The river broke up around more islands. I wondered frivolously to whom they had been given as tokens of Egyptian hospitality. Napoleon, now there was a man who brought a library to Egypt with him and might well know this curious virtue or alleged virtue that obtained in Arab countries. Why had he not ridden forward at the Battle of the Pyramids and pointed out to the Mamelukes that he was a stranger in their country, that he wanted the pyramids, and that therefore….
We passed moorhens swimming in line ahead. The Eastern Desert, which had been stalking us all along, now pounced in to within yards of the eastern bank. I watched a woman take advantage of western technology and fill blue plastic bags with water. She hefted them on to either flank of an ass so that they became water panniers. Like the women with their lighter metal pots, the ass got no benefit from his blue plastic panniers. They were bigger, that was all. When the woman had the bags in position she topped them up with water and directly they were topped up and slopping over, the ass turned away without an order and plodded up into the desert. I couldn’t see how far he had to go but clearly enough from the map there wasn’t any green stuff between him and the Red Sea. The sun was very bright and there was a cold wind.
At about 3 o’clock in the afternoon while we were still waiting for lunch the boat swerved violently. I rushed up on deck. It was clear what had happened. The linkage between the wheel and the rudder had parted. The crew, with the exception of old Saïd, was running in circles. There was much argument. The boat, engine out of gear, was now drifting rapidly back in the direction of Cairo. What had seemed an irritating impediment to our progress upstream but no more than that, I now saw to be a considerable current. The banks – in a way familiar to all wretched rivermen – seemed to be fairly streaking past. A young man whom I had noticed vaguely before – he wore a blue tracksuit trimmed with white stars – threw the foolish grapnel overboard but it did not hold. Shasli manoeuvred with short bursts of power as the boat swung until the bows struck the mud beach of a little island. The blue tracksuit dived for the beach, took a line, made it fast and there we were with the Nile clucking gently under our bilges.
The crew gathered in the central area of the boat and discussed what to do. Alaa and Rushdie, the cook/lutanist, jumped ashore. A fellah appeared with two women, one donkey and a water buffalo. He laughed a lot, particularly at me. Now there was a crowd on the beach all talking and laughing. A smaller crowd in the central cabin was examining a length of wire rope which had parted in the middle. They were trying to tie the wire rope. I suggested that they should try splicing it but I don’t think anyone understood. Indeed, they thought plainly enough what is this passenger doing poking his nose into something which only we seamen can understand? We retired to our cabin and discussed the speed with which our little expedition was getting nowhere. After a while Ann looked out of the door and returned with a fit of the giggles. She said the committee was trying to tie the steel wire rope together with blue nylon cord. It was a situation too comical for despair. It was like all those years of hapless messing about in boats, the years of making do, the animosity of inanimate objects especially when waterborne.
I went up on deck again. The village clown once more thought I was very funny. I suggested to Alaa that there was a degree of simple-mindedness to go with the clowning and he agreed, saying that the laughter wasn’t all our fault! I took a snap of the crowd and Alaa took a snap of the crowd and me. It was reasonably matey but no more.
Below decks I found that the crew had cannibalized some wire rope from another bit of machinery. God only knew, I thought, what other bit of gear would prove to be inoperative for want of wire just when we needed it. But at last we got under way again. We came to more brickyards. Upper Egypt, it appears, is constructed of red clay and brickyards. One group of chimneys stood on ornamental bases, which seemed very odd. An ornament in a brickyard seems a contradiction in terms, since brickyards are of all places the rawest and most irremediably ugly. Adornment may well wait for bricks; but in their place of making they are a kind of architectural plasma undifferentiated into grace or beauty. The attempt at amelioration was wrongheaded.
A huge crane and a water tower appeared on the southern horizon. I was beginning to grasp the character of the land. You can tell a town from a village because the town has a water tower for which the water is either drawn from the river and purified or drawn straight out of the new, deep boreholes which will make such a difference to Egyptian health. So we came to Beni Suef.
