Down the Nile Read online

  Though not all dahabiehs were luxurious enough to accommodate a grand piano, the general design of these boats was fundamentally the same, and even the most modest of them offered surprising comfort. Floating down the Nile in a dahabieh was a bit like floating down the Nile in a brownstone.

  After sufficient inspections, the travelers would select a dahabieh, have it submerged in the Nile for twenty-four hours in order to drown the fleas and rats that had taken up residence during its idle period at dock, and finally they would board the ship and make themselves at home. Nightingale and her friends rented a particularly elegant dahabieh for thirty pounds a month, a very high price for the time. “We shall have been on board a week tomorrow,” Nightingale wrote to her mother, “and are now thoroughly settled in our house: all our gimlets up, our divans out, our Turkish slippers provided, and everything on its own hook, as befits such close quarters.” Of his slightly more modest ship Flaubert wrote, “It is painted blue; its rais is called Ibrahim. There is a crew of nine. For quarters we have a room with two little divans facing each other, a large room with two beds, on one side of which there is a kind of alcove for our baggage and on the other an English-type head; and finally a third room where Sassetti [his Italian servant] will sleep and which will serve as a store-room as well.”

  Going by the popular contemporary handbooks for travelers in Egypt, the storerooms of those ships held saddles, bridles, umbrellas, telescopes, measuring tapes, flags, rifles, pistols, mosquito nets, charcoal, candles, mustard, easels, art supplies, twine, bedsheets, tents, thermometers, barometers, musical instruments for the crew, and a great deal of food and alcohol. Supplies recommended by one Baedeker’s handbook included “1 doz tins condensed milk, 1 tin tapioca, 2 tins julienne soup, 13 lbs of bacon, 15 lbs of ham, 2 tins of ox tongue, 3 tins preserved meat, 1 bottle worcestire sauce, sardines, 60 bottles of medoc, 36 medoc superieur, 35 bottles of res voslauer, 25 bottles of white voslauer, 20 bottles of beer, 1 bottle of brandy and cognac each, 1 bottle of whiskey, one bottle vermouth, a little champagne for festivals and the reception of guests.”

  In addition, the early Nile tourists dragged a shockingly hefty supply of books with them. (Napoleon and his men had carried on their trip a library of five hundred volumes.) Murray’s Handbook of 1858 recommended:

  vols. ii and iii of Larcher’s Herodotys; Champollion’s Phonetic Systems of Hieroglyphics, Letters, and Grammar; Pococke; Denon; Hamilton’s Aegyptaica; Savary’s Letters; Clot Bey’s Apercu Generale de L’Egypte; Gliddon on the Hieroglyphics; Mengin’s Egypte Sous Mohammed Aly; Robinson’s Palestine and Mount Sinai; Stanley’s Sinai; Lane’s Modern and Wilkinson’s Ancient Egyptians; Hoskin’s Ethiopia; Col-o-nel Leake’s, Lapie’s, or Wilkinson’s Map of Egypt; Captain Smyth’s Alexandria; Wilkinson’s Survey of Thebes; Costa’s Delta; and Parke and Scoles’s Nubia; to which may be added Burckhardt, Laborde’s Petra, Ptolemy, Strabo, and Pliny.

  A dahabieh provided great comfort for its passengers, but the crew — usually ten or twelve Egyptian sailors, the rais (captain), a cook, and dragoman — were generally expected to sleep outside on the lower deck with no pillows or mattresses and nothing for warmth but one rough blanket apiece. While the passengers enjoyed sumptuous dinners prepared by the cook, the crew ate little more than gruel or bread. It was written into the rental contract that the crew should be allowed to stop at certain towns along the way in order to use the ovens of the local bakers so they could store up a load of fresh bread for themselves.

  Once the dahabieh was registered with the authorities in Cairo and fitted with an identifying pennant, the travelers were free to set sail out of Cairo and up the river.

  It never surprised me that Gustave Flaubert might want to float down the Nile. He was a man who deeply disliked his own country, had a longtime love of things oriental, was interested in the baser aspects of humanity, and was capable of writing in a letter to a friend that women generally confused their cunts (his word) for their brains and thought the moon existed solely to light their boudoirs. Florence Nightingale, however, was another case.

