by Paul Theroux
But now no one knows, and as with the Napoleonic graffiti, which has acquired significance over the years, the defacings are as fascinating as the finished sculptures, giving the figures the weirdness and mystery of a mutilated corpse at a crime scene.
Syrians, Asians, and Nubians were pointed out on the temple walls, and while the Egyptologist was explaining their features and their characteristic clothes, some of the cruise passengers were becoming impatient, jostling in the little cluster of concentrating and querulous tourists to ask a supplementary question: ‘Which Ptolemy was that?’
At last when Fawzi was done, the question came: ‘What about the Jews?’
It so happened, Fawzi said, that for the length and breadth of the Nile Valley, from the Delta south to Upper Egypt and into the dark pyramids and temples of Nubia, there was no mention of the Jews, nothing of Israelites, and even when captives were shown, their religion was not indicated; they were merely a mass of undifferentiated pagan prisoners. There are pot-bellied hippos, and bat-eared jackals, there are plump-lipped Nubians, and Asiatics squinting across the millennia, but there are no Jews. And there are whole dynasties of pharaohs depicted, but not even the faintest trace of Moses on an Egyptian wall.
So he said. But there was a group of people whose generic name, ‘Other siders,’ or ‘Crossers over,’ occurred now and then on Egyptian tombs and temples and in papyrus scrolls. The pharaonic word for these people was Apiru or Habiru, and was derived from an Aramaic word, ‘Ibri’, which meant ‘one from the other side.’ It is not a great phonetic leap from Habiru or Ibri to Hebrew, a crudely descriptive name (like ‘wetback’ for Mexican), for people who had crossed the water, in this case the Red Sea. And the word for Hebrew, in Hebrew, is Ivri.
Some of these migrants (‘Habiru, in cuneiform sources’) found employment doing the heavy lifting on building projects in the eastern Delta. The Egyptologist K. A. Kitchen described them in his life of Rameses II, as ‘displaced, rootless people who drifted or were drafted into various callings … Lumped in with the Apiru generally were doubtless those who in the Bible appear as the Hebrews, and specifically the clan-groups of Israel.’ Those people had been resident in the eastern Delta since the time of Jacob and Joseph, when their forefathers fled to Egypt to escape famine.
That I found out later. While I listened to Fawzi’s explanation, someone saying, ‘I guess it’s all a riddle,’ a woman approached me and hit me on the arm.
‘Hey, that’s a dandy idea!’ She was from Texas. I had seen her on the boat, looking unsteady. She had a new hip. New hips are common on cruise ships and among cruise passengers chit-chat about hip surgery is frequently audible.
‘What is?’ I said.
‘Little old notebook to write stuff on.’
I shut my notebook and held it like a sandwich.
‘Little old pen.’
I had been doodling, a hieroglyphic, a squatting man in a stool-shaped hat, one knee up, both his arms crooked and raised above his head in a gesture of amazement, as though saying, ‘This is incredible!’ This lovely compact and comic image was the hieroglyphic for ‘one million.’
The woman punched my arm again as a sort of compliment and when she moved off, favoring one leg, I wrote, Hey, that’s a dandy idea …
Some aspects of the touristy Nile cannot have changed much in a hundred years. There are no taxis in Edfu, only pony carts and they clashed and competed for customers, the drivers yelling, flailing their whips, maneuvering their carts, scraping their wheels, and there was something ancient, perhaps timeless, in the way a driver – my Mustafa, say – turned, as the pony trotted towards the temple, and demanded more money, double the price in fact, whining, ‘Food for my babies! Food for my horse! Give me, bleeeez!’
The most idyllic stretch of the Nile that I saw, an Egyptian pastoral as serene as any watercolor, lay between Edfu and Esna. Afterwards, when I thought about Egypt I always saw it as it appeared to me that hot afternoon from the deck of the Philae. Fifty miles of farms and plowed fields, mud houses and domed mausoleums on hilltops; fishermen in rowboats, in the stream of the river, and donkeys and camels on the banks, loping among the palms. The only sounds were the gurgle of the boat’s bow wave, the whine of locusts, and the flop and splash of the fishermen’s oars. The sky was cloudless and blue, the land baked the color of biscuits and with the same rough, dry texture, as though these low hills and riverbanks had just come out of the oven. The green was deep and well watered, the river was a mirror of all of this – the sky, the banks, the boats, the animals, a brimming reflection of everything, near and far, an ambitious aquarelle that took in the whole visible peaceful landscape.