Apparently this was where we were to stop. We tied up alongside a station for the river police. This sounds more impressive than it was. 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 [see plate]. They were heavily armed, however. A sentry cradled a submachine gun of some sort or other and it was nastily clean. Here, Alaa produced our trump card – a letter he had obtained from the Chief of Police in Cairo directing all river police to give us every assistance, et cetera. So we were fixed up with water and fuel, the second everywhere in short supply. It was dark now, a darkness which began at about 6 o’clock in the evening and lasted a full twelve hours. We moored at some ornamental steps, which were convenient for shopping. We went ashore with Alaa and were ‘hello’d’ by men and boys. Indeed, I was even asked my name by a gaggle of schoolgirls in western dress who then fled with shrieks of laughter, ‘appalled at their own temerity’. Near the river there was a small public park, very neat and clean. All the roads were tree-lined. There was a social centre further on, with a theatre and a cinema. But dust was king and made a drabness in what might have been elegant. The sparse street lighting competed unsuccessfully with the darkness of early evening. There was a street of small shops and stalls. Here and there these stalls were operating by the light of acetylene flares which took me back more than half a century. It was indeed curiously like revisiting the past. For the tendency of our street lighting is to spread round. It is hoisted up by wire, or what John Betjeman called ‘seasick serpents’. This gives a height to the lighted area which enhances a sort of public bleakness as if something is being revealed which had better not be shown. But these lights were low down, at head or even waist height and shuddering. They were not so much bright as flaring; and they hollowed out a comfortable warm space like a cave in which human activities could go on in the full importance of bargaining and gossiping and quarrelling without being staringly lighted into insignificance. They were a proper light for the oranges and mangoes and bananas and for the ubiquitous carriages, the calèches of the Nile Valley which clopped and creaked here and there. There were patient donkeys being ridden by large men who sat well astern and by small boys who sat amidships as it were and pretended they were riding horses. There were trucks, bicycles and a few young men on unsilenced motor bikes. The costume was, on the whole, drab western. But the place was quite uncivilized. You could walk down the road, not on the pavement, and the traffic would divide round you as if pedestrians had a right to live. So we shopped, buying towels and tangerines and bananas. The bananas weren’t very big but that was because they were straight off the tree.
We found our way back to the boat in nearly complete darkness. There was music on the corniche above the boat, music on the ship’s radio – or was it a tape? – Arab utility music sounded strangely familiar. And once Rushdie had got settled in, his lute began to compete. The crew chattered busily. We seemed, I thought, to have been in the boat for a month though it was no more than two days. We were sixty odd miles from Cairo. I reminded myself that we still had a meal to come before we tried to sleep – but the meal didn’t come. Instead, the chattering died away, the generator stopped and slowly the lights in our cabin faded until all that was left was a faint glimmer through the starboard ‘window’ from the street lighting of Beni Suef.
3
It was another cold and restless night. Since we were moored alongside quite a large town we could hear t
he muezzins competing from their minarets at that point of the night, ‘When a white thread may be distinguished from a black one’. I personally did not sleep after the competition. We were under way by about half past six. There is a bridge at Beni Suef but it is only half built. In Cairo I had been told that the bridge had already been ten years in the building and certainly the unfinished end where it hung out over the water had a rusty and depressed look about it. Just beyond the furthest point to which the bridge reached, an iron stake stuck out of the river at what was clearly the wrong angle. It was not buoyed. I should like to have found out the history of that stake but never did. In any case, there are so many quaint stories about bridges over the Nile one more would make no difference. There is the story, for example, which I told Alaa that very morning as we were passing the dangerous-looking stake on our way out of Beni Suef. I wanted him to tell me if it was true. There was an architect who designed a swing bridge for Cairo and it was completed and the king of Egypt turned up with much pomp and circumstance and pressed the button but nothing happened. Nothing ever did happen according to the story and the swing bridge stayed where it was without swinging and the pomp and circumstance left for other places as if for a previous engagement. Well, was it true?
