by Paul Theroux
I fished for my twenty Egyptian pounds. We mounted the horses and were off, trotting through garbage beside ancient walls.
‘You pay later. Hey, how many wives you got? I got four – two Egyptian, two English. I keep them very busy!’
‘Of course.’
‘You are a gentleman. I can see in your face.’
‘Twenty pounds, right?’
‘No, no – twenty American dollars. See Safinkees. You touch the moomiya! My fren’ he let me. He know me. Maybe you buy picture. Papyrus. Mother-of-pearl box.’
‘You said twenty pounds.’
‘I say “twenty.” You hear me say “twenty”? Use Visa card!’ He leaned over and whipped my pony. ‘Make the horse gallop. I see you next week. Ha!’
He took out a mobile phone and stabbed the buttons with his stubby fingers and shouted into it and then, ‘This my phone. “Hello, hello!” Cost 2000. Horse is 5000. Arabian is 20,000 – maybe 30,000. Money! You give me baksheesh.’
‘Money, money.’
‘America – best country! America money – best money!’
We were still jogging along, up one muddy littered alley, down another, as dusk fell, as men in gowns and women in robes walked in a stately way, in spite of the puddles, and children shrieked at me on my pony.
‘You give me America money. I take you inside pyramid!’
‘Money, money, money, money. Please stop saying money.’
Mohammed howled into his mobile phone and dug his heels into his horse’s belly and slapped the reins against his horse’s flanks. And he led me past the wall, which was the perimeter of the enclosure of the Gizeh pyramids, a tumbledown neighborhood of squatters and slum-dwellers attached to the wall. In Egypt every wall attracts dumpers, litterers, shitters and pissers, dogs and cats, and the noisiest children.
Mohammed was manic in his banter: ‘America – strong country. Number one country. My fren,’ baksheesh! You buy papyrus … You touch moomiya … You take picture in pyramid … See Safinkees.’
Yakkety-yak, all for money.
And yet, in spite of his banter and his pestering and his deceits, the jaunt on horseback that early evening in Gizeh was gorgeous. Trotting through the back alleys that were stinking with garbage and litter in the mud, the basins of dirty water and buckets of garbage and chamber pots that were being thrown from upper balconies, with a squawk that might have meant ‘gardy loo.’ The smoke from the fires lit in braziers, the stink of the pissed-on walls, the graffiti, the dust piles, the brick shards, the baked mud, the neighborhood so decrepit and worn, so pulverized, it looked as though it had been made out of wholewheat flour and baked five thousand years ago and was now turning back into little crumbs. And yet I loved riding through the crepuscular dusk, parting the air that was penetrated with food smells and smoke and garbage, jogging through the puddles, with the muezzin howling, the dogs barking, the children chasing my sorry pony – the lovely evening sky showing through the dust cloud and striped bright yellow and cobalt blue. And then the pyramid, smaller than I had expected, so brown and corrugated and geometric it looked like giant origami folded from cardboard.
‘Safinkees,’ he said and waved his arms.
The Greek word ‘sphinx’ is unpronounceable to Egyptians, and also inaccurate – the fanciful Greeks associated it with their own mythical creature, appropriated it, much as the Arabs have done.
‘What do you call it?’ I asked.
‘His name Abu-el-Houl,’ Mohammed said.
But that is no more than an Arab nickname meaning the Father of Terror. The enigmatic creature is Ra-Herakhti, manifestation of the sun rising, with a lion’s body and the facial features of Khafre, who was King of Egypt at the time of its construction, 4500 years ago. Sesheb ankh or ‘living image’ is the ancient Egyptian term for such a statue.
Holding on to my saddle I peered into the dusk at the worn down and noseless face resting on crumbly forepaws, like a sand sculpture that had been rained on.
Because the Sphinx is the embodiment of dawn, it faces east, and so the sun was setting in the dust cloud directly behind it. You would not know that from some of the paintings that have been done of it. But Egyptian ruins are so atmospheric they tend to inspire the watcher into blurring reality, the over-excited traveler into seeing much more than is there. Hardly a painting depicts the Sphinx as it is, and even the stickler for Middle Eastern detail, David Roberts, gives it a yearning expression and, for effect, makes it face the wrong way. Earlier painters gave it thick lips and big staring eyes, the painter-traveler Vivant Denon gave it a Negroid face and a wondering gaze.
