An Egyptian Journal, Page 2

  Next morning we were taken with our suitcases to the boat again. Our Minder had hired us a cook and he turned up, carrying a lute. I asked our Minder if, since he was responsible for Hani, he knew anything about boats. No, he said, with what I hoped was modesty, nothing at all. It all seemed a bit surreal. The crew consisted, then, of one engineer, one cleaner, one cook with lute and the reis. Our Minder, Alaa, told us that Shasli was a reis – Reis Shasli – and to be addressed as such. Reis was a dignity he stood on. It didn’t mean ‘captain’. It meant ‘Foreman of these circumstances’. But a crew of four to handle a boat not as big as one I had once owned and sailed! I looked at them and they seemed to avoid my eye – or did I avoid theirs? I strolled away, leaving Ann to talk to Alaa and pretended to examine the banana tree. But really I was remembering a painful quotation from one of the books I had not brought with me.

  … English go their way … with their habit of looking ‘through’ persons who do not interest them, and of waiting for friendship rather than going to seek it … the British are the most foreign of all the foreigners in Egypt … prevented … by their temperament from assimilating themselves to the life of the country….

  It was true. I could feel a lifelong experience of being a particular sort of Englishman building up in me like a wall. It was more impervious than a wall of language. It was assumption and custom. And I was the one who had hoped that my book would not be about temples but about people!

  I turned back to the boat. The crew had gone aboard. Alaa and Ann were talking animatedly. Near them was a frail old Nubian, black and crumpled, in jeans, grey jersey and close turban, messing tremulously with ropes. He had a dazzling white moustache but looked strangely sullen behind it. Dr Hamdi, his son and charming wife turned up together with the females of Alaa’s apparently extended family. It was a scene of much animation and reminded me of such pictures as The Departure of Christopher Columbus for the New World. We said our farewells and went bravely aboard. Reis Shasli, a slight figure in grey galabia and large, grey turban ascended to the glass box which housed our wheel and slave controls. His face was black as the Nubian’s. It was well enough featured but mud-coloured from heredity and exposure. Our engineer, a sophisticated man in western dress and with a Ronald Colman moustache was busy over the engine in the centre compartment. The cook had stowed his lute and was in the galley. Shasli started the engine. The Nubian cast off ropes, the audience waved and took photographs.

  The Nubian clambered aboard as we moved away from the pontoon.

  Crew of five.

  The main thing was to get away. We stayed on deck, waving and shouting absurdities and not understanding the replies. Presently a gaggle of yachts at anchor hid the pontoon and we could be said to have started. Ma'adi is a nondescript suburb of Cairo. We left it and the high rise area of the city behind us at 11 o’clock. Industry clusters by the water and the suburbs stretch south for miles. It was cold and the river Nile, most famous, most exotic of rivers, was about the same size as the Thames by Tower Bridge and the same colour. The adverse current meant that we made little headway – surprisingly little since the boat was allegedly capable of eleven knots. We were using no more than five of them from which the adverse current subtracted one. There was nothing about the scene to distinguish it from any river scene in any city. The pyramids, of course, were hidden by buildings. The grey, poppling water and the occasional barges were too matter-of-fact for description. Reis Shasli didn’t steer straight up the river and I thought at first that he might be following a winding channel, but no. He went from boatyard to boatyard, zigzagging from one bank to the other, each time hollering to a chum on shore. I thought at first he was showing off his splendid command, but in fact he was wanting to borrow a bit of rope and a thingummybob, a machin, a what d’you call it. He was – is – steersman of one of the Nile tourist boats and only allowed to hire himself out to us because his own boat was being refitted. We went below to look at our cabin. Ann discovered at once that there was no hanging space for clothes, something I had not noticed when I hired the boat. I tended after that to avoid catching her eye. We put up the upper bunks and used them for stowage of clothes (of which we clearly had too many). I pretended to find this just as convenient as drawers and cupboards but deceived neither of us. I didn’t like the look of our lavatory, toilet, loo, heads, admiral, either. The bore looked small to me.

