the highway, as the cars whooshed past - only moderately fast, though, because each side was signalling the other with bright lights, that a radar control was coming up... and sure enough, after a few hundred meters, just before the checkpoint that marks the entrance from the desert to the first belt of Cairo's suburbs, there they were: a handful of sturdy men, dressed all in black, except for the stitched silver lines on the shoulder pads of their jumpers. They were already eyeing us from afar - like a pack of hungry dogs awaiting their prey. The aggressive gloominess of the day was mirrored in their eyes - a suspicious and wicked stare hit us as we passed them.

And despite all of that, the driver (I forgot his name - Ahmed, maybe), was singing along fervently, yet with a smile on his face, to the powerful tonal recitation of the holy Qur'an blasting out of the van's speakers.
Behind the checkpoint, where large and dangerously packed lorries turn around and cause massive queues with mind-numbing horn concerts, the wind was playing inbetween the cars with a team of plastic bags - whirling them up in spinning culumns by the dozens... and of all colours, raising them over the car's roofs, where the flow grabs them and drags them down again. There, the coughed-out warm air from the exhausts inflates them, blows them up like little balloons, that gather between the impatient wheels, between the lapidated pieces of thin, patched-up metal, that separate inside from outside, or sometimes one driver from another - there they gather and call upon the wind to start their whirling dance again.