‘No drawing that I have seen conveys a proper idea of it,’ Flaubert wrote, which is probably true. But when he rode out to it in 1849 he repeated the name the Arabs had told him, Abu el-Houl, the Father of Terror, and noted in his diary, ‘We stop before the Sphinx; it fixes us with a terrifying stare.’ But he also said it seemed to him dog-like, ‘pug-nosed and tattered,’ and Flaubert’s friend Maxime Du Camp claimed that it looked ‘like an enormous mushroom when viewed from behind.’ The Sphinx was the one sight on his Grand Tour that Mark Twain did not mock. The pages in The Innocents Abroad that concern the Sphinx are unique in that breezy book and rare in Twain’s work for his descriptive flights, as he rhapsodizes, even gushes, studying the thing. ‘So sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient … It was MEMORY-RETROSPECTION wrought into visible tangible form … [and] … reveals to one something of what he shall feel when he shall stand in the presence of God.’
This is travelers’ invention – I saw it, you didn’t, therefore I am licensed to exaggerate. Twain tells us how he had longed to see the Sphinx, but he at least had seen a photo of it. Flaubert had seen drawings of the Sphinx but never a photograph – there were none. In fact, Maxime Du Camp claimed to be the first to take a picture of it. In his life of Flaubert, Geoffrey Wall noted that these men were probably the last Europeans to see it in this way, afresh. But photography’s spoiling the visual pleasure of places is nothing compared to the way the Internet and our age of information have destroyed the pleasure of discovery in travel.
Invention in travel accords with Jorge Luis Borges’s view, floated beautifully through his poem ‘Happiness’ (La Dicha), that in our encounters with the world, ‘everything happens for the first time.’ Just as ‘whoever embraces a woman is Adam,’ and ‘whoever lights a match in the dark is inventing fire,’ anyone’s first view of the Sphinx sees it new: ‘In the desert I saw the young Sphinx, which has just been sculpted … Everything happens for the first time but in a way that is eternal.’
Ruins especially lend themselves to invention; because they are incomplete, we finish them in our imagination. And although later that evening I ran into a beaky-faced man, in wilting clothes, thirtyish, fogeyish, frumpish, one of those pale bosomy academics you could easily mistake for a senile old woman, who waved his art history degree at me and said with slushy pedantry, ‘The Sphinx is vastly overrated,’ the Sphinx is a perfect object to turn into something of your very own, something grand, or in Nigel’s case, something negligible.
Mohammed said, ‘You give me money. I show you moomiya. You touch!’
‘Please stop saying money.’
He laughed, he gabbled, I was not listening, I didn’t really care, I was laughing myself. I felt a great happiness – the horse, the light, the decay, the ancient shapes, the children’s laughter – and it became one of the epiphanies of my traveling life.
I dismounted and leading my horse closer to the Sphinx I was approached by a woman who asked, using gestures, if I would help her lift a heavy plastic basket. I heaved it – but it was heavy, perhaps forty pounds – Mohammed was laughing at me from where he sat on his horse – and she curtsied while I placed the big basket on to her noggin. She could not hoist it alone but she easily carried it on her head.
Riding back to the stables, Mohammed began shouting ahead of me, louder than before.
‘Look! Look! See that man!’
&n
bsp; The man was standing by a wall, a young man in a white robe, a tangle of turban on his head.
‘He not from Egypt! He from Sudan! I know, I know – because his face! He from there.’
Mohammed waved his arm, indicating far away – southerly, in a Sudanese direction.
‘Black!’ he howled, for blackness was such a novelty in Lower Egypt; and he galloped onward. ‘Black!’
Traveling south of Egypt I would be entering the Sudan. I did not have a Sudanese visa and for Americans such visas were hard to come by. The reason was understandable. On the pretext that Sudan was making anti-American bombs (and some people felt to correct the negative image created by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, to look decisive and presidential, even if it meant risking lives and flattening foreign real estate), President Clinton ordered air strikes against the Sudan. He succeeded in destroying a pharmaceutical factory outside of Khartoum in August 1998. This bomb crater would be on my itinerary, for after the bombs were dropped no one in the United States took much interest. Though we become hysterical at the thought that someone might bomb us, bombs that we explode elsewhere, in little countries far away, are just theater, of little consequence, another public performance of our White House, the event factory.
