The Nile

by Toby Wilkinson

  The removal of the monuments to a different, higher location had been rejected in 1901, and there were still those who thought it was a bad idea, not only because “Philae will be deprived of its fascination and glamour by separating its temples from their enchanting natural setting”29 but also because of “the enormous cost to carry out this futile work.”30 Building a series of coffer dams around the entire island was an alternative suggestion, but this was dismissed as impractical. Eventually, the decision was taken to transfer the monuments to the nearby island of Agilqiyya, in a project as bold in its own way as the construction of the Aswan Dam. In 1972, work commenced with the building of a huge but temporary steel coffer dam around the entire site. Once protected from the waters, the temple could be dismantled safely. Over two-and-a-half years, the structures were cut up into forty thousand blocks. These were then transferred by boat to Agilqiyya to be cleaned, measured and reconstructed like a giant Lego® model. In 1980, after the best part of a decade’s work, the temple of Philae, in its new home, was reopened to tourists. So nearly consigned to death and oblivion, Philae has been reborn. Visitors remain enchanted; the ancient priests of Isis have been vindicated.

  The Cataract region’s close association with the life-giving waters of the Nile and the resurrective power of the inundation has remained a potent belief. Two of Aswan’s most prominent modern monuments owe their origins to similar notions of cheating death. Standing proudly on the river’s edge, overlooking the island of Elephantine, the long, low, brown-painted buildings of the Cataract Hotel are every bit as much an Aswan landmark as the city’s ancient remains. Set amongst luxuriant sub-tropical gardens, the hotel conjures up images of a bygone age, of wealthy guests sipping cocktails on the terrace at sunset, of colonial administrators and exiled royalty, of panama hats and pith helmets. Agatha Christie stayed here, and it was the natural point of assembly for her fictional guests in Death on the Nile. Hercule Poirot’s remarks on the view from the hotel grounds remain true today: “The black rocks of Elephantine, and the sun, and the little boats on the river. Yes, it is good to be alive.”31 It is a sentiment that would have been shared by many of the hotel’s early guests, for the Cataract Hotel was actually built as a sanatorium, a place where wealthy Europeans and Americans suffering from tuberculosis, gout or any of the other conditions of early twentieth-century urban living, could escape the cold, damp, unhealthy air of a Western winter for the warm, dry, health-giving climate of Aswan. A description of the hotel in 1899, a year before its official opening, focussed on its benefits as a health resort:

  In the construction of this Hotel, great attention has been given to the requirements of invalids—most of the rooms have verandahs, and a warm, sunny aspect; many are fitted with fireplaces, and the position and form of the building has been chosen to provide shelter from the prevailing winds. The sanitary arrangements have been carefully studied, Moule’s earth closet system being adopted … Every modern convenience is provided in the form of electric light, hot and cold water baths, &c., and a reference to the plan will show that there are a number of private sitting-rooms to meet the requirements of invalids. There is an English physician and nurse in Assouan, and an English housekeeper is in charge of the domestic arrangements of the Hotel.32

  The Cataract Hotel has recently reopened after a long and painstaking restoration, and it is no longer the haunt of invalids and consumptives. There are fewer places in the world more pleasant to spend December or January, especially knowing that it is cold and wet in London or New York. Sipping a cocktail on the terrace, you can watch the sun set over the western cliffs, while from the hotel’s riverside balconies, a panorama of remarkable beauty opens up before you: to the left, the rocks and islands marking the northern end of the Cataract, interspersed with reed beds alive with snowy-white egrets; to the right, the smooth, rounded, grey granite boulders of Elephantine; behind it, the lush oasis of Gezirat el-Bustan (Plantation Island), presented to Lord Kitchener in 1898 after his successful campaign in Sudan, and planted with trees and shrubs from tropical Africa; and, on the far shore of the Nile, the steep desert cliffs, plunging down to the water’s edge.

  Below the crest of the western escarpment, on a low ridge, stands a lone, domed building, its sandstone walls blending into the sand dunes all around. In the best tradition of the First Cataract, it is a place of contemplation, worship and pilgrimage—not for Christians or Isis-worshippers, but for Ismaili Muslims. Set alongside the tombs of Aswan’s ancient princelings, this is the mausoleum of a modern prince, the third Aga Khan. How a descendant of the prophet Muhammad, a knight of the British Empire and one of the world’s wealthiest men came to be buried on a desert ridge opposite Aswan is a remarkable story of twentieth-century global politics and the abiding allure of Egypt.

