by Jessica Mann
She’s right; but the analogy I think of is the reincarnations conversation, which has been gone through more than once since our arrival in this country. Vanessa thinks she might have been Cleopatra. In our imaginations, starvation, sickness and inferior social positions are someone else’s fate.
We wait; and wait. The aircraft is coming. It is not coming. It comes. It will not take off again. It will take off again. Eventually it takes off, a small craft filled with camera-slung tourists.
Lake Nasser is like a huge oil slick on the sea of desert. Its colours are viscous. The land is hostile, barren. ‘How strange, how frightening,’ the passengers murmur.
The pilot makes the aeroplane swoop to and fro, to gasps and squeals. The statues are not so impressive from the air and we land at a small, prosaic airstrip. But when we round the artificial mounds built to support the re-sited temple we all gasp at the size of the quadruplicate monarchs. The Colossi of Ramasses warn of Egypt’s might, those of Nefertiti welcome visitors to its civilisation. Miss Benson quotes Shelley again.
One cannot help being awed by the grandeur of the worked stone. But our awe is scientific not mystical. We are almost more impressed by the feats of engineering that moved the temples than by the ancient art that built them.
Abu Simbel is no longer numinous. The dust of ages does not lie beneath our feet.
‘They should have brought the potsherds,’ Hugo Bloom rightly says; at other temples the visitor walks on a carpet of the centuries’ debris.
One can tell that Tamara Hoyland is the sort of person who passes examinations after brief revision to the fury of those who have to slave for three terms. She listens knowledgeably to Sayeed and can answer questions that are addressed to her. But she confides to me that she is counting on filling in the gaps with Giles Needham at Qasr Samaan. Those of us who are to venture further into what once was Nubia (an ill-assorted party, I must say) are reminded how the vast likenesses of Ramasses and his Nefertiti once gave warning to travellers between the two lands.
‘I think it is quite creepy,’ Miss Benson says. ‘I feel premonitions.’
‘Of what?’ Timothy Knipe asks. He is the kind of person to read runes, or palms, or entrails.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you a psychic?’
‘What nonsense,’ her brother interrupts.
‘Don’t you believe in Pharaoh’s curses?’ says Vanessa Papillon.
‘You can hardly expect me to take such a question seriously.’
‘Vanessa’s too down-to-earth for that kind of thing,’ Timothy Knipe says. He does not seem to admire the attribute. Later I hear them quarrel.
I drink mango juice. Timothy Knipe says that his beer is flat and warm. Vanessa tells him that he will have the right to complain on the day that he picks up the bill. He says that is typical of her materialistic attitude. He thinks that she thinks she has bought him.
I am joined by the courier from another party of Britons.
We agree on the curious infantilism of our charges, who surrender their adult independence on this kind of holiday, and who, bent on pleasure, lack patience and philosophy as they did when they were children.
‘They want to be nannied,’ my acquaintance says. ‘Mine expect me to tell them when to get up in the morning and what to wear.’ I explain the Camisis arrangement with Giles Needham. He is interested in the economics of so small a party’s travel, and whistles soundlessly when I tell him how much my charges have paid. ‘All that to sit in a sandstorm in a reservoir!’ he says.
Osmond is proud of having offered a unique extra to his Egyptian package. He has contributed to the cost of the excavations at Qasr Samaan and in exchange his clients will be welcomed there. His generosity will be acknowledged in the report, and exclusive photographs will appear in his next brochure.
But Needham left England last October. There has been no contact since. I hope he will be reliable.
He is reliable. Just in time for its passengers to take our places on the return flight to Aswan, a tug-boat from Qasr Samaan approaches across choppy water. Five sunburnt Europeans and three Egyptians in European clothes leap from it and dash past us. They are followed by several dark-skinned men in native dress.
‘Have fun,’ one calls, and another says, ‘Keep our places warm.’ They are to have a three-day break from work while we use their facilities. They look healthy, dusty, a little wild-eyed. The fleshpots of Aswan beckon them. We watch the plane, containing them and the rest of the Camisis party, circle once more around the island before turning northwards. We (or at least I) feel curiously abandoned. We are south of the Tropic of Cancer.
