Down the Nile Read online

  At a mile long, Elephantine Island forced the Nile to divide into two channels on either side of it. I rowed up the narrow eastern passage between the Old Cataract Hotel on the mainland and the enormous rounded clifflike boulders near the top of the island. One of the many theories for the derivation of the name Elephantine was that from a distance these boulders resembled elephants. Floating not two feet from the smooth rocks, I could see clearly the unfinished cartouches and hieroglyphs that had been chiseled into them millennia before. Just above these rocks was the Elephantine nilometer, built by the pharaohs to measure the river’s annual inundation and rebuilt by the Romans.

  The water was black, glassy, and, squeezed as it was through this narrow channel, very swift. I rowed hard until I rounded the top of the island and could rest a little. Because of the huge boulders that lurk just below the flat mirror of the water’s surface, the currents here were tricky: shifting and twisting with turbid force. At the top of the island, I was dazzled by the sight of twenty white rowboats anchored in the shallows below the ruins of the Temple of Khnum, every boat freshly painted, and every one perfect for my purposes. I realized that among the boats a young man was bathing in the river stark naked. He saw me looking at him yet didn’t seem to care. In fact, he waved his skinny arms and shouted at me to come and sit on a rock with him and drink tea. When I began to row off he screamed, by way of introduction, “I am in the army!” and jumped out of the water and bounded toward me across the rocks, desperate for my attention, his naked body glistening, bands of silvery water streaming from him. A big felucca passed behind me, and its captain shouted coyly at me, “Hey, Egyptian! Want to come in my boat?”

  The distractions and confusion made the coordinated labor of rowing the boat nearly impossible. My linen trousers were transparent with sweat; the legs of them clung to my shins. The metal hull of my boat grazed a rock just below the surface of the water with a grinding squeal. Seconds later, coming through a narrow passage between two small islands, the prow of a felucca called Smile glanced off the stern of my boat and spun me around like a pinwheel. I had never seen so many sailboats moving so fast in such a small space, nor had I ever witnessed quite this daredevil brand of sailing. The sailors in Aswan operated their feluccas the way adolescent boys operate dirt bikes in a mud pit, with flashy flourishes and abrupt precision; their stunts were the nautical equivalent of fishtails, hairpin turns, and wheelies. A lifetime of sailing had given them a kind of rollicking freedom on the water. I envied them.

  I was tired and realized that my hour was quickly passing. I didn’t want Amr to worry about his boat. I rounded the southern tip of Elephantine Island and headed easily downriver on the western side of it, the current coaxing me swiftly along. The river was less crowded on this far side of the island, and there was some semblance of peace here. The sun, though far from setting, had sunk fully behind the high desert dunes on the west bank of the river, cloaking the water in purple shadow. A boat overloaded with young police officers raced by without noticing me.

  Farther along, a boatful of gamesome Nubians moored in an island cove sat smoking marijuana. One of them shouted at me, “Whose boat is that?” Another said, “Please come in our boat and smoke!”

  When I asked what they were smoking, they giggled and showed their dazzling white teeth.

  “Lady, you know what we smoking. You have any we can buy?”

  I said no.

  “We would pay for it!”

  “I don’t have anything to give you,” I said and thought of the sign I had seen in the Cairo airport the first time I arrived in Egypt, a sign informing visitors that should they be found carrying anything faintly resembling intoxicating drugs, their hands might be cut off, they might be executed, and either way they would certainly have to pay the Egyptian government something like a million-pound fine. Who would dare? But many of the sailors in Aswan smoked marijuana and hashish, and I had seen a small but unmistakable Rastafarian element among some of the young Nubian captains. Some wore their hair in dreadlocks, not a natural Nubian style, and boldly smoked their ganja in the open air. In Aswan I had seen an anomalous few feluccas with the names Hash Family, Rasta Famely, and Jamaica Famely. Chiefly Muslim, the sailors’ interest in Rastafarianism seemed to have less to do with religious belief and a devotion to Haile Selassie than with Jamaican fashion and the ethnic identity that grew out of it. The pot smoking in this Muslim country struck me, but according to some of the earliest travelers in Egypt the use of the hemp plant as a narcotic was an old and common tradition here. Charles Sonnini, who traveled from France to Egypt in 1777, claimed that the consumption of hashish in Egypt was “very considerable” and that hashish was to be found in all the Egyptian markets. Sonnini wrote, “The Arabs and the Egyptians compose several preparations from this plant, with which they procure for themselves a sort of pleasing drunkenness, a state of reverie which inspires gaiety and produces agreeable dreams. This sort of annihilation of the faculty of thinking, this kind of slumber of the soul, has no resemblance to the intoxication produced by wine or strong liquors, and our language has no terms expressive of it.”

