An Egyptian Journal Read online

  In the event old Saïd appeared, creeping out of the fo’c’sle as in a dream. He went slowly and carefully and lowered himself down at last to sit astride the gangplank just where it was fastened at its inboard end to the boat. All this time the crowd along the corniche watched the performance in silence. When Saïd finally settled down they let out their breath in one huge ‘aah!’. I photographed the crowd and this appeared to please them, which was strange. A man of some portly dignity appeared among them and shouted at me. I asked Saïd what the man meant and Saïd told me the man wanted me to take another photograph.

  Then I thought it was time I tried out my Arabic in public.

  ‘Good day,’ I said.

  ‘Good day,’ they said.

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Does anyone speak English?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ they said.

  There was another long pause.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said. ‘Goodbye,’ they said.

  So I went below again. Shasli of all people was urging Ann to go ashore! He was, said Alaa, proud of his two captive westerners. In his tourist boats he had had little to do with the passengers and was concerned solely with steering the boat. Meanwhile old Saïd drowsed on the gangplank and the rats (grey ones) jumped and gambolled and played on the mud beach. The crowd still watched the boat and were as indifferent to the rats as the rats were to the people above them. Descent of the corniche would be a laborious affair. Live and let live appeared to be the rule between rat and man.

  Rushdie had really gone sick again. I suggested that we should put him on a train for Cairo, where he could get as proper treatment as was possible in Egypt. But he didn’t want to go – just wanted to sleep. To my way of thinking the danger was that since there was no town between us and Asyut, eighty miles down river, he was taking a chance in staying aboard. However, he was an adult and I had no authority to shift him. I dropped the question of our sick list and took up the question of rats. Saïd couldn’t sit on the gangplank all night and to leave the gangplank unattended was asking for much trouble. Alaa, who was preparing to go ashore himself, said once more that they would ‘Do something’. They did indeed. They shifted the gangplank so that there was now a stretch of perhaps six inches of water between the end of the plank and the beach. The rats could have stepped across.

  Defeated once more I returned to the cabin, where it was now necessary to switch on the light. We had supper, prepared by Akhmet and partly by Faroz. It was goat’s cheese or perhaps sheep’s cheese, I’m still not sure which, with Arab bread and loukoumi: all washed down, as they say, with mineral water. I personally couldn’t have asked for a better meal, except for the mineral water, which of course was cold. So we read our books and listened for rats and tried to believe with the crew that no rat would get aboard. We heard a noise and started up, but it was only Alaa going ashore. Somehow or other I could not concentrate on my reading. I was now eager to cut my losses, get back to Cairo and do various trips that I had designed as a kind of appendix to this trip by water; a visit to the Fayoum; interviews with people, and a bit of a wander in the Delta.

  Ann put down her book. I turned off the light and lay in the dark. Well, not the complete dark, of course, for there were street lights along the top of the corniche. Egypt is not badly off for electricity what with the dam and a few power-stations. That’s not what she lacks. I searched back in my intentions and remembered that ‘inclusive’ view of ‘my’ Egypt which I had intended; a view taking in geology and archeology and astronomy and theology and papyrology and sociology and any other ology that might come to hand. I tried in my own mind to remember the different scales of Time, the riddles, mysteries and the problems, the histories and novels from Gautier’s Roman de la Momie right down to the latest recreative blockbuster. I tried to hold the immense canyon over which we hung in my mind together with the as-ancient (on one scale) suggestions of civilization in the pre-dynastic period. It was impossible, of course, and my mind went numb: but it proved an excellent method of getting to sleep.

  14

  That was how one sleepless night caught up with me and I slept very deeply indeed. True, I was subliminally aware of voices in the night but must have supposed it was yet another muezzin with his waitings and incomprehensible cries. So only minimally awake, reaching awareness as a dolphin reaches oxygen I dived down again away from it all, only to be jerked right up to the surface by the sound of the engine! I lurched up on my bunk. The night was pitch black. We had never had the engine on at such an hour. They had brought in the gangplank with an appalling thump. Under us the propeller began to spin faster and faster. It was preposterous. I pulled curtains, peered out of our windows and could just make out – was it Faroz? – hurrying round the deck. This was no ‘Rhythm of the Nile’. Had the rats invaded us? had we fallen out with the River Police? I remembered the pirates. That was it. We were escaping. Or perhaps we were going full ahead to get through pirate waters before they were awake or so fast they couldn’t catch up with us.

  But Shasli, the fool, was pushing us faster and faster. I was trying to dress but the vibration made even that mechanical job difficult. When at last I had managed to drag my clothes on and tried to make a note of these events in my journal the pen danced so that I could not do it. The propeller was no longer banging but chattering in agony. It seemed to me the boat would come apart at any minute. Now there was the quick Egyptian dawn outside in the sky and I could see the bank rushing past us faster than ever before. There was a great cry from the other end of the boat. I went to the door but could not open it – something soft and heavy moved away from it on the other side. I got it open; and there was Saïd in the middle area, getting up floorboards!

