There had been, I knew, in the last few years, a swing against Akhnaton – or at least a reassessment [see plate]. First regarded as a towering monotheist, a mystic, a religious genius, he was now argued to be a dictator with a purely material idea of his god the Aten, the physical disc of the sun. He was thought also to have made a god of himself – which is not surprising in view of the accepted status of a pharaoh – and to have declared that no one could approach the Aten except through Him. But then, I knew also that during the last year a text had been discovered the alleged translation of which made a pointed reference to a spiritual reality behind the physical object. That would put Akhnaton back on line once more as an original religious thinker – a mystic rather than politician. However, archeology always does things by halves and it seemed unlikely that a single text should turn up to settle a vexed question. I wanted to talk to the discoverer and translator of that text in Luxor.
Madame X was continuing to talk and our really rather large group stood round. I was thinking of Amun and Aten and deciding that I at least knew little to choose between them when I chanced to lift my eyes away from what was in front of us and look up into the shadows nearer the roof.
The generous, life-giving hands still reached down, in that wonderful symbol of divine and natural abundance. Even the individual rays led upwards and inwards from the hands towards their source; but someone had taken his chisel and carefully, methodically obliterated the sun.
The sun was blinded.
You can say, of course, if you want to slice things small that the sun is not always beneficent in Egypt, is to be avoided in some seasons, and is a breeder of plagues. But despite that the Egyptians always knew that the sun was the giver of light and life. If he sometimes killed or blinded, well, what would you expect from a god now and then? Are there not the afflicted of Allah? Was there not a fig tree blasted once and a man struck dead for trying to support the Ark of the Lord? But here, for all that, a chisel had been driven deep into the very heart of life. Somehow that obliterated, that gouged-out disc of the sun settled the whole argument for me as between Amun and Aten. It spoke of a bigotry and blasphemy, a dark and cruel intention as if the priests of Amun had been worshippers of a black sun.
We came away, back down the path over the donkey steps, back in procession to the char-à-banc and jolted once more across utterly desert Akhetaten to the village and the river. I had always intended to walk along the south part of the bank along what had been Akhnaton’s royal way where the strange family of king and queen and small daughters had ridden in their chariots by the water in the sweetness of living. But now I saw how naturally everyone was assuming we were homeward bound, having seen what was suitable. I knew I could not ask our assembly either to walk with me or wait. So we moved back across the river and I was questioned some more and answered where I could. A conference of writers in Minya was proposed to which I regretted I could not commit myself as it was so far ahead.
We stopped far short of Minya. This was a sugar refinery and a very big one. The director used all his status to get us in and had to sign many papers. We went first to the recreation centre, which was empty except for a huge television set showing a man orating to nobody in particular. Presently a youngish man came in, seated us, seated himself and began to give us statistics. Egypt manufactured a million tons of sugar annually. There was such and such a number of employees in the place, which was owned by the government. Behind the speaker’s head the programme changed on the television set. It was a lecture by a doctor on diseases of the eye. I tried to look away but found it impossible. The facts and figures continued. The young man, feeling himself in competition with the television turned the sound down and went on with his stream of information. A hideous series of eyes in one state or another of decay, eruption, malformation, obliteration stared at me over his shoulder. Presently we all stood up. The young man led us away and left the eyes still demonstrating themselves.
The factory was huge, covered acres. This time, instead of the hopper I had seen earlier in the day in the little machine at Abu Qurqas there was a gigantic trough. A truckload at a time the cane ascended a gantry then was thrust into a trough to be crunched with a sound as of dinosaurs at dinner. It entered a complex of machinery which jetted heat and steam and noise and clank and squelch. We ascended like the cane to move among machinery on walkways of steel net. We followed our leader between boilers and vats and varicose piping. The temperature was well over a humid hundred. Here our introduction was shouted to a young man who proved to be the engineer in charge. His face was extraordinary and stripped by his enthusiasm or passion or obsession to skin and bone from which unblemished eyes stared as if they saw a single truth which must be proclaimed no matter what. The thought flicked through my mind that there was a little of Akhnaton left about the place. The young man never blinked. He grasped me by the arm and led me into the system, inventing English as he went in the passion of his explanation. Here the juice boiled while this was added, the effect of which was to remove this here. Now the juice was affected not by steam – he was insistent it was not by steam – but by vapour. I was to inspect this gauge, at such and such a temperature. Here the lime was added, whereas here….
It was extraordinary and moving. The explanation, if such it was, of his actions came to me late because it was at first sight so implausible. He comprised in himself the machinery and the process. He had swallowed the factory, become it, in his single-minded passion. He was not so much an engineer as a refinery. So he drew me on between the jets of steam, the blasts of heat from one vat, blip, blip to another, blop, blop, then onward to where things were cooling and cooler; and so at last to the great, revolving drums from which, lo, a powder of white crystals fell – he thrust his hands into a sack and held out these elements which had achieved such a glittering transmutation through his own body.
‘See. Take. Eat.’
