(Original headline: The Strangest Days )
Nothing can stem the snarling tide; the Silawa is now on the outskirts of Cairo. For the past three weeks, the mysterious beasts have terrorized the desert community of Qatamiya, southeast of the Citadel on the road ot Ain Sukhna, built to house the homeless of the 1992 earthquake. Nearly two dozen children have been bitten, newspaper reports claim. Citizens and security teams are roaming the surrounding wasteland and have so far killed more than 400 dogs, endangered desert foxes, and other assorted caninids.
On 1 April, 23-year old Sayeda Abadi Mahmous beat a silawa to death as it tried to attack her sister. Newspaper reports described the carcass of the beast as somewhat smaller than a dogs, black, with soft-hair, two prominent fangs, and specially developed hind legs which allow it to leap for your throat, much as in the rabbit scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
The silawa bounded into Egypt's imagination last August, when a pack of similar creatures attacked the Upper Egyptian village of Armant. Though rousted from that area, silawa attacks were reported over the winter in the Delta. This is the first time they have hit the capital since the 1960s, however, and newspapers are predicting a massive silawa incursion into Heliopolis and Nasser City. The silawa infestation is not all bad news, however. After Cairo's deputy chief of security visited Qatamiya to present Mahmous with a LE 200 reward, he was beset by citizens upset over the absence of phone lines in the district, which they said were necessary for, among other things, coordinating their anti-silawa defenses. The Minister of Communications installed phone lines the very next day, an all-time Egyptian telecommunications industry record.
The Arabic-language press has speculated that the silawa, whose name means she-wolf, is some sort of dog-wolf or dog-jackal mongrel. However, most naturalists say that both wolf and jackal have been eradicated from Egypt's deserts years ago, meaning that the silawa is probably either an abominable hybrid created in the biotechnology laboratories of Tel Aviv, or is simply a feral dog.