  Reis Shasli brought us alongside a floating restaurant and went aboard it. Presently, staring through our windows (they were too large to be called ports), I saw him coming back with the old Nubian, who was carrying a grapnel. So we had had no anchor either! I saw no more of them for the young man, Faroz, in his blue tracksuit, started to clean the outside of the window six inches from my face. Shasli took us back into midstream.

  We wrapped up even more warmly and went on deck and stood, chillily in the cold north wind. On the left, a mountain of white stone lay perhaps half a mile from the eastern bank of the river. There was much machinery, smoke and clouds of dust. This was Tura with its quarry for fine limestone. Chephren faced his pyramid with it, all blinding white. Five thousand years of quarrying had put half a mile between the mountain and the river. It was something to have seen after all and consolation for not being able to see the pyramids from the river. After Tura the banks became a bit more countrified and even Egyptian. There were plantations of date palms and lines of delicate green trees – tamarisks, I think. We passed a huge dovecote built in the distinctively Egyptian manner, massive mud walls then domes and minarets with niches for nesting. There were donkeys, untethered and grazing on the bank where it was clear of reeds. It seemed odd to see a donkey doing what it liked and not laden to death [see plate]. But this was February, the Egyptian winter, and a relatively lazy time for man and beast, unless your business happened to be with the water traffic or you were a woman. The Nile was very low and women were washing clothes on the mud beaches. A solitary man moulded mud brick and women processed up the bank with huge water jugs on their heads. The palms, I thought, looked like bottle brushes – but then did I know what bottle brushes looked like? Here and there brickyards or brickfields obtruded most rawly into the Nile with great screes of red fragments. There were sailing boats moored alongside the screes taking in loads of red brick. Rarely the interruption to the mud bank was not red brick but stone foundations of some vanished building which might have been any age.

  Then, in broad daylight – with hours of daylight left – we tied up to an open sailing boat that was moored next to a whole mountain of straw pecked over by pigeons and rat-rustled. The straw, being in a brickyard, was, I supposed, the stuff which Pharaoh wouldn’t give the Hebrews. As far as I was concerned (and the rats poked out their noses or rustled invisibly) anyone could have had it.

  The first bad news of the journey filtered through to us. The boat carried neither sheets nor blankets. Alaa and the cook, Rushdie, scrambled ashore over the sailing boat and rustling straw and went to find a place where they could buy what was necessary. The crew evaporated. Fish jumped round the boat. The wind blew. A pulley block tapped the mast of the sailing boat, tap, tap, tap for ever. Dusk approached quickly. The sky was covered with high cloud and it was cold.

  Alaa came back with sheets and blankets. The crew materialized and music, Arab music, resounded from a loudspeaker. It was nearly 6 o’clock and sunset. We have, I said to Alaa, a few more hours of the evening in which we can make more distance. This remark was translated to the Reis. It stopped the music, stopped conversation, even seemed to stop the block tapping, or perhaps it only stopped the wind. The answer to my remark filtered back to me. Nobody uses the Nile after dark.

  Then why, I asked, have we those little green and red navigation lights up forrard? This piece of expert knowledge created a pause. But once more an answer came filtering back. Nobody uses the Nile after dark. You have to have permits, which can only be got back in Cairo. There are regulations. The river is low. There will be trouble.

  Ever
yone was smiling in a friendly manner. It was an Egyptian smile. I had seen it many times on statues but now for the first time I understood it. We should only move between the hours of six in the morning and six in the evening. There was no question of working watch and watch.

  In that case, I said, we would start sharp at 6 o’clock in the morning. The answer filtered back again. We would start as soon as possible but there might be fog.

  Fog.

  Fog, the seaman’s bane was the captain’s friend. I envisaged him lying in while the early sun dried up a trace of mist, which had lain, but penetrably, about the banks.

