I wish to board the Abu Simbel and leave Aswan on an upbeat note, wanting to feel at ease with this majestic river, but it is very hard. I think of the “sociological” concerns I would like to touch upon but cannot. By Egyptian standards Aswan is as clean as, say, Toronto, yet its backstreets smell of filth, of urine and corruption. Much of Egypt smells like this. I cannot hesitate even a second to ponder the squalor and poverty of Egypt; it would require the passion, the commitment, of an entire book. Meanwhile, my concern is with the dam and its twin goblin, tourism. Realizing the possible absurdity of my obsession with the latter when I am but a particle of the tourist mass, I find that what I see still bothers me sorely. Above Cairo, Flaubert's Nile was virtually empty, its mode of navigation primitive; certainly the river did not lack a few travelers, but when Flaubert writes about them they take on the quality of being unannounced, rare, a little strange. (“A cange carrying a party of Englishmen comes sailing furiously down the river, spinning in the wind.”) Berthed near us at quayside are two enormous boats of the Sheraton hotel chain. Ungainly, totally utilitarian, they are painted in garish blue, white, and gold colors and are capable of accommodating one hundred and seventy-five persons.
These barges, together with their two sister vessels, are typical of the bloated floating hotels that have replaced the much smaller, humanly scaled paddle-wheelers that cruised the river as recently as 1975; those were stylish old boats, really, with the charm of Mark Twain's Mississippi. They carried a reasonable number of passengers. Unsurprisingly, the Sheraton monsters have been made possible by the High Dam, since the fluctuating depth of the water in the old days prevented vessels of such bulk and displacement. At temple sites they disgorge tourists in nearly unmanageable hordes. Also, besides carrying far too many people, these boats are of such size and power that their wake has begun to contribute to the erosion of riverbanks already eroded badly enough. In the gentle dusk they possess a truly wounding unsightliness. And I cannot decide who has produced the greatest eyesore here in lovely Aswan—Sheraton or, once again, the Russians, who during the building of the High Dam erected a hotel that unpardonably interrupts the serene, low skyline like some grandiose airport control tower. (There have been, since the departure of the Russians, serious thoughts about blowing up this structure, but like the dam, it is built for such permanence as to make the cost of demolition prohibitive.)
But during the days that follow on the Abu Simbel, almost all anxieties concerning the Nile's future are absorbed in contemplation of the river itself. When one is removed from the population centers like Aswan—and there are few of these—it seems impossible that anything could seriously encroach upon this timelessness. In benign hypnosis I sit on deck for hour after hour, quite simply smitten with love for this watercourse, which presents itself to the gaze in many of its aspects exactly as it did five thousand years ago. “Like the ocean,” Flaubert wrote, “this river sends our thoughts back almost incalculable distances.” Beyond the fertile green, unspooling endlessly on either bank, is the desert, at times glimpsed indistinctly, at other times heaving itself up in harsh incandescent cliffs and escarpments, yet always present, dramatizing the fragility but also the nearly miraculous continuousness of the river and its cycles of death and resurrection. Sometimes life teems, as at the edge of a village where men and women, children, dogs, donkeys, goats, camels, all seem arrested for an instant in a hundred different attitudes; a donkey brays, children shout and whistle at us, and the recorded voice of a muezzin from a spindly minaret follows us in a receding monotone.
At other times life is sparse, intermittent: a solitary buffalo grazing at the end of an interminable grassy promontory, seemingly stranded light-years from anything, as in outer space. A human figure on a camel, likewise appearing far from any habitation, robes flapping in the wind, staring at us until we pass out of sight. Undulant expanses of sugarcane, furiously green; groves of date palms; more cane in endless luxuriant growth; then suddenly: a desolate and vast sandbar, taking us many minutes to pass, that could be an unmarked strand at the uttermost ends of the earth—one could rot or starve there and one's bones never be found. Now in an instant, a fabulous green peninsula with dense undergrowth, feathery Mosaic bulrushes, a flock of ducks scooting along the shore. We pass by a felucca, drifting, its sail down. One robed figure kneels in prayer; the other figure, with an oar, keeps the bow pointed toward Mecca. Then soon, as we move around a gentle bend, history evaporates before the eye, and there is an appalling apparition: a sugar refinery belching smoke. But infernal smoke! Black smoke such as I cannot recall having seen since childhood in the 1930s, during a trip past the terrible mills and coke ovens of western Pennsylvania. There are no smoke pollution controls along the valley—another bad sign for the beleaguered Nile.
