by Paul Theroux
At Karnak, great city and temple complex, nothing on earth like it, all those columns, I remember mainly the images of honey bees – Nesrut Bity – (King Bee) – symbol of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt – painted high on a roof truss and how the bee thoraxes and legs were defaced. Flaubert said that Karnak looked like ‘a house where giants live, a place where they used to serve up men roasted whole, à la brochette, on gold plates, like larks.’
At the 3000-year-old Mortuary Temple of Medinet Habu, commemorating the victories of Rameses III, I watched a group of Spanish tourists do a double take, first shock, then fascination passing one wall, as they discerned the depiction of hands and penises being cut off captives – the tourists peering at the great stack of dicks carved into the temple wall.
‘Paynees,’ one man murmured softly, putting his knees together.
I remember the Rameses temples of course, the howling statues on the plain, that alarmed the Greeks, and the melancholy trunkless legs of Rameses colossus that inspired Shelley to write ‘Ozymandias,’ one of my favorites from Poetry Corner. Flaubert camped in Luxor, too.
But as impressive as anything else in Egypt in terms of obsessive continuity over the centuries was the sight of the dark bump and bruise on the forehead of devout Muslim men, from striking their head on the mosque floor – the alamat el-salah, ‘mark of prayer,’ colloquially called a raisin (zabibah) in Egypt. For it was here in Luxor in 1997 that Islamic fanatics appeared suddenly at a temple in Luxor and opened fire on some tourist buses. Fifty-seven tourists died in this outrage. A month after I left the Nile six German tourists were taken hostage in Luxor, as well. The kidnapper was said to be a nutter, and the hostages were released after a week, but more incidents were expected.
One day at the Temple of Hatshepsut, a name I could only utter by slowly syllabicating it, I found myself saying, ‘How in heck did they manage to move those things?’ I took this as a sign that it was time to move on.
Because of the terrorist threat, a convoy left Luxor for the coast every morning, thirty cars and buses, led by speeding police cars, across the Eastern Desert, about 100 miles to Port Safaga, and another thirty to Hurghada, on the Red Sea. For about two hours the desert was flat and featureless, then there were low hills like rubble piles and heaps of stone, and finally tumbledown mountains of brown boulders, among which Bedouin children in dark gowns scampered, herding goats.
On the barren coast of the deep blue Red Sea the town of Hurghada sprawled, a Russian resort with all that that implied – cheap hotels, tourists in tracksuits, terrible food, joyless gambling halls and hard-faced hookers. Here and there were luxuriating Romanians and budget-conscious Poles and backpackers who had lost their way. There was nothing but sunshine here and somehow that glarey light made the tacky hotels look uglier.
‘In nineteen-eighty this was a Bedouin village,’ a local man told me.
I had found a nice hotel at the most southerly dune of the district, a place with the fetching name of Sahl Hasheesh, the epitome of splendid isolation. Though the place was arid, hasheesh in fact means greenery, and sahl means coast (thus Swahili means coastal people).
‘You can relax here,’ the manager said.
I thought: I don’t want to relax. If I wanted to relax I would not have come to Africa.
‘You can rest.’
To me, travel was not about rest and relaxation. It was action, exertion, motion, and the built-in delays were longueurs necessitated by the inevitable problem-solving of forward movement; waiting for buses and trains, enduring breakdowns that you tried to make the best of.
‘You can sit on the beach. You can go for a swim.’
To someone who lived half the year in Hawaii, doing such things here seemed perverse. The Red Sea in February was cold, ‘sand’ was just a euphemism for gravel and sharp stones, the wind was strong enough to snatch at my clothes.
What about a ship? I thought. I called an American travel agency in Cairo. The agent, a vague English girl, confused by my request, said she knew nothing of ships.
‘But how about a Nile cruise?’ she inquired.
‘Did that.’
‘Or you could visit Cairo and see real dervishes.’
‘We have dervishes in Hurghada.’
She couldn’t help: no brochure for ships, though the Red Sea must have been full of them. I went to Port Safada. No ships to Djibouti, only a ship full of hajjis to Jiddah in fanatic Arabia.
