[New York Review of Books, September 26, 1968.]
Down the Nile
In the autumn of 1849, Gustave Flaubert and a friend, Maxime Du Camp, made a wonderful trip to Egypt. At twenty-eight, Flaubert was a handsome, tall, high-spirited, neurotic young man with an ardent yearning for the exotic enchantments of the Orient. It may have been flight from his adored but incredibly dominating mother that in part impelled this journey, or perhaps it was disappointment over his first serious literary effort, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. More understandably, he had a serious and informed taste for antiquity and an irrepressible love of prostitutes, and in Egypt he knew he would find both in abundance. In any case, Flaubert, who was unknown as a writer (Madame Bovary would not appear until seven years later and bring him instantaneous fame), was even then indefatigably recording his impressions of the world, and his travel notes and letters from that nine-month odyssey along the Nile remarkably foreshadow the powers of observation and the acute sensibility that brought his masterpiece into being. By turns beautiful, rapturous, bawdy, hideous, and brutal, his record is also from time to time quite funny. Not only because of the contrasts it presents between the Egypt of now and then but because of the similarities, it comprises a fascinating and instructive document, delicious reading in itself but required reading—let me assign it as a text: Flaubert in Egypt, translated and edited by Francis Steegmuller, Academy Chicago Limited Edition, 1979—for all present-day voyagers along the Nile.
It can accurately be said that there is almost no place on earth that any longer is safe from tourism. When cruises to the Galápagos Islands are within reach of middle-class vacationers, and jumbo jets from New Zealand fly past the ice mountains of Antarctica for panoramic sightseeing trips (and tragically crash, as one plane did not long ago), we have truly begun to inhabit the “global village.” Not only is the Nile no exception, it was beginning to be overrun by tourists even in Flaubert's time, when the exigencies of transportation were complicated to a degree that people accustomed to modern luxury travel can only reflect upon with discomfort. In the Egypt of the mid-nineteenth century, the invaders were already on the scene, inflicting their characteristic wounds. Their ubiquitous spoor—the inescapable graffiti—caused Flaubert some of his deepest moments of depression. “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.” At the Pyramid of Khepren his despair deepens. Under the name of Belzoni, the great archaeologist, he discovers “no less large, that of M. Just de Chasseloup-Laubat. One is irritated by the number of imbeciles’ names written everywhere: on the top of the Great Pyramid there is a certain Buffard, 79 rue Saint-Martin, wallpaper manufacturer, in black letters; an English fan of Jenny Lind's has written her name; there is also a pear, representing Louis-Philippe.”
Tourism is, in general, a human activity that is neither desirable nor undesirable, merely existing in relationship with some landscape or other because people in their incessant curiosity will travel and observe and explore. Under certain circumstances, however, and usually after the passing of a long period of time, tourism becomes absolutely essential to the life of a place, becomes symbiotic, indeed so organically linked as to resemble the teeming bacterial flora that inhabits the human alimentary tract and that contributes to the body's very survival. Over the past one hundred and fifty years or so, Egypt has developed just such a relationship with its legions of visitors. The tourists who pour in season after season, year after year, comprise a critical factor in Egypt's economy; remove tourism, and the country would suffer a catastrophic blow. What makes the present situation so ironic, and so gloomy to contemplate, is that the very tourism that supplies Egypt with an essential part of its sustenance is threatening to destroy the body of the host. Aggravating as they were to Flaubert, and are to the modern visitor, the composers of graffiti are a minor annoyance compared to the larger menace. Both the proliferation of people—in multinational droves becoming more uncontrollable each year—and the sheer physical damage caused by so many millions of shoes stirring up so many tons of abrasive dust, by countless lungs exhaling huge volumes of corrosive carbon dioxide into the fragile environment of the tombs, have brought on a situation of real crisis. Expert observers believe that only immediate and drastic measures will enable Egypt to save the Nile and its treasures for future generations.
