In early spring of this year. Mark's Egyptian fiancee mailed him a package of his favorite tobacco, ending a three-month attempt at quitting his sheesha. A sheesha is an elaborate water pipe, with a glass bowl base, topped by brass fittings called 'alb al-sheesha, or "heart of the sheesha." "Above this fans out a copper dish that serves to catch any coals or ash falling from the haggar or "stone." Smoke is drawn through the lay (hose) which is connected to the 'alb al-sheesha.

The whole apparatus is very much like a bong, which led to a lot of interrogations when Mark used to sit crosslegged in the Winthrop courtyard puffing away, water gurgling through the pipes, hose coiled around his knees. The caterpillar in last fall's Mainstage production of Alice in Wonderland, pillowed like a pasha on his guru's mushroom, was smoking Mark's sheesha.

He began smoking the sheesha, and met his fiancee, during a year and a half of study at the American University of Cairo. Originally Class of '89, Mark went to Cairo halfway through his sophomore year, and spent the following year there as well. He returned to three semesters at Winthrop, and spent his last living off campus on Irving St. His fiancee and he met in Cairo in the fall of '87, and he describes her in contrast to the majority of women he met there.

"Almost all the kids there are extremely rich, elite Egyptians. And there's this type--people say bint masr gadida, `girl from Heliopolis.' It's sort of like saying valley girl, Basically an extremely spoiled person who likes dressing up. And what you get used to seeing at A.U.C. is bint masr gadida, girls from Heliopolis. It's sort of hard to take after a while...The first time I say [my fiancee] she was wearing khaki pants," he laughs.

"The way she and I met was that she was a campus radical, and I, well I got into an argument with the A.U.C. admininstration. Let's leave it at that," he laughs again. "We were both in the doghouse."

During his time in Cairo the sheesha, which is a fixture in the city's cafes, became for Mark a way of meeting people outside the university. "People are always surprised to see a foreigner sit down and be familiar with a sheesha," says Mark," and they get very curious and friendly. It's a very communal custom."

One of Mark's most focused forays into the city was during the summer of '89, which he spent getting to know some of the people who live in Cairo's City of the Dead. He was interested in the social networks that exist among the people living in poverty in the city's old tombs. The work he did eventually became a photo essay and an article(for Harvard's Development Forum) in which he was able to show, in this neglected part of Cairo, the existence of a healthy fabric of human community. All were photos taken in the City of the Dead; there are people going about daily chores, a smoke-filled barbershop and an unforgettable image of a gravedigger's young son laughing and playing on the gates of a tomb.

This spring, after three months abstinence, the sheesha brought back strong memories of his explorations of Cairo. It was easy to sit with him in the back-yard, stirring tea, handing back and forth the lay, basking in a stream of Arabic names and stories. Every night until the tobacco ran out, Mark would be in the backyard, arranging glowing embers with the masha' (a pair of small brass tongs), cupping his hands and blowing softly on the coals.

It was through Egypt that most of Mark's lasting commitments were forged--personal, political, and also professional.

"My earliest ideas about doing photo-journalism," he says, "came from being in Egypt. When I first got to Egypt I thought of it like Disneyland, because there's an amazing amount of freedom if you're a Westerner there...So I had a good time for a few months." Then the significance of social conditions began to sink in, particularly the startling contrast between "the wealth of the elite and the next to nothing of the poor people. You see those contrasts so much more clearly than you do here, even between wealthy Harvard students and homeless people in the Square. It's so much more vast that it's hard to imagine."

Mark began working in Cairo with a community service society, work he continued in a homelesss shelter once back in Cambridge. The work was "a start," through he was drawn more and more to what he could do with a camera. At the time he was taking pictures for Caravan, a student paper at A.U.C., covering a lot of demonstrations. One experience in particular stuck with him, giving him his first sense of the power of film.

A demonstration was being held for the Day of the Land, which for Palestinians is "the equivalent of a national day." It was the first since the intifada. Al-Quds, A.U.C.'s Palestinian club, was holding a bookfair and some rightist students from the university got into an argument with one of the club members working at a bookstall. They seemed to think the books he was selling carried over-extreme messages, and so ("these people have a lot of power, they're in the super-elite") they called a university security guard to take the student away.

"I was above all this, taking pictures from a stairway above the bookfair. My fiancee came running up and grabbed my shoulder and told me what was going on. I ran down there to get pictures of him being taken away, because the university had denied taking people away previously.

"He was being led away by a security guard, but all around him were these sort of rightist goons...One of them was nicknamed Al-gebel, 'The Mountain.' Al-gebel saw me with my camera...I kept taking pictures and he kept getting closer, and finally he picked me up and moved me out of the way. There's a great sequence of photos in which you see him notice me, start advancing, and then the final frame is a blur..."

Followed closely by the gathering crowd, the student was taken by the guards to a small room on campus. One fear was that he would be turned over to the state police, and that, again, the university would deny involvement.