  Edward Lane in his 1836 An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians noted that though the sale of hashish and Cannabis indica was then prohibited in Egypt, Egyptians still employed this “pernicious and degrading custom,” and that hashish could be got at coffee shops and smaller private shops called mahsheshehs, which were exclusively for the sale of hashish “and other intoxicating preparations.” Lane wrote, “It is sometimes amusing to observe the ridiculous conduct, and to listen to the conversation, of the persons who frequent these shops. They are all of the lower orders.” He went on to explain that in Egypt the Arabic word hashshasheen, which meant “users of hemp,” was often applied to “noisy and riotous people,” and that during the Crusades the name hashshasheen (the origin of the word assassin) was given to Syrian warriors who used mind-altering drugs to confuse and disarm their enemies.

  I waved good-bye to the pot smokers and moved on past Kitchener Island, a small island wholly taken up with the most exotic botanical garden I had ever seen. It was filled with tropical trees and flowers, everything marked in Latin and Arabic. On another trip I had seen a horse-radish tree there, a cape honeysuckle, a mountain ebony, a baobab, an ironwood, a rubber vine, a spotted gum, a silver trumpet tree, and an enormous mahogany. I had seen a Strychnos nux-vomica, a strychnine tree, and had put one of its spherical seedpods in my pocket, then later threw it away for fear it would poison me. Kitchener was cool and quiet and shady, and it was home to a curious cat that had one green eye and one blue.

  Half an hour later I rounded the bottom of the island and pulled myself up to Amr’s dock. He was still standing there with several other sailors, still waiting for work. As I climbed out of the boat he looked at my face, took the oars from me, and said nothing. When I moved to hand him some money for the use of the boat, he shook his head, showed me the palm of his hand in protest, and then pressed it to his chest, an indication that he could not possibly take money from me.

  Such a refusal was unheard of in a man in his line of work. I offered the money again; again he protested. Clutching the knot of tattered Egyptian pounds, I asked Amr if I could come back and take the boat again the next day.

  He smiled. “Any time you feel.”

  That evening the woman who tended the front desk in my hotel invited me to come to her house. In her late thirties, Christian, married with three children, Safaa was short, solid, intelligent, and spoke English very well. She was gap toothed and good natured, well educated, had a sense of humor and a sometimes comical manner, but was often bored and frustrated and glum about her life. She had the air of one whose ambitions had been thwarted at every turn. She spoke freely, as though she had known me for years. She was tired of being poor, disliked Egypt, and wanted to travel. She had nine-year-old twins, boy and girl, and a six-month-old infant whom she referred to as “the surprise.” Every day Safaa’s hus
band minded the baby until the twins came home from school in the afternoon, then he would go off to work and the twins would take over the babysitting until Safaa returned home at eight.

  Safaa valued education and was depressed about her twins; they were smart but didn’t study. They spent all their time watching television, and the husband never lifted a finger to prevent them, though she complained about it again and again. “When they with my husband, they watch TV all day,” she told me. “Soon as I come home from work I turn that crap box off. And then my twins, they do nothing. They won’t read a book. I have to put the book in their hands and point their heads at it and say, ‘Now, you two little dogs, you read!’”

  If the children refused to study, they would never pass their exams, and what sort of future would they have if they didn’t pass their exams? They’d end up poor like everyone else in Aswan.