‘I would like to see the bomb site,’ I was telling the Sudanese ambassador, Salih Mashamoun, in his office in Cairo. He was a pleasant, well-educated man who had been ambassador to Vietnam. He was Nubian, he said, from northern Sudan, and raised speaking Nubian.
‘Is Nubian anything like Arabic?’
‘Nubian has no connection with Arabic. It is the true pharaonic tongue.’
He said that he regarded Nubians as the genuine Egyptians and that colonialists had confused the issue by imposing a frontier that divided Egypt and the Sudan. Talking with him made me want to go to Nubia.
‘There, inshallah, you will find pyramids and ruins that are greater than Egyptian. Nubia is the source of Egyptian culture. You must see Dongola and Meroe. The upper Nile. The Nubian tombs.’
But first I needed a visa. I made repeated visits to the Sudanese Embassy. The doorman got to know me, and after three visits he simply waved me through the gate and I went unaccompanied upstairs to the ambassador’s office, and when I put my head through the door he beckoned me in and urged me to sit and talk and offered me tea and told me that Khartoum had not responded to my visa application.
‘But perhaps, inshallah, it will be given.’
‘What shall I do?’
‘You can reapply. Or see Mr Qurashi. He is consul.’
Mr Qurashi Saleh Ahmed was thin, smirking, officious, always waving a cigarette, with a male secretary who constantly shouted at him. Mr Qurashi blew smoke at him and did not respond.
‘No fax from Khartoum.’
‘Maybe it will come tomorrow.’
‘Inshallah.’
It was helpful at this early stage of my trip to be reminded of the conflicting meanings of inshallah, which are: ‘We hope’ and ‘Don’t count on it.’
Mr Qurashi said, ‘You can reapply.’
Inaction from an official in such circumstances inspires the thought: Does he want baksheesh? I hung around, wondering whether to offer a bribe, and how to phrase the offer.
I took Mr Qurashi aside and said, ‘Is there anything I might do to help this matter along?’
He said nothing, he happened to be reading a closely typed letter.
‘Perhaps I could pay in advance?’
He was not tempted, he accepted my new application, he urged me to pay another visit because phones were unreliable. ‘But they will be repaired, inshallah.’
I went the next day, and the day after. The same taxi driver, Guda (‘like same as Dutch cheese’, I got the joke every day), who said, ‘In my whole life, I have never taken an American to this embassy. And why you want to go to Sudan?’
‘To see the pyramids. To talk to the people.’
‘Leetle birameed! Boor beeble!’
There is no ‘p’ in Arabic, no ‘v’ either.
More visits followed, I wanted to give this visa my best shot; but in a narrative of this kind such stories of delays are not interesting. The traveler awaiting a visa sits in a stinking armchair in the embassy foyer, looking at the national map and the colored photographs of the national sights and the dusty national calendar, the framed picture of the head of state smiling insincerely, the unfamiliar national flag; cranky officials, the sounds of telephones and murmurs, the back and forth of harassed secretaries. It is easy in these circumstances to talk yourself out of going, for this awful building and this dreary room begin to seem like the country itself.
To pass the time in this week of waiting, I went to the Cairo Museum, I visited the Nobel Prize-winner, Naguib Mahfouz, whom I had last seen in the Intensive Care Ward of the Military Hospital after his stabbing by a Muslim fanatic (recently hanged); I went to a party, I got other, easier visas.
Images of the African interior, where I was headed, filled the Cairo Museum, and I consoled myselfby strolling up and down the enormous rooms and the ornate displays, looking at the Africa of wild animals and majestic palms and sculptural faces with the heavy-lidded Nubian gaze, vividly displayed in ancient carvings and paintings and bas-reliefs and sculptures in the museum. Representations in gold and ebony and precious stones of lions, cheetahs, cobras, eagles, hippos were everywhere, not as incidental decorations but as idols, the cobra god Wadjet, the bat-eared jackal Anubis, god of mummification, the sly sexual lion-headed goddess Sekhmet, lion-bodied men, alabaster cats, huge gold hawks, and even the chariots and the gold beds were given an African theme in the vivid imagery of posts with the features of hippos and rails in the shapes of leopards.
