At the time when the Swedish Academy announced on October 13, 1988 the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the famous Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, the entire Arab world flew flapping its wings like a bird rejoicing in this overwhelming literary victory.

The owner of the Mahfouz wedding sat on the edge of the oriental bed in Fishawi cafe "calling" the master to bring him his favorite drink "hibiscus with tamarind" in one of the cafes in Al-Hussein neighborhood in Cairo, as a simple Egyptian citizen on an ordinary morning, wetting his index finger with his mouth and browsing the Al-Ahram "journal" while the world behind him was overturned, unconcerned and disbelieving an expected news or certain that there was some error in the announced name, and ruling out that he was the one intended, and the man whose head they wanted.

 And in the midst of the  flood of calls  which pour in and almost do not stop  on his home phone  congratulating and blessing, he stood for a moment fixing his concave glasses   He called "the newspaper" to confirm the news, Congratulations you won the Nobel "Captain", despite all those confirmations he did not stand stunned and they did not achieve the desired expected joy, euphoria and happiness or they did not move a still or moving thing in him.

Until the sound of the Swedish Ambassador's footsteps came on the stairs of his apartment building in Auza neighborhood and the eyes were fixed on this tall blond man in an elegant suit and decorated necktie where he stopped with all diplomatic routine to knock on the door in front of Mahfouz's apartment to receive him in "pajamas" as if he woke up from a long dream that he did not believe and could not explain, shaking his hand, congratulating him and announcing the news of his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Here he felt tension and confusion and after congratulations and drinking a cup of coffee the Ambassador asked him to prepare for departure to Sweden, here he requested as if he was electrocuted by an electrical wire "I don't ride planes" and after attempts to dissuade him from his decision both parties agreed to authorize the Egyptian Ambassador in Sweden to receive the prize, but the committee refused to deliver Naguib Mahfouz's Nobel Prize to the Egyptian Ambassador in Sweden because the prize is private and the Ambassador is a public official and state official.

To treat that crisis and reduce the burden of fear and solve the problem, both parties agreed on a middle ground which is for the writer Mohamed Salmawy to travel accompanied by his daughter Fatima to receive the Nobel Prize on the tenth of December of that year, all that because of fear of planes 

Travel in a novel : 

Naguib Mahfouz did not travel outside Egypt or even inside it much, and his favorite routine trip was cutting the distance on foot from his home in Auza neighborhood in Giza vernorate to his office in Cairo at Al-Ahram newspaper on the sixth floor, and he used to travel to Alexandria sometimes to write some of his novels, he was a lover of Cairo and that's why he wrote most of his novels about its old and new neighborhoods, and his novels are considered a witness to the Egyptian transformations that he started with Pharaonic history and Egyptian monuments until Cairo neighborhoods such as: Midaq Alley, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street, and the events of her novel and its characters revolved in various Cairo neighborhoods. 

 Naguib says in a segment of a novel in "Palace of Desire", we see "Hussein Shaddad" asking "Kamal Abd al-Jawad" (one of Naguib Mahfouz's novel heroes): "Doesn't your soul yearn for tourism in the wide corners of the earth? Kamal thought for a while, then said: It seems to me that I am naturally disposed to the love of stability, and as if I shrink from the idea of trips, meaning from movement and disturbance not from vision and inquiry. I wished if it were possible for the world to circle around me where I am"

"Hussein Shaddad laughed his pleasant laugh coming from the heart, and said: Stand in a fixed balloon if you can, and look at the earth as it rotates under you". After a long dialogue about moving, Kamal says: "Fortunately, intellectual trips do not necessarily require moving"