An Egyptian Journal by William Golding
I had assumed that the hotel could do it for me, but no. It appeared that we should have to spend time again in Cairo on that chore when we seemed to have done so little. It would be infuriating to spend time in an office, queuing; and now we should have to go to the British Embassy, which, I here record for the information of other travellers, shuts at one. We were tired indeed and the future seemed to have burdens in it that were … pyramidal. We drifted down to the basement of the hotel, where there was a twenty-four-hour restaurant and we lingered long over a meal, not eating much but not saying much either. It was difficult to get the drumming of the car out of our bodies.
17
That night once more I couldn’t sleep. In the end I got up, switched on the smallest of the lights and set about putting various things in my journal. It made me feel better. Writing things down is therapeutic.
After breakfast we braced ourselves and set off to extend our visas. By an odd irony we got the job done in seconds and at once the tragedies of the night became silly. We were now stuck with additional time when we had not expected to be free. As we were in the right area we went to the Museum of Egyptology, that very odd building with its, of all things, Latin inscriptions on the front. I had to do this because I proposed to write at least a thousand words on the muddle the museum was in, having been shocked and disappointed the last time we visited it. Any writer, or perhaps I should say any journalist, will understand my irritation when I say that in the years between my visits the display had been entirely reorganized and was now as accessible and reasonable as most other museums. My thousand words (already composed in my head) went straight down the drain.
Of course the museum shows too much for the available space. But what else can it do? The needs of the scholar, the casual amateur and the tourist all conflict. The first needs to know everything, the second something and the last nothing. The inevitable crowding of sculpture together, while it is convenient for a scholar more concerned with comparison of details, does remove any possibility of aesthetic enjoyment. You cannot concentrate on one piece of sculpture when your eye is jostled, so to speak, by a crowd of others. However, aesthetic enjoyment is a modern addition to whatever those carvings were about so perhaps it is no great loss. You could even argue that the splendidly enjoyable objets so lovingly exhibited in the Luxor Museum is some sort of falsification; but of what?
They say there is or was a mummy room in the museum, but I have never seen it. The craft of the Egyptologist is too often mortuary for my comfort and I think that mummies are at once disgusting and pitiable. Once the experts have done their jobs of examination, from an assessment of how many threads to the inch in the bandages, through a numbering and photographing of the amulets to the final belated medical examination of the patient the remnants should be burned. There was good sense in the custom of using mummies for fuel in the earliest Egyptian railways. It got out of the way objects that had already lasted too long. So if there is a mummy room we did not see it.
What we did see was first the collection from the tomb of Tutankhamun. The collection is, as all the world knows, an extraordinary assemblage of furniture of one sort or another. It is as if when the young man died the whole contents of his house had been swept together by the removal men and dumped in the tomb. It’s difficult to think that he would really need all those bows in the next world. Someone (a removal man) scooped them out of the bow chest or bow rack or bow cupboard and dumped them. As for the famous shrines that guarded the mummy they seem tinselly. The celebrated goddesses who stand round the shrine and spread their arms protectively are often published as if they were life size but in fact they are only about eighteen inches high and doll-like. It is not really easy to feel with Howard Carter that they are ‘moving symbols of love and compassion’. Sheer numbers in the case of this exhibition defeat their own end. I guess that an Egyptologist would trade most of the heaped-up duplicates for one written document! It is difficult not to feel irritated with the ancient priests who packed away rolls and rolls of papyrus in the tomb – all of them blank.
We also went to the carefully guarded jewel room, where only a certain number of people are admitted at a time. Here again it is difficult not to carp. The truth is that jewellery dies if it isn’t worn. There is a curious dullness that comes over gold in a showcase as if it knows it’s in the wrong place. They say that gold doesn’t tarnish. What, then, accounts for the obvious difference between the gold of your wife’s wedding ring and the stale pieces of yellow metal exhibited in museums? Is it microscopic dust? Is it dirt? Does the gleam of gold when worn derive from the ‘natural oils of the body?’ If so, then there should be a stately ball given once every so often for curators and their wives or girlfriends or husbands or boyfriends (we have to be so careful!) at which that ancient stuff is given an airing and a chance to resume its former splendour. There is, alas, a proviso. The jewellery is for men as well as women and in both cases you have to be dark brown. Anyone who has ever seen a ‘white man’ on the stage masquerading as an ancient Egyptian will know what I mean.
