by Paul Theroux
My hotel was on the river, walking distance from the train station. Gull-winged feluccas on the sparkling Nile, hawks overhead, crows, breathable air, a clear sky, and as many as 300 riverboats moored for the Nile cruises to Luxor. But business was poor – there were more boats than there were mooring places or piers, they were piled up and double and triple parked. It was early February, low season, and because tourists confused Israeli and Palestinian violence with much-more-placid Egypt, they were avoiding the Nile cruises.
I had breakfast, bought some amber beads in the bazaar, and did the Al-Ahram (English edition) crossword puzzle in the sunshine, sitting on a bench.
It was then, setting down one answer (it was aa, a Hawaiian word for a certain kind of cindery lava rock) that I was approached by the young man in a grubby white gown, who said to me, ‘We go. Nice felucca. We find Nubian banana.’
There were plenty of takers. Young women, singly or in pairs, being sailed by Egyptians, singly or in pairs, at sundown had to know that they were doing something that no Egyptian woman would do without understanding that they were putting themselves completely into the hands of these young men – these priapic young men.
While watching the feluccas tacking into the darkness into crepuscular copulations, I was approached by a big dark man.
‘I am Nubian,’ he said. ‘Mohammed.’
Another unambiguous flirtation, I was sure.
‘You ever been to Japan?’
‘Yes, I have – several times.’ Thinking: an ambiguous flirtation, then.
‘You like?’
‘Japan? Lots of people. Very expensive. Unlike Aswan – not many people. Very cheap.’
‘I am a tour guide here for ten years for Japanese people,’ he said. ‘I hate Japanese people. What is in their heads? What is inside? They are …’ But he didn’t finish the sentence. He winced, searching for words. ‘I hate to be a guide for them. Something is wrong with Japanese people.’
‘Maybe they are not like you,’ I said, trying to calm him.
‘They are not like me. Not like you. Not like anyone.’
‘You think so.’
‘I know this!’
To a Nubian such as Mohammed the Japanese were weird, mask-faced, backward-looking, strangely attired, oddly aromatic and inexplicable; much as a Nubian might seem to a Japanese. It was not for me to arrange for the twain to meet here in Aswan, but as a matter of fact there were a great number of Nubians here, who had been uprooted and rehoused because of the disruption of the High Dam and the lake that emerged.
Sudan was just at the other side of the lake, and there was a clear link, culturally and racially, with greater Nubia, the coming and going, the language most of all. No one said to me here as people said all the time in Cairo, ‘This isn’t Africa.’ This was Africa, and Aswan was full of relocated Nubians, whose villages had been inundated by Lake Nasser.
At noon that day I boarded the Philae, a lovely river cruiser with a capacity of about 100 passengers, and there were almost that number on this down-the-Nile trip, lots of Germans, some British and Americans, Egyptians, Dutch, and one Indian family, two adults and a small badly-behaved boy, the only child on the boat, who was bored and whiney the whole trip.
Recreational history, what most sightseeing amounts to, the History Channel in 3-D, to justify the enormous gourmet buffets and fabulous dinners and drinks on the upper deck: this was the mission of the Philae contingent. I had been on only two other cruises in my life – the luxury Seabourn Spirit (‘Your caviar will be sent to your suite shortly, sir’) and a Turkish junket in the MV Akdeniz which had delivered me to the coast of Egypt, with 450 courteous Turks, reminiscing about the Ottomans and wishing the Khedive still had the whip hand.
Wealthy people too lazy to read love cruises for the anecdotal history and archeological chitchat that later serve them to one-up their listeners in boasting-bouts after they go home. The Nile cruise passenger is someone in the process of becoming a licensed bore. The apprenticeship is filled with exploratory questions in the realm of Egyptology, much more than just the correct pronunciation of Ptah and Hatshepsut.
‘So the common people weren’t allowed to enter the temple?’ and: ‘Which one is Horus?’ and the recurring question of the tourist on the Nile, ‘How in heck did they manage to lift these things?’
Now and then the queries were detailed: ‘You mean there’s more than one Ptolemy?’ to which the answer was ‘Zayre was feefseen’ – – and Ptolemy the math whizz wasn’t one of them.