After that and our thanks we walked away through stocks of sugar, machinery, old boilers abandoned, and metal shapes of unknown name and function, through lessening noise and heat until we were out from the artificial light of the factory to the light of the real sun. I, by now, was exhausted and glad to see our minibus; but the day had not quite done. In the first place I saw a man on the other side of the canal using a shadouf, that primitive, counter-balanced machine for lifting water which is now disappearing from all over Egypt to be replaced by diesel engines. A shadouf in the Bahr Yusuf! Then again on the other side of the road was a narrow gauge railway; and presently we overtook a train on it. The railway was the sugar cane railway and here was the sugar cane, truckload after truckload, piled so high, heaped so thick that small boys were running beside it and tugging lengths of cane from the trucks. The minibus stopped and all the passengers except me piled out and took part in the plundering. I merely took a photograph – or thought I did, but the film was not advancing. The person most amused by all this carry-on was the driver of the train.
So then we arrived back at the boat. I thanked everybody in sight profusely, thanked and apologized to the young men whose notebooks I hoped were full. I went down to the boat where Ann had sketched and not been satisfied with her work. I had so much for my journal. I did my best; but beside the phenomena – the Secretary General, the ‘poor’ fellah, Akhnaton, the engineer – anything I could do seemed hardly worth the trouble.
6
I did not hear the dawn chorus of the muezzins and woke only when the engine came to life at half past six. By the time I was dressed we had left Minya, and fast too. It seemed that we had acquired a couple of extra knots, courtesy of the mended water pump. Rushdie, in his capacity as cook, had by now discovered that we liked meals at set times where possible. So we actually had a bit of genuine breakfast, bread and cheese and mineral water, round about half past seven. I asked for coffee in my rudimentary Arabic and got it between eight and nine. Hardly had I finished drinking this when through our stern window I saw that the Nile was black with smoke. My fir
st thought was that we were overhauling some craft very much in need of de-coking. My second was that this is always one’s first thought on sea or river or canal and one is always wrong. The trouble is always with one’s own boat. But this, as had been made abundantly clear, was not my boat. All the same there are some things … I went on deck. Sure enough, a quarter of a mile of thick, black smoke was trailing from us astern and blotting out a view of the suburbs of Minya. I gesticulated at Shasli in his glass box but he only nodded and smiled. We were certainly moving along fast enough – doing a good three-quarters of those alleged eleven knots we were supposed to have at our disposal. I did some more gesticulating at Akhmet, our engineer, but he shrugged resignedly and pointed upwards, either at Shasli or Allah or both. I turned back to watch our smoke, and as I did so, a police launch moved out of it and began to overhaul us. I cursed Shasli for a fool, thinking that we must be breaking some river law by our filthy pat of pollution but while I was still finding unusual words to describe him my irritation changed to incredulity. The old Nubian Saïd was kneeling up in the launch and waving a handful of dusters.
Shasli slowed down and the smoke diminished as the launch came alongside. Rushdie and Akhmet hauled Saïd shivering out of the launch. The two policemen, first making the launch fast to one of our cleats, followed him into the centre cabin. Alaa appeared and at last I got an explanation. Saïd had been sent ashore for dusters in Minya and had been mislaid. When he got back to the police station we had gone; so with a simple faith in the importance of people who went for an interview with an Egyptian Secretary General and came back in one piece he had commandeered the launch on our behalf and set off in pursuit. The launch was open, the morning chilly and they had all three, Saïd and the two policemen frozen solid. They would warm up soon, said Alaa. In fact everything had ended happily except for Faroz. My heart sank. Well, what had happened to Faroz? He had set off to look for Saïd in Minya and must have missed him but anyway he would be able to rejoin us further on. But, said Alaa, we must not worry. With that he went below, where the policemen and Saïd were being revived with some refreshment or other. I stayed on deck and tried to convince myself that this sort of accident could have happened to anyone. I examined our wake, under a trace of smoke which had appeared again. Shasli was speeding up – not very much, of course, for the police launch was still made fast alongside. I decided I had found a reason for his hysterical burst of speed which had made so much smoke. He had seen the police launch following us and had thought of his sins, or ours, or the crew’s and he had decided to try and make a bolt for it. The thought was curiously pleasant.
We passed a peculiar thing lying in the water which was made to waggle a bit by our decorously small bow wave. ‘Nonsense,’ I thought to myself. ‘It’s only a dead fish.’ Odd, rotting stuff gave it the appearance of having four legs – illusory, of course, for what fish ever had four legs? I went below, and found the frozen three restored. Two of them got into the launch and swung away from us. I congratulated Saïd on his initiative, then went into our cabin, feeling a bit chilly myself and watched the world for a while through our ample windows. I was rewarded with two splendid sights: first just above El Roda I was delighted to see a very small felucca with a loose-footed mainsail towing a larger rowing boat heaped high with bright green clover. In sail and towing! It was a vision to restore a man’s faith in the use of nature; second El Roda itself (fronted by a high revetment of white limestone of which huge semicircles had collapsed) was all beset with trees, big trees; and for a mile or two thenceforward the trees were so full of Amis des Paysans roosting among the branches that they looked like sulphur cockatoos in Australia. Come to think of it the trees may well have been eucalyptuses, which are notably established in Upper Egypt, unless my eyes have deceived me. But more poetically than cockatoos I decided the mock ibises, the Farmers’ Friends – I cannot be official about them, getting either the language or the apostrophes muddled – I decided they looked like white magnolia blossoms.
