Walking the Nile

by Levison Wood

  It was with the police crowing in my ear, and in a constant mood of paranoia, that I arrived in Luxor. Modern Luxor has grown up on the site of the ancient city of Thebes, and its ruined temples, monuments and tombs once drew hordes of tourists from all over the world – but, as I woke on my first morning in the government-approved hotel, the city seemed eerily still: like everywhere in Egypt, there was barely a tourist in sight.

  In the morning, Turbo and I crossed the town to the deserted Temple of Luxor. The Nile runs directly alongside the ruins, and was key to its creation – the Ancient Egyptians brought its massive stones downriver by barge from the quarry at Aswan – and to walk along the banks of the modern corniche is to live and breathe the historical wonder that this outdoor museum evokes. Our footsteps echoed spookily as we came into the temple’s main chamber, watched from on high by the faces of gods and a colossus depicting Thebes’ ancient ruler, Ramesses II. The temples at Luxor had been built as long ago as 1400BC, and slowly excavated across the 19th and 20th centuries. At some time in their history, these vaults had been places of worship for Ancient Egyptians, a centre of the Greek administration and a fortress for the Roman legionnaires that manned this southerly outpost; now they were as hollow and untouched as in the days before they were rediscovered.

  ‘Here he is,’ said Turbo. ‘Ibrahim?’

  There was only one other man at the temple. Ibrahim was a tour guide from Cairo, who now had to travel far and wide to find any business at all. An ebullient, round-faced man in his mid-thirties, with thick-rimmed glasses and a slightly balding head, he’d agreed to show me around the temples while Turbo, who’d seen it all before, lounged by the riverside.

  Ibrahim was a member of the Egyptian minority: a Coptic Christian. Meeting him here was a stark reminder that Egypt was not entirely an Islamic country – and never had been. According to Biblical tradition, it was into Egypt that Joseph and Mary had fled with the baby Jesus, after King Herod had commanded the death of all first-born male infants. By the middle of the 1st century, the Coptic Orthodox Church had been born. For six centuries, Christianity prospered here – and it wasn’t until the Islamic conquest of Egypt, beginning in 639AD, that the faith had been forced into the country’s borderlands. Ever since, Christians have been persecuted, taxed more heavily to undermine the Church’s foundations, and generally driven underground. Nowadays, only ten per cent of people belong to the Coptic Church – but, in a country as big as Egypt, that’s still a sizeable population.

  ‘Mr Wood,’ Ibrahim said, as we walked through the inner chamber. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think I may be the luckiest person on Earth. Who else gets to see the Temple of Luxor without a hundred other people bustling around?’

  For a fleeting moment, Ibrahim was visibly upset. ‘What’s lucky for you is not lucky for us. It wasn’t like this in the good old days. Mubarak was a good man . . .’ His voice had faded to a whisper. ‘Look at this,’ he said, pointing at one of the intricately decorated inner walls. ‘It breaks the heart to see what some of these Muslims have done to the temple. They did this last year, when that clown Morsi came to power . . .’

  I followed Ibrahim’s gaze. Four-thousand-year-old hieroglyphs adorned the walls, but across the top of them somebody had scrawled writing in Arabic – graffiti left by the mob when the revolution had spiralled out of control.

  I looked around the hall. Some of the statues had been disfigured, decapitated or worse. ‘Was that the Muslim protestors, too?’

  ‘Well,’ Ibrahim admitted, ‘that was actually Christians. But it was 1500 years ago – they didn’t know any better. Today people have the internet, they have education – but they still use religion as a justification to deface our history.’

  Ibrahim seemed to be typical of the tour guides of Egypt – he spoke a plethora of languages, held a master’s degree in ancient history, was married to a European woman, and generally hated the anarchy that had resulted from the so-called ‘Arab Spring’. ‘At least we had stability in those days. Everybody had a job, the money was amazing . . . but now look! We had almost two years of mob rule. I only hope this latest guy can bring back order.’

  ‘Sisi?’

  ‘He has such a tough road ahead of him . . .’ Against his will, Ibrahim had started to shed tears. Beneath the colossus, he stopped to dry his eyes. ‘At least he’s clamping down on the Brotherhood. He’s arrested most of them and threatened them with the death sentence. It’s the only justice these killers will understand.’