Or: ‘How many centuries did you say?’ and the answer: ‘Seerty.’
The more meaningless the question the more detailed the interrogation, and the cruise passenger would just nod when the answer was delivered.
A woman on the Philae, for reasons of her own, kept asking the onboard Egyptologist, ‘Is that fronic?’
And the answer was sometimes yes, and sometimes spelled out on the item in question, the two hieroglyphics indicated in the cartouche, Per and Oni, meaning Big House, or Big Structure, or King, Pharaonic.
One night in Aswan I went by felucca to Elephantine Island, while in the distance midstream more feluccas, Egyptians at the tiller, were steering foreign women into the darkness and the quality of light gave the expression ‘being spirited away’ a definite meaning. The island was a gift to Horatio, Lord Kitchener, for mercilessly putting down the rebellion in the Sudan, a massacre known as the Battle of Omdurman, which was belated revenge for the Mahdi’s decapitation of General Gordon. Kitchener turned Elephantine Island into a botanical garden, which he could view from his villa. Some of the palms and plumeria and exotic shrubs still flourish, but what is most remarkable about the island is that from the east bank there is a view of the cliff-side town and the bazaar, and from the west, across a stretch of river, just sand dunes, long monumental sand pistes of smoothness, suggesting depth in the way it lay in wind-swept swathes, scooped and carved, like trackless snow-fields tinted pink and gold at sunset, awaiting skiers.
My felucca sailor dropped me in the dark at the east bank, below the town where, at the limit of the bazaar, I spotted an imam in a white gallabieh standing at the gateway of his mosque. But it was too dark for me to see the outlines of this place of worship. As I walked closer I saw it was not an imam but a priest in a white cassock – what’s the difference? He was standing at the gateway of his church, inhaling the night air. Seeing me, he beckoned with a benign wave of the hand.
He was Benito Cruciani, from Macerata in Italy, and had come here to Aswan by way of the Sudan, where he had stayed for nine years until he became ill and was invalided out.
‘I was in Darfur,’ he said – a remote district in the western Sudan. ‘The Africans used to throw stones at me. But when I said, “I am not American, I am Italian,” they stopped.’
He was a Comboni father, the order named for Daniel Comboni, whose motto ‘Africa or death’ was prophetic, for in the event he achieved both simultaneously, dying in the Sudan in 1881. Father Comboni’s plan was ‘Save Africa through Africa,’ which seemed a gnomic way of expressing a missionary intention. In fact, such priests made few converts, taught by example and were watched closely by the Islamic Brotherhood, less robust than in Cairo but robust all the same. That is to say, unbelievers were now and then made an example of by being murdered.
‘Your name, Cruciani, sounds like “cross” in Italian,’ I said.
Yes, he said, it was a deliberate construction, Cruciani was a Florentine family associated with the Crusades, and six centuries later he was still a crusader (crociato), promoting Christ in an intolerant Islamic fastness.
‘I want to go to the Sudan. I’m still waiting for my visa. Any advice for me?’
‘You are alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘We say, “Mountain and sea – never travel alone.” ’
‘A proverb?’
‘Not so much a proverb as a rule you should obey.’
‘I don’t have much choice.’
/> ‘So my advice is – pray,’ Father Cruciani said. He then beckoned, Italian fashion, dog-paddling with one hand. ‘Come.’
He stepped inside the church and just as I entered I heard a great booming muezzin’s voice calling the faithful to pray, ‘Allahu akhbar!’ As this reverberated in the crypt, Father Cruciani showed me the under-altar effigy of St Teresa, the saint’s life-sized figure in a glass coffin. While we were looking at it four youths in blue and white school uniforms crept towards it and stuffed some notes through a slot in the coffin.
‘So they will pass their exams,’ Father Cruciani said and made a satirical face.
Outside I said, ‘No one is very upbeat about the Sudan.’
He said, ‘Wonderful people. Terrible government. The African story.’