  As a child (and, I am embarrassed to say, well into my teen years), I thought Florence Nightingale was a fictional character — the “Lady with the Lamp” of idealized storybook illustrations, afloat on the same cumulonimbus of wonder that carried Snow White and Cinderella. She was a mythological emissary from heaven, pure and incorruptible, ageless, parentless, and glowingly good. Then I got a little older and Florence Nightingale got real, transmogrifying into a historical figure; yet still she was selfless and holy and good, and therefore my attention tended to shut down at the mention of her. I had the impression, founded on precious little, that Nightingale was unworldly and dull, circulating within her tiresome purview of bedsores, disinfectant, wound dressings, and germ theory. In adolescence I preferred Amelia Earhart in her flaming plane, or Harriet Tubman who had dug her way out of slavery with a soupspoon (not, of course, quite what Harriet Tubman had done, but such was the vague and slightly fantastical quality of my perceptions), or the more modern Angela Davis who picketed a TV station with a gun hidden in her huge hair, or Annie Oakley who could shoot a bullet through the eye of a needle — I preferred them all to the blameless Nightingale in her pale green sickroom.

  Naturally, then, I was stumped when, several days before I left for Aswan, I found in a Cairo shop a book titled Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile, 1849–1850 by Florence Nightingale. It struck me as uniquely unlikely, like finding a book called Mother Teresa’s Personal Guide to the Mississippi, or Notes on the Volga by Grandma Moses. I thought it had to be some other Florence Nightingale. It wasn’t. I opened the book to its dead center and read:

  We saw the whole crew start up, fling down their oars, and begin to fight violently . . . howling and screaming and kicking, the boat of course drifting down upon the rocks meantime . . . Out rushed Paolo with an ebony club, — which I had bought from the Berber savages coming up the cataract . . . [and] fell upon the mass of struggling heads, and began to belabour them with all his might, so that I thought he would have broken in their skulls. He was alone against the eleven, but he did not seem to think of it, though he was generally a great coward.

  and then, of a group of Ethiopian slave women:

  They were sitting round their fire for the night; they came out to beg of us, and, in the dusk, looked like skulls, with their white teeth; they set up a horrid laugh when we gave them nothing: our guide poked one with his stick, when it was sitting down, as if it were a frog.

  I bought the book, and as I read it a remarkable person emerged from the traducing haze her legend had engulfed her in. I was struck by the force of her writing, by its bristling intelligence. Nightingale’s powers of description rivaled many of the known writers of her day, including Flaubert’s. Written chiefly to family and friends in En-gland, the letters revealed a curious, keenly observant mind and an enormous range of knowledge. Nightingale was already well traveled before she went to Egypt, spoke several languages, and was astonishingly well read. She was adventuresome and passionate. She had, above all, a wicked sense of humor, which surprised and delighted me. Her characterizations were sharp, subtle, often comical. Her interests were many and various: artistic, philosophical, spiritual, and temporal.

  In Egypt, Nightingale disguised herself in an Egyptian woman’s robes and veil and visited a mosque, where she was jeered at by Egyptian men, an event that prompted her to write, “I felt like the hypocrite in Dante’s hell, with the leaden cap on.” She went to the catacombs in Alexandria “which, after those of Rome, are rather a farce.” She shot the rapids of the Aswan cataracts in her dahabieh, visited a harem with unabashed enthusiasm, examined nearly every tomb and temple in Egypt with the dedication and understanding of a true Egyptologist, dined with German counts and Belgian scholars, and rode a donkey across the desert. “The donkey is very small and you are very large . . . You sit upon his tail; and as he holds his head very high, you look like a balance to his head . . .
You set off full gallop, running over every thing in your way, and the merry little thing runs and runs and runs like a velocipede.”

