We went into the mosque itself. The dominant colours were brilliant blue and gold. Typically you would see a quotation from the Koran in gold leaf against brilliant blue. I was told how beautiful the calligraphy was, but of course saw it with the blank stare of incomprehension. To me the interlaced patterns were agreeable, nothing more; but I accepted what I was told.
The mosque had stained-glass windows and here we felt on firmer ground. For western and, better still, medieval western stained glass sets a standard which can be equalled but not surpassed. The Arab – Egyptian? Nubian? – genius expresses itself in colour combinations that we should call garish, when they put pieces of stained glass together. It is usually, though not invariably, a mosaic of geometrical patterns and I cannot say, even in this mosque that the glass was particularly good. It had, like all southern glass, a slight touch of the conservatory or even the bathroom about it. Nevertheless, like everything else in the mosque it was being restored painstakingly by glass specialists among the young people.
A notable point about these windows and one which delighted me (since I have always thought of stained glass as a method of keeping unwanted light out of a building rather than letting it in) was that these windows were accepted as means of keeping out the light of the sun – and the moon! They were known as ‘Sun and Moon windows’. The name was suggestive of a southern full moon, such as the moon we had seen rise in dustless, cloudless brilliance over the Eastern Desert, a moon you could read by and which could well try the eyes, not by forcing them to strain after the curled script but by making the whiteness of the paper intolerable.
We walked round in this collegiate rectangle, enjoying the near-silence, which was only modified by the murmur of consultation, the gentle tap, tap of a mallet and the occasional sound of a heavy blow from up on scaffolding where great blocks of stone were being shifted. It was a most moving atmosphere of health and sanity in which you knew all intolerance and hysteria had been put aside and what was being done was for the greater glory of God. So there is that strand too in the ‘Islamic Revival’. It is a thing to remember among all the horrors of terrorism.
But we had yet another appointment. We went by car in the direction of the citadel, turned off to the left then climbed again to the region that I believe is called Darbel Habbena. We were going to call at last on Mr Hassan Fathy. He lives on the top floor of an ancient Mameluke palace. We climbed to it by way of a winding stair, which I felt would have been more appropriate to the tower of a cathedral. He received us with gentle courtesy. This at first was made a little difficult by the behaviour of his seven cats. They exhibited every half-minute or so their feline capacity for instant combat with yells and thumps. Mr Fathy would expostulate each time mildly with an admonitory ‘Oh pussy, pussy!’ He sat in what was either a smoking or dressing gown behind a table with a few papers on it. We had come to pay our respects, nothing else, but this was difficult while the cats were at war. Finally his housekeeper, a large Egyptian lady in traditional costume, tempted the flock, herd, group – what can one say as a collective noun of creatures so solitary by nature? – by means of food out of the room and shut the door behind them and herself.
Hassan Fathy is in his eighties and is said sometimes to be a little abstracted in manner, but we did not find him so. I wished to pay him the respect due to a man who has conceived, promulgated and tried to carry out a great social idea. He murmured that it had all been a failure – in Egypt at least. He had tried and tried again but each time it had all come to nothing. I suggested diffidently that the mosque and the houses he had built at New Gourna were there for all to see. If only the tourists who thronged round the Colossi of Memnon could be induced to walk a couple of hundred yards….
No, no, he said. That would do no good. It was the fellaheen – they were the people who should be reached, and after that, well, there was the government, that solid immovable rock. It had been a complete failure. Gentle old soul, he seemed to cherish the failure for its own sake.
Then he brightened.
‘All the same, I have been in Mexico – New Mexico. I was there for twenty-three days and – do you know? They took to it at once! They have adobe, of course, and when I introduced the idea of the mud brick arch to them they took to it at once! Think of that! Forty years I have tried in Egypt without achieving anything! Then in New Mexico in only twenty-three days I achieve a success! Even my book – they read it. My book is now a text book in America and France.’
We stayed a little longer, trying to convey respect and admiration without being too fulsome. Finally we stood up and Mr Fathy said how kind we were and so on – all the courtesies. We went away down the winding stair and into the night.
‘Actually,’ said Alaa, ‘I did not tell you, but he is a prince.’
‘Officially?’
‘Of course. But since the revolution….’
