The Nile

by Toby Wilkinson

  Today, unbridled development poses an equal threat. An oil well is being dug on the Giza plateau, just a few hundred yards from the archaeological site, while a building boom threatens the Giza pyramids not with destruction, but with encirclement. To the east of the pyramids, the city of Giza is now just an extension of metropolitan Cairo; in front of the Sphinx, roads, streetlights, car parks, shops, fast-food outlets, and seating for the sound and light show surround the great statue, robbing it of dignity. To the west, Cairo’s huge satellite settlement, known as 6 October City, is sprawling southwards along the Fayum Road, almost surrounding the Giza Plateau. Where just a few years ago there was nothing but desert, today apartment blocks, electricity pylons and the minarets of new mosques ring the horizon. Within a few years, if construction continues at the same pace, the pyramids will be left marooned, a small island of antiquity in a sea of indiscriminate, uncontrolled, substandard development.

  The pace of Cairo’s expansion is dizzying. Adjoining 6 October City to the east, New Cairo was born in the 1990s as part of the Mubarak regime’s project to relieve pressure on the Nile Valley. It is an extraordinary phenomenon—an enormous new city of apartment blocks and villas, built on barren desert. Yet not all Egyptians are able to keep up with this rush towards modernity. Below billboards advertising the latest household cleaning product, children wander barefoot through dirty streets, past canals filled with rubbish, sewage and dead animals. Men on donkeys ride past glitzy showrooms for Mercedes-Benz and BMW.

  Since Egypt’s 2011 revolution, property developers have taken advantage of the lack of a functioning government to circumvent the usual planning process and indulge in an even greater orgy of speculative construction, hoping to make a big profit when economic stability returns. The result is that hundreds of blocks of flats—empty or half-finished—litter the outskirts and even the inner suburbs of Cairo; many are built on agricultural land, leading to the loss of precious productive capacity. Each block is identical to its neighbour, a basic concrete frame with infill panels of shoddily laid bricks; a minor earth tremor would send them tumbling to the ground like a pack of cards. And all this at a time when ordinary Egyptians are so hard up that they cannot afford the rent on the smallest of apartments.

  As well as disfiguring the landscape, threatening Egypt’s ancient monuments and swallowing up agricultural land, the trend of rapid urbanisation is having a profound effect on society in Cairo and throughout the Nile Valley. The close-knit relationships that have characterised Egypt’s communities for millennia are giving way to the disconnectedness and anonymity of city life. One of the aspects of the 2011 revolution that brought Egyptians most joy was the rediscovery, among the placards and tear gas, of a sense of common purpose, shared identity and communal pride. They will need to hold on to those values if the exponential growth of Cairo is not to do irreparable damage to people and environment alike.

  ALTHOUGH A NEW RING ROAD has been built around Cairo, the wide, nineteenth-century boulevard that runs in a straight line between Giza and the city centre (the old Pyramids Road) is far more colourful, with its cafés, “papyrus institutes” (tourist bazaars), and twenty-four-hour traffic congestion. It presents a typical cross-section of Cairo life, from young men on mopeds talking into their iPhones to old widows swathed in black, balancing bags of food on their heads. Donkey-carts and horse-drawn caleches do battle with cars and lorries; the only rule of the road is to use your horn continuously. The Pyramids Road is a vivid illustration of what happens in a fast-growing city without rules, regulations or a functioning transport infrastructure—it is a chaotic free-for-all. Just before the end of its eight-mile run, as it prepares to disgorge its cacophonous contents into the heart of downtown Cairo, the road crosses an island in the Nile. Gezira (its very name means “island”) has stood in midstream for thousands of years. Transformed over the last one hundred from a low-lying swamp into a fashionable district of designer boutiques and parks, Gezira occupies a ringside seat in the midst of Egypt’s capital. From Gezira’s leafy eastern shore, central Cairo can be observed at close quarters, yet at a safe distance, on the other side of the Nile. There are few better places to take the heartbeat of the city and chart its changing face. Few better places, either, in this country heavy with history, to experience Egypt’s past, present and future so vividly and in such a small space. A walk along the Nile on Gezira Island offers the perfect summation of Egypt’s riverine story.