  ‘Saïd! What is it?’

  The engine stopped between one revolution and the next. The hideous silence broken only by the lap, lap of decreasing momentum struck me wordless. On deck there was the sudden noise of activity. In the brightening dawn I could see the banks swinging every which way as the boat turned helplessly in the current.

  ‘Saïd! Motor kaput?’

  ‘La. Benzine mafish.’

  I shut the door and sat on my bunk.

  ‘They’ve run out of gas.’

  ‘Right in the middle of pirate waters.’

  The boat seemed to swing round faster and faster as the current swept it along. As I looked out of the window I could see here and there in the river the tell-tale marks of shoals. These were the diagonal lines like tide rips and some of them were in midstream. The boat by, as it were, an innate sense of hydrodynamics avoided the first three while the deck above our heads was loud with the thumps and scurries of the crew. In the mid-section Saïd had the boards up and was pawing idiotically at the engine as if he could invent fuel or push the propeller shaft round. There was yelling from on deck. All those components of awareness of the Egyptian Thing which I had tried to fuse a few hours before into a single state of comprehension! It had not included this kind of modern idiocy.

  ‘It must have been Shasli,’ said Ann. ‘He was trying to get somewhere before the fuel ran out.’

  ‘I just don’t understand it.’

  ‘Difficult.’

  ‘I give up.’

  ‘Really,’ said Ann, trying to look interested only and not worried. ‘How are you going to do that?’

  It was a good question: and a shoal mark – a tide rip – was right on us. A moment later we struck so hard that the boat lurched sideways then came upright as we swung once more. There was yelling from the deck. Through a side window I could see Akhmet pushing at the bottom of the river with our solitary boat hook. There was danger. We could catch on a shoal and then the current could push us over, capsize us into the hole on the other side of it.

  ‘I think that perhaps we had better…’

  We bumped and dragged over what felt and sounded like a rock. Then we were out in the current once more.

  ‘Saïd! Saïd! Tell them to use that bloody grapnel!’


  That was a method of using a current as old as seamanship. They call it ‘Danning’. You can see it in the Thames when barges come up on the tide with no engine at all. You lower the crown of the anchor to the river bed and its drag gives sufficient differential to enable you to steer. It was a method that had been used on the Nile since those predynastic times which had soothed me to sleep only an hour or two before – well, seven or eight hours before. Alaa did not appear to be on deck. We struck again and lurched but came upright. We were being carried towards the west bank, and there, among the reeds was a pirate squatting in his rowing boat and looking interested. I could see a tram coming upstream. There was a loud series of screams from our siren, shouts from the crew, more wild and uncoordinated activity. The tram slowed and hung in the current but we were in water which was too shallow for it. Now the pirate was heaving at his clumsy oars. He caught a rope from our bow and ferried it dextrously to the tram where it was made fast. He hauled off, waving.

  I shouted at the top of my voice.

  ‘Thank you! Thank you very much! Shockran gazeelan!’

  The pirate was smiling sleepily back at the boats. His mouth opened and shut. I could not hear but knew what he said.

  ‘Afwaen.’

  He waved us a cheerful goodbye.

  We swung alongside the tram with a crunch. We made fast bow to stern like two horses in a field. The crew started to leap about again. Once more it appeared we were in the market for fuel. Well, had not the Secretary General said we were guests of the government? It seemed only a few minutes before the engine started again and we went full speed down the river. We had the biggest yet, the fattest, longest, densest trail of smoke behind us. The screw was rattling like a castanet. The table at which we sat jumped up and down. The noise was like the inside of a sugar factory. Then just when I was sure the screaming engine would explode, we slowed down.

  It was Abu Tig. Astonished, I watched a writhing Rushdie carried ashore. There was a long pause. I went into the centre cabin where the floorboards had been put back and gathered up bits of bread, some cheese and a new bottle of mineral water.

  Presently the crew returned and Alaa told us the story. He was astonished, as I suppose he might well be, that we had not understood what was happening earlier. The strange noises that had reached me where I lay sunk deep in sleep were the screams of poor Rushdie, who had been taken desperately ill with his kidney complaint. The nearest clinic or hospital was Abu Tig. It was that or nothing so they had pushed on regardless, hoping to reach Abu Tig before the fuel ran out; but it had done so a few kilometres above the town. If it had not been for the convenient tram and the pirate….

  Rushdie was now sedated and under observation, said Alaa. Alaa himself seemed very upset and I guessed at awful arguments and decisions. Even his perfect English seemed to get a bit confused. He said how they had carried Rushdie ashore and looked for a taxi to take him to the hospital, found one at last and had put him in it but then found that it was standing outside the hospital. They had been very worried and not thought or had time to tell us what was the matter.

  I asked why they had not tried El Maragha for help, but El Maragha, well as a matter of fact, El Maragha was Hicksville.