As if this were not enough, there is the matter of the dam—the High Dam at Aswan. Built in the 1960s by the Russians at the behest of Gamal Abdel Nasser, then Egypt's president, this vast edifice—now the second-largest rock-filled dam in the world—was intended to usher in the nation's new economic millennium; by the trapping of billions of tons of Nile water in a prodigious reservoir named Lake Nasser, the river would be subjugated, while judicious control and manipulation of the water would bring cheap electrical energy to the entire Nile Valley, along with the potential for millions of newly irrigated acres of fertile land. That much of this has already been accomplished seems indisputable, but, it is becoming increasingly clear, the cost may eventually cancel out the benefits. Many observers believe that the negative effects wrought upon the river by the dam will prove in the long run to be, quite simply, disastrous. I was to learn in detail about these consequences and to view at first hand some of the harbingers of the Nile's change for the worse (I had been on the river once before, in 1967) during a recent February trip down the waterway from Aswan to Cairo, when I was from time to time made uneasily aware that I, too, along with my companions on the voyage, had become yet another manifestation of the tourist pestilence. But even so, it was possible to take some comfort from the fact that the auspices under which we traveled were both dignified and felicitous. Our host on the trip, and a good friend of each of the dozen or so Americans and Europeans whom he had invited aboard the M.S. Abu Simbel, was Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, son of the late Aga Khan and until recently the High Commissioner for Refugees of the United Nations. Married to an Egyptian and profoundly involved in Egypt, its culture, and its history, the prince has a house in Cairo; even more significantly, it was in large measure due to his efforts through UNESCO that the majestic colossi and temples of Abu Simbel and Philae were rescued from the encroaching waters created by the High Dam. Thus, plainly, although we were traveling in privacy and style (the comfort of a boat of one's own is something one need not apologize for), the prince's intimate connection with the Nile and his concern for its heritage and its future allowed his guests a unique perspective—without overly solemnizing what still remains, despite the foregoing auguries, one of the most mysteriously ravishing and moving journeys it is possible to make on the face of the earth.
“Handsome heads, ugly feet” is Flaubert's comment upon the Colossi of Abu Simbel, those gargantuan figures that stand guard on the shores of the Upper Nile, six hundred miles from Cairo; in 1850 the four statues were still partially buried under the sand. Flaubert's companion, Du Camp, made the first known photographs of these sandstone figures of Rameses II, after a boat trip from Cairo that lasted nearly two months. Our own trip from Cairo to Abu Simbel (which we visit before boarding our vessel in Aswan) takes a bare two hours by Egypt Air Boeing 737. In these upper reaches of the waterway, the Nile itself, of course, has become obliterated below the vast and murky expanse of Lake Nasser, which spills out across the desert in a desolate pool nearly the size of Delaware. Interspersed with jagged rock promontories and devoid of vegetation at its edges save for a rare patch of the palest green, like lichen, the lake from the air has an evil, unearthly look, resembling the kind of lake astronauts might encounter beneath the mantle of Saturn or Venus. We land on the recently built airstrip, step out into desert air, which at noon is briskly chill, and are thankful that it is winter. In the depths of summer it has sometimes become so hot that planes have been unable to land; the tarmac melts, turne
d to the consistency of black glue. A brief overland trip by bus brings us to the site.
Rescued from the flood and, by a marvel of engineering, hoisted above it nearly two hundred feet, the Abu Simbel colossi are appallingly big, exceeding all preconceived notions (derived from photographs, even Du Camp's flat, primitive ones) of their bigness; they are simply immense. And awe-inspiring, without a doubt. That these great effigies might have been allowed to sink without trace beneath the waters of Nasser's lake is unthinkable. But despite the sense of awe that they elicit—monuments to human ingenuity, human toil—they do not, for me at least, inspire that ineffable thrill of pleasure that one experiences in the presence of great heroic art. This could be partly due to that “pitiless rigidity” of which Flaubert complained in regard to Egyptian sculpture; or it might be because the colossi, with their enigmatic smiles that so often seem to possess the faintest shadow of a smirk, are simply intimidating, vainglorious, invoking the idea not of true grandeur but of pelf, influence, power. Also, to reproduce one's self four times in figures sixty-six feet high would seem to be a redundancy. The playwright Arthur Miller, one of the Abu Simbel’s voyagers, sits in the chill afternoon light regarding these grandiose duplications (a cast on a recently fractured ankle renders Miller less mobile than the rest of us). “Think of the poor people in those days,” he muses, “who dared to come down the river to invade Egypt from the south. One look at this display and they'd be ready to run back home.” One agrees. They are paradigms of a universal motif: human domination. They would not look out of place adorning the façade of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Even so, they may be more perishable than one might imagine. Farida Galassi, the eloquent French-born Egyptologist who is our guide and who has lived in Egypt for most of her seventy-four years, speaks dispiritedly of the future of the colossi, remarking that she and some of her colleagues feel that the elevation of the statues to higher ground is not only a mere reprieve but a move that in itself contains the seeds of doom. The reason for this is that the old site offered shelter to these vulnerable sandstone figures, while the new location provides exposure to frequent sandstorms, which could prove to be completely destructive in no more than an eyewink in Egyptian time—seventy-five to a hundred years. Thus the High Dam, in a perverse and unpredicted way, may claim Abu Simbel as a victim after all.