Back at Sahl Hasheesh the kindly manager could see I was agitated.
‘Just relax. Have a nice time.’
‘I want to be on the move.’
‘Where to go?’ He laughed.
‘Well, Cape Town eventually.’
This left him puzzled. It is always a mistake to try to explain plans for the onward journey. Such plans sound meaningless, because they are so presumptuous. Travel at its best is accidental, and you can’t explain improvisation. One day I got sick of being becalmed in Hurghada and, more worrying, I was told that the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha was about to begin. This six-day Feast of the Sacrifice commemorated the Lord’s providing Abraham with a ram to replace Isaac on the sacrificial altar (corresponding to Genesis, 22: 6–14). Six days of everything closed. I decided on an impulse to call the Sudanese again.
‘Your visa has been approved,’ a man named Adil told me.
But the border was closed. I would have to fly to Khartoum. I went into town to get a ticket. With me in the line was a friendly voluble man, also buying an Egyptair ticket. He had the squarish head of the urban Egyptian, and chubby cheeks and gray eyes, and a stockiness that gave the illusion of bad posture. His name was Ihab.
‘Like the captain in the novel.’
‘What novel? Like Ihab in Holy Koran.’ He wiped his sweaty hands on his shirt, darkening the smear that was already there. ‘My name mean “gift.” ’
‘You come from Hurghada?’
‘No one come from Hurghada,’ he said. True, the resort town had been a Bedouin village twenty years ago, but Bedouins were always on the move.
‘Egypt, then?’
‘I am hate Egypt.’
‘Why?’
‘I am tell you tomorrow.’
Tomorrow?
Before I left for Khartoum I called the American consul general there whose name had been given to me. What was life like in the Sudan?
‘I’m not allowed to live here,’ he said. ‘I live in Cairo. I just fly back and forth to Khartoum. Going back to Cairo tonight.’
‘I’m wondering about traveling outside Khartoum.’
‘I’m not allowed to travel outside Khartoum, for security reasons.’
‘Have American citizens been hassled in the Sudan?’
‘Hassled? Well, one was picked up by security police a few months ago and interrogated, and I’m afraid tortured, for three days.’
‘That sounds awful.’
‘That’s the only complaint we’ve had, but as you can see it’s a pretty serious one. I am obliged to tell you this.’
‘Did they let him go?’
‘Not at first. Only after they subjected him to a mock execution.’
‘Something I would like to avoid,’ I said.
4 The Dervishes of Omdurman
Even while I had been entering Sudanese air space, Ihab in the seat beside me was telling me it was a country he frankly hated. I was reading the US State Department unclassified travel advisory for the Sudan, an amazing document:
Travel in all parts of Sudan, particularly outside Khartoum, is potentially hazardous … [American] travelers in Sudan have been subjected to delays and detention by Sudan’s security forces, especially when traveling outside Khartoum … unpredictable local driving habits … roadblocks … In addition to the ongoing civil war, heavy rains and above normal Nile River levels have caused extensive flooding throughout Sudan. Nile floods have affected Khartoum … Water-related diseases such as malaria, typhoid and gastroenteritis will threaten many … The government of Suda
n’s control over its police and soldiers may be limited …
My favorite phrase was In addition to the ongoing civil war. I glanced beside me. ‘You were saying?’
Being Egyptian, Ihab mocked the Sudan with affectionate gusto, in the same spirit that he jeered at Egypt. His main objection was simple: ‘Because beeble no free!’
‘In America, beeble can kiss girl on street – no broblem. But in Egypt, in Sudan, I kiss girl and bolice come! They take me!’ He sulked, thinking about it. ‘They make a bad bosition for me!’
‘For kissing a girl?’
‘Is illegal. But not in America.’
‘You can’t kiss strangers, though,’ I said.
He wasn’t listening. ‘I want go to New Jersey! I want to be New Jersey man!’
A pretty Egyptian woman, traveling with an old woman who might have been her mother, sat in the seat just across the aisle.
