An Egyptian Journal by William Golding
Now we were approaching the two burnt-out tour boats. Seeing them twice was sheer waste to the practising journalist; it simply got in the way of new experience. Exploration by boat had come to an end. Glumly I numbered the things I had meant to do and had not done. I had meant to reach Aswan and have another look at the High Dam. I had intended to find the Unfinished Colossus this time and had even designed what I should say about it. I had slotted it in with Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures of the fettered giants, had designed an elegant bit of writing about our modern preoccupation with the fragment, the allusive and the suggestive – a generation and perhaps century that believes a truth is there, somewhere, but not to be grasped, not to be seen plainly; in fact if we saw in any way it was the Mosaic way, seeing not the face of Truth but his or rather her back parts from our cleft in the rock and covered by her hand or sat on perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But I had not found the Unfinished Colossus, so that though I guessed how powerful an image of emergent majesty it was I could not say so.
We were close to the western bank, slipping past it at more than ten knots, a headlong speed. Our wash broke against the bank. Here and there it struck a clod out of a little mud cliff or mounted splashily to a foot or so of green. There was a beautiful plot of onions holding up their proud heads. Is there any crop quite as beautiful as a patch of onions? Our wash snaked into it. A young woman who had been squatting beside it jumped up. She seized a stone and hurled it after us, screaming, a good throw, though short. Then she went on making furious gestures after us as we slipped away. She was handsome, her face uncovered. You could see her eyes flash long after the rest of her features were a pale blur. Eyes really do flash, at least in Egypt. Once I had received a flash from a young thing through a slit in her yashmak or whatever they call it. The flash had not been meant for me but for a young man. Even so the near miss had startled me. Now here again, flash after flash, oath after oath – not the same thing, no not at all the same thing.
Egyptian women have relied on their eyes for glamour for thousands of years. An undiseased pair of eyes in Egypt must have been rare and a sign of rude health. Even famous, fabulous, poor, boring Nefertiti had one blank eye which she does not commonly turn towards the camera, though she does very well with the other.
The tomb paintings make a glamour point of the eye more than anything else [see plate]. There was – is – a wall I remembered, it’s not painted but sculpted in alto relievo, which is an astounding record of delicacy and sophistication. Of course, not realizing that these thoughts on eyes would be forced on my attention I had neglected to go back and check on the wall; but I did remember taking a photograph of it years ago. As you back off from the wall you can see the eyes long after the rest of the figures themselves have become indistinct.
It was a pity about the woman who had thrown the stone, though. One couldn’t apologize. And how typical of alluvial Egypt that she had no more than one stone to hand! Her world was a muddy one, for all the Theban Hills and the huge canyon reaching down more than two miles under her. She would never know about that canyon either, or that the slight rise behind her, ‘Armant’ was not just a place but a geological expression.
Faroz got us a meal as Rushdie was still turned in to his bunk and groaning every now and then. I asked Alaa if he thought we ought to take Rushdie to the hospital at Qena, but Alaa said he thought Rushdie would be all right. Alaa had a medicine chest and faith in it.
At Qena Reis Shasli hurried ashore to see his wife, or wives, again. What was left of the crew and on its feet sniggered. Then the old Nubian, whom I had expected never to see again came aboard. Absence had made his heart grow fonder evidently. He was grinning all over his face and shook hands heartily. He produced a length of flexible steel wire, good old man, which he thought would take the place of the jury-rig. He seemed much more cheerful now than anyone else in the boat. Shasli had been gone no more than a few moments when he came hurrying back and climbed into the steering position. His family life seemed to be at some point of crisis but we never discovered what it was. We set off again, this time into the Big Bend below Qena, where west was bahari and so on. Alaa entertained us with the saga of Bassem’s car. Half Luxor seemed to have been involved in one way or another.
‘But now,’ said Alaa, ‘his car is as good as new.’
We were positively roaring along, the propeller shaft hammering like mad. I was resigned to my impotence. If we dropped the screw on the river bed, well, malesh. If the shaft broke in the bilges and knocked a hole in our bottom – what of it? If he had meant us to have engines in boats Allah wouldn’t have arranged the Nile in the way he did so that for most of the year an engine is only useful for the foolish purpose of saving time; and what do you do with this so famous Time when you have got it? For the current of the Nile being for nine months of the year or thereabouts opposed to the wind the two may be balanced the one against the other and so you can perform marvels of dexterity in the slow handling of a sailing boat, making it hang in the current or slide off as you please, go up or down; and in the case of the frequent ferries sometimes use no sail at all, the furled mass of canvas catching sufficient wind to bring you from east to west or contrariwise almost imperceptibly. Then, if it were not for the godforsaken engined craft that make waves on the river you could cross with no more than a half-inch of freeboard, though the sailing boats and the powered boats get on well enough with a kind of lazy acrimony. Reis Shasli, when he wasn’t dishing out information or advice or asking for information from the other Riders of the Sea of the Nile, was pretty indifferent to what happened to our wash. It was embarrassing sometimes.