  Mohammed Shah was born in Karachi (then British India, now Pakistan) on 2 November 1877, a member of the ruling Kajar dynasty in Persia. On the death of his father, he succeeded as the third Aga Khan (a title bestowed on his grandfather by the British) and, more importantly, the forty-eighth head of the Ismaili sect of Shiite Muslims. Hence, at the age of just sixteen, the Aga Khan found himself the spiritual leader of twelve million followers spread across the Islamic world from North Africa to the Bay of Bengal. A liberal and a moderate, he urged his followers to integrate themselves into their host societies—a stance that won him considerable favour with the British imperial authorities. Received at Windsor Castle in 1898 by Queen Victoria, who personally invested him as a Knight Commander of the Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire, the Aga Khan was subsequently recognised as the leader and spokesman for all Indian Muslims and was elected the first president of the All-India Muslim League. It was in this capacity, as a prominent Muslim leader and a trusted friend of the British, that the Aga Khan was sent by Lord Kitchener to Egypt in 1915 following the outbreak of World War I. His sensitive mission was to secure the country’s internal stability and pro-British allegiance, despite the Khedive’s pro-German leanings. Egypt, after all, was of great strategic importance to the British, with all shipping between Britain and India passing through the Suez Canal.

  The Aga Khan already knew Egypt well. It was home to a substantial number of his Ismaili followers, and during an earlier visit in 1908 he had met, fallen in love with and married an Italian dancer. Now, seven years later, he used his connections to promote the British cause. On arrival in Cairo, he went directly to al-Azhar University to speak to its professors, who were (and remain) some of Egypt’s most influential Muslim leaders. Lambasting the Germans’ autocractic and illiberal attitude, the Aga Khan portrayed them (unfairly) as a threat to education. His arguments proved persuasive, just as Kitchener had hoped. The professors of the al-Azhar backed the British, the Khedive was deposed and Egypt was declared a British protectorate for the duration of the war. The Aga Khan was lauded in the British press as a national hero.

  He now devoted himself to his growing passion, horse-breeding and racing. Just four years after coming to the English turf, the Aga Khan won the Queen Mary Stakes at Ascot. This was followed by the Triple Crown in 1935, and no fewer than four Derby wins. When he received the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George from Queen Elizabeth II in 1955, one may suspect it was as much for his prowess with horses as for his career as a statesman and philanthropist. Indeed, his political influence had waned following the partition and independence of India. But his interest in Egypt remained strong. In the 1930s, he had made several trips to Cairo to visit the Egyptian king. On one of these visits, in 1937, the Aga Khan met a former Miss France, Yvette Labrousse, who was living as the mistress of a rich Egyptian. Richer, and more dashing, the Aga Khan won her heart and stole her away. She returned with him to Europe, and they married in 1944 in Switzerland, where she was to care for him in his old age.

  When the Aga Khan died at his home near Geneva in 1957, Yvette, known as the Begum, announced to the world that this most international of men had chosen Aswan for his burial
: a place where he might lie, like the pharaohs, undisturbed for eternity. There were undoubtedly other, more personal reasons for the choice. Egypt was where the Begum and her husband had met and fallen in love. The couple had recently built a villa, called Noor el-Salaam (“light of peace”), on the banks of the Nile at Aswan. It was on the hill above the villa that the Begum planned to build an airtight mausoleum where her husband might lie for all eternity. In the meantime, the Aga Khan would be laid to rest temporarily in a vault sunk into the villa’s inner courtyard. The funeral and interment blended ancient and modern symbolism in characteristically chaotic Egyptian fashion. The Aga Khan’s body was flown from Cairo, but before the plane could land at Aswan, in the fierce sun, sand had to be swept from the runway with brooms. From the runway, where it had been received by the Governor of Tanganyika (as the representative of Queen Elizabeth II) and the Governor of Aswan, the coffin was carried and dragged to the banks of the Nile. With much heaving and after nearly falling into the river, the coffin was finally hauled aboard a large barge for the journey over to the west bank—the traditional Egyptian land of the dead. A flotilla of small boats, filled with journalists, mourners and sightseers, crowded round to catch a glimpse of this extraordinary pharaonic spectacle. Because of the low Nile, the barge had difficulty mooring at the villa’s small landing-stage, but eventually the coffin was carried ashore and set down in the entrance of Noor el-Salaam.