‘Egyptian woman very sexy,’ Ihab said, in a confiding whisper, his mouth full of saliva. He shifted, canting his body towards me so that the woman would not hear and said, ‘She cut.’
I had a good idea of what he meant but pretended I didn’t, so that he would have to explain. This he did, first making a specific hand gesture, inserting a clitoral thumb between two labial fingers.
‘She cut here,’ he said, slicing at his thumb with his free hand.
‘Painful,’ I said. And what was the point?
‘No bain! She small – leetle. One week, one month maximum, she cut.’
Infant clitoridectomies were new to me but much on the minds of feminists in the West and the women’s movement in Egypt, as well. I asked the obvious question: What was the point?
‘Better for her – make her more sexy,’ Ihab said. ‘If she cut, she like sex all day.’
This conceit, echoed by some other men I met on my trip, went against all medical evidence, and was a bit like saying sex for a man was more fun if his goolies had been snipped off. I also heard the opposite and more believable reason: that it dulled the woman’s pleasure and made her faithful. Ihab was so rhapsodic on the subject he had begun to raise his voice, and I feared the woman might hear and be offended,
‘A woman who cut like this – you touch her’ – he grazed my leg with his knuckles – ‘she get so excited.’
‘Imagine that.’
‘American woman, no. But in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Saudi – woman who cut, they get so excited if you just touch something.’ He smiled at me. ‘Touch feenga. Touch skeen.’
He showed me his hand and made the gesture again with his fingers.
‘When you blay in zees blace,’ he said, emphasizing his thumb, ‘she go crazy.’
Whispering the Arabic word for the procedure, he compressed himself and breathed into my ear, lest anyone hear this forbidden term, which was khitan.
And on leaving the plane his eyes bugged out as we followed the attractive woman and her mother, addressing the woman’s secret, roused and frisky, picturing in his fevered brain the thing he could not see, saying, ‘Woman with khitan, she more sexy.’
Coming from Hurghada, he knew a thing or two about women, especially foreign women. In his business, which was sales and marketing, he had many sexual proposals from visiting women – all Egyptians did. Visitors found them attractive. Well, I could vouch for that: the embankments of the Nile rang with the shrieks of Europeans being pleasured on board feluccas, indeed, the very name felucca had a sexual ring to it.
Ihab had had marriage proposals, too, from Russian women.
‘Give me an example.’
‘One woman. She want to make marry with me. But I marry already. I like my wife, I like my two kids. So why marry?’
‘I agree.’
‘But my wife so jealous.’
‘Mine too, sometimes.’
‘Yah?’ He seemed somewhat shocked. ‘Yours? Mine? So woman are all the same?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Almost the first man I met in Khartoum refuted everything Ihab said. He was a small thin man named Haroun, whom I met at the Acropole Hotel. From the outside, the Acropole was just another seedy building on a dusty back street of the hot city of broken streets and deep potholes. But the hotel had been recommended. Inside, the Acropole was clean and pleasant, marble floors and tidy rooms, run by a courteous Greek, George Pagoulatos, whose heart was in his ancestral Cephalonia but who had been born in Khartoum. Tell me what you want to do in the Sudan, he said, and perhaps I can arrange it. He kept his word. Because of George, all journalists and aid workers stayed at the Acropole. He was the helpful manager of the exotic hotel in the classic movie, and for much of the time I stayed there, life at the Acropole seemed like Casablanca without the alcohol. Not George’s fault: sharia law meant that alcohol was banned in the Sudan. There were no restaurants to speak of in Khartoum, so all meals were taken in the Acropole dining room, supervised by George’s cheerful Sicilian wife.
‘Take it from me,’ Haroun said, speaking of female circumcision. ‘I can tell you from experience that such women feel nothing.’
‘But they submit?’
‘They lie there. They have no idea what is happening. You feel a little silly if you are a man. And if you are a woman, I don’t know.’
‘So what’s in it for them?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Well, children.’
‘Egyptians are pretty jolly, though.’
