Lights, Camera...Travel!

by Lonely Planet

  I took pictures so the Hollywood producer would know that I got there, then I walked back to the Land Rover and saw that we were bogged.

  It took us four hours to dig the Land Rover out with our hands. And I really did think that I was going to die. As I scooped out gloop with my fingers, on my knees at the back wheels with that furnace heat enveloping my entire being with its suffocating stupor, I began to think of my wife, my young children, our new house, and the insurance that would keep them going after they found my body, shrivelled to a dried prune somewhere out in the deserts of southern Eritrea.

  There would probably be a funeral in the church where all the film people in Sydney have funerals, and there would be a few articles, maybe in the local trades. The local television station might run a couple of my films as a memorial, most probably at 1:30am. Would my death make Variety? I hoped so. These things I considered as I scooped gloop.

  We finally got the vehicle moving, the dark coming on, and I was so weak with heat exhaustion and lack of hydration that I’d started to hallucinate. I’d finished my water hours earlier, and so we made our way further south to a fishing village close to the border, hoping they’d have some.

  The village was a cluster of small huts and houses, all painted the most vivid pastel colors, huddled around a small raised hill overlooking the gulf. The colors were a marker for distant fishing boats, to find their way home. They offered me some water pulled from a near empty well. It wasn’t water so much as gruel. It was like the slop that I’d hauled out from under the Land Rover. But it was liquid, of sorts, and I gulped down as much as my stomach would allow.

  A few days later, on returning to Addis Ababa, I would be bedridden in my room in the Hilton – unable to move for a couple of weeks.

  But at the village, after slaking my thirst with the dregs of the well, the driver Tommy took me down to the water’s edge, where a group of fishermen were sitting around a smoky fire in the growing gloom, patching their nets.

  Through a translator I asked the old men if they’d heard through story or myth about an Italian man who’d come to their area a couple of generations earlier, and met a woman who he believed to be a dolphin.

  The men laughed and laughed. We see them all the time, they said. The women fish. They foul our nets. We always have to repair our nets, they are such a nuisance.

  I sat there in the dim light stunned. Were they serious? Or were they having a gigantic lend of me? They didn’t seem to be mischievous or tricksters – they had no reason to lie, there was no financial gain for them.

  ‘When did this last happen?’ I asked them.

  The head man, an old wizened weather-beaten fellow, thought back, talked to his mates, and said a couple of months ago. He said it was like a fish, but it had the breasts and the genitals of a woman.

  Was this a dugong, I wondered – often mistaken for a creature that’s half woman and half fish? Surely there had to be a logical and scientific explanation. The old man told me that they’d caught this creature and skinned it. It was hanging up in one of their houses on the edge of the village.

  ‘Can I see it?’ I immediately asked. I could then tell if they’d skinned a Maasai tribeswoman or a dugong. It was grizzly, yes, but at least after coming all this way, I would know. But Tommy was getting antsy. It was near on dark now, and there was a curfew back at town. We had to go or else risk getting shot or imprisoned. I pleaded, implored, offered money, but Tommy was resolute. We had to get going straight away. So I never did get to see the dried hanging skin of a mermaid – or perhaps a dugong.

  I got back to Assab before the curfew and raced to the shower to try to cool down, given that the air-con in the room was an illusory joke. However, when I stood under the tap, I screamed. I thought perhaps I’d turned on the hot tap by mistake but there was no hot tap. The cold water could boil eggs.

  Next morning I flew back to Addis Ababa, unsure as to what I’d actually achieved. Was the rocky pile really the grave? I liked to think so, but then again, I’d once liked to think that the Red Sea was blue too. And were the fishermen telling the truth about the female sea creatures who fouled their nets? Certainly this was a part of the world where you could believe anything – even the most fantastical – and if it was true that the Gulf had become a closed ecosystem, might it not be true that real mermaids swam its murky depths?