We sit on the rock to watch the tug being loaded with supplies. The crew are all Nubians, with dark round faces. They take aboard crates of oranges and bananas, tomatoes and tinned milk. John Benson watches with disapproval.
‘Why they need so many men . . .’ Certainly far more are at work than would seem necessary at home. A patriarchal figure in white draperies is directing it. Beside him another, captain or pilot, sits cross-legged, motionless, in the bows.
At last we embark. We wait on board while the frenzy continues. My charges are impatient. I refuse to see if there is anything I can do.
After another hour we move slowly out onto the water to hoarse shouts from the patriarch. Beneath us is the bed of the narrow Nile and the sandstone cliffs against which the Colossi of Abu Simbel once loomed. The water is deep over the drowned land. We see nothing through it, but where dry rocks once spread for endless miles points of sparkling light wink from wave to wave.
The tug is crewed by about a dozen men. It is flat bottomed and an awning flaps over a section of the stern. We sit under the canvas, and the women of the party anoint themselves against the reflected light. I ask in English, French and Italian how long the journey to Qasr Samaan will take but cannot understand the voluble reply.
*
Tamara said, ‘I understood. They were saying that it was in the lap of God. I thought it was a rather sinister answer. But the whole place was sinister, actually.’
‘That’s what Max Solomon thought too.’
*
We remain within sight of the lake-shore which is stone, all greyish brown. I have seen many desolate landscapes. This is not the most forbidding of all, because the water redeems it; but it is empty and dead where the new shore meets the new sea. If this penned-up water bursts its high dam it would flood the length of the Nile and inundate Cairo. A bomb could breach the dam.
The tug has a diesel engine, whose fumes blow back onto us in the strong wind. John Benson says he cannot bear the smell. ‘It is the stink of civilisation. I had hoped to leave that behind.’
The water is choppy. Miss Benson lies prone on the deck, her eyes closed.
‘Somehow one wouldn’t expect to be seasick in Egypt,’ Hugo Bloom murmurs. He is happy. His skin, naturally dark, is deeply tanned. He wears army shorts and a rolled-sleeve shirt. He looks like an Israeli soldier/scholar. He gazes ahead with eager eyes, his teeth biting around his pipe. He has been excited by everything we have seen and is one of the few people among us whose pleasure shows. I wonder about the motives of some of our party. Their holiday is expensive and some of it is arduous. Why are they here?
After about three hours the blank expanse of water is interrupted by a low mound ahead. The rays of the lowering sun shine on white stones and columns. The patriarch shouts, the wheel is turned, the engine dies. Soon it appears that it was not intended to. The sailors rush about, their bare feet slapping against the wooden deck, and we realise that they are agitated. We are drifting away from the island, north. We perceive people on the island. They seem excited too. We listen to the sound of an engine refusing to start.
‘Can’t you do something?’ Vanessa Papillon says. She has draped her head and neck in gauzy scarves and wears impenetrable glasses. I can see Janet Macmillan reflected in them.
‘Anybody understand engines?’ John Benson says, since it
is obvious that he does not.
I do not worry. I say that we are hardly likely to drown.
We don’t drown. Eventually some poles are produced. We are paddled towards Qasr Samaan. There is just enough daylight left for us to see the way to step on shore.
Chapter Seven
‘I had this feeling of foreboding,’ Tamara said.
‘Hindsight.’
‘No, I really did. I noticed it because I’m not the kind of person who feels vibes and shivers. We were being handed across a kind of plank, to step onto the island, and that silly Ann Benson said something so acute that I stumbled and the Nubian whose hand was on my arm gripped me so hard that I got a bruise.’
‘Ann Benson?’
‘She said I’d be able to take my eye off Janet now we were marooned here, and so would Hugo Bloom.’
‘What did she mean?’