‘They laugh, yes. Nasser said, “Our lives are terrible but at least we know how to laugh.” ’
‘They seem friendly.’
‘You think Egyptians are friendly?’ He looked at me as though I was off my head. ‘Their friendliness is fake.’
Haroun was as skeptical of the Palestinians as he was of the Israelis. He wasn’t fond of the Iraqis, but he didn’t like the Iranians either. ‘And the Saudis are just one big corrupt family.’
‘Arabs,’ he said, and showed his yellow teeth in a cynical smile and shrugged his skinny shoulders.
‘What would you call yourself?’
‘I am a Catholic,’ he said.
He was Jordanian, with a business in Amman, and didn’t have much time for the Jordanian royal family, either. One group of people had his total approval – the Sudanese.
‘Look how they greet each other,’ he said. ‘They embrace, they slap each other on the back, they hug and kiss. No other Arabs do that. They like each other, they are good people.’
‘Have you had any problems here?’
‘None.’
Khartoum, a city of tall white-robed men with thickly wrapped Aladdin-like turbans, and tall veiled women in bright gowns and black gloves, was a city without rain, wide and brown like its set of intersecting rivers. Khartoum’s tallest structures were the pencil-like minarets of its many mosques. The lanky shrouded inhabitants looked spectral, as people often do in glarey sun-dazzled places. There was no shade except the slanting shadows of the Sudanese. Their ghostliness was made emphatic by their shrouds and cloaks, even their heads loosely wrapped against the sun and heat, nothing showing except brown beaky faces.
The city lay at the confluence of two wide rivers, the Blue Nile and the White Nile, both of them very muddy, bearing silt from the south, coursing past earthen banks that were cut straight up and down because they had been chunked away by rushing water. The bushes beside both Niles were hung with rags and plastic bags, snared by branches in the flood. To the west, across an old British iron bridge, was Omdurman, where over a century ago General Gordon had been killed and decapitated by the Mahdi, whose great-grandson, Sadig el Mahdi, still lived in the family mansion by the river. Here the river was both Niles combined in a wide gurgling mud current, flowing north towards Cairo. To the northeast, in the industrial district of North Khartoum, Clinton’s rockets had fallen in 1998.
‘Five rockets – very sudden,’ a student in a group told me, pointing it out across the river.
Passing this squatting group of three young men, two things caught my attention. They wer
e speaking English among each other, and one was carrying the Penguin paperback of Lady Windermere’s Fan. So I said hello and soon we were talking about the rocket attack.
‘The factory made pharmaceuticals, not weapons. But it was empty. There was no night shift on Thursdays. We think the Americans knew that.’
They were university students, in their early twenties. I obliquely asked how they felt about Americans as a result of the bombing.
‘We like Americans. It was your government that did it, not you.’
This distinction between politics and people was to be made quite often by people I met on my trip. Africans in general disliked their governments so intensely, and saw them as so unrepresentative of themselves, that they were happy to give me the benefit of the doubt.
‘We want to be friends,’ one of the others said.
That was Hassan. The others were Abd-allah and Saif-Din.
‘Saif means sword and Din is faith.’
I made a slashing gesture. ‘ “The Sword of Islam” – meaning jihad?’
‘Yes, yes, exactly!’
‘Not much of that stuff in this book,’ I said, tapping the cover of Lady Windermere’s Fan.
‘I am reading for my English. To learn better. Very important.’
Hassan said, ‘Very, very important.’
‘Crucial,’ I said.
They didn’t know the word. We sat down on the Nile bank, across from Tuti Island. I taught them ‘crucial’ and ‘vital.’ It is important to learn English. It is vital that we understand what is happening. It is crucial that we act quickly.
‘But let me interrupt you, sir,’ Abd-allah said. ‘What you think about Afghanistan?’
‘It is vital that we understand what is happening,’ I said. ‘It is tribal warfare.’
‘What do Americans think about Israel and Palestine?’
‘That’s tribal warfare, too.’
Hassan said, ‘You see, sir, if you kill Afghans and Palestinians, they have families and they have children and they will always hate Americans and try to kill them.’