Down the Nile Page 3

  Aswan’s desert air seems to caress the town with warm promise, lending vividness and meaning to manifestations of poverty and human struggle that would elsewhere be considered ugly. The piles of garbage, the heaps of smoldering ashes, the scatterings of broken glass, the architectural rubble, the human excrement, the sun-bleached plastic shopping bags and rusted tin cans that seem to ring all Egyptian villages and besmirch every empty plane between them are, in Aswan, softened by the sheer volume of sun and water, color and air. Here, fishermen’s houses cobbled together out of mud bricks and rusted tin cans appear somehow more ingenious than slovenly, more fascinating than dispiriting. In a little village of Aswan near the Old Cataract Hotel, I stepped on a scrap of shaggy bath mat in the road and realized with a start that it bore in one of its corners a yellowed set of jaws studded with two rows of brittle teeth. In another corner it had a moth-eaten tail. It was not a mat at all but the flattened carcass of a dog, a mud-caked rope cinched around one hind leg, tongue hanging out like a twisted strip of leather. It had been there a very long time. I walked on, fine beige dust splashing up around my ankles with each step, and knew that the thing I had just stepped on would have had a considerably more disturbing effect on me in a cold and rainy climate.

  Aswanians had physical freedom, if not economic. The lissome ease with which Aswanian men move seems a direct response to the bright, dancing air. Fat men jiggling up and down on the backs of trotting donkeys manage to look graceful and in control. A man riding a bicycle and carrying enough lumber on his head to build a modest dance floor turns at full speed and without mishap through a crowded intersection, squeezing between a truck and a bus, one hand on the handlebars, the other steadying his boards. He moves with the swift, elegant confidence of a bullfighter evading a bull, though his tires are strained nearly to flatness beneath the weight of his cargo.

  As I walked up and down the river, I stopped each time I saw a boat I liked and struck up a conversation with its owner, and if he seemed even remotely congenial I would eventually ask if I could try the boat for just a minute. The request usually met with a derisive snort of laughter and a long string of questions and jokes. “Only if I can come with you,” the men said. Or, “You don’t know how. I will row you,” or, “Only if you pay me eighty pounds for one hour,” or just plain, “No, madame. You cannot.”

  One day I met a young red-haired, blue-eyed, freckle-faced Nubian * who agreed to let me use his boat, until his father found out what he had done and chased him down the riverbank, shouting and cursing and brandishing a bamboo stick. It was a matter of money — the boy, unaccustomed to foreigners asking for rowboats, had neglected to ask me to pay for the privilege of rowing myself around in a very small circle in front of the Old Cataract Hotel. I made up for the son’s transgression by paying the father, who looked as though he wanted to beat me too. In the end I didn’t dare try his boat.

  Another hot day in a palm-ringed cove on Elephantine Island, the largest island in the Nile at Aswan, I came upon a young man sitting in a rowboat anchored in the shade in shallow water. He was deeply absorbed in the task of sewing a rip in a dingy pair of boxer shorts and didn’t notice that I had appeared on the riverbank above him. In the cockpit of a felucca anchored not two feet from him, an older man lay on his back napping, one arm slung across his face and his bare toes pointing up into the trees. I sat on a rock above the cove, listening to the smooching sound of unripe dates the size of peas falling into the water from the overhanging trees, until the men noticed me and both sprang up at once and began to shout like hounds heralding an intruder, asking me if I needed a lift across the river for a special price. I approached the men, greeted them, and after some minutes of small talk eventually asked the young one if he thought it was possible to row all the way to Cairo in the boat he was standing in.

  “I have done it,” he said, and as if to prove this he sat down abruptly on the thwart. “It took me three weeks to row from Aswan to Luxor.”

  In proper bantering Egyptian fashion, which had taken me some time to get used to, I clapped a hand to my forehead with mock astonishment and suggested that three weeks was awfully slow, that a person could drift that distance in less time, which was probably not far from the truth.

  “I think I could row it in ten days,” I said, testing his sense of humor. This needling boast was just the thing, for the young man gave his rat-colored boxer shorts a twist and let out a yelp of laughter, and his sleepy-eyed friend smacked the deck of his boat and hooted, “Oh, laugh! It’s fun! For you, madame? Not possible!”

