It was a non-place. Perhaps the half a dozen trams and two or three sandals had indeed huddled together to avoid pirates or thieves as they may have been. After all in Chinese waters they used to say the rivermen would sell you an anchor chain at the stern while paying it out over your bows. It was all a very honourable profession and perhaps ‘piracy’ on the Nile was the same. I slept the worse not for thoughts of ‘piracy’ but from the cold. We both got to sleep at last under piles of assorted clothing. I dressed at dawn and stared through the port window. We moved away from the gaggle of craft and all set off in procession. There were much bigger rafts of Nile Roses coming down the stream. The cliffs were in on the east side and there was an orangey glow of sunrise behind them. It looked as if dust or smoke was hanging in the sky. I could not believe there was water up there – but why the dust? And now, as the sun pushed up, character entered into the cliffs, as the play of light and shade, all sharp in contrast, created an infinite variety of forms in the rock. There were faces of men and beasts that changed into cities and fallen trees. A sleeper lay, his head pillowed on a coign of vantage. As we moved past, the face fell in, the sleeper became a clenched fist then vanished altogether. The sun, blazing now, was parodying or analogizing in rock its own acts of universal creation. Oh, yes – to cut out the disc of the sun was a dreadful thing.
We moved over closer to the west bank, which was burstingly fertile now but swept by a considerable current. There were groins and little promontories of limestone in the curved shelters of which the water and the masses of Nile Roses gyrated. Reis Shasli sent down a message that we were passing by a notorious pirate village. There seemed to be no inhabitants and only one small rowing boat was drawn up on the mud beach.
We went on deck and waited for the barrage at Asyut to come in sight. It was impressive. It is essentially a road stretching across the river with one hundred sluice gates ranged side by side below it. At one end there is a kind of travelling crane made of what looks like gigantic meccano. This machine is the size of a four-storey house, the bottom storey of which straddles the road, while leaving a hole in itself big enough for any truck to pass. The whole huge contraption travels on railway lines set on either side of the road and running from one end of the barrage to the other. So the crane can move from sluice to sluice and adjust each of the hundred massive gates as required. As we approached it was plain that the river had not yet been ponded for the replenishment of the irrigation system for all the gates were letting plenty of water foam through. On the right-hand side of the barrage as we faced it, were lock gates with trams and sandals waiting for them to open [see plate]. Getting through into that lock, and getting out of it afterwards was a slow business. The in-between business was terribly slow. That whole operation took us about three hours. ‘He who rides the Nile must have sails woven of patience.’ The word that proverb uses for ‘Nile’ means ‘Sea’ so perhaps the whole thing is mock-heroic. How can you tell, in a language you don’t know?
Once clear of the lock we went roaring up the river at our top and smoky speed and were chased at once by a police launch. I had just the same nervous reaction you feel, however virtuous your conduct, if the police stop your car. But Alaa’s letter from the Chief of Police was now working its magic more potently the further we got away from Cairo. The police launch merely wanted to know if we required anything. Shasli, never missing an opportunity, got water and fuel with a quick tie-up at the police station.
The Nile is notably broader above Asyut. Most rivers get a bit wider as they approach the sea, since tributaries increase their flow. But the Nile has no tributary to join it anywhere north of Khartoum. So the flow, what with more than a thousand miles of evaporation and irrigation, decreases all the way to the Delta. To say thus is to simplify a process that is vastly complex and, be it said, not yet fully understood by the people who study the water or administer its distribution. There is, for example, seepage of unknown quantity – unknown because for some ineluctable reason the seeped water sometimes elects to flow on underground and rejoin the Nile at a point further north, thus making a nonsense of exact calculations. To complicate the complications there is what geologists call ‘juvenile water’ – the stuff that bubbles up from the endless crack between the two Atlantic Ridges – which may have been trapped somehow in the exhaustingly ancient African landmass before there was life on earth or even a decent stretch of sea. That water runs under the Sahara – possibly. Perhaps it’s as well that there are still mysteries left for our grandchildren to solve, even in something as apparently simple as a river.