The question of rarity value is interesting. Silver was more precious than gold, steel rarer than either. Yet there must have been masses of meteoritic iron lying about the place though we have only one dagger blade to show for it. What happened to all the rest? In any case, precious stones do not seem to have been gathered for intrinsic value because where possible the jewellers used glass. The splendid pectorals which Tutankhamun wore were once thought to be full of precious stones but not a bit of it. The object of the pectoral was to be colourful and splendid, not glittering and precious. In any case the repertory of precious stones should be called rather of ‘semi-precious stones’. They used quartz and obsidian for the eyes of statues – obsidian probably from Lipari on the north side of Sicily. Turquoise they found in Sinai. Lapis lazuli probably came all the way from Afghanistan! Gold came from Nubia by the ton. The nearest source of silver was Anatolia and they very rarely used it. They found amethyst and green feldspar in the desert. Also yellow jasper. But though they would use stones when they were pretty (rose-quartz is an example) they were happy with coloured glass and may have regarded it as just as valuable. Their most precious stone by our reckoning was emerald. The sight of all that jewellery set me wondering how ‘Value’ came about. I don’t mean ‘value’ as it applied by the time the Lydians invented money. I mean how the concept of value arose in the very beginning when even the idea of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ must have been no more than hazily formulated. There must have been a time when the man-creature liked not just to pick up the pretty pieces of yellow stone from streams or sandy plains but to keep them; and then, oh most destructive and aweful moment, swapped them, this one for that or this one for a lick of your marrow bone or this white stone for that yellow stone. Ignoring as we should the authoritative declarations of professional economists can we not see a mystery in the way the ancient Egyptians mingled what we should call ‘costume jewellery’ with the occasionally ‘genuinely precious’ stones? Certainly they were not at all interested in sparkle, for their jewels were never faceted except by accident as in crystals. Their only cut was flat or cabochon. Then, too, they carved rock crystal into smooth rounded surfaces with no apparent delight in the exquisite geometry of nature. It is impossible to put oneself back there in the position of people so stripped of our assumptions, or perhaps it is better to say innocent of them. We are so furred up with the growth of needs and complications and laborious knowledge. Here and there are the objects that would delight any age but suffer where they are from museum dullness and surrounding competition. The outer, gold sarcophagus of Tutankhamun lies at one end of the room; and with a feeling for the symbolic nature of gold rather than its rarity, its financial value, even its beauty as an exhibit, the makers have covered it thickly with coloured inlay – enamel I think – which disguises the metal. Perhaps in the jewel room more than anywhere else you find a denial of the facile idea that they were ‘just like us’. We find
Here, in the museum, I suffered once again that simple trip-up by circumstances which can make long-laid plans come foolishly to nothing. I wanted to see the diorite statue of Chephren but simply could not find it. I wandered round and consulted the plan and then the museum shut. That was that.
However, seeing the museum at all was a bonus, a visit snatched from time laid aside for renewing visas and therefore a sheer gain. Reeling with sleeplessness and too many exhibits we got ourselves taxied to the hotel and slept away the afternoon. This was necessary because our day was only just begun. Time was now short and endurance almost at an end. I needed to make up for several nights I had lost. I fell so deeply asleep that when I was woken up I had no idea at all where I was.
Alaa called for us and drove us to an exhibition of modern paintings by the modern Egyptian artist Salah 'Enany which we had wanted to see. It is one thing to go mulling round among ancient leftovers but what is Egypt if not its young people? So we went, looked and were impressed. They were oils mostly. They were, and this seemed strange to me at first, pervaded by gloom. I mean that though the interiors were shaded reasonably enough and the figures in shadow, even street scenes were dimmed by the same atmosphere of shadow as if a total darkness were waiting in the corners and would at some future time well out from them and submerge the whole. Yet the pictures had compassion and satire in equal quantities. It could not be satire of a very overt nature. Egypt is not the kind of country where it would be tolerated. The pictures, if they satirize anything, strike out at city life and bourgeois life at that. All the characters are seen to be busy doing things and staring at emptiness. They are not even puzzled by the worthlessness of their own lives. Sexual encounters seem either a desperate grabbing at something which must of its very nature get away, or the juxtaposition of people who are really attending to something else. You feel all the time that apparently normal groups of people are beginning to attend to something, listen for something that is expected and will prove to be an unpaintable horror. Yet that horror will be vacuity. The artist in question had a long training as a caricaturist on a daily paper. He painted the whole of this exhibition, some forty or fifty canvases, in a violent burst of passionate creativity. I asked him why the pervading tone of the pictures was dark in a land of such brilliant light? He replied that Egypt may seem so to foreigners. But, said he, smiling, you may if you like believe that since the city Egyptian spends his life in shadowy rooms the darkness of the picture is not in any sense a social criticism!