  Safaa had learned the word crap from some Australian guests in the hotel and used it often and with relish. Like most Christian women she wore modest cotton dresses that covered her arms and knees and never wore a veil or a head covering of any kind. Because of their relative freedom of dress, their exposed shins and ankles, their uncovered necks and heads and fully visible hair, Christian women were easily identifiable on Egypt’s streets. They always looked more modern, lighter, freer, less alien and mysterious than the Muslim women.

  That evening we walked together to Safaa’s apartment. Along the way I praised the dress she was wearing, a pleasant, long-sleeved, flowered gown with a black Peter Pan collar. She looked down at the dress and said, “I like this one too, but my manager in the hotel, he says, ‘Safaa! That’s a crap dress. It so old-fashioned; from the days of your old mother.’ But I give no damn. I like it. He tells me don’t wear it. I wear it anyway.”

  We walked through the older streets of Aswan, away from the river. The farther we got from the corniche and the markets, the darker the streets became, and eventually the pavement gave way to dust, and we were walking in a black maze of small pathlike alleys between run-down two-story houses that looked on the verge of toppling. The smell of cooking and coal smoke drifted through open doors; dim yellow lights shone in open windows. Dogs barked in the distance. Suddenly Aswan felt like a small village. Safaa pointed to a row of dark buildings in a narrow street and said, “I hope they rip those craps down! They are only empty and dangerous! And kids like to play in them and sometimes they get hurt. Aswan is a crap.”

  At the end of the street a group of older Muslim women stared as we approached, and one of them asked Safaa why she was walking with a foreigner. Safaa told the woman, “She’s my American cousin, and it’s none of your business anyway,” then translated for me what she had said, tittered at her own impertinence, and added “Crap!” for good measure as we walked on.

  Safaa’s apartment was big, clean, and appointed in the Egyptian fashion with a lot of heavy and uncomfortable hand-hewn wooden furniture. An enormous television sat on a table in the middle of the room. The walls were covered with Christian symbols and decorations: a picture of Mar Girgis, or Saint George, slaying a pathetic-looking dragon who was rigid and twisted with agony; a picture of the Coptic Pope Shenouda with his big grizzly beard; a picture of an Egyptian-looking Blessed Virgin with big dark eyes, a long nose, and a wide mouth; and beside the Virgin a fuzzy reproduction of The Last Supper. The knob on the front door was embossed with a cross and the words “God is Love” in Arabic. And on the mantel stood a two-foot-tall statue of a Caucasian Jesus in a rose-colored robe cradling a slightly cross-eyed lamb in his arms. Dust had collected in the ceramic folds of Jesus’s gown and turned the rose color to gray.

  The modern Coptic Christians are the descendants of pharaonic Egyptians who had been converted to Christianity by Saint Mark in Alexandria. It is believed that the later pharaohs spoke the Coptic language, a modern form of Egyptian heavily influenced by Greek. Copts now make up only 15 percent of the Egyptian population. Safaa liked Hosni Mubarak because he defended and protected the beleaguered Egyptian Christians. Sometimes, she said, Muslims kidnapped Christian women and forced them to convert to Islam by threatening to rape them if they didn’t convert. In Lower Egypt, north of Qena, there were constant fights, gun battles, even small riots between Christians and Muslims.

  I asked Safaa why all the tailors in Egypt were Christian. She said disconsolately, “I ask myself that.” Her view was that in the fifties and sixties there had been many more Christians in Egypt and that when Nasser came to power he stole the important jobs from the Christians and gave them to the Muslims. “So that’s why the Muslims have all the good jobs. The professional jobs. Now the Christians that’s left here can only be tailors and other crap jobs. Nasser took the Christians’ money and their land.”

  This reminded me of Florence Nightingale writing in 1849, “Abbas Pacha is so furiously Mahometan that he has just dismissed all Christians from his ser-vice . . . besides 900 Coptic scribes who are fallen into the lowest poverty thereby.”

  At the sound of our voices, Safaa’s children came out from a back bedroom. They were pale faced, dark haired, handsome, and small. The daughter Mary carried the six-month-old infant expertly on her hip. The boy, George, stood behind them. The infant, very tiny and naked from the waist down, was beaming and gnawing on the edge of a small saucer gripped in her hand; later I saw that the saucer was painted with an image of the Virgin and Child. The three little children had been home alone all afternoon minding each other. They stared at me with sweet, fascinated smiles.