  Well, there was nothing to be done. Once, I remembered, an old lady told me about her young brother, a midshipman. He boarded a slaver in the gulf while his gunboat rushed off to chase another dhow. He was unarmed. He drew a chalk line across the deck and forbade the slavers to cross it. (Provenance of chalk not stated.) Hour after hour he paced the chalk line until his gunboat came back and arrested everybody. Aye me!

  No, there was nothing to be done. The generator and the lights started up and the music. I was informed by a smiling Reis that we had come seventy-five kilometres.

  After some time the generator stopped and the lights dimmed as the music faded. Presently light and sound faded right away. The block tapped.

  I lay on my bunk, fully dressed, wrapped in a sheet and blanket, my head, since we had no pillows, on a rolled-up raincoat. Across the cabin Ann shivered a little under a whole heap of clothes.

  It seemed that I would never get to sleep. I began to reflect glumly on the inadequacy and incompetence of my approach to this business of finding out about Egypt.

  My childish approach had been replaced gradually by an adult one which had become more and more complicated. It was not just an inability to meet people, it was a question of the inward eye. My whole imaginative concept of the country had changed because of the explosion of knowledge, not just about ancient Egypt or even modern Egypt but about what might be called geological Egypt. All the way up the Nile valley there had been made, I knew, boreholes for water; and, of course, there had been much exploration not just for ores or water but for oil as well. In addition, the massive evidence for plate tectonics and continental drift had put the northeast corner of the African land mass firmly into a more general picture. My imagined Egypt (the one which would have to go into the book) now included this majestic history, which by its very nature was difficult to assimilate into the more limited human story, even when that was stretched to take in the successive changes in the nature of Homo sapiens himself. It was a question not of thousands but of millions of years which conditioned the imagination. I knew now, as I had never known when I was a child, that there had not been just one Nile in this valley but five Niles successively. By the standards of some of them our present Nile was no more than a trickle. But to exercise that geological imagination it was necessary to see through the surface, to turn back, as it were, successive blankets on a bed of rock and to realize vividly – poetically – that this was a place like any other, welded into the total nature of the planet and an expression of it.

  Stars shivered at me through a gap between the curtains which covered the window behind my head. They were piercing stars and emphasized the major history over the minor one. The fifth Nile clucked occasionally under our bilge.

  This was my ludicrous problem. In imagination I had filled something like the Grand Canyon, only larger, with evaporites, boulders, crags, fossils, gravel, sand, clay and mud so that its cliffy sides projected from the rest no more than a few hundred feet – and that was now my Egypt, impossible to gather into a simple picture. The canyon was no plausible guess. Echo-soundings and drillings have mapped it all. The time scale which used to stretch over ten thousand years must now be stretched to cover ten million. The story of Man himself, it seems, has occupied at most no more than half of that. We must adjust ourselves to time scales that differ by a factor of a thousand.

  I thought of the famous statues that now illustrated both scales so that a man needed an impossible depth of imaginative focus to appreciate both aspects at the same time. There were, I seemed to remember, worked stones from temples which included a fossil by accident. Even without the fossil the type of stone was significant and evocative. The archaic figure of Zoser in the Cairo Museum takes us into the inconceivably distant (on one scale) past of nearly 3000 BC. We feel that, and are perhaps awed by it. But our other eye, other focal length, must recognize that it was made with stone from Tura, that mountain of fine, white limestone we had passed earlier in the day, and multiply the time if not the awe by a thousand.

  I was warm enough now, but my bald head was cold. I felt round in the dark and found my floppy sun-hat, crushed it over my head and waited for the heat of imagination to be useful for once.