In a little corner of the rescued and reconstructed Temple of Isis at Philae, in the river south of Aswan, was a bull in stone, the image of the god Hapi – or Apis – surrounded by protective snakes. Apis was the sacred bull of Memphis, associated with the river and so with fertility, and worshiped as the god of the Nile. Nearby was the image of Osiris, god of the earth, in his candle-pin headgear, personification of the Nile, the flooding of the river symbolizing his rebirth; his features were smashed, and so were those of Horus, its falcon face obliterated by fanatic Early Christians. There was lots of Napoleonic graffiti on the walls. The Nile cruise past Egyptian ruins is an experience of obliterations and graffiti. Over 150 years ago, the young Gustave Flaubert lamented these very things in a letter to his mother. ‘In the temples we read travelers’ names; they strike us as petty and futile. We never write ours; there are some that must have taken three days to carve, so deeply are they cut in the stone. There are some that you keep meeting everywhere – sublime persistence of stupidity.’
The human faces were scratched away, the gods’ images were chipped off, the walls have been stripped and chiseled into. But though the experience of the ruins is the experience of millennia of vandalism the proof of the strength and glory of the ruins is that they are still beautiful, even cracked and defaced and scribbled on.
The tall pink granite obelisks that you see in London and Paris and Central Park originated at the ancient quarry outside Aswan where work in stoppage shows the famous Unfinished Obelisk. This stone pillar, eighty feet long, distinctly geometric and symmetrical, being chopped from the granite ledge, lies partly hewn, being gaped at and trodden upon by bewildered admirers.
‘It was all by hand!’
‘Maybe they just got sick of working on it.’
‘How in heck did they manage to lift these things?’
An Egyptologist was saying, ‘So Osiris was killed by his evil brother Seth and cut into fourteen pieces. One of them was eaten by a fish, and Isis used it to revive Osiris and give birth to Horus. Which one, do you think?’
His leer suggested the obvious answer but speaking for the group one passenger asked, ‘Any crocs in the river here?’
The answer was no, none here, none even downstream at Crocodilo-polis – though one had been kept and worshiped at the temple there, as the cat – image of the goddess of joy and love - had been worshiped in the temple at Bast. The big crocs these days lazed on the banks of the White Nile, in the swampy Sudd in the southern Sudan and even farther upriver at the source of the Nile, Lake Albert and Lake Victoria. The crocs here had been long since made into handbags and belts.
We visited the High Dam and Lake Nasser, we waited until our flight was canceled to Abu Simbel, 200 miles south at the border of the Sudan and the head of the lake.
The pleasantest aspect of the river cruise was the combination of gourmandizing and sightseeing, gliding with the current and stopping every now and then at a resurrected ruin. And I liked the ruins most for the way they were overrun by the rackety bazaar, not just curio-sellers but browsing donkeys among the pillars, and goats in the roadway; hawkers’ stalls in the foreground and Ptolemaic colors on the sheltered upper parts of the temples, still bright after thousands of years. Kom-Ombo, where the Philae stopped the first day, was an example of these features – the bazaar, the ruins, the chewing animals, the loud music, the double shrine of Horus and the croc god represented by mummified crocs inside the temple. Kom-Ombo was not just temples but a small town and its name, meaning ‘Pile of Gold,’ was both flattery and mockery, and the temples looked more appropriate as part of the life of the town rather than fenced-off museum pieces. They did not gain dignity in being reconstructed; they looked false and approximated.
The town itself with its Nubian name was ancient.
‘Who lived here way back?’
‘Many bibble.’
The walls of the temple at Kom-Ombo were Egyptology in pictures, history and culture. As a reminder of the wisdom and skill of the Egyptians, one wall depicted medical instruments: pliers, forceps, knives, hooks, suction devices, the paraphernalia for carrying out serious surgery, possibly more surgery than was being carried out in the present-day Kom-Ombo General Hospital. Childbirth was illustrated in one hieroglyph. I sketched a picture of the Eye of Horus, which in a simplified form became the symbol (Rx) for a prescription. Elsewhere on the temple walls were representations of the natural world, vultures, ducks, bulls and hawks, and farther on, warriors, and a whole pantheon of the Egyptians’ enemies, including an unmistakable Negroid head and torso, a fierce warrior with the heavy-lidded gaze of the Nubian. It was wonderful to see such black assertive faces glaring from the walls of these ancient temples, like DNA in bas-relief, proof of the power and persistence of the African.