Our eponymous vessel awaits at dockside in Aswan. The son of a shipbuilder, I look over the M.S. Abu Simbel with thoughtful attention and am utterly pleased. Relatively small by Nile standards—one hundred and twenty feet long—she and her sister vessel, the Aswan, were built in 1979, the first metal boats to be constructed in Egypt. With a catamaran bottom, she is able to negotiate the shallows. She has nice clean lines, with no furbelows or waste space; yet there are ample cabins with efficient plumbing and abundant hot water (essential after each day's desert dust), a comfortable dining saloon with bar, and, perhaps most attractive of all, an open upper deck of fine proportions, allowing visual access to what for many travelers is a Nile voyage's greatest glory: the incomparable river itself and the timeless tableaux of its shores. Flaubert and Du Camp navigated the Nile by cange, a small sailboat also supplied with oarsmen. “Our two sails, their angles intersecting,” Flaubert wrote, “swelled to their entire width, and the cange skimmed along, heeling, its keel cutting the water….Standing on the poop that forms the roof of our cabin, the mate held the tiller, smoking his black wood chibouk.” Flaubert and his friend traveled with a crew of twelve, a fairly high ratio for two passengers; our baker's dozen requires twenty in the crew, likewise a high ratio when one considers that none are oarsmen. A passage by sail and oar would surely have its own enchantments, and such a trip can still be managed for one or two adventurers; but this form of cruising has virtually disappeared from the river. We are enfolded, rather, in soothing decadence. The food is excellent, often superb. Fully air-conditioned, our vessel travels downstream at an almost vibrationless eight knots, powered by twin one-hundred-and-fifty-horsepower Caterpillar engines. But if our motors are modern, our helm is nearly as ancient as the river itself. There is not a single navigational aid on the Nile—not a buoy, not a marker or a beacon—and our helmsmen steer by sight, most often discerning the bars and shoals in this generally shallow river by the characteristic rippling effect on the surface (sometimes completely undetectable to the casual eye) and proceeding boldly at night as long as moonlight permits. They are incredibly gifted navigators but, alas, not perfect; once in a great while, the boat scrapes bottom.
We remain in Aswan for a day or two. The city, situated above the rapids of the river and its clumps of vivid green islands, is a beautiful one, even though its runaway growth (from fifty thousand to almost a million in twenty years) is a measure in itself of Egypt's huge population explosion. Just as the city dominates the river, the city is dominated by the High Dam. Dams, with their attendant benefits and mischief, are not new to Aswan. Around the turn of the century, the British built a dam that, though lower than the new Russian model, was considered a prodigy among dams in its day, allowing the cultivation of vast tracts of land in middle Egypt. It also caused the submergence, for most of the year, of the nearby Temple of Philae, a grand edifice of the Ptolemaic period dedicated to the goddess Isis. Sixty years later the High Dam threatened inundation of Philae forever. But thanks to the similar, almost superhuman efforts that saved Abu Simbel, Philae was rescued, lifted up stone by stone with astonishing precision and deposited in perfect rebirth of itself on a nearby island. Thus was effected over the High Dam a major cultural triumph. It is a pity that such triumphs are few, for it is becoming clear that the harm inflicted by the new dam is enormous. Just one unforeseen case in point may be demonstrated by a crucial difference between the old dam and the new. Whatever its drawbacks, the British structure, with its elaborate chain of sluiceways, did permit an unquestionably major function: it allowed most of the huge tonnage of silt to pass through. By contrast, the High Dam is badly flawed in this respect: so much silt has backed up in Lake Nasser that it has become an obstruction, making necessary a diversionary channel to deposit this life-giving soil in, of all places, the desert.