  Nubian bongo drums pulsed in the botanical gardens of Kitchener Island across the way. A curious warbler talked loudly in a tree. The young man had a thick face and a bouquet of coarse black whiskers on his chin. His hair was straight and glossy and black, and he wore it in a bowl-shaped cut, a curtain of bangs hanging to his eyes. His teeth, which I speculated had not been brushed since grade school, were the color of unpeeled almonds. His gallabiya was torn and dirty, and that was surprising, for in Aswan even the lowliest laborers always looked recently washed and laundered. He sat in his boat and smirked at me. I asked him if he would sell me the boat. “Three thousand bounds!” he shouted. His laugh was startling, a toy poodle’s high-pitched yip.

  “Magnoun,” I said, and the old felucca captain hooted again. “She said ‘crazy’! She is good woman!” Standing barefoot on the deck of his boat, one arm rakishly hugging the mast, the captain asked what country I was from. I told him. His salt-white mustache and handlebar eyebrows twitched with interest. “Ronald Reagan!” he said gleefully.

  “Yes,” I said, “and George Bush.”

  “John Kennetty!” he said in a trumpeting way. It sounded like a minor challenge. I hesitated, not certain what the correct reply might be. I took a stab. “Richard Nixon.”

  “Ibrahim Linkum!”

  Curious as to where this would lead, I said, “George Washington.”

  The captain fussed with his turban and pointed a crooked finger at me. Gamely he cried, “John Wayne! Beel Cleelington! Gary Coober! Charlington Heston!” categorizing presidents with movie stars in an entirely reasonable way.

  In the distance the noontime call to prayer had begun, and though to me this enormous sound was always utterly arresting, like a simulacrum of God himself suddenly descending from the sky, and though it was officially imperative that all good Muslims get down on their knees and pray, the two men seemed to take no notice. I asked the young man if I could try out his boat, but, like so many men in Aswan, he had difficulty understanding what exactly I wanted until I went over, lifted an oar in my hand, and pointed at myself. He offered to row me. I said no. He offered to come with me while I rowed. I said no, I just wanted to try the boat alone for one minute. With stabbing defiance he said, “Fifteen bounds for one minute!” After a protracted wrangle, we settled on a slightly less extortionate five. The young man fell to a crouch in the bottom of his boat and began rummaging in a cubbyhole under the stern, and at the end of a lot of muttering and pawing through a jumble of possessions that clanked and thudded loudly against the hull like chains and stones and empty cans, he withdrew an English copy of Marie Claire magazine. Courteney Cox on the cover. He climbed out of the boat, opened the magazine, and held it up for me to see. Pointing at the English text, he said, “German?”

  The magazine had the heft of a telephone book. “English,” I said.

  He flipped furtively through the pages, showing me photographs of women in scanty outfits, advertisements for bras and stockings, tampons and vinegar douches. Lovingly he touched the smooth thighs and burnished breasts on the pages, the glazed lips, the bare bellies, and bunchy buttocks with his calloused fisherman’s fingers. He seemed to have fallen into a trance. He gave off the humid scent of wet hay. His black eyes looked feverish as he jockeyed the magazine up to my face. He wanted me to look with him. He breathed down my neck. My presence at his side, though sweaty and dirty and wary and outfitted not unlike a Canadian Mountie,
had clearly had an enhancing effect on what were, for him, already titillating images. And seeing these otherwise banal ads through his goggling Muslim eyes, they looked, in turn, weirdly pornographic to me.

  “Let’s go,” I said, anxiety in my voice. The young man was twice my size. He dropped the magazine into the bottom of the boat, snatched up his undershorts, held them to his mouth, and snapped the sewing thread with his teeth. With an awkward little one-footed hop, he tried to pull on the shorts under his gallabiya, hooked his big toe on the waistband, stumbled, jigged about in the sand, righted himself, and tried again. I climbed into the boat, and he untied the painter and pushed me off with his foot.

  I rowed out to the middle of the river, which was quiet now in the midday heat, while the two men looked on, up to their hairy shins in water and daintily elevating the hems of their gowns to keep them dry. They watched nervously, as if anticipating having to catch me in a neck-breaking tumble.