  Until the second half of the nineteenth century, Gezira was suitable neither for agriculture nor settlement. Prone to flooding and accessible only by boat, it was a neglected if picturesque spot on the western edge of Egypt’s rapidly expanding capital. Muhammad Ali built a garrison and a harem on the island (he evidently liked his troops and his women to be within easy reach but safely secluded); and in 1863 his grandson Ismail began construction of a new palace on Gezira, to add to his thirty other royal residences. It was conveniently situated on the eastern shore of the island, directly opposite the landing-stages of Bulaq where boats destined for Upper Egypt moored to take passengers and cargo on board. (Amelia Edwards dismissed Bulaq as “a desolate place by the river, where some two or three hundred Nile-boats lay moored for hire.”17) Inspired by the architecture of the Alhambra in Spain, the Gezira Palace was designed by a German and completed by a Frenchman, exemplifying the prominent role played by Europeans and European taste in the nineteenth-century development of Cairo. Indeed, the first guests at Ismail’s island retreat were not Egyptian but European royalty: the Prince and Princess of Wales (the future King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra) stayed there in the spring of 1869, followed a few months later by an even more illustrious royal, Empress Eugenie of France (wife of Napoleon III). The reason for her visit was the official opening that summer of Ismail’s greatest project, the Suez Canal—which, not coincidentally, had been designed by the Empress’s cousin, Ferdinand de Lesseps. Eugenie had been invited by Ismail as the guest of honour, and she graced the Gezira Palace with a four-day stay before all the assembled dignitaries decamped to Ismailiya for the opening ceremonies.

  After so grand a birth, the subsequent history of the Gezira Palace was decidedly chequered. At first, the Egyptian royal court used it as a summer palace, the cooling breeze off the Nile offering a welcome respite from the stifling heat of the city. Ismail had the banks of the island reinforced to prevent flooding, and commissioned the head gardener of Paris to lay out a grand park around the palace where he and other members of the royal family could saunter at their leisure. Following Ismail’s bankruptcy and abdication, the palace was transformed into a hotel, before being sold as a private residence in the slump that accompanied the aftermath of World War I. Under General Nasser’s socialist regime, the building was confiscated by the state and finally relaunched as a hotel, the Cairo Marriott, in 1983. (A plaque—in English—records its reopening by Hosni Mubarak, in the presence of the Egyptian prime minister.) One building thus perfectly embodies the defining trends of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egyptian history.

  Today, the Marriott is a magnet for wealthy Cairenes as much as for European visitors. The elite of the Egyptian capital flock to the hotel’s Garden Promenade Café to take lunch on the sunny terrace, under the gilded ironwork arcades (prefabricated in Dresden, shipped to Cairo and assembled on site by German workers). On a typical day, a late-middle-aged businessman of ample girth sits smoking a fat Cohiba. Younger aspiring plutocrats in designer suits talk loudly on their mobile phones. Once-glamorous women of a certain age with flowing hair (there are no headscarfs on show here, let alone hijabs), brightly painted nails, heavy gold jewellery and large sunglasses try not to show how much they are keen to be noticed. A spoiled rich kid in shades, with a medallion dangling at his chest, tilts back his chair, bored by the conversation at his table. If the Marriott’s Egyptian clients harbour worries about the future, they don’t show it. For some, it seems, Gezira is still a bastion of wealth and privilege.

  Beyond the hotel
grounds, the neighbourhood of Zamalek occupies the northern tip of Gezira. Scarred by the ugly concrete flyover of the 26 July Bridge, it nonetheless preserves an air of gentility rare in this heaving city. Zamalek is the place where expats congregate, where Egyptian women can still wear Western fashion in public without fear of abuse or attack, where the cars are more likely to be Porsche Cayennes than the old Peugeot 504s so characteristic of the rest of Cairo. It also seems to be the only city district where butcher’s shops display their meat inside the shop window, rather than hanging outside in the open air.