That the Americans, largely because of the politics of John Foster Dulles in the 1950s, were prevented from being the builders of the High Dam is perhaps just as well. Certainly, among other things, Americans are now spared the blame for that appalling monument to Egyptian-Russian friendship, which stands two hundred and fifty feet high at the dam site. Dazzlingly white and constructed in the shape of what may crudely be described as four symmetrically arranged winglike pylons rising toward heaven, the monument achieves an effect just the opposite of upward aspiration, resembling nothing so much as the exposed fins of a colossal concrete artillery shell that has embedded itself in the earth. As we ascend to the top in an elevator, Prince Nicholas Romanoff, a collateral descendant of the czar who can at other times speak with deep affection of things Russian, comments glumly on the traditional failure of Russian architecture, interestingly theorizing that as architects, Russians have been so uninspired because the country has always lacked in quantity that requisite material: stone. In any case, although the view from the top of the structure is spectacular—offering a bright blue vista of the waters of Lake Nasser; the surrounding desert; and also the dam itself, stretching an amazing two miles across the crest of the site—one is scarcely heartened by what one hears now about the dam's further pernicious effects on the river, to which it was supposed to bring an unmixed shower of blessings.
The greater part of the water of the Nile comes from heavy rainfall in Ethiopia. Because of seasonal vagaries, the volume of Nile water is produced with irregularity, but for thousands of years, life along the river has been governed by the annual flooding, whether little or great or just enough. Too much water in this flood and there is risk of a destructive inundation; too little water and the fields grow dry for want of irrigation. This is an oversimplified description of the hydrology of the Nile, about which there have
been written many scientific volumes and about which, too, much remains a mystery. The High Dam, aside from its hydroelectric capabilities, was built to put an end to the unpredictable nature of the annual flood and, in effect, to stabilize the flow of water from Aswan to the sea. Probably the most serious consequence of such stabilization is this: while, indeed, the damage that comes from uncontrolled flooding has been eliminated, there has resulted a situation in which the great deposits of silt, so necessary to agriculture, have also been eliminated. Thus the land has suddenly and for the first time become seriously dependent on artificial fertilizer, which is extremely expensive and something few Egyptian farmers can afford. Also, at the mouth of the Nile, fish in the Mediterranean used to feed on organisms conveyed by the silt, but now that the silt is gone, fish and fisheries have been decimated. It is an ecological nightmare. The long-range effects are incalculable—and cannot be good.
Another unforeseen result of the dam is one that demonstrates in a rather weird way man's ability to alter the very normality of certain natural phenomena. It of course almost never rains in the desert, and the green richness of Egypt comes about entirely because of the Nile. But through the formation of Lake Nasser's mammoth reservoir, one of the largest of its kind anywhere, there has been created around it a microclimate in which large-scale condensation and precipitation occur from time to time, and rain falls, reportedly often in torrents. Many villages in the Upper Nile region, made of mud brick and totally unprepared for such freakish downpours, have suffered severe damage because of the High Dam. In other times, people were at least forewarned about occasional inundations.
—
A few miles north of the dam, at the Temple of Philae, I remember Flaubert's reflection: “The Egyptian temples bore me profoundly.” This is not entirely true, for it is belied by his vigorous descriptions at other moments in his journal; often his reactions to these antique glories are deeply appreciative and recorded with excitement. Yet there is something genuine in his boredom, and his friend Du Camp wrote: “The temples seemed to him always alike….At Philae he settled himself comfortably in the cool shade of one of the halls of the great Temple of Isis to read Gerfaut, by Charles de Bernard.” Visiting Philae myself and recalling this passage, I do not quite feel disposed to sit down and read, but I can begin somehow to partake in Flaubert's dissatisfaction (or is it merely impatience?) with these places, wondrous as they are and as essential as one feels it is that they be seen and visited and strenuously preserved. There are moments of melting and exquisite beauty in Egyptian art—the friezes, the statuary, the gods and goddesses—but for me the glory lies less in the art itself than in a resonance of time and history. This is felt (or, paradoxically, almost heard) in the architecture; for, as Flaubert wrote, “everything in Egypt seems made for architecture—the planes of the fields, the vegetation, the human anatomy, the horizon lines.” And here Flaubert begins to reveal what it is about the Nile that most deeply moves him and engages his passionate attention: the people and the landscape of unparalleled enchantment. I am afraid that it is a feeling that I share. Witness, for instance, his dutiful description of the Temple of Esna: “This temple is 33m. 70 long and 16m. 89 wide, the circumference of the columns is 5m. 37. There are 24 columns….An Arab climbed onto the capital of a column to drop the metric tape. A yellow cow, on the left, poked her head inside.” Plainly, it is the cow that interests Flaubert, not the temple. It is much the same with me.
My Generation: Collected Nonfiction Page 39