This was the tip of something. What is more, the job of unearthing the rest of the mountain or political structure, whatever it may be, will be left for someone else. I cannot do it. Why was there a fattish man in a dark red tarbush standing on a barrel and surrounded by a small crowd in a narrow, dark street where all the figures were dark? Why was that ‘extended family’ seated round a table, all withdrawn, all silent, all preoccupied with the contemplation of something not painted? Did I overreact, and was this nothing more than a brilliant perception of boredom? I do not think so. There was in this painting evidence of that trite bit of criticism ‘more than meets the eye’, and talent getting less attention than it deserved because to draw overmuch attention to it might get the artist or the critic into trouble. It was all as enigmatic as the old woman who was loaded with jewellery and telling dirty stories.
We returned late that night to the hotel and ate a silent meal in the downstairs restaurant, which only came properly alive after midnight. Then sleepily into the night or morning I scribbled notes of the crowded day before I went to sleep. It was not possible to leave them till later in the week, for in the morning I was booked to take a kind of dive into the Delta. It is after all the place where the man who wants to know about Egypt should start, rather than end. It was all proving to be – to have been – a messy, upside-down journey.
‘Tomorrow the Delta. I don’t want to and am seriously considering having a headache or something. I learn too much; or less and less.’
We were fourteen storeys up on the west side of the Nile again. The traffic was still swarming and glittering and parping down the corniche.
18
The morning hummed with sleeplessness. Alaa called for me in his car and I had not the energy to resist. There was a third person in the car. I shall call him ‘the doctor’. He was tall, very thin and elegant. He was connected with a university, perhaps as a medical adviser, and he was willing to talk but had little English. He wore a dark suit, very sharp, with flared bottoms to his trousers. I was reminded of Akhmet returning to ‘his’ village though this was a more expensive suit. It is high fashion in Cairo. We drove off north down the river then across by the most northerly of the Cairene bridges. There were miles of city then more miles of advertisements, Esso, Mobil, Michelin, food, clothes, restaurants, all advertising in two scripts which started from opposite poles and never seemed to achieve an absolute transliteration. Then, as the billboards became fewer and we could see open country, there were pyramids of oranges and tangerines for sale by the road, stacked on the ground, lit brilliantly by the sun … heaped richly for miles. We reached Berket el Sab a considerable city or at least a centre of dense population since this now was un-tourist Egypt with a vengeance, very crowded and beautiful when we turned off the main road on to a narrower one. Almost at once we turned again but on to a wider road made of heaped-up earth. It ran straight for miles and its builders seemed to have been indifferent to the boundaries of the fields through which it ran. The doctor told me it was ‘a treaty road’. When the British – us, if you like – withdrew to the Canal Zone, a condition was that the Egyptian Government should build these roads to make British troop movements easy. Those ‘treaty roads’, once an inconvenience and imposition on the fellaheen, were now tree-lined and useful, with grateful shade and a wide, dirt surface for pack or draught animals, for flocks and herds, the occasional truck and bicyclists. The fellaheen call the bicycle ‘the iron donkey’. They have taken it to their hearts in a way they never did their donkeys. The machines are tended but the animals scruffy.
We turned off into a yet smaller road by which a yoke of a cow and a buffalo, both blindfolded, were turning a new metal waterwheel. We passed several more of these. I couldn’t believe that they were drawing water from the narrow canal. It must have come from boreholes. The Delta is the most diseased area of Egypt though the people here looked as healthy as in Upper and Middle Egypt. We turned off again and were in the village where the doctor was born. There was the usual village mess, usual uninspiring untidiness, straw, sticks, reeds, dung, dust and a narrow, soupy canal that trees hung over. There were palms, acacias and figs. Crops were high and dense, green, dark green, heavy. We were met by the doctor’s cousin, a good-looking young man, not dressed like the doctor but in a grey galabia and turban. At once he got Alaa to tell us that he was home on holiday, which was why he was dressed in this manner. He had been working in Iraq as a driver and would go back at the end of the month. He was energetic. He rushed us to his house, where we met his father, a white-bearded old gentleman who had known the Koran by heart by the time he was twelve. He was holy and had lips which were far too red and full for perfect beauty. We had tea, served by one woman while others peeped. The Koran provided him with a quotation for any eventuality. He asked me if I spoke Arabic. When I said that regrettably I did not he replied at such length that Alaa had to translate. ‘It is much to the glory of God that he creates men of different kinds and natures and languages.’
After delivering this apothegm he bowed round the company as Reis Shasli had bowed when talking about his two wives and children. We drank our tea in silence. At length the cousin led us off to see the house opposite, his own house, which he was having built with money he had earned in Iraq. It was yet another example of that drift away from the land to where there is good living to be had, money to be made and an eventual return of the native to local wealth and dignity. The hou