  The water that I’d chewed at the village was full of bugs and parasites, and I got very sick – so sick I couldn’t fly out of Ethiopia. But on a local doctor’s advice I began eating homegrown yogurt and that either killed the bugs or confused them, because soon I was able to return to Australia.

  When I got back, I called Hollywood and I told the producer of my adventures. He was fascinated, of course, as all Hollywood producers are when they talk to writers, and even more intrigued when I told him of how I’d got stuck in the desert and nearly died. I said I was thankful for the life insurance policy because that had given me some solace in those direst of moments.

  The producer laughed. It was the kind of laugh you’d hear from a robotic sideshow clown just before you put a ball in its mouth. ‘You did take out the life insurance, didn’t you?’ I asked him. ‘Oh yes,’ he replied, still chortling. ‘Except too bad you made it back because I made myself the beneficiary. I coulda financed my next picture.’ I concluded the call with him still laughing.

  The film never got made. The producer lost the rights; I heard they went to Bertolucci’s producer and he never made it either. But hey, it was a great trip.

  Egyptian Magic

  ANTHONY SATTIN

  Anthony Sattin is the author of several highly acclaimed books on history and travel, and a leading travel journalist, identified by Condé Nast Traveller as one of ten key influences on travel writing today. His books include The Pharaoh’s Shadow, Shooting the Breeze, Lifting the Veil, The Gates of Africa and A Winter on the Nile. He discovered and edited Florence Nightingale’s previously unpublished letters from Egypt and co-edited the anthology A House Somewhere: Tales of Life Abroad. He has been a long-time regular contributor to the Sunday Times travel and books pages and to Condé Nast Traveller. His work has appeared in a number of other international publications, including the Daily Telegraph, the Independent and the Guardian. He sits on the editorial advisory board of Geographical magazine and has contributed to several guidebook series, including Lonely Planet’s Egypt and Algeria. He has also written and presented on television and radio, including several high-profile documentaries for BBC Radio 3 and 4.

  The café was just back from the waterfront. The evening was hot and humid, the lights foggy with Mediterranean brine. There was a constant stream of people along the pavement and the café was busy, so it wasn’t long before someone asked if they could join me at my table. I moved the glass hub of my water pipe aside and gestured to the seat beside me. Atfaddal. Help yourself. He did and, since he was Egyptian, it wasn’t long before he began a conversation.

  ‘From where? England? What brings you to my city?’

  The opening was familiar. I had heard it a dozen times that day and wondered whether everyone in the city had had a briefing about how to address a foreigner.

  When the conversation had run its course – my job, my family, the price of cigarettes – I asked the one question I needed answered.

  The man, who was a teacher, looked puzzled. As he said nothing in reply, I had a moment to watch his face. I could see he was turning over the options, before choosing the most obvious.

  Had he heard me correctly?

  ‘Yes,’ I assured him. ‘I am looking for a magician.’

  ‘Are you in trouble?’

  ‘Not yet,’ but I would be if I didn’t find one – and very soon – for I had just one day left in the city.

  I had been to Alexandria on other occasions, for many different reasons. It was a place I had gone to have fun, to do research and to make irrevocable decisions about my future. Once, I was even sent there by my doctor, in summer, to r
ecover from a bout of typhoid. ‘The sea air will do you good,’ he had assured me, and he was right. It did. And now I was there to fulfill a commission from a television production company that wanted me to look for magicians in Egypt. I’ll come to the why of it in a minute.

  ‘So why,’ asked my café companion, ‘do you want a magician?’ I explained about the television program and that I had heard that there was one particularly skilled practitioner in Alexandria. I had come to the city to find him, but after several days of looking, I had drawn a blank.