We drove away across the city to spend the evening with a friend of Alaa’s who was a film producer and made documentaries of the Egyptian countryside. They spoke for themselves those films, making audible what we had seen. There was a worker in a mud brickyard endlessly setting out the pats of mud. He was grateful for pathetic small mercies, as well he might be. There was a refugee from Suez, a mother with small children, who simply talked about them and her animals, not really distinguishing one from the other. There was a portrait of a village. The work and play – play of children at least – broke off at a certain moment; and then you found they were all flocking to a level crossing and waiting for the train. It was the great event of the day. The train trundled through slowly and the children waved and people looked at the faces in the window, infinitely distant from them. The film was called, The Village Where The Train Does Not Stop. She showed us the video film of a festival of Arab music which took me straight back to the boat, with Alaa and Rushdie or Reis Shasli switching on the tape of Arab utility music. But she was very kind to show us so much about Egyptian life and we were duly grateful. We were in fact getting the insights we might well have started with. Then we drove back to the hotel and fell into bed. The night disappeared without trace and in a flash and we had interviews in the morning so got up at dawn more or less and packed. Ann was interviewed first and was shown the picture in the morning papers of our interview with the Minister for Culture. Emboldened, she appealed to the women of Egypt to rescue the Institute for the Multiplication of Mango and Olive Trees. Surely any Egyptian male worth his salt would give his wife an olive tree? Were Egyptian women not capable of seeing the beauty of this idea? A million olive trees! Then I was interviewed and answered the usual questions. The hotel suddenly became very respectful and presented our bill almost with an air of apology. We drove to the airport, said an emotional farewell to Alaa, went through the airport as in a dream, were lifted into the air where we both fell fast asleep. Sleeping we flew out over the choked canyon, then the sea, Greece, Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany … and woke with the plane commencing its long descent across the North Sea. It had been a dream really.
What I have tried to describe and what these sixty pictures show is a touristic commonplace, the fact that Egypt is a land of wonderful beauty. Perhaps I have been able to contribute a rider to that fact – if a fact can have a rider – call it a proposition – that proposition: namely that Egypt suffers from the indifference of its inhabitants to that beauty; and that those with power and influence in the land have missed a golden opportunity of counteracting the drab and dangerous ugliness of its domestic buildings. Perhaps the omission has been deliberate on the part of what is commonly called ‘vested interests’. I do not say that Hassan Fathy’s mud brick vaults are a complete solution to the problem, but at the very least they would restore to Egypt what it has so sadly lost, a belief that buildings other than ruins are worth thought and care.
In our defended wanderings we have been forced into a deliberate mistake, that of trying to look at everything and having an opinion on everything. Of course the result is that you end with opi
nions on nothing. It must remain then an expanded journal in which I have been able, by consulting my notes, to put back to some extent what I felt and more often what I was thinking. The reader may here and there find sufficient description to enable him to some extent to share the irritations and excitements of our absurd journey. There is a sense in which any journey is absurd. If he finds himself now and then lying on his back in my bunk and staring upwards through a deck and two miles of superincumbent rock now worn away and aware at the same time that he is suspended over an invisible canyon two miles deep, he will perhaps have added to his experience a way of imagining things that will be unfamiliar. If he feels he would have made better use of the journey, come to more informed opinions and written a better book about it all, he may well be right and I would recommend him to stick to the one hundred pictures. It was, after all, a kind of challenge to see what would arise in an unusual juxtaposition of two cultures and two wildly differing sets of experience. As the scrap of papyrus says in the original Greek set out as epigraph to this volume:
Sailors who skim deep waters, Tritons of the salt sea, and you Riders of the Nile who sail in happy course upon the smiling waters, tell us, friends, the comparison of the ocean with the fruitful Nile.
But an ampler summation of the experience in all its strange and nonsensical complexity can only be achieved by nonsense at the highest level: and as we returned at last to our own country a bit of nonsense from its literature seems an appropriate explanation and conclusion:
the dram of eale
doth all the noble substance of a doubt
to his own scandal.
Illustration Acknowledgments
All photographs in the book are by William Golding except for the following:
Brian T. North: photographs of calèches at Luxor; the Temple at Luxor; the Sphinx; selling fish from a boat; a young boy with donkeys; papyrus plants stacked on a truck; near Giza; Cairo street scenes; the Mosque Al-Azhar, Cairo.
Rainbird Archives: photograph of Queen Nefertiti.
Alaa Swafe: photograph of Saïd, Ann, the author, Rushdie, Akhmet with Shasli in the wheelhouse.
J. Allan Cash: photograph of Egpytian children.
Bruce Coleman: photograph of the Nile kingfisher.
Douglas Dickens: photograph of man operating a waterwheel.