Here, then, and for whatever reasons, the Nile was majestic; and as if wealth were to be gauged exactly by the size of its flow, mile after mile, south of Asyut the banks were dotted with villas splendid by Egyptian standards. The weather, as if it had been ponded behind the foaming barrage of Asyut, became significantly warmer. I began to rejoice, feeling that we were getting on. But just as I began to rejoice we tied up at a place called Abu Tig. Nobody had told me anything; but to my surprise Alaa and Rushdie asked me to come and see the town. So ashore we went. An aspect of any Egyptian town that is bound to surprise a westerner – northerner – is how the children swarm everywhere [see plate]. They seemed healthy enough to me as did the population generally. There were no ghastly cripples begging beside the road, no children too listless to move. Even so, the children stopped their playing as we approached and waited. They did not bother us, however, but only examined us curiously and from a distance. This is a change that has happened in the last ten years. It was not because we were ‘convoyed’ by Alaa and Rushdie, who look as Egyptian as anyone can. It is the result of a push by the authorities to get the bakshish boys off the backs of foreigners. Ten years before we had been plagued by them and they have been notorious for generations. But as far as my experience goes, from one end of Egypt to the other the bakshish boys are gone. So in Abu Tig we were able to walk free and unhindered. The streets were a little untidy but not dirty. There were small shops which seemed to stock only a few goods, except the tobacco kiosk which was loaded down with every kind of tobacco product. The Egyptians make ‘hubble-bubbles’ out of a can and a length of bamboo. Those who could afford the earlier, ornate versions of the hubble-bubble now smoke western style. But the average Egyptian if he is not dragging at his bamboo pipestem is smoking a cigarette. Everybody smokes hash now and then. Officially the police are supposed to stop it, but wink.
Beyond the kiosk we came to Nasser Park. For a small town it was a remarkable place. There were winding walks under trees, all concrete and all swept clean. The trees were festooned with fairy lights. There was also a zoo with animals in rather cramped cages. The captive birds seemed depressed. What I found remarkable was the fact that the place had many statues; and these were mostly reproductions of ‘Pharoni’ works. They were made in the appropriate stone, granite, basalt, limestone, quartzite, but reproductions nevertheless. The effect was curious in a way not easy to define. For outside Cairo and Alexandria the craft of statuary is not much practised. Off hand, I could only think of one attempt at a modern ‘work of art’ and that was the war memorial in Asyut, which seemed to be made of aluminium and to my untutored eye was dramatically inartistic. But then, what war memorial isn’t? Perhaps the strange effect of these reproduced ‘Pharoni’ statues was because in most western countries we have the genuine article and connect fake Egyptian with those super cinemas of the Twenties and Thirties. I still can’t quite account for my bewilderment at meeting a Ramesses or an Amenhotep quarter size in a bed of Strelitzias. The statues drew me on until we discovered that we were back at the corniche and only fifty yards from the boat; so we climbed a fence illegally and went back on board. It was early. Ann stayed in the middle cabin to be taught her numbers but even this palled. The time was just after six and it was growing dark. There was nothing left to do but read our minimal supply of books and write my journal. Bedtime could not be before 9 o’clock and that was a long haul. I still do no
t know why we stopped at Abu Tig and forgot to ask Alaa, having by now become a little fatalistic in an Egyptian way about the reasons for things. It was a defeat.
In the morning the engine began to tick over at a quarter to seven but we did not get up until a quarter past. The Nile was copious as if we had passed the principal points where irrigation drew it off from the main stream. The air still felt a bit warmer. There was some temptation to relax into that warmth and forget the duty of being interested. Shasli was pushing the engine, I thought, and we were still trailing our thick black tail. We made the day noisome for any craft that followed us too closely. Fishermen, sitting in their rowing boats and rocking in our wake did not like us. To tell the truth, both Ann and I were prepared to admire nothing so much as a comfortable hotel with large, clean bathrooms and large, clean beds with large, clean sheets. They awaited us at Luxor, still a long way ahead. Meanwhile, I fulfilled my duty by noting the river craft – still more interesting than temples – or rock tombs at any rate. This stretch of the river above Asyut appeared to breed a standard small felucca, lightly built – skin on ribs? – and setting one of those loose-footed lateen sails which can be so adjusted as to seem to be lifting the craft along with something the aspect of a hang-glider. They all carried the standard Nile variety of sculls – that is a pair of lightly shaped baulks of timber. These boats draw next to nothing. Under oar they are ideal for fishing. The fisherman lowers a stone buoyed by a tin then rows towards the bank, spreading a net behind him as he goes. It seems infallible. Fish never learn.
