Down the Nile Read online

  The fisherman was entertained and clearly interested that I had come this far upriver. He grinned and nodded and for lack of any other English phrases he said, “I am bolice.”

  He wasn’t the first to make such a claim. It was beginning to seem that every fisherman and shop clerk and felucca captain in Aswan was a member of the police force. Even the man selling postcards and stamps in the Oberoi Hotel had declaimed in aid of nothing, “I am bolice,” waving his identification card at me.

  As for the on-duty police, when I completed my day’s row and returned toward Aswan, I passed a teenage slew of them sitting in their black woolen uniforms in an inflatable boat on a dock. They were drinking black tea out of tiny glasses, and like all Egyptian men they held their glasses between thumb and forefinger in a strikingly light and delicate way. They watched me closely as I approached, but there were no hellos, no waves, no smiles, as if they had been told by their commander that it was unacceptable and unseemly for the tourist police to flirt with foreigners. Their silence and restraint was notable. They sat staring at me as I rowed by. All of them. Intently. They were young. They all wore black mustaches. There was something touching about their professionalism, and I couldn’t help smiling. One of them bravely — or foolishly — smiled in response and, like a dark set of dominoes falling fatally one by one, the entire group collapsed into smiles, and then giggles, and before long they were waving and cheering at me and hoisting their glasses like spectators greeting an astronaut just back from the moon, and one of them tossed all caution to the wind and threw out a joke: You go to Cairo in boat? I smiled and nodded and said, Yes, Cairo, and all fifteen of us had a long, loud convivial laugh at that. To them I was silly and harmless. That fact gave me strength; they would never expect me to do the forbidden thing I planned to do.

  The next day when I returned to Elephantine Island, Amr Khaled invited me to sail upriver with him. His felucca was called Fantastic. It was twenty-two feet long and eight feet wide, and like all of the feluccas in Aswan it was very clean and freshly painted and tidily kept, with everything stowed and lashed in its proper place. The entire ship looked as though it had been steeped in chlorine, and the extreme whiteness of it seemed to throb in the sunlight. When we boarded the boat in front of the Oberoi Hotel, Amr immediately removed his shoes, like a Japanese woman entering her home. Shoes, he said, made the boat dirty, and furthermore it was easier to sail without them. The soles of Amr’s wide feet were thick as elephant hide and yellowish and full of cracks and gouges, like slabs of Spanish corkboard. Considering their density and durability, I saw no reason for Amr to wear shoes at all. The dark brown tops of his feet carried a fine whitish bloom, as if freshly dusted with baby powder.

  He sailed me up the first cataract — far beyond where I had been able to row myself — where the river roared around large boulders, its eddies shoving the felucca from side to side. Most Nile travelers who had passed through the cataract in order to venture farther south into Nubia had been compelled to describe this place in their letters and travel accounts. I now understood why. It was not simply the danger of the passage but the stunning proliferation of bizarre rocks that made the place memorable. The rocks, rising eerily up out of the water, were strangely shaped, blackish, sometimes reddish, and seemed to be masked with a layer of lacquer that shone as acutely as buffed silver. Florence Nightingale had described the cataract as “an expanse of heaps of Syenite, with rapids between them; the rocks hollowed out into the most inconceivable shapes, — some like bowls, some like boilers, some like boot-jacks, some like etruscan vases.” Major R. Raven-Hart, who went up the Nile in 1936, wrote of the cataract, “The rocks have that curious stove-polish coating, shiny black over the granite: Darwin says it occurs also on the cataracts of Congo and Orinoco.” What Darwin actually said was:

  At the cataracts of the great rivers Orinoco, Nile, and Congo, the syenitic rocks are coated by a black substance, appearing as if they had been polished with plumbago. The layer is of extreme thinness . . . The origin, however, of these coatings of metallic oxides, which seem as if cemented to the rocks, is not understood.