Small blue-glazed hippos, King Tut’s cheetah-skin shield, the multitude of stone-carved upright cats – all of them feline gods. To me this was an African treasure house, with fantastic mummifications, the mummified falcon, Horus, mummified sacred ibis; fish in mummy wrappings, and a crocodile in cloth, too, for crocs were worshiped up the Nile in Kom-Ombo, where I wanted to go. The Goddess of Joy, Bastet the cat, mummified as a slender gauzy idol. The Egyptian sentiment and craze for preservation had them mummifying their pets, their trophies, their prize catches, much as a moose hunter seeks a taxidermist and just as frivolous – a mummified Nile perch five feet long, a mummified dog with its tail jerked vertical, the skeleton of a horse.
I was reminded of how from medieval times mummies were taken to Europe for use in medicine (Montaigne mentions this in his essay ‘On the Cannibals’) and that Othello’s handkerchief, woven by an Egyptian, had magic properties, for it was ‘dyed in mummy.’
Nothing was weirder to me than the seated baboon, also a manifestation of Thoth (as well as ‘god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned’), this one mummified but coming apart, the wrapping over its head falling loose, its unwrapped paw extended, still furry and a little dusty, like an ape stirring in a haunted house, shedding its bandages, peeping through its blindfold, looking hairy and vindictive.
And if you were planning to worship anything it might as well be the three-thousand-year-old stone carving, towering over me, of the goddess Taweret, ‘The Great One’ – a pregnant hippo standing upright with its big belly ballooning out, with human arms and a lion’s hind legs, associated with fertility and childbirth.
These marvels were within walking distance of the Sudanese Embassy, and my desire to see others like them on the Nile and in Nubia kept me pestering Ambassador Mashamoun for a visa.
‘Nothing yet but maybe soon, inshallah,’ his excellency said. ‘Will you take tea?’
He was more upbeat than many others. I went to a party given by a hospitable family in the salubrious suburb of El Maadi and at dinner an American woman on my left, hearing of my proposed trip said, ‘I have never been to Africa.’
‘I’ve never been to Africa either,’ an American man said across the table.
‘But this is Africa,’ I said.
‘No, no.
Africa is …’ The woman made a gesture, like Mohammed’s gesture at the Nubian boy, meaning down there somewhere.
Without perhaps intending to be negative the partygoers conveyed to me nothing but discouragements.
‘I was in the Sudan,’ a man said. ‘Lovely people. But the roads are awful. I wonder how you’ll manage?’
‘When were you in the Sudan?’
‘Oh, this was’ – and he wagged his head – ‘this was years ago.’
An Irish diplomat said, ‘Your man in Kenya met with six members of the opposition in Khartoum last week and after he left every single one of them was arrested.’
The American man who had claimed Egypt wasn’t Africa said: ‘Zambia’s the place you want to avoid. Zambia’s a mess. People have high walls around their houses. You can’t walk the streets.’
‘Ethiopia – now there’s a place you want to stay away from. It’s still at war with Eritrea.’
A Ugandan man said, ‘Don’t go anywhere near Uganda until after the eighth of March. There’s an election that day and it will be violent.’
‘You heard the AIDS statistics in Kenya? AIDS is wiping out whole communities.’
‘Kenya’s kind of funny. They hired a guy to look at corruption – Richard Leakey. He found lots of it, but when he turned in his report he was sacked.’
‘The thing about the roads in Tanzania is that there aren’t any.’
‘There are no roads in the Congo either. That’s why it’s ungovernable. Anyway it’s really about six countries.’
‘The Sudan is two countries. The Muslim north. The Christian south.’
‘Those land seizures in Zimbabwe are horrendous. White farmers wake up in the morning and find hundreds of Africans camped in their fields saying, “This is ours now.” ’
‘Did anyone read that book about the massacres in Rwanda? I tell you, I got so depressed I couldn’t finish it.’
‘Somalia’s not even a country. It has no government, just these so-called war lords, about fifty of them all fighting it out, like street gangs.’
‘You know about the drought in the Ogaden? Three years without rain.’
