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 Submitted by: Sawsan Fawzy Mohammad Ali
 7 May 2012
A Summary of Qaher Azzaman (Conqueror of Time)
By Nihad Shereef
Conqueror of Time, first published in 1972, is considered one of the master
pieces of the Egyptian writer Nihad Shereef who has pioneered Science
Fiction genre in Egypt and the Arab world as well. The story is about a
scientist who aspires to defy time so as to live far beyond his present age.
Nevertheless, his innovative scientific project tragically fails at the end of the
novel and claims the lives of his and many other victims.
The story started after midnight with the footfall of a man walking a steep
mountain asphalt road from the observatory located outside Hulwan town
boundaries to the suburb where he lived temporarily. The young man was
interrupted suddenly by a high–speed cart ascending the mountain road and
was about to run him over. He could escape it; however, he kept thinking
about its mystery. He got to his residence and went to bed recalling the start
and development of his career. He had graduated from the faculty of law and
joined a magazine as a journalist. He had succeeded in authoring short
stories and his name, Kamel Ahmed Bahnasawy, had become a renowned
one of a writer and a journalist whose audience had belonged to the youthful
rebellious generation opposing British colonialism. Afterwards, he started
working at Hulwan observatory so as to enjoy the suburb tranquility so that he
could write a research on "History of Astronomy in Egypt."
On the following day, he could not escape thinking about the mysterious
crazy cart so he attempted to find out about it. When he questioned the
observatory guard the latter pretended he had never seen or heard anything
mysterious like that before. Kamel's friend and colleague Ra'ouf said he had
never stayed at work until midnight so he could have never met such a cart.
On the day after, Kamel accompanied Ra'ouf to a local market from which
they could get folk powdery medicine for the latter's sick father. Among the

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crowd, a beautiful innocent girl attracted Kamel's attention as she was scared
by a traditional recurrent scene of a chicken being slaughtered. Kamel
guessed that the adult girl was pained by some other grievous situation she
recalled at the sight of blood. He sympathized with her supposing she was in
desperate need of his help. Nonetheless, when he offered it, she ran away
and, surprisingly, boarded the same cart he had met before and further
complicated its mystery. In the following morning, one of his colleagues
invited him to view the suburb from the top of the observatory tower while
measuring the speed of the wind. Kamel could see from there something that
looked like a cottage behind the hills. However, when he asked his colleague
about it he unwillingly gave him a very concise answer that it had been the
villa of a physician called Dr. Haleem Sabroon, and then he prevaricated and
ran to answer the phone.
Kamel concluded that there was a relationship between the cart ascending
the mountain road and that villa and they were both covered by a mystery that
everyone avoided talking about. Then he learned from his friend Ra'ouf that
Dr. Haleem was an internist, surgeon, owner of a hospital, and researcher as
well. Ra'ouf added that the mountain villa had been said to have laboratories
where the doctor had been conducting his exciting experiments and from
which horrible screams had been often heard. Kamel kept thinking about
those rumors. At the following night, while the two friends were having a short
talk, they heard a dreadful cry that Kamel identified with an Astronomy
professor. Later, they found his dead body lying on the mountain road to the
villa. Investigations could reveal neither the reasons of the accident nor those
of a similar one that had occurred within the previous five years. Kamel
suspected that the criminals were the villa residents. Pushed by a journalist
curiosity, he decided to sneak into the villa in order to unveil the secrets its
residents were hiding and to find the attractive poor girl he had met in the
market. He could enter the villa and eavesdrop on some conversations from
which he learned that the girl's name was Zain, Dr. Haleem was her uncle and
the cart was of his. Nevertheless, Kamel was caught, hit on the head, and
thrown on the mountain road.
After being saved, Kamel had a surprise visit from Dr. Haleem. The doctor
offered the anxious journalist a job of recording his exciting scientific

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researches. Kamel accepted the offer, moved to the villa and started to write
his memoirs. In the villa, he concluded that he was kept under surveillance.
He could see Zain for a while but she vanished out of fear. Later, he had a
long discussion with the doctor who told him about his project.
Dr. Haleem was interested in prolonging human lives in order to escape the
scourge of the Third World War and to enjoy the development of the
wonderful future age. Kamel supposed that the ambitious scientist aimed at
living beyond the age of British colonialism and Feudalism too. The scientist's
studies were mainly founded on preservation of living matter from decay as
long as possible through refrigeration or rather freezing. The idea had jumped
to the doctor's mind when he had been skiing on the slopes of the Swiss Alps
with his friends. It had been fortunate for him that a part of the iceberg had
collapsed and swallowed one of his friends. More than twenty four hours later,
the body of that friend was found alive. The reason that he had not died had
lain in the experimental anti-arteriosclerosis drug he had invented and injected
himself with that had thickened his blood totally and immediately with the
glacier collapse and temperature reduction. The living matter had been
preserved by the effect of that intravenous drug called the Pink Elixir of Life
along with the freezing process, and it had been ready to get back to its
normal state as soon as it had been heated and unfrozen totally and instantly.
Afterwards, Kamel spent a long time reading in Dr Haleem's library folders
of freezing experiments on animals and plants and their successful outcomes.
Nonetheless, the freezing experiment on the most similar animal to humans
failed and the monkey died in minutes. Dr Haleem comments on that last
experiment expressed how much he was shocked by the fact that the human
body would be huge so that it could not be frozen or unfrozen all at once. In
other words, the imbalance in the temperature of the human body cells would
cause some of them to explode and result in fatal hemorrhage.
Kamel passed his days in the villa either reading experiments papers,
recording studies, or wandering in the garden where he could secretly meet
Zain many times and fell in love with her.
In the mornings, Kamel had headaches that led him to discover the
soporific agent he had every night in his cup of milk. One night, the curious
journalist could spoil that scheme and set out an adventure to disclose the