Furthermore, lest I become too beguiled by the river's charms, I am sobered by evidence of still another kind of havoc wrought by that hulking barrage at Aswan. This threatens the very existence of the monuments themselves and can be viewed graphically at the Temple of Esna, thirty miles south of Luxor, on the west bank of the river. The harm being done is the result of the titanic volume of water behind the High Dam, the pressure of which has altered and, together with overirrigation, slowly raised the subterranean water table along the valley. In places the water contains a heavy saturation of salts, which, rising to the surface, have begun to attack not only the land but the foundations of many of the temples. Quite corrosive white streaks of this ominous residue can be plainly seen everywhere; but at the ancient Temple of Abydos (which we visit a few days later), the wonderful and mysterious underground structure known as the Oserion (aptly called “an idea in stone”) has become sacrificed not to the salt but, even worse, to the water itself, and much of the great architecture is flooded forever. Thus, like an unshakable and troubling presence, the High Dam adumbrates the future of man, his heritage, and nature up and down the valley. In the gorgeous lush green fields beyond Esna, I glimpse a stunning juxtaposition that tells much about the confusion—the triumph and error, gain and miscalculation—that ensues when man attempts to modify any natural force as prodigious as the Nile: adrift in the air, a web of high-tension wires, humming, gleaming, the very emblem of newly harnessed energy; directly beneath the wires, a sickly and ravaged field not long ago cultivated in thriving vegetables, now overlaid with huge dirty-white oblongs of deadly salt.
But what is the future of the Nile? Do these alarming portents mean that the outlook for the river is inescapably somber? At the moment, one can only speculate. If it is remarkable that human beings in their recklessness and folly have, in the past hundred years or so, nearly destroyed some of their greatest and most beautiful rivers and lakes, it is equally remarkable that those very waterways have proved to be capable of survival, even health, given enough time and given the human determination to reverse the death process. The Thames, the beautiful Willamette in Oregon, and to some extent the Hudson—still in the midst of resuscitation—are just a few examples of this provisional deliverance; and it may be that even the awful felony committed upon the James in Virginia—the wanton dumping of tons of a lethal insecticide into the stream, causing a contamination of marine life that destroyed fishing and the fishing industry for years—will be alleviated by time, with the poisons eventually washed away and the natural equilibrium once again achieved. Pollution along the Nile (including much sewage and trash pollution from tourist boats) is a potential problem; more subtle and dangerous is a form of pollution by disease—and once again the culprit is the High Dam, the sins of which begin to bemuse one by the sheer monotony of their enumeration. This has to do with bilharzia (also known as schistosomiasis), the gravely debilitating, often fatal parasitic disease that is endemic in lower Egypt. Many experts in environmental medicine believe that the disease—caused by microscopic blood flukes that breed in the bodies of snails, then float about in shallow water and penetrate into the bloodstream of mammals, including human beings—was minimized in its extent by t
he annual flushing action of the great Nile flood, which swept up countless quantities of the snails and their larval guests and removed them from the shallows, where people were most likely to become infected. But the dam changed all this. Now the general stillness of the water means a more prolific generation of snails and parasites, more frequent infestation in the backwaters, and possibly more disease, despite strenuous public-health campaigns.
The Nile is the ancient mother-river of the Western world, and it is impossible to conceive of her failure to survive these present vicissitudes. Although what man has done in the past twenty years may appear inexplicably thoughtless, and vainglorious, too—interrupting that immemorial ebb and flow, shattering a rhythm that existed eons before man himself appeared on these seductive banks—one feels that it does not really spell the end, although much cruel injury has been done. Human beings are both resilient and ingenious in crisis—never more so than when guiltily surveying the harm that they have inflicted themselves—and one can conceive of the unhurried pace of Egyptian time allowing men to forestall more ruin and even perhaps to rectify some (though certainly not all) of the damage that may now seem beyond repair. Finally, there might be controlled hereon the Nile one of the worst of the pollutions of man: the aimless proliferation of his own peripatetic self.
—
Toward the end of our trip, stopping to view the Colossi of Memnon at Thebes, I recall a typical Flaubertian animadversion. “The colossi,” he wrote, “are very big, but as far as being impressive is concerned, no….Think of the number of bourgeois stares they have received! Each person has made his little remark and gone his way.” This sour putdown inevitably causes me to think of the hordes of tourists who stream past the colossi on their way to or from the Valley of the Kings. As a fragment of one of these hordes, but momentarily detached, I stand at midday on top of the towering cliff overlooking the enormous Temple of Deir el Bahari, certainly the dominating man-made presence in this valley of temples and tombs. Far below on the desert floor, dozens of buses and vans are disgorging their human cargo. The visitors represent nearly every nationality in the world, and as they proceed up and down the terraces ascending to the colonnade at the temple's upper level, they seem an orderly but overwhelming mass, almost numberless; they remind me of the throngs of Disneyland or, even more claustrophobically, as I go down and move among them, of the mob of which I was a gawking young member at the New York World's Fair in 1939. It is fortunate that they—or I should say, we—have been barred permanently from many of the tombs, for it has been demonstrated that the acid exhalations of our breath combined with our million-footed shuffling in the dust has caused irreparable damage already. But people keep coming in ever increasing legions, and it may be that these very numbers, uncontrolled, will soon prove to be more injurious to Egypt than the High Dam.