‘No,’ said Alaa, ‘it wasn’t.’
‘But my dear boy! I was told in the minutest detail – the architect went straight home to his apartment on Zamalik and shot himself. Architects always shoot themselves when things go wrong. It’s a tradition. I bet the ancient Egyptian who made a mistake over the “Unfinished Obelisk” shot himself.’
‘Where is this bridge?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I’ve never seen it,’ said Alaa brusquely. ‘I know the story. It’s about Aboul-ela bridge. And in any case he didn’t shoot himself. He went off and built something else. Maybe he built the Eiffel Tower.’
The wind of morning was keen.
‘I expect the truth is he shot himself and then built the Eiffel Tower.’
All the same, there are some strange and authenticated stories about building bridges over the Nile. They are based in the huge, mild power of river water, with its unceasing pressure day and night, year in, year out. There was a bridge built with the best of intentions and the most elaborate of calculations, only somehow the river had not read the calculations and did something which was not in the figures. It just ignored the bridge altogether and went somewhere else so the bridge was left high and dry without any river to give it a reason for existing. Once a large river boat full of stone sank in midstream. The hulk broke the current at that point so that silt fell out of the water where it was slowed. The silt became a mud bank and then an island which is still there, all because of one boatload of stone. I wondered what the water would do with that stake at Beni Suef and its obviously wrong angle.
The river seemed a little wider above the bridge of Beni Suef than it had been in Cairo. As the dawn mists cleared away we could see that there was some evidence of prosperity over on the eastern bank – houses and villas and estates stretched out among palms under the brown and yellow desert. The levees were lower now and we could see over them. On the west bank by contrast and only a mile or so beyond Beni Suef there were real hovels and the abjectly poor fellaheen so often written about. There were small enclosures made of nothing but dried sugar cane or perhaps maize stalks, mud huts with a few canes laid across one corner to serve as a roof. Then we came to an unconcealed mud brick village and my facile ideas about the ‘immemorial angle’ were at once complicated out of existence. There was no immemorial angle; or rather there were all kinds of angles and curves; and all plainly the ‘incompetent angle’, for if the fellaheen had ever known how to build in mud brick they had forgotten now. Some of the angles actually went the wrong way so that the building leaned out instead of in. That this was a mistake was plain to see because some of the buildings had actually fallen and blocked alleys. One ridiculous hut had the left-hand wall leaning out and the right-hand wall leaning in so that the whole building leaned to the left and looked as if it would slump sideways at any moment. Reeds were employed in this complex of misuse, but scantily. It was all hopeless. Once again we were in time to see that curious moment when the trance of the night turned into the slow movements of dawn [see plate]. The first movements came from small children who ran about to keep warm. Women wrapped in black slowly crept out of holes in houses. Goats and donkeys moved but only just. Then we had left them behind and never saw the brisker movements of their day. That’s the traveller’s trouble when he’s carried in a vehicle that he doesn’t control. I’ve never forgotten travelling by express train on the old Great Western Railway and seeing a cricket match going on. The batsman had hit enormously towards mid-on, who was running frantically to catch the ball. He stretched out his hand and a house hid him. That’s fifty years ago and I’ve often wondered whether he caught the ball or not. Silly. Anyway, we left the village coming back to life such as it was.
Alaa got out his battery of cameras. They were more costly than the boat, I should think. As the day broadened under a low sun we began to meet the Nile barges, powered craft called trams (the ‘a’ is long) which can take up to a couple of hundred tons of bulk cargo. Some craft are combined as you may see on the Rhine or Seine, one pushing the other. The bows and stern are so shaped as to interlock. The first one is called the ‘pusher’, and the one ahead of it the ‘sandal’, though it has no sail. Both together make up a ‘fleat’. A tug is called a ‘kicker’ and usually pulls a line of sail sandals. The first pusher we saw had a large cabin right aft, rather like a landing craft, with painted kerosene cans containing hopeful shrubs. This was rare. Egyptians don’t often go in for private gardens.