  The man told me not to worry. He didn’t know of one himself, but he thought he knew someone who did. He would make enquiries and suggested we meet again the following evening, when he hoped to have a lead. In most countries this would seem like a lost cause, but life in Egypt is often strange and wonderful, and the unlikely is never impossible. I’ll give you an example. A while back, I was in a Cairo taxi, stuck in the usual mire of traffic, when the driver burst into tears. You and I can think of several reasons why a Cairene taxi driver might want to cry: the traffic, low earnings and high pollution levels being just three. But when I asked what was wrong, he told me that he wasn’t a driver. He was an accountant. He had borrowed the car from a friend because he needed to make money in a hurry. His wife had been badly hurt; a gas canister had exploded while she was cooking in their kitchen. He needed money to pay for the operation that would save her. Was there anything I could do to help? I gave, of course. There was a report in the news the next day about a woman hurt by an exploding canister. But that didn’t prove that the woman in the story was the wife of the taxi driver.

  The following evening, back at the waterfront café, my fellow tea-drinker was there with a smile on his face. ‘I have an address. I know where to go.’ We would have to wait until a little later, he assured me, though as the hours went by I realized that this was as much for him to smoke his water pipe and tell his stories as it was for the magician to arrive at his home.

  Eventually we took a tram, a rattling remnant of the colonial age, and headed out east through four or five stops of unremitting crowds and concrete. We then turned inland on foot for a while until we stopped in front of a nineteenth-century building. This neighborhood was rundown, and so was the house, so much so that it wasn’t until we got inside that I realized it was derelict.

  We walked up the unlit, broken, littered staircase to the third and uppermost floor. There was only one door off the landing. We knocked and waited, knocked again and entered. The door opened onto a void: the floor had fallen in and been replaced by some planks leading away from the door. Lit by light from the street, I could see that on the other side of the room there was another door. We crossed very carefully and entered the magician’s room.

  Whatever might be said about this man of tricks, he was certainly neat. Equally certain was the fact that he was asleep when we walked in. He had electricity and when he switched on his bedside light, I took in the room. It contained a large brass bed, a chest of drawers and a massive wardrobe. The remaining floor space was taken up by myself and my guide.

  The magician was a man in his fifties, tall and wiry, his hair still black. His name was Bafa and he was clearly down on his luck, living alone in this ruin, occasionally being paid to brighten up a children’s party, eking out a very meagre living. When I explained why I had come, that I was looking for the roots of Egyptian magic for a television show, he had a feeling he had just won the lottery. He sat up, rolled an old newspaper into a cone, took the recycled plastic water bottle off his chest of drawers and poured its contents into the paper, which he then handed to me. When I opened it, the paper was dry, the water nowhere to be found.

  ‘I can do more. I can do better,’ he assured me, ‘but I need a little time to prepare.’

  Time was one thing I couldn’t give him; in the morning, I had to leave for the south and before leaving, I had many questions to ask. Who was he? How had he come by his skills? How long had he been practising? Where did he perform? But he had no use for words and he ignored my questions. Instead, he lit a cigarette, took a deep draw on it and then swallowed the butt. He opened his gaseous mouth to show that it was empty, then opened it again and the butt reappeared.

  I wished he could do the same with time. ‘But I will come back and then you can show me your skills.’

  I headed south.

  The program’s producers had raised a significant amount of money by promising to take some of the world’s most famous magicians in search of the origins of Western magic. Their production team had spent time trying to make contact with Egyptian magicians, or at least to do some background research, and had got nowhere. Knowing that I had undertaken my own hunt for magicians for my book The Pharaoh’s Shadow, they had asked if I could help.

  The Pharaoh’s Shadow was an account of my search for the surviving culture of ancient Egypt. It was an attempt to answer a single question. We know that so much of the fabric of ancient Egypt has survived in the form of its temples and tombs. But what of the life that had been lived around them? Magic was an everyday part of ancient life. Each part of the day, each stage of life and death was wrapped in, and shored up by, magic. Spells were used to ensure the pharaoh would reach the afterlife. Religion was also heavily dependent on tricks, magic turns that ensured the pharaoh heard the voice of the gods when he entered the holy sanctuaries alone. When Christians finally stormed the great pagan temple of Serapis in Alexandria in the fourth century, the mob hesitated in front of the massive figure of the god: they had never been so close to divinity before and they knew of the warning that if a mere mortal should approach the statue, the city would be struck by an earthquake, a serious matter in that region. The zealous bishop, later described as ‘a bald, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood,’ finally broke the spell when he had the god beheaded and its body toppled. The levers that had given the god ‘life’ were exposed, the trick was up, the god was dead. To prove it, the zealots dragged the body through the streets, burning parts in different quarters of the city.