By now our crew, including Alaa, had adopted the habit of having all their meals in the centre cabin without benefit of tables, chairs, or stools. They set out as much as a dozen plates of various foods on the carpeted floor then squatted round cross-legged and ate. I felt it looked exotic and grubby; but on analysing this reaction discovered that I was the exotic one with my needs for and assumption of a rich paraphernalia for the daily business of eating. The crew had been amiable enough, but since we could only communicate minimally unless we used Alaa as an interpreter, they remained other. There is no doubt that with sufficient enterprise along the Moorehead or Stark lines I might have found out more about them. The fact was – and I here put it down in black and white – I was shy. Invite a Frenchman to translate the word into his own language and he is likely to come up with ‘réservé’, or ‘timide’, neither of which will do. A Greek will give you ‘deilos’‚ German ‘scheu’ none of which is appropriate since it misses out the ‘I would if I could but I am not able’ which is inherent in ‘shy’. It is no good asking an Italian for a translation for the concept of shyness is unknown to him. But here I was, a week in the boat, living cheek-by-jowl with a crew and unable to catch their eye in a matey way and with not even the courage to try to learn a word from anyone except Alaa! I had to stand round, humming and nodding on the edge of things, even when Ann was learning numbers from them and having Egyptian bread explained to her. Significantly enough, I felt I knew Saïd the Nubian better than the others because he had a genuine, simple reaction to us. We were English and therefore to be disliked. The others might think that but would be too complicated or, if you like, too sophisticated to say so.
My small stock of Arabic now contained, however, the words for ‘north’ and ‘south’. They were interesting. ‘South’ is ‘qibli’ which is of unknown derivation, as if the south anyway was a mystery; but ‘north’ is ‘bahari’‚ which simply means ‘towards the sea’. The interest in that is partly because we were approaching the ‘big bend’ which is so notable in maps of the Nile, where the river kinks violently in a right angle then gets back on course again. So for a time the river does not run north and south but east and west. Nevertheless, what was really east would still be ‘qibli’ and west would be ‘bahari’ or in the direction of the sea, though the nearest water in that direction would be more than three thousand miles away in the Atlantic.
At about midday, while Rushdie was giving us an elementary but I am afraid misleading lesson in hieroglyphics – children are taught a list of the ‘alphabetic’ signs at school – while, I say, we were having our names written out with no benefit of syllabic signs or determinatives, the rudder lines parted again. Shasli repeated his former manoeuvres and we half-motored, half-drifted to the western shore. It was the more comfortable one. On the east bank, while Rushdie scribbled, the cliffs had become high and spectacular again. Directly opposite there was a quarry and while we watched, it blew the day’s charges, making much dust and rubble but having little effect on the cliff. We cast off from the shore and with a jury-rigged rudder went looking for a bit of wire from a passing tram. It had no wire but agreed to give us a pluck. The energetic young man Faroz, officially our cleaner – but on Hani there was no demarcation – Faroz in his blue tracksuit with its white stars and his rakish blue turban, seized what I think must have been our only bit of rope and leaped across about six feet of Nile on to the tram. He made the end fast. That was fine and gallant except that no one was holding our end of the line and it was not made fast to us either so we lost Faroz once more and our rope. Since our rudder was jury-rigged we could not manoeuvre and the tram had to do the job. I watched with a mixture of keen enjoyment and irritation. We got alongside at last, made fast, and retrieved our rope and a crestfallen Faroz, though it was no more his fault than anyone else’s. He is a likeable lad and we thought he would be excellently cast as Aladdin [see plate].