  In his characteristically terse and graphic fashion, Flaubert described the rocks as “dark chocolate-color, with long white streaks of bird-droppings that widen toward the bottom.” And Amelia Edwards, with her habitual detail, wrote of the cataract:

  The Nile . . . here spreads itself over a rocky basin bounded by sand-slopes on the one side, and by granite cliffs on the other. Studded with numberless islets, divided into numberless channels, foaming over sunken rocks, eddying among water-worn boulders, now shallow, now deep, now loitering, now hurrying, here sleeping in the ribbed hollow of a tiny sand-drift, there circling above the vortex of a hidden whirlpool, the river, whether looked upon from the deck of the dahabeeyah or the heights along the shore is seen everywhere to be fighting its way through a labyrinth, the paths of which have never yet been mapped or sounded.

  Many Ancient Egyptians believed that the cataract was the true source of the Nile, that its waters bubbled up from beneath this rocky ground, one half flowing north to the Mediterranean, the other half flowing south into the Sudan. The belief was hardly surprising; the place, with its chaos of boulders, tumbling water, and churning currents, felt nearly supernatural. The ancient Egyptian name for Aswan was Sun, which meant “opening” or “entrance,” because the Nile entered Egypt through this treacherous and narrow cataract.

  Sailing upriver here was a matter of waiting for a gust of wind strong enough to counterbalance the river’s rushing pressure. It was a strange brand of sailing, one in which we spent long minutes parked in trembling stasis, while the water rushed past and beneath us, and the wind strained forward in the sail with equal force. It was a bit like being in the eye of a cyclone, terrific energy teeming around us while we sat still, gently bobbing and swaying, the cotton lines creaking in their blocks and pulleys. We were passing up a narrow corridor between two small islands on the west side of the river, with no room to tack or turn. When the wind failed momentarily, we had no choice but to slide slowly backward on the current, a deeply disquieting sensation in a place riddled with boulders, many of them invisible, just inches below the surface of the water. It was like sailing an obstacle course.

  I could see from the way Amr leaned against it that the wooden tiller was incredibly heavy. Under these conditions, the slightest mistake or moment of inattention could mean rapid disaster, yet Amr appeared calm and controlled, reflexively clutching up his gown at just the right moment to keep from tripping on the hem, sometimes steering the boat with his outstretched foot, as hand over hand he trimmed the sail or raised the centerboard. From time to time he would point at some random-looking spot in the water and say, “Is a rock down there.” When I asked him how he knew there was a rock, he just shrugged. He knew by heart the location of every eddy and every underwater hazard in the river at Aswan and how to avoid them in the nick of time, feinting and dodging mere inches left or right with dazzling finesse. When the wind lagged, he would tuck the boat behind some large boulders to evade the press of the current, then dart out again at just the right moment to catch a countervailing gust of wind that would press us forward another fifteen feet. The whole operation looked about as easy as controlling an eighteen-wheeler skidding down an icy hill. When I commented on his skill, Amr only shrugged again and said that like most sailors in Aswan he had been sailing since he was a small boy.

  Watching Amr manage this passage so gracefully, it was easy to picture the famed Shellalees, known also as the Cataract Arabs, the Egyptian sailors of years past whose sole occupation had been to navigate these rapids of the first cataract. Because of the Shellalees, hundreds of large dahabiehs had successfully surmounted the cataract in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries without mishap. Passing through the cataract, Florence Nightingale had been struck with the acumen of these sailors, comparing their skill to that of the American Indian who by sheer inheritance of instinct could navig
ate an uncharted forest with almost magical ease. “In America,” Nightingale wrote, “the wild Indian tracks his way through a trackless forest, by an instinct to us quite as miraculous as clairvoyance, or anything we are pleased to call impossible; and in Egypt the wild Nubian rides on the wave, and treads upon the foam, quite as securely as the Indian in his forest.”