  The exertions of the day had already begun to tell on the Aga Khan’s nearest and dearest: his son, Sadruddin, telegraphed his fiancée: “Aswan glowing heat—complete chaos—impatient to return to you.”33 But more tribulations lay ahead. The following morning, after a solemn service in Aswan’s mosque, the heavy oak coffin was carried by the Aga Khan’s four closest male relatives, with help from the Egyptian army, into the villa’s inner court where it was lowered into the waiting vault. Unfortunately, the architects had miscalculated, and the door to the vault was too narrow to receive the coffin. The mourners had to wait in the boiling sun while workmen were summoned to widen the door with hammers and chisels. It was late afternoon before the coffin was finally installed.

  For over a year following the interment the Begum remained at Aswan, supervising the construction of the mausoleum that would be her late husband’s final resting place. For his burial on 1 February 1959, five hundred guests were invited from around the world. The entire Cataract Hotel was taken over for the guests’ exclusive use; but even its three hundred rooms were insufficient, so the Begum hired the (not yet finished) Grand Hotel, bringing in fixtures and fittings from Cairo. Three thousand Ismaili mourners, complete with one hundred barbers, descended on Aswan, and were accommodated in a great tent city erected on the outskirts. A temporary bridge was built over the Nile at Noor el-Salaam, since there was not enough space for a large flotilla of boats to dock nearby. When all the mourners were in place, the coffin was brought out of its vault and covered with a sheet of pure white silk. At three o’clock in the afternoon, the coffin was raised on to the shoulders of the Aga Khan’s male heirs and fellow Ismaili leaders and carried up the hill to the mausoleum with its burial vault built of solid white marble at the staggering cost of £150,000. As the procession passed the women’s tent, the Begum, together with her secretary and maid, all dressed in white, emerged and joined the mourners—in direct contravention of Muslim law and against the express instructions of the new Aga Khan. Just before sunset, when the men had left, the Begum led a large procession of women to the mausoleum, making sure that the world’s press were there to take photographs. A love forged on the banks of the Nile proved stronger than bonds of custom.

  An ancient Egyptian town and village must have presented much the same appearance as an Upper Egyptian town and village of to-day.1

  —WINIFRED BLACKMAN

  I am standing on the upper deck of a dahabiya, moored a little north of Aswan, on the west bank of the river. It is late afternoon, but the heat is still intense. As I look towards the shore, a timeless scene unfolds: dark-skinned Nubian boys play in the shallows, water-buffalo wallow or graze on the lush green grass, donkeys wait patiently in the blistering sun, swishing away the flies, occasionally goaded by some of the naughtier boys but otherwise left unmolested. Two young men bring a camel calf down to the water’s edge and, after much grunting and snorting, the beast is persuaded to immerse itself for a brisk wash. Clouds come over, the egrets fly off to roost and another day ends.

  Until very recently, life in the villages and fields of Egypt’s deep south had changed little in thousands of years. Yet, in the twenty-first century, under the pressure of a relentlessly rising population, modernity is fast encroaching. North of Aswan, a huge new bridge spanning the Nile seems to go from nowhere to nowhere. In fact, it has been built to serve a new city, springing up out of sight behind the hills of the west bank. “New Aswan” already has its building plots, roads and street lamps, its water towers and electricity wires. This is where Aswan’s overflow population will be accommodated in the next decade, until New Aswan, like its parent, has nowhere left to expand.

  But aside from the lines of electricity pylons which now march along both banks of the river, the scenery is otherwise unchanged. As the river flows between steep sandstone cliffs, its floodplain is a thin ribbon of green, impossibly narrow in places, yet able to support a series of thriving farming communities. The continuity of occupation here in the southern Nile Valley is remarkable. It was here, along a quiet, unassuming stretch of the river, that Egyptian civilisation began: here that Egypt’s earliest art is carved into the rocks; here that Egypt’s first city and first temple were built. The ancient Egyptians themselves acknowledged the primacy of the deep south as the cradle of their civilisation, recognising a local deity, the falcon-god Horus, as the very embodiment of their distinctive system of rule, divine kingship.