  I remembered an incident that happened to me years before across the river, at Aswan. I was up by the tombs on the fringe of the Western Desert. I saw, lying in a ditch near them, an ancient maul. This was a lump of stone, rounded so that it could be held with reasonable comfort in one hand. It was the earliest of all stoneworking implements. All you did was to pound persistently at a slightly softer rock until it crumbled away. The day before I had seen the results brilliantly illustrated in the unfinished obelisk on the other side of the river. There I had inspected the wavy surface of stone which had been worn away by this method and marvelled at the length of time the workers must have spent, prone or supine, pounding unhandily at the bottom of the object to undercut it. They had failed to complete the obelisk because it had split from a flaw not at first detected. But they had succeeded in leaving behind them an object lesson in the powers of persistence and elementary sculptural technique. Now here on the other side of the river and at my feet was an example of the primitive tool. Facing me was an outcrop of the same stone as they had pounded into the near shape of an obelisk. The rock was red Aswan granite. There must be few major museums which do not preserve a specimen or two. In the British Museum, for example, the huge head and forearm of Sesostris are fashioned from it. Experimentally, then, I lifted the maul and examined it closely. There were no visible marks on the surface. But then, why should there be? You can scratch a steel knife with a diamond, which remains unaffected. This stone was dolerite from the shores of the Red Sea and twice as hard as granite. I began to pound solemnly at the red Aswan granite of the outcrop. To my surprise it cut easily. Before I tired I cut a groove a foot long and half an inch deep. Of course, near the surface even granite will have undergone a delicate chemical change on the road which will (after a few million years) rot it down to kaolin. Nevertheless, even after I had penetrated this skin I went far enough down to find that virgin rock was workable. How was one to cope with such an experience? To me, it was delightful and significant – but of what? There was the knowledge that the granite was a geological event in one time scale, that the dolerite maul was in the same time scale but a different event. There was (coming down to the other time scale) an attempt at imaginative identification or empathy with the workmen, fellaheen, slaves who had fashioned this primitive implement some five thousand years before.

  What I am trying to convey is the confusion of a lifelong relationship. I needed to find a centre to knowledge so wide yet superficial and a treatment which could contrive to be comprehensive without falling into the jejune. I could only see that the cohesive element would have to be my own individual experience and the impact of disparate and dissimilar phenomena on my particular sensibility.

  My head was warm, not to say hot. Huddled under my heap of clothing, with one star glittering past the curtain, I lay, feeling that if anything, my head was now steaming. I had an illogical feeling that something had been accomplished. I must have slept.

  2

  I surfaced – probably from sleep though I couldn’t be sure at the time – at about a quarter to six. It was still dark outside and cold. I looked out. Strange! There were robed people about, some in boats, some on the ban
k but no one was moving. The water was so flat that the current was not visible. The stillness of the scene was such that the figures of robed men seemed to brood as if contemplating some inevitable and awful tragedy before which movement and noise were useless and irrelevant. Had they, I asked myself, sat, crouched, leaned or stood thus all night? Were they – were we since the night had left me diminished – like lizards, which require the sun’s warmth before their muscles can operate? I watched them as the dawn lightened swiftly and the faintest trace of mist drew away from the water. A fisherman was crouched in his rowing boat, his ridiculous oars (two unshaped baulks of timber) lying idle along the thwarts, his head closely wrapped against the chill of dawn. He was moored only ten yards from us. He never moved, wrapped elaborately in a thick galabia. It was as if the night was a time for grief from which men had to recover daily.

  The east lightened all at once. A woman crept out of a house with a tin water vessel on her head. She came slowly down the mud bank and the tin flashed as the first grain of the sun struck it. The fisherman lifted his head. Figures began to move on the bank. It was theatrical in that it led from the first tableau of grief to the common preoccupations of day in two minutes flat. A woman led a donkey. The fisherman shipped his ridiculous oars and rowed slow strokes. Two men spread their robes and squatted by the water. The rising sun grabbed the hill of straw and at once turned it to the gold woven for the girl in the fairy story. The pigeons started to peck, the rats to rustle. A big sailing boat, her torn sails wrinkled like ancient skin, came with a just perceptible movement as the current brought her towards us. She was empty, going north. A smaller boat stood south towards us but did little more than stem the current. She was loaded deep with raw, red brick and seemed to have no more than six inches of freeboard.