Esna had always been a stopping-off place, even when the temple lay buried, ‘to its chin,’ as one Victorian traveler wrote. The ruination had not made it less popular. The advantage of a mostly buried temple like this was that a visitor had a close-up view of the upper parts of the massive pillars: the great sculpted capitals and the interior ceiling showing papyrus leaves and ferns, grasshoppers, the symbolic garden easily visible, with zodiac signs, the enormous scorpion and the ram-headed god, Khnum, to whom the temple is dedicated.
The young sensualist Flaubert – he was only twenty-seven – went to Esna in search of a celebrated courtesan, Kuchuk Hanem, ‘Little Princess’, and her famous dance, the ‘Dance of the Bee.’ Esna at that time was the most vicious town in Egypt, filled with prostitutes who by law had been rounded up and rusticated there from Cairo. Flaubert found Kuchuk Hanem, she danced naked for him, among blindfolded musicians.
The Dance of the Bee has been described as ‘essentially a frenzied comic routine in which the dancer, attacked by the bee, has to take all her clothes off.’ But in the word bee there is also a distinct allusion, for it is an Arabic euphemism for the clitoris. Flaubert slept with the dancer and minutely recorded in his travel notes the particularities of each copulation, the temperature of her body parts, his own performance (‘I felt like a tiger’) and even the bedbugs in her bed, which he loved (‘I want a touch of bitterness in everything’). In every sense of the word, he anatomized his Egyptian experience and he became an informal guide and role model to me.
At Esna, Flaubert made two memorable entries in his diary. At the temple, while an Arab is measuring the length of one of the exposed columns for him, he notes, ‘a yellow cow, on the left, poked her head inside …’
Without that yellow cow we see nothing; with it, the scene is vivid and complete. And leaving Kuchuk’s room after the sexual encounter he writes, ‘How flattering it would be to one’s pride if at the moment of leaving you were sure that you left a memory behind, that she would think of you more than of the others who had been there, that you would remain in her heart!’
But that is a lament, with the foreknowledge that he will be quickly forgotten, for later he concedes that, even as he is ‘weaving an aesthetic around her,’ the courtesan – well, whore – cannot possibly be thinking of him. He concludes: ‘Traveling makes one modest – you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.’
After the Philae docked, I went ashore and walked through the little town to the enormous and now fully exposed temple that lay in a great square pit, as though quarried from the earth. The painted signs of the zodiac were beautiful, the columns massive and intact. It is a late, Roman era temple, but the Egyptian style is that of a thousand years earlier, the worst damage is the façade, bullet-pocked by French soldiers who took pot-shots at it in the 1840s, plinking away at the magnificent edifice for the sheer hell of it.
A bazaar clustered around it, narrow lanes, screeching traders, children and animals crowding around.
I went back to the Philae. I finished Flaubert, I started Heart of Darkness, which I was to read twelve more times before I got to Cape Town. Lolling on the upper deck I realized that the Philae was not the Roi des Belges, but rather one of those ships – very few, in my experience – that I wished would just keep sailing on, with me on board, bearing me onward t
o Khartoum, and southward through the Sudd; into Uganda and the big lakes, pioneering a water route down to the Zambezi.
‘Just yourself this evening, sir?’ Ibrahim, the waiter, asked each night at dinner.
I smiled: Yes, just me and Joseph Conrad.
‘Going to Cairo afterwards, sir?’
‘Yes, to get a visa. Then I am heading south. To Nubia. The Sudan. Ethiopia. And beyond, I hope.’
‘Alone, sir?’
‘Inshallah.’
‘Business or pleasure, sir?’
‘Both. Neither.’
‘Very good, sir. An adventure for you, sir.’
Ibrahim was the soul of courtesy. They all were, really, full of compliments. It is well known that the staff on cruise ships are helpful and friendly because they are hustling for tips. They smile and banter so that you will reward them. I smile; you give me money.