  Over the millennia, religions and rulers have come and gone, all leaving their mark on Egypt. Some regions have prospered, others have declined, but the southern Nile Valley has remained relatively unchanged: self-sufficient but not prosperous, significant but seldom central to national affairs. Here, more than anywhere else in Egypt, past and present are constant bedfellows, and the threads of a long history weave an enchanting tapestry.

  ABOUT AN HOUR’S GENTLE SAILING downstream from Aswan, the Nile rounds a wide bend and there, on the right-hand bank at the river’s edge, stand the majestic ruins of Kom Ombo. After Philae, the temple of Kom Ombo has perhaps the most dramatic location of any in Upper Egypt. Its looming riverside presence has as much to do with the recent movement of the Nile as with the designs of its ancient architects. Indeed, the great gateway that now dominates the view from the river was once preceded by an entire courtyard and a further, forward gateway. These have been lost to the Nile, which, since the temple was completed in the early Roman period, has moved steadily eastwards, scouring out the bank and sending bankside buildings toppling into the river below. Only the construction of a stone embankment in the late nineteenth century prevented further collapse, and, for the time being, has saved the remaining temple buildings from their watery doom.

  A stone plaque on the wall of the temple records how, in 1893, the Antiquities Service reconstructed and restored the entire building in just four months. In the early twenty-first century, the Egyptian government has invested once again in the tourist infrastructure. Docks have been built for cruise ships, allowing them to moor up as close as possible to the ruins; a paved esplanade with shops and cafés takes visitors straight to the temple; local businesses have been encouraged to set up along the corniche; and the effects of tourism are beginning to transform the local economy. But, as always in Egypt, official bureaucracy is as often an impediment as a stimulus. In late 2010, a museum built to display objects found at Kom Ombo stood shuttered and closed, despite the hordes of tourists; it could not open its doors until the Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities found a window in his diary to perform the official opening. T
he museum finally opened on 31 January 2012, by which time the Secretary-General was on his way out of office, along with the rest of Mubarak’s discredited regime.

  Thanks to its riverside location, Kom Ombo is one of the more romantic Egyptian temples for today’s visitor. Its situation reflects the Nile’s abundant rewards and hidden risks. Kom Ombo—the ancient temple and the modern village—sits at the edge of a large, fertile basin. As the twentieth-century financier Sir Ernest Cassel appreciated when he bought land nearby in readiness for the raising of the Aswan Dam, this part of the Nile’s east bank—given perennial irrigation—is bountiful in its productivity. Since the late nineteenth century, the region has been an important centre of sugar production. In Ptolemaic times, the abundant fodder grown in the surrounding fields proved an ideal source of food for African elephants, which were brought to Kom Ombo for training as war machines in the pharaoh’s army. Earlier still, in the distant prehistory of the Upper Palaeolithic period (15,000–12,000 BC), some of Egypt’s earliest inhabitants lived in this part of the Nile Valley, working local flints for their tools and living off the river’s riches.

  A place of such abundance was a natural location for a pharaonic temple, where the king could give thanks to the gods for their generosity and receive their blessings for his continued rule. The earliest temple at Kom Ombo was founded during the golden age of the New Kingdom, but today’s ruins date to the time of the Ptolemies and the first Roman emperors. In fact, Kom Ombo is not one temple but two, cleverly conjoined in a single edifice, but preserving twin axes, twin offering chapels and twin sanctuaries. The western half is dedicated to the sky-god Horus; his sacred animal was the falcon which still inhabits this stretch of the Nile Valley, soaring high up on the thermals that rise from the western cliffs. The eastern half, by contrast, is dedicated to a deity far more down-to-earth, and far less beneficent than the celestial falcon. His image is to be found on almost every wall: a man with a monstrous reptilian head, cold, unblinking eyes, and a fierce, toothy grin. He is Sobek the crocodile, bringer of doom to the unwary.