  Opposite Zamalek, on the other side of the Nile, the buildings strung out along the corniche signal Cairo’s status as a capital city. First there is the Foreign Ministry building, an impressive and elegant sky-scraper combining Western and Islamic architectural forms. Despite the parlous state of the Egyptian economy, the Foreign Ministry is beautifully maintained: testament, no doubt, to the billions of dollars of U.S. aid that have propped up successive Egyptian governments as a peace dividend from the Camp David agreement. Less fortunate is the nearby Ramses Hilton, once one of Cairo’s smartest hotels, which now looks tired, dejected and down-at-heel. Foreign investment in Egypt has dwindled following the 2011 revolution, and the future for luxury tourism, in this part of the country at least, does not look rosy. Even more battered than the Hilton is the television station, scene of fierce battles during the uprising against Mubarak. Somehow, it still functions, limping on like the rest of Egypt’s creaking infrastructure. At least it was spared the fate of the towerblock housing the headquarters of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party. Once the nerve centre of Egyptian politics, this has been reduced to a burned-out shell—gutted by fire in an act of rage against thirty years of kleptocratic despotism.

  Cowering at the foot of the blackened building, hemmed in between the busy flyovers of the 6 October Bridge and the building site of the erstwhile Nile Hilton (a concrete skeleton swathed in dirty sheets, awaiting rebirth as the Nile Ritz-Carlton), sits one of Cairo’s most iconic buildings. With its glazed dome and distinctive terracotta paintwork, the Egyptian Museum is one of Egypt’s most visited attractions. It is the greatest repository of ancient artefacts on earth, situated in one of the world’s most vulnerable locations. The Egyptian Museum is the place, above all, where Egypt’s past, present and future collide most spectacularly.

  It was the French who first encouraged Egypt to look after its antiquities. In 1834, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic expedition and the subsequent publication of the Description de l’Egypte, none other than the great Jean-François Champollion persuaded the Egyptian ruler to found a conservation department and establish a national collection. Unfortunately, Muhammad Ali used the collection as a convenient repository from which to take gifts for visiting (European) dignitaries, and he eventually presented the whole lot to Archduke Maximilian of Austria in 1855. Three years later, at the urging of Napoleon III, another Frenchman by the name of Auguste Mariette was created Egypt’s first Director of Antiquities; with an extraordinary energy, he set about excavating, conserving and curating Egypt’s patrimony. In 1863, Mariette oversaw the building of a museum in Bulaq (opposite the Gezira Palace) to display recently discovered objects. Bringing Egyptian antiquities to wider public attention was not without risks, however, and in 1867 the Empress Eugenie requested the cream of the collection for herself. To his eternal credit, Mariette refused, devotion to science trumping patriotism to France. The collection grew steadily, outgrowing the Bulaq museum and moving to Giza in 1891.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, it had become clear that Egypt needed a purpose-built national museum in the heart of the capital city with enough space to display the many thousands of objects being dug from the sands of time. An international competition was launched, and the winner was yet another Frenchman, Marcel Durgnon (who died before even the foundation stone could be laid). His design was for a grand, neo-classical, sandstone building in the best tradition of European national museums. It opened its doors in 1902 and has been one of Cairo’s most recognisable landmarks ever since.

  The task of arranging objects in the new museum and publishing its immense Catalogue Générale fell to Mariette’s successor as Director of Antiquities, Gaston Maspero. He collected together many of the brightest minds of the day to embark on one of archaeology’s greatest-ever feats of scholarship. The Catalogue Générale, or CG, remains to this day the best record of the artefacts in the Egyptian Museum: the hundred thousand on display as well as the equal number in storage in the basement. While Egyptologists have cause to remember Maspero, the museum itself pays homage to its founding genius, Mariette: in the garden to the front of the museum stands Mariette’s tomb, a stone sarcophagus of pharaonic proportions together with a statue and the inscription “L’Egypte Reconnaissante”—“a grateful Egypt.”

  But the gratitude has suffered of late. Post-Mubarak Egypt is too preoccupied with its present and future to worry about its past. Since February 2011, the guards and tourist police have vanished from the museum’s galleries, and there is only token security at the entrance and exit. Upstairs among the treasures of Tutankhamun, cases stand empty, their priceless contents stolen at the height of the revolution. Only half the lights are working, and the glass in the dome is black from decades of traffic fumes. Through open windows and broken windows, sunlight streams down on to fragile, 2,500-year-old wooden objects, stored in ninety-year-old glass cases with no temperature or humidity controls. Each case holds a king’s ransom, yet is secured by nothing more than a small padlock and a piece of wire with a wax seal. The conditions in which Egypt’s treasures are being stored is both sad and alarming. But Egyptians have other concerns on their mind: the back wall of the museum is covered in graffiti, angrily (and offensively) denouncing Mohamed Morsi.

