An Egyptian Journal by William Golding
‘The whole scene, river and shore, was wholly unlike the Nile of further north where we had seen the kilns and brickyards. Here all was rock and water.’
‘On the way we found that the camel drove had been, as it were, tapped all along the road. Here and there were trucks still loading camels, their owners having forestalled the Esna camel market further north.’
A herd of camels being driven north from Esna. ‘They had made one of the longest herding treks in the world – all the way through the desert from south of Khartoum. The escorts were a number of genuine-seeming Sons of the Desert.’
Esna cattle market. ‘Hundreds of camels were being sold, some for work but most for slaughter. There were trucks waiting from as far away as Cairo and Alexandria.’
A young boy with donkeys. ‘It seemed odd to see a donkey doing what it liked and not laden to death.’
Papyrus plants stacked on a truck. ‘The Ministry of Culture has caused papyrus plants to be reintroduced into gardens near Cairo so that the stems may be made into papyrus, following exactly the ancient methods.’
The Colossi of Memnon.
A poor fellah’s house. ‘It was not so much dirty as untidy, for who minds a bit of dried cowdung and dried straw about the place.’
Hassan Fathy’s New Gourna. ‘It is signed all over by Fathy’s particular vision. There is everywhere the sophisticated use of mud brick, use of the vault and the dome. There is a sense of grace and fitness.’
Kalabsha. ‘The houses were simple. The walls were rendered so I was not able to find out what was underneath but they didn’t seem to be built of mud brick.’
‘There were many trams under way with lighters full of cane made fast to them.’
A ‘gaggle’ of feluccas.
The Nile Kingfisher.
‘Once again we were in time to see that curious moment when the trance of the night turned into the slow movements of dawn.’
Near Giza.
‘In El Fayoum itself a more interesting sight and sound is the multiple waterwheel. It consists of several undershot waterwheels placed side by side and linked.’
‘The noise seems always on the very verge of concord or even melody as if, given just one tiny further impetus, one last heave, it would manage against all the odds of the universe to sing.’
The waterwheel which is still used for irrigation throughout Egypt.
Cairo. ‘So we set out with Alaa into deepest Cairo much as an English botanist – an amateur one at that – would enter a Sussex woodland and hope to find a species of plant that nobody had ever noticed before. We went straight to the most touristy bit of all, the bazaar.’
The Mosque Al-Azhar, Cairo.
‘Outside the gate we passed at once from medieval to modern with traffic to be dodged and crowds hurrying to catch buses.’
‘An aspect of any Egyptian town that is bound to surprise a westerner is how the children swarm everywhere. They seemed healthy enough to me as did the population generally.’
Near the Well of Umm Fawakhir. ‘The boy declared we must go further on then further. Instead of gold mines and huts we were now to inspect graffiti which were not what I had set out to see.’
Graffiti by a desert road.
Dusk on the Nile.
About the Author
When William Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel Foundation said of his novels that they ‘illuminate the human condition in the world of today’. Born in Cornwall in 1911, Golding was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose Oxford. Before becoming a writer, he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor, a musician and a schoolteacher. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, submarines and aircraft, and also took part in the pursuit of the Bismarck.
Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was rejected by several publishers and one literary agent. It was rescued from the ‘slush pile’ by a young editor at Faber and Faber and published in 1954. The book would go on to sell several million copies; it was translated into 35 languages and made into a film by Peter Brook in 1963. He wrote eleven other novels, The Inheritors and The Spire among them, a play and two essay collections. He won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of Passage in 1980, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993.
www.william-golding.co.uk
Essays by William Golding
Read more about William Golding’s lifelong fascination with Egypt in his two essay collections.
The Hot Gates (1965) contains the essay ‘Egypt from My Inside’, in which Golding describes his preoccupation with Egyptian culture and history, as explored through myths, art and artefacts.
A Moving Target (1982) includes both ‘Egypt from My Inside’ and also ‘Egypt from My Outside’, an account of Golding’s first trip to Egypt and how reality compared with the Egypt of his imagination.
Praise for The Hot Gates and A Moving Target:
‘His writing is a joy.’ Sunday Times
‘Essays which afford us many fascinating insights into Golding the man . . . Even the slightest piece bears the mark of his rare, austere mind, his remarkable imagination.’ Tony Tanner
Books by
Sir William Golding
1911–1993
Nobel Prize for Literature
Fiction
LORD OF THE FLIES
THE INHERITORS
PINCHER MARTIN
FREE FALL
THE SPIRE
THE SCORPION GOD
DARKNESS VISIBLE
THE PAPER MEN
RITES OF PASSAGE
CLOSE QUARTERS
FIRE DOWN BELOW
THE DOUBLE TONGUE
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
(a revised text of Rites of Passage, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below in one volume)
Essays
THE HOT GATES
A MOVING TARGET
Travel
AN EGYPTIAN JOURNAL
Play
THE BRASS BUTTERFLY
LORD OF THE FLIES
adapted for the stage by
Nigel Williams
WILLIAM GOLDING:
A CRITICAL STUDY OF THE NOVELS
LORD OF THE FLIES
by Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Ian Gregor
Copyright
First published in 1985
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition published in 2013
All rights reserved
© William Golding 1985
© The William Golding Estate 1995
The right of William Golding to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–26549–7
William Golding, An Egyptian Journal
(Series: # )