We were provided with a full police escort into the city of Sohag – or to its corniche and police station. I felt that had we come by road, Alaa’s letter from the Police Chief would have ensured us motorcycle outriders – what fun! The police were helpful. Sohag is a big city with housing estates and many mosques. More than that, Sohag has a bridge going all the way across the river so that the city lies on both sides of the river as Minya will do when they contrive to get the root built on the east bank and a bit in the middle. I noted yet another example of our confined inability to make contact with people. Rushdie spent most of the afternoon with Alaa’s head in his lap, reading aloud in Arabic what Alaa called ‘A tale by some Lebanese idiot’ [see plate]. They were hysterical with laughter every now and then but I saw that it was useless to try to find out what it was all about. Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don’t understand.
We had tied up by a quarter to five and I was by that time resigned to wasted hours that might have been spent making headway. The reason this time in any case was sensible – an effort to find the correct flexible steel wire for the connection between wheel and rudder. Five minutes after we tied up, Ann and I were alone in the boat. There was nothing to do but wait and watch. One of the consolations was a beautiful sailing sight. As we waited for the quick dusk to well up round us two huge sandals came up the river before a following wind [see plate]. Each had her lateen spread out to port and a ‘balancer’ to starboard [see plate]. They were laden deep with white limestone. Their sails caught what light was left and the water was so smooth now that as they inched along they were mirrored faintly in it. I took more shots with my camera – wishing all the time for Alaa’s battery, but felt I was preserving this magnificent sight for posterity. I had an uneasy feeling that we were among the last people who would ever see sail used as an economic proposition – used, as it were, healthily and not preserved for occasional pleasure or to dress a tourist scene. For, of course, the huge trams, able to transport hundreds of tons of stone or brick, must end by pushing the exquisite sandals off the river and they will finish by being preserved only to take tourists on sentimental journeys. However, the thought struck me that they would be an even more magnificent sight if the Khamsin started to blow and they had to beat up the river at top speed!
The crew drifted back having failed to find the bit of wire they wanted and the police this time were unable to give us fuel, having none for themselves or saying they had none. We were, therefore, in a mild kind of fix. Shasli said he thought he would be
able to get fuel from one of the trams, once we were out of sight of the police and the city. How odd. However, we had taken water aboard and could wash if nothing else.
7
In the morning the engine started at a quarter past six but I did not get up. I lay, instead, trying to deduce what was happening from what I could hear. It was complex. Just when I thought we were all set to roar smokily off up the river, Shasli put the screw out of gear for a couple of seconds. Then he moved our boat by a series of delicate little engine-nudges, each time only using the screw minimally. He was going alongside something again. We bumped. I got out of my bunk, drew a curtain and stared out. I got a shock because there was a limestone cliff only a yard from my face and for a breathless moment I feared the worst. But in the next moment I saw that this cliff of limestone was supported by a tram and we were now tied up to it. The tram was moving too and soon we were off up river, our engine just turning over while the tram hauled us along faster than we could have gone under our own power. I dressed after that and went on deck to see what was happening. The cliff of limestone reached up about six feet above the gunwale of the tram and must have been at least twenty yards long. The steering position – but this is customary and a definition of ‘tram’ – was right up in the bows [see plate]. The engine, engine-room and engineer were right aft in the stern. The engine-room ‘telegraph’ consisted of a piece of string laid sloppily along the top of the stone cargo. Presumably if it was pulled it rang a bell in the stern and presumably the engineer knew what the signals meant. But in any case, when I came on deck there was no engineer in the engine-room at all. He was forrard in the steering position together with the tram’s crew of six and most of our own crew. It was a matey and animated scene. Shasli was bargaining for fuel; or rather both crews were bargaining for it. As far as I could see there were at least ten people in command. I understood that the only male in either craft with no contribution to make was myself. I felt not so much a passenger as a bit of lumber. Alaa emerged from the after part of the tram.
An Egyptian Journal Page 9