A KING'S HOME

SIX weeks ago King Farouk, with his Queen and his seven-month-old son, left Cairo in a hurry. He took 204 trunks with him into exile, but left most of his other possessions behind. Last week, for the first time, a group of Western newsmen got a peek at some of them. An Egyptian army captain rolled back the monstrous iron gates of famed Kubbeh Palace and cheerfully announced: "Boys, you're going to see things here that you probably thought didn't exist."

What the newsmen saw was the world's biggest and most expensive accumulation of junk. It threw a pitiless light on the character of the man who had lived here until a few weeks before. Farouk's tastes sometimes seemed curiously childish, like those of a schoolboy who has never grown up beyond the French postcard stage. Above all, the palace gave the impression that someone had feverishly and indiscriminately crammed possessions into the vast rooms, to ward off loneliness, or perhaps despair.

On the ground floor was the recreation room, a large, round, bleak affair, as dreary as a nightclub in daylight. Beside the gambling table was a huge steel cabinet bulging with roulette wheels, dice, hundreds of decks of playing cards with Esquire-style pin-up girls on the back. On a key board hung keys to every room in the palace, and to dozens of apartments in Cairo, with the names of the occupants attached on neat labels.

The palace vaults in the basement held six huge safes. One contained a fabulous collection of coins--cartwheel-sized Czarist medals, gold sovereigns anc silver dollars. Another was packed tight with paper money, including 1776 Continentals. There was also a stamp collection worth millions of dollars.

Upstairs, miles of corridors, reception rooms, drawing rooms, anterooms, bedrooms, bathrooms were lined with paintings and stuffed with bric-a-brac. The music room, as big as a cathedral, housed all kinds of instruments, including an antediluvian phonograph and an organ. All the instruments were automatic. In the gymnasium were all sorts of exercise equipment, including an ingenious machine, made in Battle Creek, Mich., which was supposed (but signally failed) to keep the royal rump from becoming imperial. Farouk's study was a pornographer's paradise, hung with garish paintings and crammed with statuettes of nudes in attitudes conventional as well as unconventional--at least by U S standards. In his desk was a box of "magic tricks," including two pocket radiation counters inscribed: "Measure Nuclear Energy Yourself."

Farouk's master bedroom was cold, ugly and boxlike, like a room in a cheap summer resort hotel. It was heaped high with a weird mixture of pornography, childishness and sentimentality--mild glamour shots like those advertising Chicago burlesque bars; Kodachrome nudes complete with pocket viewers; trick photographs that could be squeezed to make a fan dancer bump and grind There were also pictures of Queen Narriman as a bride. Near the royal stood two stacks of well-thumbed U.S. comics.

In the dressing room were 100 suits, 50 canes, 75 pairs of binoculars and 1,050 ties, some with the initial "F" five inches high. Most pathetic item of all: a snapshot of Farouk as a boy, slim and handsome.

A windowless hideaway between the first and second floors was the "treasury." An officer flung open box after box of diamonds, rubies, emeralds and platinum brooches. "Like Woolworth's," said a correspondent, "except it's not glass."

It was the same at Montazah, Farouk's summer home. Beside the King's bed were six telephones, two radios and his field marshal's uniform. In Queen Narriman's boudoir lay her latest reading matter: Lady Chatterley's Lover and Arabian Nights in French. In Her Majesty's bathroom still hung her dainty white bathrobe, left behind in the rush.

"What are you going to do with all this stuff?" a newsman asked. " don't know," said the captain. "But it's Egypt's now."

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