The two sights put us both in a cheerful mood for the day. I was able to point out to Ann the tombs I had examined in the previous two days, those square black holes halfway up the eastern cliffs. But after Akhetaten – Tell el Amarna I suppose – the escarpment came close to the river and spread out in whole libraries of geology, fawn, off-white, yellowish and light brown. Cultivation still clung to the east bank under the cliffs, but only just [see plate]. In fact we saw (and photographed on actual rather than conceptual film) the Last Palm of Akhetaten. Every now and then there were more holes in the cliff, some square like those at Beni Hassan and Tell el Amarna, some shapeless mouths, caves it might be for anchorites or corpses or both, adits for any sort of mine you care to think of, refuges for – who can say? They are all ‘published’ somewhere if you care to chase through a library after them, all dealt with if you have the patience. Meanwhile they were enigmas, square holes, round holes, lopsided holes, here and there a speckle like a group of swallow holes and here and there a black hole with a white scratch of path leading up to it. The sky was bright blue over the cliffs, and opposite them the other bank of the river was flat and fertile. The Western Desert was still out of sight. In fact, since leaving Cairo, had we not previous experience, we might have thought the fertile western part of the valley stretched and stretched away for ever, or to the Atlantic at any rate. The Nile itself was still greenery-yallery with a bit of reflected blue mixed in. Nile Roses were drifting past in green patches. There was some sparkle.
To the east, cultivation began to come back. Every few hundred yards there were feluccas drawn up on the bank. They were a new breed, very small and very lightly built. They looked as if they might be made of hides stretched over keel and timbers. There were crazily angled mud huts again and a single, crazy wooden one. A woman squatted before a tripod of sticks from which hung an inflated goat’s skin. She was pushing and pulling this vigorously, churning milk into butter. There were, here and there, a few prosperous houses, each with a hand pump well away from the river.
The note of the engine rose. I glanced aft. Sure enough, our trace of smoke thickened, became the usual pat, thick, black. I rushed out of our seclusion and found Alaa.
‘You are planning again. Relax! It is not your boat.’
‘It isn’t Shasli’s either!’
The argument went no further. Short of physical violence there was no way of stopping Shasli handling the boat any way he liked. I invented sayings. Behind the apparent amiability of the Egyptian is a steely determination not to be moved out of his habitual indolence. And so on.
Near Mallawi we saw a young man standing up to his knees in water on the west bank and signalling with his shirt. It was Faroz. We picked him up and found he had been waiting for us for hours, having taken a taxi from Minya. The time was 5 o’clock and after moving on a mile or two we approached the west bank again and made fast to a tram among some others. We were now in the allegedly piratical stretch of the Nile. Shasli thought there was safety in numbers. The crew drifted away to the other trams or to the shore. We discovered the water was off. In any case we could not have had a bath but only a minimal shower. Presently it was explained to us that the crew was fetching water so that they could drink. We frail creatures, of course, stuck to mineral water from plastic bottles. Night fell, almost, one felt, with a crash. Rushdie made us coffee. After we had both drunk it he explained it was made with ‘good water brought from ashore’. He added as an afterthought, that boiling the water had ‘killed everything’.
Almost certainly it had been a dead fish and not a crocodile.
Alaa brought his coffee along to drink with us. He mentioned that Saïd was proposing to spend a night with his people at Aswan in Upper Egypt when we got there.
‘We shan’t get there, Alaa. You know that. We shall be lucky to get to Luxor in this boat.’
‘That will suit Faroz.’
‘Why?’
‘He comes from a small settlement on the west bank just beyond
Luxor.’
‘What about Shasli?’
‘He comes from Qena….’
‘In Upper Egypt on the way to Luxor. What about Akhmet?’
‘He was born in a small village some way ahead of us on the east bank.’
It is not that Egyptians are particularly devious. It is that they all, from Hamdi down, believe in killing as many birds as possible with one stone.
The engine started in twilight.
‘What’s happening?’
‘I don’t know.’
But Shasli was only manoeuvring from alongside the tram to lie alongside a big sandal with a cargo of sugar cane piled in its hold to the height of our bridge. Some of the sticks overhung our deck. I remembered how everybody had run along beside the sugar cane train and grabbed bits of cane for themselves. Now it was sticking out and to be had for nothing, nobody bothered. I sat and filled in my journal by the dying, or at any rate fading, light of a small strip. Never mind I thought – if that were the only problem! What great works have been written by the light of a penny dip.
An Egyptian Journal Page 8