  I remembered vividly the policemen rampaging into the mosque to drag away the member of the Brotherhood. Ibrahim’s was a view held by many – but there were still plenty of fanatics. However the fissures had formed in Egyptian society, it seemed clear that they were not ones that could be easily healed.

  We walked on. As he regained his composure, Ibrahim pointed out yet more graffiti – this time from Ancient Greeks, Arab invaders, Italian and French explorers, Egyptologists, and soldiers from the 18th and 19th centuries. One was from a mercenary in Napoleon’s army, another the signature of a senior British diplomat from 1820. ‘This is Greek,’ he said, pointed to something scratched on a pillar, ‘and this belongs to . . . Alexander the Great.’

  Inside the priest’s sanctum stood a vast stone shrine, into which had been carved – in ancient hieroglyphs – the name of Alexandros. ‘He stood in this exact spot,’ said Ibrahim, once again welling up. ‘Doesn’t it make you feel humble?’

  I couldn’t help but agree. Four thousand years of name-carving, artwork, defacing and tit-for-tat scribbling showed that the human condition – the endless desire to leave one’s mark on the world – hadn’t changed across the aeons. I’d seen the same at the Pyramids of Meroe.

  ‘And now for the pièce de résistance,’ said Ibrahim, now back to his bouncing, enthusiastic self. He led me around the side of the shrine to where human and godlike figures were carved in a beautiful example of late era pre-Ptolemaic art. ‘This is Min, the god of fertility.’ I could see why. The figure of a man stood proud, pointing rudely at Alexander’s signature. ‘Look how big he is!’ grinned Ibrahim. ‘It’s the biggest member I’ve ever seen. They say if you wish for good luck and children and point at it, your wishes will be fulfilled. I used to bring the Japanese ladies here, it makes them blush . . .’

  Outside, we made our way to the riverside and rejoined Turbo.

  ‘Are you ready to hit the road, Lev?’

  I wasn’t sure that I was. At least in Luxor there were moments – a precious few, but there were still some – when I didn’t feel the police crowing at my shoulder, and didn’t have to dance for the ministries as I made my way north. My legs were aching, my feet seemed to have permanently changed shape from the months of endless walking, and the frustration of being scrutinised every step of the way was adding a new dimension to the pain. Even so, Cairo was our next big stop – and, after that, it was only a short hike to the Rashid and the Mediterranean Sea. I took a deep breath, thanked Ibrahim for his counsel, and told him we’d see him further north, in his home city of Cairo.

  One last push and I would almost be home.

  Eighteen days, I cursed to myself, ignoring the police over one shoulder, thinking of Turbo somewhere up ahead. Eighteen days to cover the six-hundred and sixty-six kilometres between here and Cairo. I had to be crazy to even attempt it – but those were the rules set down by the Ministry of Tourism, and the expedition would be ruined if I failed.

  Miserably, I continued into the north.

  Thirty-four thousand dollars, Turbo had told me, only afforded me forty-five days of ‘supervision’. Leaving aside the fact that being heckled by a group of bored, invidious policemen hardly counted as ‘supervision’, this left me with less than three weeks to reach Cairo. It was not going to be easy. It wasn’t that I’d never covered thirty-seven kilometres a day before – Boston and I had done it regularly, pushing up through Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. But that was before my body was broken. Som
ehow, I hadn’t accounted for the idea that my body might start to rebel along the way. It was, I supposed, the same trick an athlete’s mind plays on his body at the three quarter point of a race – as I approached the finishing line, I was hitting ‘the wall’. Each morning, I woke in agony, unable to even walk to breakfast. This morning, it had taken an hour of unbearable pain, hobbling slowly along, before I could convince my brain to stop sending pain receptors to my legs and just get on with the job at hand – and, all the while, I could hear the policemen barracking me from their car, tempting me to climb in.

  Late in the afternoon, on the outskirts of a small riverside town, I caught up with Turbo. As he had every day of this interminable march, he handed me a can of soda, filled with sugars to restore my electrolytes, and a handful of painkillers. I hated it, but I was on a steady diet of them now – a chunky dose of paracetamol and ibuprofen with every meal of refried beans and boiled egg. We had reached the stretches of Middle Egypt, where people seemed to live as their forefathers had done for generations – men in shades of white tilling the land along the Nile, still working their fields with buffalo-drawn ploughs, while women in black flitted between the shadows of half-obscured gardens.