  Far from being an insufferable saint, Nightingale was a woman of deep opinions, discriminating, decisive, and sometimes unkind. Her observations could be harsh but were clear eyed and unsentimental. She was also democratic. If she was capable of writing this of the Arabs: “an intermediate race, they appeared to me, between the monkey and the man, the ugliest, most slavish countenances,” or this of the Nubians in Aswan: “Troops of South Sea Savages received us . . . not shiny as savages ought to be, but their black skins all dim and grimed with sand, like dusty tables, their dirty hair plaited in rats’ tails, close to their heads, naked, all but a head veil. I heard some stones fall into the river, and hoped it was they, and that that debased life had finished,” she was also capable of criticizing her own beloved Anglican Church, after having visited one in the Coptic quarter in Cairo: “One’s feelings towards the Anglican Church are very different when she is hiding in corners, struggling with the devil . . . to when she is stretched out in fatness, with the millstone of the richest hierarchy in the world about her neck, and the lust of the world tempting people to make her a profession and not a vocation.”

  Florence Nightingale was so interesting, daring, and intelligent that reading her letters I had begun to feel, by comparison, frivolous, meek, and not terribly bright.

  MY SECOND NIGHT IN ASWAN, I sat on a pier in the dark, staring at a small rowboat docked between two huge feluccas, feeling anxious and foolish and depressed that I still had no boat. The river and the town seemed to vibrate with joyful shouts and laughter and winking yellow lights. Bats skittered around the shadowy trees. Herons muttered and screeched in the reeds. Cruise boats lumbered into Aswan like drifting carnival rides, with their thousand lights blazing, their horns bellowing, and their names — Seti First, Papyrus, Nile Sovereign, Seti Two — emblazoned on their chins. The ships docked six deep along the ghats of the east bank, while above them loud music blew out of the shorefront restaurants — the mannish voice of Oum Kalsoum throbbing in competition with Michael Jackson and Elton John. At night the Nile looked dense and black and slippery as motor oil; three feet from me, big silvery creatures that could only have been fish jumped spookily in the water with a lot of plump splashing. They jumped and disappeared so quickly it was hard to see exactly what they were.

  As I stood on the pier fretting and musing and muttering to myself, a young man in a dark gallabiya came up behind me and said, “Something you need?”

  I was tired and didn’t want to answer him, didn’t want to go through the list of questions, the ridicule and banter and haggling over money. It was wearing, like being poked in the face all day with a sharp stick. How many men had I spoken to about boats? Fifteen? Twenty? All of them had rebuffed me. And I was growing weary of having to be secretive and evasive, of telling people that I wanted the boat not for myself (wanting it for myself was too outlandish) but as a surprise for a nonexistent husband who was perpetually asleep in the hotel. It was ten o’clock but the sun’s heat stored in the granite boulders along the riverbank still wafted up into the night air in suffocating gusts. My damp blouse clung to my back.

  I explained to the man that the boat I was looking at was not unlike the boat I had at home, that I liked rowing and hoped to try rowing around Elephantine Island while I was here in Aswan. I stared at the stars, bracing myself for the verbal pokes and slaps, but the man remained silent. Without asking how old I was, where I was from, or whether I was married, he said softly, “This is my boat. You can using it any times. It is always in docked across in front of Oberoi Hotel. You don’t need ask. Just take if it is there.”

  The pier was illuminated only by the dim lights of restaurants on the bank above it, and it was difficult to make out the man’s features in the moonless night. His words carried trust and respect and were surprisingly devoid of the usual distancing banter, the jokes, the sexual innuendo, or mention of money. He spoke gently and slowly, and I sensed from the tone of his voice that it wasn’t a ruse, that his offer was sincere. He was a felucca captain, he said, and didn’t use the rowboat much. His name was Amr Khaled. He didn’t ask me my name or whether I knew how to row. He expressed neither doubt nor prying curiosity. That made him an odd Egyptian, and interesting. I thanked him for his offer, said I would take him up on it. Excusing himself, he left me there. This was odd too. No Egyptian man had ever left me standing anywhere; usually they hung around as long as they could, waiting to see what would happen next with me. In Egypt I was forever in the position of having to bring the conversation to an end and make my retreat.