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covert world of nights. He came upon freezing experiments performed on
humans in a secret laboratory. When he protested, the scientist justified his
criminal experiments saying that he had been sacrificing hopeless cases for
the good of humanity.
Experiments on humans kept failing, in spite of developing the Pink Elixir of
Life and inventing giant equipment capable of instant freezing and unfreezing,
because of another kind of hemorrhage due to deficiency in the amount of
oxygen delivered to the cells in the unfreezing process.
Eventually, the researcher found out a novel technology of pumping oxygen
into the human cells by which he could hinder that deadly internal bleeding.
He decided to carry out a new experiment on his volunteer assistant Marzouq
to test the effectiveness of the new method, and it eventually succeeded.
Kamel proudly recorded the historic exclusive dreaming of the worldwide
journalistic scoop; however, he could not resist his fears about the
implications of such a project.
The following nights, Kamel and Zain surmised some suspicious
preparations. Kamel tried to find about them and he finally discovered a giant
hall inside the mountain where fifteen large automatic pieces of freezing
equipment had been installed, loaded with human bodies, and labeled. Kamel
learned from the bio data written on the labels that all the pieces of equipment
preserved bodies of scientists whom Dr Haleem planned to accompany to the
future age, except five items that were dedicated to Kamel himself, Zain, the
doctor's assistants, and the last one was left anonymous. Few minutes later,
Kamel could overhear in a conversation between Dr Haleem and his assistant
Marzouq that the latter was a wanted criminal physician, Dr Haleem was not
Zain's uncle, he was crazy about her, and intended to accompany her along
with the group to the future age.
Kamel was further shocked. He attempted to escape from the villa with
Zain sacrificing the scoop honor he had aspired to but they failed. Kamel was
imprisoned in a remote dark room; however, he could escape capture and
direct to the so-called frozen Sleepers Hall. He arrived too late as he found
Zain had been already frozen. He was obliged to hide behind a closet in the
Hall and overhear a conversation between Dr Haleem and Marzouq. It turned
into a fight over the Pink Elixir formula, the glory of the discovery, and both

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men's love for Zain. The battle involved Kamel as Marzouq caught him. The
conflict was ended by an explosion the flammable substances caused. A part
of the mountain collapsed over the villa and Kamel fainted, but all the others
died.
Kamel recovered his consciousness and testified at an official inquiry that
Zain was still alive but frozen in the immense Hall inside the mountain and
she must have been saved. The officers did not believe his story. He insisted
to go and search through the debris of the villa for the entrance of the giant
Hall to rescue Zain. He, along with the policemen, could not find any trace.
Kamel stayed there searching in vain for Zain so that he became to be
thought of as an eccentric hermit residing in the rubble and telling a pathetic
fantastical story. His friend commented at end of the story that it had been the
revenge of age on the genius scientist: "if what you narrated had been true,
that may have been a horrible revenge time had taken on the physician who
had ridden roughshod over it, … as if time, which Dr Haleem had been about
to defy, had unawares regained its dominion, eliminated him and his
assistants, and deprived him of his most cherished person, Zain, to get her
lost and forgotten forever" (my translation). (217)
‫ل‬‫و‬..‫دكتورك‬ ‫علٌه‬ ‫تطاول‬ ‫الذي‬ ‫الزمن‬ ‫من‬ ‫رهٌب‬ ‫انتقام‬ ‫فٌه‬ ‫ٌكون‬ ...‫تذكره‬ ‫ما‬ ‫صح‬.‫أوشك‬ ‫الذي‬ ‫الزمن‬ ‫كأن‬
‫الدكتور‬‫حلٌم‬‫صب‬..‫ٌقهره‬ ‫أن‬ ‫رون‬.‫أعز‬ ‫منه‬ ‫وسلب‬ ‫أعوانه‬ ‫وعلى‬ ‫علٌه‬ ‫فقضى‬ ‫بغتة‬ ‫سلطانه‬ ‫استرد‬ ‫قد‬ ...‫وٌذله‬
‫ٌم‬ ‫ما‬...‫لك‬...‫زٌن‬‫لٌطوٌها‬‫أبدٌته‬ ً‫ف‬ ...‫ثناٌاه‬ ً‫ف‬...
(217)
Many years later, Kamel was found dead and his eyes were fixed toward
the mountain.
Work Cited:
Shereef, Nihad. Qaher Azzaman. Cairo: Helal Publishing House, 1972.
Print.