We were back in sugar cane country. There were many trams under way with lighters full of cane made fast to them [see plate]. Sometimes a tram would be centre to a whole cluster of lighters so that the group looked like some sort of moving island. Halfway round the Big Bend we passed a huge sugar factory which I had not noticed on the way up river. Presumably I had been watching the other bank steadfastly, which only went to show that the River Nile was only half as good – or rather twice as bad – a vantage point for tourism as I had supposed. But this factory was built of aluminium with flashing great tanks for molasses and a deal of river traffic fussing round its feet. Yet such a factory is only busy for two months in the year. Once the cane harvest has been dealt with the factory goes to sleep. It seems wasteful. I suppose in a better organized world, cane would be trained in from other seasons.
It was about here, my eyes having been opened in Qena, that I discovered that the Nile Kingfisher, though rare enough, is not as rare as I had thought. Each stretch of river had its resident and dominant bird. At one point only I saw three of them together and wondered if they were fighting it out for territory or a mate. Mostly though you see them doing that exquisite looping and hovering movement as they hunt along by the river bank then perhaps fly away low, six inches off the surface across the river. Though there are other birds on the river, sea gulls, within a hundred miles of Cairo, moorhens, a grey, nondescript wader, sparrows and swallows, occasional hawks hanging above the fields just far enough to be inland of kingfisher territory, the white and black Nile Kingfisher and the pure white Mock Ibis are the aristocrats of the river.
I had hoped we would be able to reach Nag Hammadi and even get through the barrage in daylight, but in the end we tied up short of it. This, I found, was so that Rushdie could go ashore and get a shot for his kidney ailment at the Clinic which was fair enough. Once more, then, we spent the early evening waiting, the late evening in darkness and the night feeling only just warm enough. I found I had been bitten irritatingly by a mosquito and that must have happened in the Old Winter Palace, which seeing how exposed we had been in the boat was remarkable. My bites, if nothing else, kept me awake. I tried the amateur and perhaps foolish way of dispersing the poison by making a deep cross on the bites with a sharp fingernail, but it didn’t seem to work. It was another night when I did not get much sleep and had plenty of time for
I scratched myself. ‘They’ said that malaria had re-entered Egypt by way of Lake Nasser. That, I thought, was all that was wanted; to go to Egypt trying to find out something without knowing what it was and bring back nothing but a disease! Well, a disease was some sort of knowledge; and Egyptian health did seem to be improving, by way of clean water.
To say that Egyptians were slothful was a half truth. Just under the surface were the tensions which gave way every now and then to let out spurts, eruptions of that appalling energy in violence. The riots between Muslims and Copts, the sudden, animal reactions to foreign interference that had resulted in the hideous cruelties in Cairo during the fifties. Most of the Egyptian population has been helpless for thousands of years, exploited, tortured, worked to death when not disease-ridden. Small wonder that when they get the chance they repay as much of those thousands of years as they can by smashing the nearest object. No wonder their psychological spectrum stretches from indolence to hysteria. I had, that day, seen a woman demonstrate it, using a week’s precious energy in her frantic leap, screaming curses, hurling a stone then jerking and jerking her arm afterwards as if she could re-create the stone and hurl a stream of them! And we, passing close, insulting her land with our wash from what must have looked like a sumptuous toy, had been the last straw in her endurance of all the rich, foreign traffic of tourism on the river.
The energy could be channelled, given time and will. Driving illegally by the Suez Canal I had seen the result of one of Egypt’s modern military operations. On the other side of the water the sand of the bank had been washed away to make a breach through which shock-troops might attack. Egyptians had gone in there, under fire, and washed away the bank with hoses. They had suffered heavy casualties but kept on, wave after wave, until there was a way for the mass of infantry, then tanks. In the sad annals of military heroism and devotion that action stands high. Given necessity – in this case of belief – all the generalizations came apart into a mess of particulars.