  Beyond the shade of the cove, the heat of the sun directly overhead was so intense it seemed to affect my hearing, rendering the swilling of the oars in the water surreally loud. In the stark sunlight, the water was the color of mercury. Batlike green bee-eaters darted over my head like gaudy bits of paper caught on a wind. The fat magazine was slippery under my feet. I gave it a kick and sent it flopping into the bow. The sun that day seemed full of vengeance, intent on punishing every living thing. Gusts of heat came off the dunes with the force of a fire draft. I let myself get snagged on the river’s current for a moment, floated quickly downstream twenty feet, and climbed back up with stiff slow pulls at the oars. The oars were long and unwieldy. The boat moved heavily. It was portly and thick planked, hard to maneuver, and much bigger than I needed. Yet it was immensely exciting to be alone, finally, in a boat on the Nile, like that dream of stepping off a towering cliff only to find that you can fly.

  IN THE THIRD WEEK of November 1849, Gustave Flaubert and his friend the photographer Maxime du Camp arrived at the port of Alexandria with the intention of renting a boat and crew and sailing up the Nile. Several days later Florence Nightingale and her friends Charles and Selina Bracebridge also arrived at Alexandria intending to do the same. Egypt in 1849 was still at the relative dawn of its popularity with European travelers: Thomas Cook’s steamship package tours hadn’t yet arrived; some Egyptians had never seen a white woman before; and for a European a trip on the Nile was still an exotic adventure. The novelty of the Nile experience for Edwardian travelers like Flaubert and Nightingale is best understood in light of the fact that between the years 646 and 1517 Egypt’s Islamic rulers had closed the country to virtually all outsiders. A few traders and pilgrims managed to enter the Nile Valley during this thousand-year period, but reliable information about Egypt was scarce. To the average European, the place was as arcane and mysterious as the moon. In 1517 when Egypt fell under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, it became more accessible to Europeans, and by the eighteenth century several Europeans succeeded in traveling up the Nile all the way to Upper Egypt. * The site of the ancient city of Thebes was lost to the world until 1707 when a French Jesuit, Claude Sicard, positively reidentified it. The British adventurer Richard Pococke, the Swedish scientist Frederick Hasselquist, the Danish artist Frederick Lewis Norden, and the French naturalist Charles Sonnini all traveled to Egypt during the eighteenth century and returned to Europe with detailed accounts of what they had seen. * Constantin Volney’s record of his travels in Egypt and Syria deeply impressed Napoleon and helped in part to inspire the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the resultant boom in Egyptology.

  The sudden European preoccupation with Egypt was prompted not only by literary accounts and Napoleon’s Description de L’Egypte but also by the rarely seen antiquities and obscure artifacts that travelers were bringing home with them. Visitors to Egypt returned with trunks full of mummies, painted sarcophagi, stone carvings hacked off walls, hieroglyphic tablets, statues of Egyptian gods, and funerary furnishings lifted from pharaonic tombs and burial chambers. Dazzled by all this rare and mysterious loot, collectors and antiquarians began hurrying up the Nile searching for more. The craze for things Egyptian grew so great that one wealthy British collector, William Bankes, bothered to have an entire obelisk uprooted from the Temple of Isis at Philae, had it dragged back to En-gland, and propped it up in his garden in Dorset. Soon entire nations began engaging in the plunder.

  Intent on modernizing the country, Muhammad Ali, who became pasha of Egypt in 1805, called on foreign experts for technical and political advice. In exchange for their guidance, foreign consuls were freely allowed to excavate Egyptian archaeological sites and remove the spoils to museums in their own countries. In 1815 the Italian strongman Giovanni Belzoni went to Egypt and, under the aegis of the British consul, within a mere three years found the opening of the second pyramid, discovered the royal tomb of Seti I, opened the Great Temple of Abu Simbel, and recovered the statue of the Young Memnon. Belzoni shipped off to En-gland every movable thing he found — as well as a few things any sane person would have considered immovable, including William Bankes’s six-ton Philae obelisk. In 1821 Belzoni’s collection of Egyptian antiquities was put on display at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. The show was a roaring success: on opening day alone nearly two thousand people paid half a crown apiece to look at Belzoni’s trea-sures.

  Before long, people like Flaubert and Nightingale could visit the Louvre and the British Museum and see firsthand what manner of wonders the Nile Valley harbored. Jean-François Champollion’s deciphering of the newly rediscovered Rosetta stone gave meaning to what they saw — until then even the Egyptians themselves had lost all understanding of ancient Egyptian writing. When Edward Lane’s exhaustive An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians was published in London in 1836, it met with such fascinated demand that its first printing sold out in two weeks. And when the enormous obelisk from Luxor (230 tons; 75 feet tall) was shipped to France and installed in the Place de la Concorde in 1833, Egypt was firmly locked into the European imagination.