  Back on Gezira Island, the revolutionary fervour seems far away. Under the 6 October Bridge, minibus drivers and private chauffeurs wash and polish their vehicles while their clients are out to lunch. A well-tended public park with clipped hedges and a couple of neat bandstands recalls the British colonial presence; no doubt the band of the Royal Marines used to play popular tunes here on Sunday afternoons. The park, Cairo’s answer to the Victoria Embankment, even has its equivalent of Cleopatra’s Needle, a granite obelisk of Ramesses II. It is odd that a pharaonic monument should look so out of place on the banks of the Nile. Most incongruous of all, even during the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Blue Nile floating restaurant—with dodgem cars in its forecourt—sported a banner over the entrance announcing its forthcoming New Year’s Eve party on a “mind-blowing Moulin Rouge theme.” Next to the Blue Nile, behind iron gates, is the last survivor of British rule, the Gezira Club. With its polo ground and croquet lawns, it was the hub of expatriate life in the early twentieth century. It remains a haven of tranquillity and civility in downtown Cairo. But as I approach to take a closer look, the custodian firmly and rather pointedly shuts the gates in my face. Social exclusivity in Cairo now has an indigenous character.

  The expulsion of the British in 1952—commemorated by the Cairo Tower on Gezira—and the subsequent nationalisation of foreign interests marked the end of the era of European influence on Egypt. It also marked the end of the Egyptian monarchy, in a tale as sorry as any from the annals of pharaonic history. The last man to wear the crown of Egypt, King Farouk, was a frequent visitor to Gezira. The southern tip of the island was a favourite spot for tea-parties on the royal yacht Kassed Kheir, or at the ornamental royal rest-house nearby—when the king was not partying at the Semiramis Hotel across the river. Farouk was born in 1920 at Cairo’s Abdin Palace into a dynasty founded by his great-great-grandfather Muhammad Ali, an Albanian volunteer in the Ottoman army. (Egypt’s last dynasty of kings was, like many of its ancient forebears, foreign in origin.) Sadly for Farouk and for Egypt, his abilities did not match up to the expectations for his future. Despite a costly education by private tutors, he failed to gain entry to Eton because he had not stud
ied Latin, and he also failed the entrance exam for the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. Having spent his childhood largely surrounded by his mother and her ladies-in-waiting, his four sisters and their English nanny, Farouk was uncomfortable in men’s company and entirely unprepared for the burdens of high office. Yet, at the age of sixteen, following the sudden death of his father, Farouk found himself king.

  He was forced to rely, to an unhealthy extent, on the guidance of Sir Miles Lampson, British High Commissioner (and susbequently ambassador) to Egypt. There was no doubt that Lampson called the shots, a fact that irritated and eventually poisoned the king against the British. Though Farouk was popular with ordinary Egyptians—the rector of al-Azhar called him “the first King of Egypt who has direct contact with the people”18—he was sidelined by his own ministers and belittled by Lampson, who continued to call him “the boy.” As one of the king’s biographers commented, “He was surrounded with all the appearances of absolute monarchy; he was given the deference one gave to a god. Yet he knew his power to be a fiction and the devotion of his entourage to be largely a form of theatre.”19

  Throughout World War II, Farouk was forced to do the British bidding—from dismissing a government because of its alleged pro-Axis sympathies, to accepting the stationing of over a million British soldiers in Egypt, the manning of thirty airfields and landing strips around Cairo by the RAF and the harbouring of a vast armada of British warships in Egypt’s ports. The Egyptian capital was a vital communications link between Britain, India and the Far East. In February 1942, with Rommel advancing through North Africa, Lampson ordered six hundred British troops, tanks and armoured cars to surround Farouk’s palace, before arriving in a Rolls-Royce and presenting the king with a stark choice: recall to power the pro-Allied Wafd party or abdicate. Farouk had little option but to comply. Humiliated and disgraced in the eyes of his own people, he abandoned all efforts to rule (though not to frustrate British interests) and fell into a lifestyle of escapism and debauchery. He made nightly visits to Cairo’s casinos, dressed in his field marshal’s uniform, and his 1948 divorce from the popular Queen Farida eroded any remaining sympathy amongst the Egyptian public.