  Safaa brought me mango juice, a cup of hot karkady tea, and two pears. The twins turned on the television and, like children anywhere, began frantically flipping through the channels, past glimpses of Arab rappers with baseball caps worn sideways on their heads, past the BBC world news, past CNN, Yasser Arafat, Benjamin Netanyahu, Omar Sharif looking elderly with longish white hair, a nightclub singer wailing “Habibi” into a microphone, and multiple car advertisements from Saudi Arabia that showed sexy long-haired women purring, “Next Ramadan, buy a new Jaguar for your wife.” The life depicted on the television bore no resemblance what-ever to life in the streets of Aswan.

  Safaa dandled the baby on her knee and sighed. “I spend all my extra money on the house, good furniture, new floor in the kitchen. And my husband? What he do? He spend all his money on the stupid TV. A hundred channels that crap TV has. And these kids they never stop watching it. Look at them, Rose.”

  The children stared at the television, openmouthed, dead eyed, deaf to the world. Like their mother, they had small blue crosses tattooed on their inner wrists. The baby began to cry. Safaa bounced her up and down on one knee, kissed her, then passed her over to Mary, who bounced her, kissed her, then passed her over to George, who walked her around the room and kissed her until the diaperless baby emitted a rude shower of diarrhea on his little arm. Calmly, as though he was entirely used to this, George took the baby into the bedroom, changed his shirt, washed the baby, and brought her back to the living room, again diaperless.

  Safaa was annoyed with Mary because Mary had fed the baby nothing but juice all day. “She do that because it’s easier than giving her real food,” she said to me, then she turned to Mary and said hotly, “Kula yom kida! Every day it’s like this! I tell you to feed her food but you give her juice! That’s why she has diarrhea.”

  Pale-faced Mary stood up and protested loudly with a long string of angry-sounding Arabic. She slapped her own forehead like an elderly woman, then flopped down on the couch and sulked. I couldn’t blame her — she was far too young to be held responsible for the diet and welfare of an infant.

  Safaa lifted up the baby and studied her face. “The baby isn’t beautiful,” she said flatly. “I am not beautiful. I am look like Indian lady. I have big nose and dark skin.” It was true. “And I got a big wide mouth. My daughter Mary is more beautiful than me. She is whiter. I hope the baby will be better looking later.”

  Safaa asked me how I liked the hotel I was staying
in. I told her it was very good for such a cheap place — clean, safe, with a pleasant staff. My only complaint was that every time he saw me, the chef in the rooftop dining room — a fat, unshaven, toothless old man — invited me to go dancing with him. “It’s a bit tiresome,” I said.

  Safaa howled with laughter so loud the startled baby began to cry. “Oh, that big crap!” she said. “He has had five wives and many children and he thinks he is a young man but he isn’t and he has no teeth in his head and also bad breath on top of it. God, that old goat.”

  Safaa told me that last year the manager of the hotel had found pornographic magazines “for sex” in a cupboard in the hotel kitchen, and in a fury had burned them on the roof of the hotel and had shrieked at the chef that if he ever brought such filth into the hotel again he would fire him.

  The children were now staring at a film on the Christian Channel; a story about a Muslim man who wanted to convert to Christianity because the corrupt Muslim leaders were always telling him he had to kill people in the name of God, and how on earth could that be holy and right? The Muslim imam ranted incessantly at the man about how he should live and what he should do. The imam looked like a caricature of the devil, leering in a skullcap, with a long unkempt beard and hard little lightless eyes and two hands like menacing claws with which he pantomimed his rage and hatred for the Christian infidel. The would-be Christian convert was, of course, handsome, noble, and gentle. He admitted to the imam that he wanted to become Christian, whereupon the rabid imam flipped his lid and tried to strangle the traitor with the two claws.

  I watched the scene in fascination, wondering how the Christian Channel could get away with a show like this. Christians were a tiny minority in Egypt, were persecuted and maligned, and yet they had managed to air on national television this incendiary polemic portraying Muslims as fanatical murderous maniacs.