  ‘Are you okay, Lev?’

  He asked it every time and, like every time, I didn’t answer. With the end of the journey in sight, somehow it seemed further away than ever; perhaps that was why I was at my wits’ end. I’d lost a lot of weight on this journey, my stomach had shrunk so that only one or two small meals a day seemed enough – and, though I tried to find small moments of beauty every day, it had become a constant battle. With the eyes of the policemen on my back, and the insanity of jumping into a car each night to be forcibly ferried to the nearest guesthouse, I was tired of living in this government-controlled farce.

  ‘I miss it, Turbo.’

  ‘Miss what?’

  ‘What it was like much further upriver. The serendipity of the walk – of meeting people, different people, of expecting the unexpected, of . . . Look, I came here to discover Egypt, but I can’t even speak to a local without that lot . . .’ I gestured at the policemen still idling somewhere behind ‘. . . interrupting. I want to get under the skin of Egypt, the real Egypt, not just the version the government wants me to see.’

  ‘Wait until Cairo, Lev. Ibrahim will show you the real Cairo.’

  ‘Cairo’s still two weeks away.’

  ‘Well, what do you want to know?’

  ‘Take . . . this,’ I said. On the side of one of the buildings was a familiar piece of graffiti: the stencilled image of a four-fingered hand. I’d seen it often since we left Luxor, and still didn’t know what it meant.

  ‘It’s the sign that shows solidarity with the victims of Rabaa,’ Turbo explained, solemn for the first time.

  ‘Rabaa?’

  ‘The Rabaa Massacre. It’s almost a year ago to the day. Wherever you see the four fingers, that’s shouting out to the victims. It’s a pro-Morsi signal. It’s Muslim Brotherhood.’

  The Rabaa Massacre had occurred on 14 August 2013, in one of Cairo’s major squares. For six weeks, protestors in support of President Morsi, who had been ousted from office at the start of July, occupied the square – and, when talks had failed to move them on, the army intervened. At least 638 people were killed that day – though the Muslim Brotherhood put the figure at more than 2,600. Of all the swirling information and misinformation there is about the massacre, all sides agree on one thing: this was the most deadly day in Egypt since the revolution of 2011 that had first brought Morsi to power.

  ‘I’ve seen other graffiti, too . . . CC. Donkey. Pig.’

  ‘That’s anti-Sisi graffiti. Sisi, CC, get it? All of Egypt’s the same, Lev – half of them wanted Morsi, half of them didn’t. Half of us want Sisi, half of us don’t. It’s the same up and down the Nile – no one side ever wins the day, and that’s why we’ve had two revolutions . . .’

  He was right. Later that day, as we tramped on, I saw Egyptian flags flying from the houses of one village, pictures of the incumbent leader plastered on every wall – while, in the next, the four-fingered hand was daubed onto the sides of houses. The pattern of support and dissent seemed to alternate with every mile.

  It was late when I came to the outskirts of a village called Al-Kush. For the first time in what felt like days, my police minders were leaving me alone; some time ago, they had cruised past, up the road, eager to turn in early for the night. As I came between the first houses, a collection of tall, roughly made mud-brick structures, a gaggle of men appeared between two buildings and darted away from the road. Moments later, a burst of automatic gunfire penetrated the silence from only a few hundred metres away. Instinctively, I scurried for the safety of the nearest wall. Using it for cover, I waited for the gunfire to die away and looked up, desperate to know what was going on. An old woman looked on from a nearby garden, seemingly unperturbed by the fracas, her suspicion reserved solely for this strange man hunkered down behind the garden wall.

  In that moment, a car came screeching down the street, heading straight for me. Adrenaline hit me, I prepared to take flight – but it was only Turbo, hanging half out of the 4×4 as it ground to a halt.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ I yelled, as he tumbled onto the road.

  ‘Hear what?’

  ‘The gunfire . . .’

  ‘I just saw a load of guys with guns running into the fields. They looked like Muslim Brotherhood, so I thought I’d come back and check on you . . .’

  ‘Where are those police, the only time you need them?’