  By the time Nightingale and Flaubert made their journeys to Egypt, a few steamships had already been introduced to the Nile, but for most foreign travelers the custom was to head for Boulac, the port of Cairo, and select a dahabieh, a private cruising boat, from the many available for hire there.

  By all accounts Boulac was a tumult of vermin, shysters, hucksters, thieves, and fleas. There boats arriving from Upper Egypt unloaded exotic merchandise — hippopotamus hides, elephant tusks, monkeys, ostrich feathers, rubber, pottery, livestock, slaves, ebony, and nearly everything else imaginable — from the farthest parts of Africa. Passenger steamers and mail boats from Alexandria also disgorged their cargo there; the docks crawled with stevedores, merchants, captains, sailors, and hurrying travelers. With the hired assistance of a dragoman — an all-purpose interpreter who would explain, intercede in, and arrange all the practical matters that might arise during the long trip on the Nile — the traveler would brave the chaos of Boulac to inspect the boats on offer, while the dahabieh captains and their crews looked on, hungrily hoping the foreign customer would choose them and their vessel for the well-paid three-month journey up to the second cataract on the Sudanese border and back.

  The hiring of a dahabieh was nearly as much an ordeal as any other task in the long Nile journey and often took several days to accomplish, with the most difficult moment being the settling of the rental contract. Captains and dragomans were famous for driving a hard bargain. Contemporary Baedeker’s guidebooks warned the Edwardian traveler, “The Egyptians, it must be remembered, occupy a much lower grade in the scale of civilization than most of the western nations, and cupidity is one of their chief failings.” In a letter to his mother Flaubert wrote, “I’m going to Bulak to see a few [boats]. It is no slight matter . . . Most dragomans are appalling scoundrels.”

  The dahabieh of the mid-nineteenth century was similar in design to the boats used by the pharaohs, a long, many-compartme
nted sort of floating house that could be either rowed or sailed. The largest of them reached one hundred feet in length and twenty feet in width. At their prows they had places for a dozen oarsmen who would row, galley fashion, when the wind failed. The boats were flat bottomed and shallow, had two masts and a lateen-rigged mainsail so enormous in relation to the size of the boat that the slightest puff of wind gave it sufficient force to carry the boat against the Nile’s current. The cabins were built on the deck toward the stern, and above them was a higher deck accessed by a short flight of steps. Passengers only were allowed on the upper deck, while the lower deck was reserved for the usually flea-ridden crew. The kitchen, a shed equipped with a charcoal stove, was situated toward the front of the boat, away from the passengers’ cabins.

  Amelia Edwards, who traveled up the Nile in 1872 and wrote a staggeringly detailed account of her trip, including every hieroglyph she studied, every snack she ate, and the number of steps at the Temple of Horus at Edfu (she counted 224), offers in her book, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, probably the most thorough description extant of a Nile dahabieh:

  A dahabeeyah [has] four sleeping cabins, two on each side. These cabins measured about eight feet in length by four and a half in width, and contained a bed, a chair, a fixed washing-stand, a looking glass against the wall, a shelf, a row of hooks, and under each bed two large drawers for clothes. At the end of this little passage another door opened into the dining saloon — a spacious, cheerful room, some twenty-three or twenty-four feet long [bigger than the dining room in my house!], situated in the widest part of the boat, and lightened by four windows on each side and a skylight. The paneled walls and ceiling were painted in white picked out with gold; a cushioned divan covered with a smart woollen reps ran along each side; and a gay Brussels carpet adorned the floor. The dining table stood in the centre; and there was ample space for a piano, two little bookcases, and several chairs. The window-curtains and portieres were of the same reps as the divan, the prevailing colours being scarlet and orange. Add a couple of mirrors in gilt frames; a vase of flowers on the table . . . plenty of books, the gentlemen’s guns and sticks in one corner; and the hats of all the party hanging in the spaces between the windows; and it will be easy to realise the homely, habitable look of our general sitting room . . . Another door and passage opening from the upper end of the saloon and led to three more sleeping rooms, two of which were single and one double; a bath room; a tiny black staircase leading to the upper deck; and the stern cabin saloon.