  With my spirits buoyed, I went into one of the many riverside restaurants along the corniche to get something to eat, and realized too late that I had blundered through the back door of the restaurant and landed in the kitchen, where two elderly men in white turbans sat at a table dicing a pile of vegetables. A third man was bent over a stove beneath a mantilla of billowing steam, stirring two pots at once. The kitchen was low ceilinged and hot, and under the fluorescent lights I saw that it was in a state of great disorder. Boxes and sacks of produce lay willy-nilly across the cement floor: a glittering crate of small fish the size and color of pigs’ ears; a wooden box that resembled a birdcage full of tiny strawberries; baskets of damp greens, sacks of onions; a papery pile of garlic; tubs of olives. Wilted lettuce leaves had been crushed and mashed underfoot, and the place smelled not unpleasantly of vinegar and boiling oil. A small black-and-white television parked atop a refrigerator showed a tiny soccer game going on in Morocco. An electric fan atop a crate of beer breathed slack gouts of damp air in the direction of the stove.

  The two elderly chefs stood up at the sight of me. With the retrograde gallantry characteristic of Egyptians who had learned their English in the days of King Farouk, the taller one bowed and said, “Good evening, Miss Madame. Welcome in Aswan. Very it’s plea-sure. Where you are come from?”

  I told him I was from the United States of America.

  “Beel Cleelington!” he said.

  With a paring knife in one hand and a muddy tomato in the other, the shorter man stepped forward and added wryly, “Monica!”

  Neither of them looked anything like a chef. They looked like two dandy charlatans in a French farce. They wore billowing trousers that narrowed at the ankles, large headdresses, and silken vests. They had long, well-groomed mustaches. For want of anything better to say I said, “Do you like Monica?”

  They let out a ripping shriek of laughter that plainly meant, Are you nuts?

  “Monica mumtaz!” they cried. Monica is great!

  The man at the stove, who seemed to understand little English, turned from his pots in recognition of the word Monica and grinned and nodded and raised his ladle in salacious assent. All three men were hot faced and cheerful. The short one asked, “Cleelington good president?”

  I said not a bad president, not a great husband.

  “Heelary,” the tall one said darkly.

  My face was blanketed with sweat and dirt after a day of wandering up and down the river, and having stumbled in out of the darkness I felt wan and naked under the bald lights. The shorter man signaled for my attention with an important wave of his knife. Speaking carefully and with authority he said, “Beel Cleelington is likes young girl. She is beautiful. Older man always is likes the young girl. Since ancient time. Cleelington don’t not do nutting new.”

  Undeniable truths.

  The taller man smoothed his great mustache and said, “Heelary got boyfriend too.”

  They all smiled with delight, their coconut-colored faces gleaming with perspiration. My sudden appearance had presented them with an excellent opportunity for laughter, jokes, and flirting, the favorite Egyptian preoccupations.

  I said good-bye to the men and went around to the proper end of the restaurant, which was actually a floating barge with a roof of palm fronds. From the restaurant deck, I could se
e cruise ship deckhands in blue sailor blouses, carrying heavy boxes and bundles of supplies on the napes of their necks, bounding barefoot up the gangplanks.

  I sat at a table, and a fat, very tall waiter brought me a menu that included, among other items: lamp meat, grilld pigeon, balady salad, stuffed pigeon, roast lamp, snaks. Every dinner no matter only six bound total. The waiter stood at my side with his notebook poised, reading the menu over my shoulder, as though he had never seen it before. He wore a maroon dress shirt and a skinny black necktie fixed in a Windsor knot. Before I had a chance to order my meal, he informed me that he had been married and divorced twice. I offered my condolences. He giggled nervously. He had the merry eyes and plump, slightly rueful face of Jackie Gleason. As if to quell any doubts about his marital expertise he said quickly, “Both divorces was not because of a problem with me.”

  I ordered a beer, he went to get it, and on his return he explained, without solicitation from me, why his job was difficult. “The Koran says you cannot involve yourself with the alcohol. You cannot even serve it to other people. But I have to go to the money. The foreign people drink the alcohol and have the money, so I serve it to keep my job.”