Tipping confounds me because it is not a reward but a travel tax, one of the many, one of the more insulting. No one is spared. It does not matter that you are paying thousands to stay in the presidential suite in the best hotel: the uniformed man seeing you to the elevator, inquiring about your trip, giving you a weather report, and carrying your bags to the suite expects money for this unasked-for attention. Out front, the doorman, gasconading in gold braid, wants a tip for snatching open a cab door, the bartender wants a proportion of your bill, so does the waiter, and chambermaids sometimes leave unambiguous messages, with an accompanying envelope, demanding cash. It is bad enough that people expect something extra for just doing their jobs; it is an even more dismal thought that every smile has a price.
Still, on the Philae, the waiters had a cheerful, even celebratory way of working, as though they were acting in an Egyptian comedy; and in such a country, where a schoolteacher earned $50 a month, they probably needed tips just to get by.
Although I was alone at my table, I was one of a hundred passengers – mainly those plump rich amphibious-looking people for whom travel is an expensive kind of laziness, spent in the company of other idle people to whom they relate details of their previous trips. ‘This reminds me of parts of Brazil,’ and ‘Now that, that could be Malta.’ They were American, British, German, with a scattering of South Americans, and of course the gloomy Indians with the boisterous child. The Americans on board could be divided into young friends traveling happily together, contentious aged couples traveling alone, and honeymooners, three pairs, everyone’s favorites.
I resisted mocking them because they were generally harmless and most were committed to geniality, but except for one friendly pair of honeymooners who insisted that I dine with them from time to time, I always ate alone. As for the others, trying to recall them, I only see them eating – feeding-time was always closely observed on shipboard, and they were at their most animated then. The table of older German blonde women, exquisitely dressed; the four German men who were always so curt with the waiter – and one was actually named Kurt; the young American couples, distressed by the news of the failing stock market; the hard-faced woman and her bosomy husband, each seemingly midway through a sex-change; the Indian couple and their bored bratty child.
Of the Germans, the sextet of older, occasionally exuberant blondes, like the reunion of a chorus line, interested me most, because they were traveling with a Levantine doctor. We were on the upper deck one day, having a drink, and he said to me, ‘My field is reconstructive surgery.’ I turned to the women who were talking and sunning themselves, in that odd heliotropic posture of sunbathers, canted against the sun, grimacing and just perceptibly turning.
I was struck by their similarity – the sharp noses, the smooth cheeks, the tight eyes, the bright brittle hair – and I realized that he was traveling with his patients, all of whom were so pretty he, not they, deserved the compliment. This peculiar revelation seemed to me a great subject for a story: say, a young man’s involvement with a much older woman who looks thirty, traveling with her plastic surgeon. To calm myself with the illusion that I was working, I began writing this story. This is my only story. Now that I am sixty I can tell it … As the days and weeks passed, the story became by turns melancholic, comic, reminiscing, and consolingly erotic.
Inevitably, on the Philae, there was one of those helpfully nosy couples who asked all the questions the rest of us did not dare to ask for fear of revealing our ignorance. ‘How in heck did they manage to move those things?’ and ‘Is that fronic?’ were two of their questions. The wife interrogated the women, her husband badgered the men for information.
‘Do you work?’ the bullying wife asked the shyest-seeming woman, one of the petite and pretty honeymooners.
‘I’m a prison officer,’ the new bride said.
‘That must be so difficult!’ was the predictable rejoinder.
When the honeymooner said, ‘Oh, no. We have some wonderful inmates’ all conversation ceased.
The nosy woman’s husband, an irritating old philistine, who looked like Piltdown man in a golf cap, kept saying to me, ‘I guess I’ll have to read one of your books now.’
I begged him not to, in a friendly way. One thing I had learned about traveling with lots of other people was that it was usually a good idea to hold my tongue. The talkers were self-advertisers, people to avoid, along with the networkers, the salesmen and the evangelists; the quieter ones were often worth knowing, but in any case I regarded the whole boatload as one of the sights of Egypt, like the fat stone hippos and the mummified cats and the pesky curio-sellers. I guessed that after Egypt I would not see many more tourists.