  But Turbo only gave a crumpled grin. ‘I’m glad they’re not here. It’s probably the police those Brothers are shooting at.’ He paused. ‘Either that, or a really wild wedding. Well, you did say you wanted to get under Egypt’s skin, didn’t you, Lev?’

  Battered and bruised I might have been, but on 20 August 2014, almost nine months since I tasted the Nile’s first waters in the Nyungwe forest, I stumbled into the smoggy suburbs of Africa’s biggest city. After endless days tramping north through traditional villages, corn fields and tall date palms, it was surreal to see the skyscrapers of Cairo hanging in the skyline. This was a city of twenty million people, a true metropolis, and I was walking into it a broken man.

  As Turbo ferried me into the centre, through the affluent western suburb of Zamalek, all I could see through the windows were plush hotels, fancy restaurants and upscale yacht clubs. Turbo gestured at the unveiled Egyptian girls shopping for designer handbags in the boutique stores and, at once, I was reminded of Paris or Rome. Somehow, in only a moment, I’d been sucked out of my voyage and unceremoniously dumped back into the modern world. The idea that I was close to Europe, close to home, welled up inside me. Digital billboards shone down, electric taxicabs whizzed by – and, by the time Turbo left me at the hotel, I could quite imagine the end of the expedition; only a few short days of walking were left between here and the coast.

  In the morning, rested but not healed, I was met by Ibrahim in the hotel lobby. As he had been at Luxor, he was eager to show me around his home city. Cairo is one of the oldest cities in Africa, its modern-day incarnation founded in 969AD on the site of a settlement much older yet, that of Ancient Memphis. This was the city from which the tourists who once flocked to Egypt would set out to see the magnificent Pyramids of Giza, or the Great Sphinx itself – but it was a very different side of Cairo that Ibrahim wanted to show me. As we set out into this ‘city of a thousand minarets’, he turned to me and said, ‘I’m taking you to see a side of Cairo most tourists won’t ever hear of.’ He paused. ‘Lev, I’m taking you to Al Zabaleen – Garbage City.’

  Leaving the centre of Cairo, Ibrahim led me to the hilly suburb of Mokattam. Unlike the heart of Cairo, with its gleaming skyscrapers, ornate Islamic minarets and digital billboards as bright and garish as Piccadilly Circus or Time Square, Mokattam was a sprawling shanty town. Yet, Ibrahim had another way of describing it. ‘This is Cairo’s Christian ghe
tto,’ he said. ‘There are thirty thousand Coptics living here.’

  ‘The word Copt means Egyptian,’ Ibrahim explained as he led me into the shanty’s winding roads. ‘It was an Ancient Egyptian word for the temple at Memphis, Het-Ka-Ptah, the “place of the soul of the creator God” – but it got bastardised by the Ancient Greeks into Aigyptos. Hence, Copt. And, of course, until the Arabs invaded, Egypt had been Christian for three hundred years. Mary and Joseph took the baby Jesus on a grand tour of the Nile. I bet you didn’t know that! They probably saw Memphis and the Pyramids, Alexandria . . .’

  We walked on, deeper into the shanties.

  ‘In Egypt, the Christians have to stick together – for protection. With all the violence against us in the last sixty years, Christians from all across Upper and Middle Egypt have come to places like this to live together. Not that it’s stopped the violence. Last year alone, eighty-five churches were burnt down by Muslim gangs, and all because we didn’t support that terrorist Morsi. So . . . now look what terrible conditions these garbage-collectors are forced to live in. Me, I’m lucky – I have a little money – but these people, they have nothing.’

  The reason Ibrahim had called this Garbage City quickly became clear. As we ventured deeper into the shanties, I could see the streets marked by piles and piles of rubbish. Men were flitting between the heaps, sifting through the detritus and taking barrows of it back to their houses. Children as young as three were joining them, picking up bottles and bottle-tops and collecting them in different piles. Old women were bent double, sorting out cardboard into small bales.

  ‘What are they doing?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re doing what they must to survive, Lev. These people are recycling. The whole community takes part. Plastic in one bag, metal in another. It’s how the Coptic Christians keep going. The government pays them one dollar for every twenty kilograms of sifted plastic. Cardboard’s even less.’