This is not an alarmist view—it is based on solid evidence—but even so, the situation might change for the better through a strict and systematic program of regulation. Prince Aga Khan, who has made a study of the tourist crisis, believes that a rigorous policy on the part of the Egyptian government would, in not too long a time, finally restrain this runaway influx of travelers, lessening the attrition at the historic sites and making a trip to the Nile a happier event for everyone, including the Egyptians. The policy would commence not only with the limiting of permits for the building of hotels and boats but with supervision—through expert architectural advice—of the construction of these boats and hotels, so as to avoid such atrocities as the hostelry the Russians put up at Aswan or the oversize Sheraton barges. Hotels and tourist villages would be developed in conformity with local traditions and landscape and, just as importantly, be decentralized. They would be moved away from the already preposterously engorged centers of Luxor and Aswan. Such measures would benefit both the tourist and the less economically prosperous population of the backward areas. The sites themselves would undergo drastic changes and management: rotation of tourist groups according to seasonal timetables in order to avoid overlapping and overcrowding; modernization of access roads; installation of advanced systems of dust and humidity control in the tombs, along with better superintendence and better lighting. These are strenuous measures, but in the opinion of the prince, neither impossible to implement nor economically unfeasible; the vast sums of money that tourists bring to Egypt (and which now seem to benefit Egyptian antiquities in only the most marginal way) should be sufficient to pay for such a program, with much left over. But the need is immediate.
—
How many trips in the world does one really want to make again? For me, not many. But I could go back to the Nile over and over, as if in mysterious return homeward, or in quest for some ancestral memory that has been only partially and tantalizingly revealed to me—as at that interval when one passes from sleep to waking. On the last evening aboard the Abu Simbel there comes to me a moment when I know the reason why I shall always want to come back to this river. Moored to the riverbank at the edge of a small village, the boat is peaceful, all energies unwound; at dusk, alone, I go up on deck and feel in my bones the chill of the coming night. In the village I see a nondescript street, children, a camel, a minaret. Far back on the river two feluccas rest as if foundered immovably upon a sandbar; the light around them is pearl-gray, aqueous, and they seem to hover so delicately on the river that it is as if they were suspended in some nearly incorporeal substance, like gauze or mist. With their furled sails, they are utterly motionless; they are like the boats on an antique china plate of my childhood. As the light fades from the sky and the stars appear, the village is silhouetted against the faintest pink of the setting sun. I am aware of only two sounds: the clinking of a bell, perhaps on some cow or donkey, and now the voice of a muezzin from the minaret, intoning the Koran's summons in dark and monotonous gutturals. It is then, in a quick flood of recognition, that I feel certain that I have been here before, in some other century. But as the sensation disappears, almost as swiftly as it comes, I ponder whether this instant of déjà vu means anything at all; after all, I am a skeptic about mystical experiences. Nonetheless, the feeling persists, I cannot quite shake it off—nor do I want to. And so I remain there in the dusk, listening to the soft muttering of the muezzin and gazing at the distant feluccas miraculously afloat in the air. And then I wonder how many others—hypnotized like me by this river and the burden of its history, and by the drama of the death along its shores and waters, and eternal rebirth in all—might have known the same epiphany.
[GEO, September 1981.]
Literary
Lie Down in Darkness
When, in the autumn of 1947, I was fired from the first and only job I have ever held, I wanted one thing out of life: to become a writer. I left my position as manuscript reader at the McGraw-Hill Book Company with no regrets; the job had been onerous and boring. It did not occur to me that there would be many difficulties to impede my ambition; in fact, the job itself had been an impediment. All I knew was that I burned to write a novel and I could not have cared less that my bank account was close to zero, with no replenishment in sight. At the age of twenty-two I had such pure hopes in my ability to write not just a respectable first novel, but a novel that would be completely out of the ordinary, that when I left the McGraw-Hill Building for the last time I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.
I was at that time sharing a cheap apartment with a fellow graduate from Duke University, a Southerner like myself. It was a rather gloomy basement affair far up Lexington Avenue near Ninety-fourth Street. I was reading gluttonously and eclectically in those days—novels and poetry (ancient and modern), plays, works of history, anything—but I was also doing a certain amount of tentative, fledgling writing. The first novel had not yet revealed itself in my imagination, and so most of my energies were taken up with short stories. The short story possessed considerably more prestige then than now; certainly, largely because of an abundance of magaz
ines, the short story had far greater readership, and I thought that I would make my mark in this less demanding art form while the novel-to-be germinated in my brain. This, of course, was a terrible delusion. The short story, whatever its handicaps, is one of the most demanding of all literary mediums and my early attempts proved to be pedestrian and uninspired. The rejection slips began to come back with burdensome regularity.
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