  In Nightingale’s day some forty to fifty dahabiehs went up the cataract each year during the tourist season — November to March — but a hundred and fifty years later, there were few travelers on this part of the river. That afternoon Amr and I appeared to be the only people heading upriver from Aswan. In the span of an hour we saw no one until we came alongside the steep flank of a mountainous camel-colored sand dune that spilled down the cliffs of the west bank from the Libyan desert and dipped its parched hem in a cove of the river. There, on the powdery skirt of the dune, four Egyptian men sat huddled near the water’s edge in the scant shade of a skinny acacia tree.

  It was not merely the political climate and the threat of terrorism that kept tourists away from the cataract, but the fact that since 1902 the Aswan dam at the southern end of the cataract had completely blocked the passage of river craft. Now, a trip up the cataract could only be a few hours’ excursion before, at the base of the dam, the boat would have to turn around and retrace its steps.

  Sailing was Amr’s profession. For a fee, he would take foreigners anywhere they wanted to go. Like most felucca captains in Luxor and Aswan, his specialty was three- or four-day trips down the river, camping on the boat at night. Most captains carried groups of six or eight people on these planned adventures, predominantly young northern Europeans and hardy Australians who seemed to take inordinate plea-sure in traveling rough. Amr said he had not had one trip so far this winter. Diffidently he showed me his business brochure, a much-handled photocopy of a text detailing the various trips one could make, with a map of the river from Philae to Esna and a black-and-white photograph of himself. The brochure said:

  WELCOME TO ASWAN!

  Hello, my name is Amr Khaled and I am the captain of the Fantastic felucca. I have seventeen years experience in the felucca business. Anyone who has visited Aswan will tell you that a holiday here is not complete without a ride on our traditional sailing boats. I am not associated with any tour company, but offer an in-de-pen-dent and personalized ser-vice to my customers. Whether you would like a few hours sailing around the islands of Aswan or a five-night journey to Luxor, the Fantastic felucca and my good self are at your disposal.

  The cheery self-promotion and the mannered English of “my good self ” didn’t sound like Amr. I asked whether he had written it.

  “I cannot write English,” he said with a laugh. “A British friend wrote it for me.”

  I had a bottle of mineral water with me and offered him some. He declined it, saying, “I cannot drink that. It makes me sick.”

  I assured him that the water was pure, but he grimaced with mistrust, as if only a fool would drink bottled water. I asked him why.

  “Minerals,” he said. “I am not used to them.” Presently he took a tin cup from beneath a thwart, dipped it into the river, and drank from it. I must have looked surprised, for he said quickly, “It is clean enough here to drink. And swim in. Even for foreigners.”

  Amr told me that when his parents were young, before the High Dam was built, the river water was extremely sandy because of its great volume and turbulence. When his parents scooped up a jug of water they had to wait half an hour for the sand to settle in it before they could drink. Flaubert, who marveled that the water of the Nile was very yellow because of the soil it carried with it, would probably have appreciated this detail and would most likely be disappointed to learn that now, since the construction of the High Dam, the sand and silt were gone.

  I asked Amr what his parents had thought of the arrival of the High Dam. “They were happy,” he said, “because the dam would mean they’d have more farmland.”

  The Aswan High Dam, built in 1964 just above the first dam, had radically changed the mood and pace of the Nile; it had brought the natural annual inundations to an end and had altered the style of Egyptian farming. Before the arrival of the dam, the Nile flooded once a year, allowing farmers only one opportunity to plant crops in the rich silt the receding river left behind. Though the onset of the Nile’s flood always remained constant, occurring usually in mid-June, the size of the flood did not, and for millennia predicting the amount of water the flood would bring had been one of the most important preoccupations of Egyptian life. Too little water meant drought, famine, and death, yet too much could be equally devastating. Unable to control or predict the behavior of the river, Egyptians had been utterly at its mercy.