‘That’s what I said. And she got sort of fluttery and muttered something about us both seeming so fascinated by her. And then I . . . well, I came over queer, as they say. The heat, probably, or the beginning of that tummy upset. But I remember thinking that I really didn’t want to get into the barge where we were to live. I can’t explain it.’
‘Our chronicler does not seem to have had any similar experience.’
*
We are conducted by smiling Nubians—mem. Saki’s little Nubian boy; these coal black, white-toothed young men are equally charming—into a barge that is moored on the western side of this island. It will be our home for two days.
Giles Needham is there to greet us. His face is familiar from the television screen. He is very tall, stooping, with perfect teeth, green eyes and clear brown skin. He bowls over not only Mr and Miss Benson—oh dear—but also our butterfly, who flutters. She reminds him that they have spoken on the telephone. ‘The only man who ever refused to come into my net!’ she tells us.
‘I had to get back here, as far as I recall,’ he says.
‘You could have made time for me. You will next season, now that we have met.’ She puts her hand on his, and looks confidingly up through her long, thick eyelashes. He draws away.
One other European has remained here to entertain the Camisis party. It is a girl student called Polly. I observe Vanessa’s narrow examination of her, and a satisfied nod; an ‘I thought as much’ expression.
All the rest of the archaeological party has gone to Aswan for ‘rest and recreation’ while we are here. So has the doctor and the government inspector whose role is to prevent foreign excavators from making off with Egyptian property.
We are shown to the beds vacated by them all. There are ten cabins on the lower deck. Each is identically furnished with a narrow bed made of palm leaves stretched between acacia wood, frames and an article of furniture known as an angareeb that can be used both as table and as storage cupboard. My cubicle also has a locked trunk, the property of Needham’s assistant, which he has covered with a length of locally woven cotton. Above his bed he has fastened a photograph of a pleasant, messy woman with two small children. A mosquito net dangles from the ceiling.
There are two cubicles (each containing a wc and a sink—no shower or bath) for which we queue.
The facilities are not luxurious. I expect complaints from at least two members of my party.
On the way upstairs to the living deck where we are to assemble for drinks, I receive the first grumbles. I need hardly add that they are from John Benson. He wishes me to arrange for the removal of some photographs that belong to the finds conservator who usually sleeps there. I peer in. They are of beautiful and nubile girls.
The living deck is a long, low room, where a narrow table is just big enough for the whole party to sit on two benches for meals and a few canvas chairs are scattered for relaxation. Cooking is done in the other barge, where the workmen and stewards live. The flat roof is for the excavation work; it is used for sorting and photographing finds and they call it the ‘Pot Deck’.
Our presence for two days seems to me a high price for Giles Needham to pay for Camisis’s financial contribution. He says that they always take a break from work half way through the season in any case and that he does not regret the fleshpots of Aswan. He says that in funding the excavation, every little helps. He offers us whisky, Omar Khayyam wine and mineral water, which is the chief item in luggage that comes here. A mini-pyramid of crates is stacked on the shore. Lake Nasser looked very clear and Hugo Bloom says something about coals to Newcastle, but I reiterate my courier’s warning about always using bottled water.
I don’t wish to be responsible for pax with gut trouble here.
The barge is lit by few, faint bulbs. There is an electricity generator. It is not powerful enough for fires. Vanessa complains of the cold, with some justification. It is remarkable how the temperature drops once the sun is down. She sends Tim Knipe to fetch her shawl, a cloud of raspberry pink mohair.
Dinner consists of chops, rice and tomatoes.
‘Fresh meat and veg,’ Giles Needham exclaims, tucking in. ‘We only get that when the tug comes.’
The tug goes to Abu Simbel every three weeks. Otherwise the excavators and their staff live on tinned food, rice and cereals. Sometimes the workmen catch fish.
‘You’ll get scurvy,’ Miss Benson says.
‘We take vitamin tablets, don’t we, Polly?’ Giles Needham speaks to the girl with absent-minded kindness as he might to a kitten.