None of us knew much about Egyptology, we were hazy on dates, ‘My history’s real shaky,’ was as common a remark as ‘How in heck did they manage to move those things?’
For me this was a picnic, and I suspected my last picnic before plunging deeper in Africa. This was comfortable undemanding travel among mostly companionable people, and if it was true that we didn’t know much about Egyptian history, neither did the Egyptians. It would have been very tedious if some pedantic historian had been on the cruise, correcting impressions and setting us straight. I preferred listening to the improvisations:
‘They must have used those for climbing up the wall.’
‘I imagine they took baths in that thing.’
‘Those ruts were probably made by chariots, or wagon wheels of some kind.’
‘Looks like a kind of duck.’
‘That’s definitely fronic.’
Some countries are just perfect for tourists. Italy is. So are Mexico and Spain. Turkey, too. Egypt, of course. Pretty big. Not too dirty. Nice food. Courteous people. Sunshine. Lots of masterpieces. Ruins all over the place. Names that ring a bell. Long vague history. The guide says, ‘Papyrus’ or ‘Hieroglyphic’ or ‘Tutankhamen,’ or ‘one of the Ptolemies,’ and you say, ‘Yup.’
But what you remember most is the friendly waiter, or the goofball with the mobile phone on the camel, or the old man pissing against the ancient wall, the look of a tray of glossy pomegranates in the market, the sacks of spices, the yellow cow ruminating in the temple, or just the colors, for the colors of Egypt are gorgeous. Edward Lear wrote in his diary on the Nile, ‘Egypt is at least a land to learn color in.’
What was I doing? Making progress, I felt. Proceeding from the shore of the Mediterranean, via the Pillars of Hercules, by degrees, deeper into Africa. Travel is transition, and at its best it is a journey from home, a setting forth. I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease with which a person could be transported so swiftly from the familiar to the strange, the moon-shot whereby the New York office worker, say, is insinuated overnight into the middle of Africa to gape at gorillas. That was just a way of feeling foreign. The other way, going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and my passport, was the best way of being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative
was the story of There and Back.
Close shot: me rowing hard, sweating like a galley slave. The camera draws back, revealing that I am on a rowing machine. A wider shot: I am in an exercise room; wider still: I am on a boat, the Philae, near a window. The camera rises from me rowing on my machine and focuses out the window, finding a man at his oars on a rowboat on the Nile, rowing in the same rhythm.
We came to Luxor, Thebes, the Valley of the Kings, the dream of Egyptologists and fidgety tourists, for even if you know nothing you can still gape at the beauties and listen to recited facts, that the sun is born in the morning as a beetle – the scarab; becomes the god Re at noon, and reigns until night falls, becoming the god Atun. How you can read the Profession of Sinlessness – the Negative Confession, the pharaohs listing all their good deeds on the wall of the tomb. Sun imagery blazed everywhere in the form of solar boats, sun disks on the heads of compound gods, orbs over doorways. The Egyptians saw such power in the sun they called themselves ‘cattle of Re.’
But I most remember the graffiti, the vandalism, the names of ancients chiseled into the tomb walls, and that of the French army, the English nineteenth-century travelers, the crazed Copts, the defacements of the iconoclast Akhnaton who decided to be a monotheist.
And the gravel crunching sandals of the old German professor in the tomb of Amenkopshef, as he approached the glass case and leaned over, saying, ‘See the shy-eld.’
A clutch of little bones and a crushed skull.
‘Is a moomy.’
Indeed it was a mummified foetus.
I remember the tomb of Nefertary, the Nubian wife of Rameses III, not for the many years and many millions in its restoration, nor the svelte Nefertary in her see-through gown and tattooed arms (a wide-open eye on each arm), playing a board game, and the jet blacks, bright colors, storks, beetles, cobras, greens, reds, yellows.
What I remember is that tickets were scarce and the visit was limited to ten minutes and that among all these scenes in the depths of the tomb, the attendant approached me, whispering, ‘You must go now! No, okay, stay three minutes more,’ and putting his hand out for baksheesh.