Now we entered a stretch of river with palms to the left and a low island on the right which seemed to consist of nothing but reeds, phragmites, set in shallow water and so close together you could not force a canoe through them. Once upon a time the island would have been nothing but papyrus, but not any more. Somehow, phragmites, the same tall flowering reed you can find by the Thames or any canal in England or indeed Europe, has ousted the famous paper plant. Now, except for some specimens cultivated in the Delta you have to go all the way down to the Sudan to find papyrus growing wild. These reeds were very tall, ten or twelve feet, I should think. Here and there fishermen were holed up among them in heavy rowing boats and looking rather like they do in Chinese paintings. Their oars once more were plain baulks of timber, the looms square, the blades non-existent. I asked Alaa what was the point of these seemingly ridiculous implements which are common on water from one end of Egypt to the other. He said you could consider the timber to have a long thin blade rather than a short broad one because of the huge weight of the heavy rowing boat. So there is another example of the apparently ludicrous having a logical explanation.
There was a faint breeze blowing the wrong way. I mean it was blowing from the southwest, which is where the hot Khamsin is supposed to come from, unseasonable at that time of the year. In any case, it was not only blowing the wrong way, but it was also cold. A notable phenomenon was the behaviour of the small sailing boats, which the Egyptians call feluccas, pronouncing the word ‘felookah’. Well, the feluccas, not much bigger than rowing boats, can startle the curious onlooker because they appear to be contradicting the laws of hydrodynamics and aerodynamics all at the same time. They stand within less than one point of the wind. This is impossible. I was delighted for a while. But if you should see a felucca behaving so, look closely ahead of it among the reeds, and presently, fifty yards ahead of the boat you will detect a small boy plodding through the shallow water and attached to the felucca by a long, thin line. He is usually dressed in dirty brown and thus camouflaged by the reeds.
As the sun rose, the two levees which hid Egypt from us disappeared. It seemed a contradiction in the behaviour of water but I was glad of it, because now we could see countryside. Between us and the Eastern Desert, that brown cloud on the h
orizon, there were miles of scattered scrub and palms. By 8 o’clock in the morning the laden trek to the water was beginning. The women came from more than a mile away, but with huge baskets on their heads. The baskets were full of a clover of vivid green for the donkeys that had been left overnight by the river. Perhaps with the dense rural population and inchmeal farming the narrow strip by the river was the only grazing.
The Eastern Desert changed from a cloud to solid fists of rock and swept in towards the very bank of the river. It became a cliff dominated by a cemetery which dogs liked. On the western shore there were no brickyards eating up the rich soil but maize, sugar cane and date palms, with not a smoking chimney in sight. As for the eastern shore, it was edged by the speeding water. There were obvious shallows and rips. The current was faster in the tortuous channel that Shasli was following. 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 [see plate]. There were lines of foam, then patches of flat water where it welled up again from the bottom after falling over a hidden ledge. There were more fleats and trams. We were following a whole line of them, all doing their best to wriggle through a complicated channel. But then there wasn’t so much a procession as a crowd, some of them tied up two or three deep along the western shore with others dotted here and there, fast aground. There was much shouting and manoeuvring. I stayed in our cabin watching the whole affair through our ample windows, well out of it as our crew ran round the deck, poled with a boat hook, swore, invoked Allah and a whole litany of what I supposed were saints and shouted and gesticulated. We hit, of course, hit hard in a river which I had always fancied had a deep mud bottom, but my goodness no! It was a nasty crash and grind. You could feel every bit of stone gouging at her hull and worse still at her propeller as the current drew her off. She touched on what must have been compacted gravel. Shasli went slow ahead when we were free, feeling his way along a ledge, bump, bump, bump-here! So we were able then to thread among the stranded pushers, fleats and trams for we drew less water than they. There was a crowd waiting for the sixteenth of February and the ponding of the water behind each barrage in turn. It looked like a long wait.