Roger Viollet: Hassan Fathy’s New Gourna; Kalabsha.
Two huge sandals came up the river before a following wind. ‘I thought to myself that these graceful sandals with their simple, elegant lines and single, huge sail were going to be one of the consolations of the trip.’
The Hani.
El Maragha. ‘The stone-and-concrete apron fronting the corniche was so old it was cracked everywhere. There was a low wall and a proportion of the population lined this to watch the show.’
The Fayoum. ‘You approach first a grey-green line which broadens, unfolds, becomes a brighter green and then you are quite suddenly in a land that seems even more fertile than the Nile Valley.’
Bahr Yusuf. ‘I had promised myself such a thrill at seeing it; but now I had been looking at it for twenty kilometres and made it so ordinary to myself that my promised frisson was entirely lacking.’
Calèches at Luxor. ‘The vehicles shine now with intricate brass all a-glitter in the lights of the corniche. Some are real museum pieces, elegant even in their showiness.’
‘The Temple at Luxor had not improved, I thought. There was still about the building that ineffable air of having outstayed any welcome the town was prepared to give it and of only waiting for the arrival of the removal men.’
The Sphinx. On his return to England William Golding wrote his promised letter to The Times about the Sphinx’s beard and coincidentally it was returned.
The Temple of Kom Ombo. ‘As for the Temple, I don’t say it isn’t a good temple as temples go. Oh yes, it has a good position some fifty feet above the river and twenty yards from it.’
Stela from Amarna showing Akhenaten. ‘First regarded as a towering monotheist, a mystic, a religious genius, Akhenaten was now argued to be a dictator with a purely material idea of his god, the Aten, the physical disc of the sun.’
‘Cultivation still clung to the east bank under the cliffs, but only just.’
The Blessed One with his wife. ‘The tomb paintings make a glamour point of the eye more than anything else.’
Queen Nefertiti.
‘Rushdie spent most of the afternoon with Alaa’s head in his lap, reading aloud in Arabic what Alaa called “A tale by some Lebanese idiot”.’
Saïd, Ann, the author, Rushdie, Akhmet with Shasli in the wheelhouse. Ann is doing her best to bear up while the author is determinedly cheerful.
Burning limestone.
‘The cliff of limestone reached up about six feet above the gunwale of the tram. The steering position – but this is customary and a definition of “tram” – was right up in the bows.’
‘The tram to which we were hitched was loaded with the soft limestone of the mountains over to the east. I knew it was soft because I broke a piece off the cargo and crumbled it easily between two fingers and a thumb.’
A boy climbing the mast of a felucca.
Selling fish from a boat.
‘The calèche drivers had brought their wretched horses down to the water to clean them. It was impossible not to wonder whether the horses were acquiring new diseases or merely exchanging old ones.’
River police station. ‘The place was on the slope of the levee with two shacks, some ramshackle boats and a dozen young men who were dressed in seamen’s uniforms which were ragged and dirty.’
‘Here in this potters’ field, all the houses were houses of pots because they were built of them. They were not built of sherds. They were built of whole, or nearly whole pots.’
‘In all those superimposed rows of pots that went to make the walls of houses there would not be one without some ventage of air from within. Here, suggested Ann, was the original cavity wall.’
‘In one of the huts a potter obligingly performed his dextrous bit of magic which never fails to satisfy the beholder and perhaps the practitioner too; how the seed of clay grows, buds, flowers, fruits and collapses.’
The Great Pyramid. ‘Certainly the greatest of them all, the pyramid of Cheops is anonymous in the sense that there is no inscription giving it to him.’
The pyramid of Meidum.
Hypostyle hall at Karnak.
Hatshepsut’s Temple. ‘It is one of the few “Pharoni” buildings which acknowledges the presence of the landscape and fits humbly into a gigantic cliff which it can imitate but not out-do.’
A sandal on the Nile with a ‘balancer’ out to starboard.
‘All the way up the Nile I had seen women coming down to the river. They had not just fetched water, they had done the washing, they had scoured dishes, in fact I could not begin to number the things I had seen the women doing.’
Faroz. ‘We thought he would be excellently cast as Aladdin.’
‘Alaa and Rushdie descended into the stern sheets and played music. In Arab music if you have a good thing you don’t let go of it. The first three notes of Three Blind Mice but in the minor mode lasted them for rather more than half an hour.’
The lock at Asyut.
Rushdie. ‘The rhythm of the Nile is the art of doing nothing. It is a good way of life if you can accommodate yourself to it.’