We floated onward in the Philae, nibbling delicacies, sipping fine wines, leering at the honeymooners on board, dodging the boisterous little Indian boy. We got to Edfu. ‘The temple of Edfu serves as a latrine for the entire village,’ Flaubert noted in his diary in 1850. But it was disinterred and tidied up and is said to be the best preserved temple in Egypt.
Until the later nineteenth century, all these temples were torsos, broken up and fallen, just smashed up carvings and fat pointless pillars, scattered in the Upper Nile Valley. ‘There is always some temple buried to its shoulders in the sand, partially visible, like an old dug-up skeleton,’ Flaubert wrote. The great delineator of wrecked Egyptian sites, David Roberts, loved the ruination and in 1840 he said they seemed to him much more beautiful half-buried and bruised. They reminded him of Piranesi etchings of the Forum in Rome.
I saw what he meant when I came across a ruin in the middle of nowhere – a brilliant image, the lovely carving fallen and forgotten in the desert, a much more dramatic subject than a rebuilt temple teeming with hot-faced and complaining tourists. Flaubert took a delight in reporting how dilapidated the temples were, because he was not in search of ruins, he much preferred the oddities of the Nile journey, and dallying with dancing girls and prostitutes. Twenty-seven years after Flaubert visited, another traveler reported that the 2000-year-old Temple of Edfu was being dug out and had begun to look like its old self, as in the festival days of Edfu’s greatness, celebrating the enactment of Horus avenging his father Osiris by stabbing hippo-bodied Seth.
In a new interpretation of these images, Horus is seen by some astronomers as the representation of a failed star in our solar system. The Egyptians had seen this so-called brown dwarf in the skies at its perihelion, or visible swing of its orbit, spinning round our sun beyond the known planets. This massive phantom star, out there unseen in the wilderness of space, crucially controlling our own planet, is only one aspect of the Dark Star Theory.
The Greeks learned how to make columns by studying the symmetry of Egyptian pillars like these at Edfu. If a temple is buried deeply enough and the soil is dry and no archeologist or treasure hunter disturbs it, there is a sort of preservation in that very neglect. The Temple of Horus looks whole, cathedral-like in the way the pillars soar, some friezes still retaining the red flesh tones on human figures and bluebirds and green snakes coiled on the upper walls. At the main gateway the upright falcon Horus, its eyes the s
un and moon, stands sentinel, its halo the disk of the sun god.
Some images were defaced. In the past, tourists broke off pieces of Egyptian sculpture to keep as souvenirs – Twain describes an American chipping off a chunk of the Sphinx. But in Edfu, defaced was an exact word: it told perfectly what had happened to the depictions of these soldiers and workers and striding women on the walls. It was so consistent and stylistically similar as to seem like a sort of negative sculpture, the art of obliteration. As striking as the images of gods and humans and animals on this temple – and it was a theme throughout – was the vandalism: defaced human heads, scratched-out hands and feet, chopped off legs, hacked off bodies, everything representing flesh was chipped away, even the heads and hooves of animals. Headdresses, the hats, the cloaks, the costumes were left, so that in a particularly pretty sculpture of an elaborately dressed prince, all the finery would be intact but the face would be scooped out and the hands scraped off.
‘Done by early Christians,’ was the usual explanation. But Muslims deplore human images, and so it might have been the effect of fanatic Islam. But the Muslim Egyptologists denied that, and insisted that the Christians – and especially Christians from Ethiopia – were to blame for these amazingly methodical defacings.
‘Maybe not out of anger,’ Fawzi, one Egyptologist, said. ‘Maybe because the Christians had been persecuted. Maybe to obliterate pre-Christian history.’
But he admitted that no one knew. What fascinated me was the care that the defacers had taken. They had not wrecked the temple or gone at the wall with sledgehammers. They had poked away at these carvings with care bordering on respect, and you had to conclude that they could not have done any of this in this way, removing little, leaving so much, if they had not felt a certain terror.