  During the nineteenth century, with Muhammad Ali’s campaign to modernize Egypt, the population began to grow for the first time in three thousand years, and at an astounding rate — in a mere hundred years it boomed from four million to ten million. It soon became obvious that Egypt would need a more efficient system of agriculture and a more constant and reliable supply of water to support its people. Many Egyptians were starving; the life expectancy in Egypt at that time was thirty-five. In 1960, financed by the Soviet Union, Abdel Nasser’s revolutionary government began construction of the High Dam just above Aswan. On completion of the dam in 1970, the Nile flowing up the African continent backed up and spread into the red desert of Nubia, forming Lake Nasser, which now covers an area approximately eight miles wide and three hundred miles long and holds enough water to meet the needs of the Egyptian population for approximately three years.

  With the flow of the river under human control, Egypt suffers no drought, as Nigeria, Sudan, and Libya do; Egyptian farmers have more cultivable land and are able to produce two or three crops a year instead of one; famine has been eradicated; electricity is cheap and widely available; and the once devastating Nile floods are controlled. But with these gains have also come heavy losses. One hundred and fifty thousand Nubian people who had lived for centuries in the desert of southern Egypt were displaced by the High Dam project; their villages — along with many important pharaonic structures — were submerged under the waters of the lake; and much of their ancient and unique culture was destroyed. With controlled flooding, the valuable silt once carried by the river to the floodplain of Egypt now sinks in the still waters of the lake and settles uselessly there. Deprived of the soil that essentially created a garden in one of the world’s harshest deserts, Egyptian farmers are now forced to use toxic synthetic fertilizers, and though their crops are more frequent, the quality and yield of these crops have been reduced. In addition, the present constant irrigation of the soil has caused the underground water table to rise, oversaturating crops. And without the flushing action of the natural flood, the soil has grown increasingly salty, a threat to both crops and the ancient stone monuments.

  Amr told me he remembered the rise of the river before the High Dam was completed; the water used to rise right up to the edge of his village. He pointed to a dark level line that ran across the smooth boulders four or five feet above the water. “That is how high the river comes now in summer when they open the dam,” he said. Then he pointed to a scrawny shrub growing out of the side of a dune some fifteen feet above the dark line and said, “And that is where it used to rise before the High Dam.”

  If that was true, then many of the islands we were looking at would have been completely submerged when the river was in full flood.

  As we entered a wider part of the river and prepared to turn around and go back to the city, Amr spotted a large dead fish floating on the surface of the water twenty feet upstream. “Rose,” he said, “I will bring the boat near so you can catch the fish.”

  “Catch the fish?” I said, somewhat alarmed. “With what?”

  “Hands.”

  Amr was such a serious person and so apparently confident and in command in his milieu that against my own inclinations I found it impossible not to go along with h
is strange wish. I leaned over the gunwale, and as the fish rounded the bow of the boat I made a grab for its tail. Hard and cold and so slippery it felt coated in olive oil, the fish simply slithered through my grasp. When I turned around to tell Amr that I had missed it, he was steering the boat with one hand and nimbly hauling the fish out of the water with the other. He held the glistening greenish log up for examination in the afternoon sunlight. Then, taking the fish in both hands, he put his nose into its open mouth and sniffed. He stared vacantly at the deck, his lips pursed in thought, then sniffed again. “Well, half and half,” he said, looking at me as though I had asked him a question. “Still good to eat now, but already when we get home it will be bad.” He frowned in disappointment and tossed the stiffening fish back into the river. “Look,” he said. “Another one.”

  Sure enough, another large glittering fish floated belly-up past the stern of the boat. I asked what had killed the fish.

  Amr swung the boat northward. “The white powder.”

  I looked at him. “What white powder, Amr?” I said.

  “You know, the powder that is white. The fishermen put that powder in the water near High Dam to kill many fish together. Then they catch them with the net and sell in the market.”

  I tried not to look shocked. “This white powder,” I said, thinking strychnine, cyanide, arsenic, “does it have a name?”

  “I can’t think what its name.”

  I had read somewhere that in Tanzania, on Lake Nyasa, crocodiles had been poisoned regularly with cyanide because they interfered with fishermen’s nets. Tanzania wasn’t so far away in the greater scheme of things. “Well, if it kills the fish, wouldn’t it also kill the person who eats the fish?”

  Amr shrugged. “No. No problem.”