  Christianity frowned on magic, even though one of its central moments, the communion when bread and wine were turned into flesh and blood, was clearly part of this ancient tradition of religious magic. Islam seemed to have been more tolerant and for much of the 1400 years since the Arab invasion, magic remained a key part of everyday life along the Nile. From a belief in a spirit double – an avatar – that lived alongside our earthly bodies, to a certainty that some special people could summon significant powers, magic was still common in Egypt. If a woman had difficulty conceiving, she would go first to the doctor, then to the imam of her mosque. If that didn’t work, she would then supplicate other powers. She might take herself to one of the ancient temples or shrines, and roll on the floor, wash herself in fetid water from a sacred lake or merely beg the ancient gods for help. Or she might go to a healer, who would prescribe a ritual involving vaginal suppositories and water from the Nile.

  I knew how productions worked and knew that none of these rituals could, or should, make it onto television. I toyed with the idea of finding a snake charmer, perhaps one of the Rifai Sufi sect who were said to have been initiated into a mystery that allowed them to handle snakes without fear. I looked for a levitation expert and was introduced to a Cairene theatrical agent who received me, at 10pm, in his bedroom. His wife sat beside him in her nightgown as naturally as though she were fully dressed and we were sitting in an office (the bedroom was his office). ‘This sort of act,’ and he stretched his hand flat on the bedcover and slowly lifted it towards the ceiling, ‘is increasingly difficult to stage. People don’t come to the shows like they used to. Who can compete with TV and computer games?’ He had a point: when I finally saw the act, at a village fair, it was unconvincing.

  Then I heard of a Sufi who lived in a tomb in the City of the Dead, and could put himself into a trance and drive a spike through his cheek without either pain or blood.

  The man was
understandably loath to perform for me; his act was one of devotion, not of entertainment. A century earlier, on holy days, Cairo’s streets were full of extraordinary spectacles, one of which involved a line of Sufi devotees placing daggers in their mouths while their sheikh walked along the hilts, without harming them. Other Sufis lay on the ground, in a trance, while their sheikh rode over them on his horse, again without causing any apparent harm. But the government had become suspicious of this sort of esoterica and had banned public displays of this sort. Although I did manage to persuade him to show me his feat – performed in his tomb-home, in a trance, with the man wearing a green robe – and still don’t know how it was achieved, it was clear that this too would never make it onto the screen. And then I went back to Alexandria.

  Through the man who had introduced us, I sent a message to Bafa, asking him to prepare his feats and offering to pay him well for the performance. A message came back: he would be waiting for me on the corniche, near the fishermen’s mosque. I took the train to the north coast full of expectation.

  Bafa had suggested meeting at sundown, that moment at the end of a hot day, celebrated in the same way around the Mediterranean, when people come out of their houses to take the air and to take time to greet each other. Swallows wheeled overhead, the broad sweep of the harbor was clogged with traffic, a line of fishing boats were tied up on the greasy water. The landside pavement was crowded with families, the children and mothers running and shouting. Among them was a single, motionless, magnificent point. It was Bafa.

  He stood in front of a small table at the back of the broad walkway. On his head he wore a turban. It was of gold fabric, which matched the gilding of his waistcoat and the seam of his clean, baggy trousers. He looked magnificent. In his hand he held a large drum. As he beat it, drumming up business, a circle began to form around him, small at first, but soon filling out as he announced the imminence of his show. By the time he stopped banging, there were perhaps fifty or sixty people in front of him, ready for whatever was to come.