The clear night sky continued to draw the last degree of acceptable warmth from the cabin. It was cold. I huddled close, careful to keep the area of mosquito bites at once covered by material yet not so much that there was no soothing coolness on the skin. Somewhere, sketched on the darkness, was the faintest of faint sounds, rising and falling, a muezzin somewhere, in Nag Hammadi perhaps, able now to distinguish a white thread from a black one. Oh come, all ye faithful! It went on and on, seeming to my waking ears as it always did, particularly long on a given morning as if on that day, which was emerging from night, there was a festival to be prepared for, though I knew it was not Friday and the Prophet’s Birthday was past. The distant sound came to us fitfully by courtesy of the north wind so that when I was certain it had stopped it began again. Then just when I was certain it would go on it stopped and compelled my ears to attend to the silence in expectation. Well, after all it was supposed to keep the faithful awake and was I not the faithful of some sort or other? A good question! The too-successful muezzin had gone back to his bed when chillily I rose from my bunk, visited our inadequate loo then set myself to dress and not scratch. Silently I stole on deck to be greeted by yet more chill. I hugged myself and stared over the stern. The fog was close and damp this time, no dust about it. I found an angle of the upperworks where the cold seemed less penetrating and set myself to watch. There was the ‘plop’ of a fish rising somewhere. Now the fog was more a mist and about as white as the muezzin’s thread. A dark shape came drifting slowly by, a rowing boat with a black figure huddled in the stern, even its head concealed by the robe, a smaller huddle in the bows where the boat’s boy was sleeping. Had they broken adrift so deeply asleep that they did not notice? Or was this a local custom, row up river all day and drift all night with the current? Our boat gave a grunt as Shasli started the engine.
It was still sugar country but more and more built up. Shasli was pushing us on. We reached the Nag Hammadi barrage and lock by half past seven, by which time the air was warm under a bright sun. There were huge rafts of Nile Roses trapped against the barrage and the lock gates. Shasli put us to wait alongside a tram which was carrying a load of the ultimate product of the sugar cane when it has not been used as fuel to further its own distillation. This was raw material for paper making and resembled sheets of crumpled and unsized cardboard. I found I had come to a positive respect for the sugar cane, which seemed as vital to Egypt as the olive to Greece. I also tried my hand at a description before it slipped away. That morning when the mist drew back far enough, as we moved down river, there had been degrees of shadow so that the eastern cliffs were graded right back to the desert and the fringe of palms at the water’s edge was black against the rest. All this was mirrored in old silver.
Nag Hammadi lock is ancient, large and hand operated. It dates back to the mid-nineteenth century. Each leaf of the gates has its own capstan with four bars to move it, the sort of thing round which sailors used to sing shanties while the fiddler sat on top. Each gate has four hatches with screw wheels to lift them. This sounds more complicated than the mechanism is. Eight men were assigned to the job of opening and closing the gates but only two did anything that could be called work. These moved the capstan that controlled the gate by which we should enter. One pushed one bar while man number two leaned against another bar and let it take him round with it. Man number two was the boss of man number one. Meanwhile the other six sat in the sun, scratched themselves, unwound and wound up turbans, smoked, spat, lounged off on projects of their own or composed themselves to meditation. When half of one gate was open the two openers strolled right round the lock to the other capstan of the other leaf of the gate, watched idly by the six who were lying close by it. Here the two men opened the second leaf and we moved into the lock while behind us the whole thing was repeated by one man and his boss but in reverse order. The same two men, one of them now glistening with sweat, opened the hatches of the downstream gate, one by one. When the waters were level there was a flurry of activity. The man sitting down stood up. The man lying down waved. The two others actually joined the one man and his boss at the downstream capstan and leaned against the bars. The one man turned the capstan, the sweat now dripping off him. At last we moved out of the lock while the dauntless eight returned to their meditations. Time for getting through one lock: an hour and three quarters.
We found ourselves once more in a wider and I think, fishier Nile. For either the kingfishers were getting gregarious, which I did not believe of such a solitary bird, or they needed shorter stretches of water than further up stream. We saw as many as four at a time and it looked as if they were hunting small insects the way swallows do, for they would skim the water at full speed for a quarter of a mile, rising, falling, swerving, as if they were flying through clouds of gnats and midges. If that was not what they were doing (and certainly no gnats or midges were visible) then we were driven to the unscientific supposition that they were rejoicing in their speed, skill and beauty.
Now the crew fished a number of instruments out of the sternsheets stowage and when they had assembled them it appeared the result would produce kebab for a midday meal. This was exotic, naked flames in a wooden boat among floating robes! However no harm was done and the kebab, if not up to Charlotte Street standards, was as good as the lamb’s meat would allow it to be. The performance – it was that – took all morning and most of the afternoon and our best profit was to learn to like Arab bread more than the tasteless imitation of European bread. Like most bread from poor countries it was very good.
Then just when I thought we were all set to do a record day’s run we came to El Maragha and tied up [see plate]. When I asked why, I