‘We look all right though, don’t we?’ she says, holding out her narrow, round arm and admiring it; a Narcissus. ‘Oh,’ she wails, ‘I have chipped a nail. Look!’
Nobody looks.
Vanessa is perpetually inquisitive. She cross-examines Giles Needham about the arrangements. ‘You mean to say that really you are all marooned here?’
‘Us and the workmen.’
‘Where do they come from?’
‘They are fishermen. They lived here until it was all flooded. The government tried to resettle them all on the Nile, further north, but they pine for home. Some of them live in shanties on the lake-shore.’
‘It’s so barren here. What do they build them out of?’ Hugo asks.
‘Woven palm leaves.’
‘Cold and uncomfortable,’ Vanessa comments.
‘That is one of our problems. They burn absolutely anything they can get hold of in the winter. We need new beds and angareebs every season.’
Vanessa is watching Polly. ‘You weren’t here last season?’
‘No, I’m new here. I came after Christmas.’ Her voice is husky and its accent very Knightsbridge. Her hair is loose and falls across her face. She looks like fifty thousand other rich little English girls wallowing in the dirt their nannies forbade.
‘Are you a student? What about your university term?’
Giles Needham stands up. He has to bend either his knees or his back if his head is not to scrape the ceiling. He manages to suggest without commanding that we should all call it a day. There does not seem to be anything else to do.
I have been writing by the light of a kerosene lamp, since the generator was turned off. I rest my notebook on the angareeb. I am unexpectedly comfortable. I hear voices in conversation; the slap of bare feet on the deck above my head; the flap of the awning over the pot deck. My sleeping tablets are on the table beside the mineral water. For once I feel as though I shall not need them.
*
Natural sleep is slow to come. I lie in the dark and woo it.
There is a small window above my head. I can see the brilliant stars, as different from England’s puny twinkles as is electric light from a single candle.
*
Tamara said, ‘He must have fallen asleep quite fast, though, because he didn’t write about the row between Janet and Timothy.’
‘You heard one?’
‘I should think everyone must have done. I was in the cabin next to hers and caught every word. I could even hear the sound of her getting undressed. And then Timothy Knipe came in. He did begin in a w
hisper, but he didn’t keep it up. They were quarrelling about Janet being there at all. He said she was following him around, and how dared she spoil his first trip to Egypt by having her beady eyes on him the whole time.’
She said she had as much right to buy a package holiday as he had. ‘We used to share our interest in Egyptology.’
‘You had never even heard of it until you met me,’ he said.
‘You must be a better teacher than you thought. Maybe you could earn your living that way, when you run out of women to support you.’
‘I might have known you’d talk about money,’ he said.
‘No doubt it is a matter of indifference to your new meal ticket.’
‘You leave Vanessa out of this.’
‘Oh, willingly. Out of everything.’
Tim Knipe sneered; it was the only word for his tone. If Tamara had been in Janet Macmillan’s place she would have hit him. ‘Poor Janet, devoured by jealousy. The only deadly sin that carries no pleasure in the committing. You can’t hurt me, or Vanessa. You are beneath her attention.’
‘Are you telling me that she doesn’t know we lived together for two years? That we were going to get married? I wonder whether she’ll give half her salary to your kids, the way I did? You are going to be sorry you chucked me, Timothy.’
‘You are pathetic. I suppose you are here in order to make me and Vanessa uncomfortable.’
‘I came because I wanted to see Egypt. And Qasr Samaan, after Giles’s programmes about it. I don’t give a damn if you are here at the same time with your new owner. Anyone who buys a gigolo knows he’s on sale to the highest bidder.’
‘Oh good. That’s just as well. You’re bound to hear me and Vanessa together as her cabin is next to yours.’
‘In that case she’ll know about me if she didn’t already.’ She raised her voice. ‘Are you listening, Vanessa? Have your property back. But take my word for it, he isn’t worth the money.’
Everyone must have heard Tim flouncing out; and, unfortunately for her, Janet’s muffled sobs.