  Peace had descended on the boat. We wrapped up and went on deck; but we had moved, it seemed, out of the fringes of the tropics and the north wind was very cold so we came down again. We had to clamber through the centre cabin because Akhmet and Saïd had now taken all the floor up once more. It was remarkable how that floor came up and down. We tended to notice, as it was the only way out of our cabin. The two of them were replacing the jury-rigged tiller line with the flexible steel wire which Saïd had brought down from Aswan. It was an all too familiar ‘messing about in boats’ scene. Faroz, deftly balanced on a deck beam, was cooking. There was nothing for it but to return to our cabin and wait for whatever happened.

  Later, Rushdie came back or was brought back. He had been given powerful shots. Rather than be left behind at Abu Tig he had elected to hold out until we reached Minya. There he had friends who would drive him to Cairo.

  So we read good bad books and presently the engine started to take us downstream with the pint or two of fuel we had begged or borrowed or stolen from the convenient tram. It was now a very sedate progress. We stopped south of Asyut but in sight of the barrage to get filled up with fuel. It was a busy place with about an acre of trams moored, much stone and brick being landed along the customary bouncing planks with their customary processions of heavily laden men. There were privileged persons wandering over the trams, one whose job it was apparently to open and shut small deck hatches to see if it was possible. He was an odd man because although he wore nothing but a loincloth and turban he looked in every way to be a European. At once we consulted our dim memories of The Four Feathers and decided it was young ‘Carruthers’, if that was the name: so time stretching itself too easily we passed some of it inventing dialogue. The fact was that the fuel was slow in coming because they could not take cash. They very kindly rushed our cash downtown, and brought back a credit slip. When these difficulties had settled themselves, delivery of fuel by means of a large hose took less than a minute.

  We moved on and moored alongside another police station. It was early. I came to the conclusion that there was a kind of fluvial Parkinson’s Law in operation. The various exigencies of river life would expand inexorably to fill whatever time we had left. The best I could do was to try to see that they did not overflow it. Ann decided that Egyptians worked in a different rhythm. We work at set hours and do not expect to touch work at all in the others. Egyptians do not make this distinction but expect to work or rest at any time. So the crew did odd jobs about the boat – Faroz, for example, might appear outside the window at any hour, just giving it a quick wipe over – without demanding time and a half. On the other hand the crew was just as likely to lie in their bunks all morning if there was nothing particular to do and they felt like it. They, the crew that is, didn’t know what we expected, nor we they. Women work all day from dawn to dusk and beyond at both ends, work as gently as they can with intermissions for gossip and rest. They do not distinguish.

  However, there were other jobs in which wretched men were caught, one was in operation outside the window. Cement was being carried ashore from a tram in large bags. Each was what one man could manage to carry, no less. The bags came out of the hold of the tram on the shoulders of a procession. Those going up the corniche had the courtesy of the plank, went up slowly, reduced to nothing but ambulant bags of cement powder. Those who were coming back did so as best they could, slipping in the dust. At any time there were six bags of cement powder going up the corniche with legs attached to them. It was ant work. I saw one heavy man with his heavy bag of cement fall off the bouncing plank. He must have hurt himself and cynically I expected him and his hurt to be ignored – but no. The whole operation stopped, the man was helped into the tram and presumably made to lie down on someone’s bunk. It was a curious mixture of solicitude and brutality for in any case the work was inhuman.

  Alaa came down and said that the police promised us a visit from ‘the officer’ who would turn up at the boat at ‘half past seven’. We expected him to conform to Egyptian custom and turn up at half past eight, but in the event he turned up at twenty-five minutes past seven, sent for our passports ashore then came aboard and presented himself as the General Commanding the River Police of the Province of Asyut. He explained that this meant his patch extended all the way from Sohag to Minya. He was smartly dressed in khaki and he had a bone-cracking handshake. He was cheerful and ingenious with what English he knew. He spoke with great determination, helped out now and then with a word from Alaa. It is a good method if you are bold and also have someone to help you. I felt bitterly my own linguistic deficiencies with their attendant humiliations – being rung up from France, engaged in Franglais conversation and then finding that I was broadcasting live. Without a gift for languages to attain the capac
ity for minimal conversation is such a desperate plod! It is like one of those chemical equations that are written out as working both ways. Even if you reach the state of speaking the language it was no guarantee that you had reached the even more necessary point of being able to understand it when it was spoken. It is noteworthy that all the cleverest advertisements for language courses stress that you will soon be able to make yourself understood and play down the other necessity of understanding the language when it is spoken! However, here was our General of River Police chatting away with great success. He was a figure of authority and the crew was bent double with respect. I had the feeling that none of them was accustomed to social intercourse with policemen other than the ragged recruits with their shining guns. Now here was a general in creaky boots and leather straps only a foot or two away. He was insistent that he would do anything for us. At that point the only thing to say was that his visit was in itself a gift and would he take tea with us? This he agreed to do, the tea being prepared by Faroz, who slopped the liquid nervously, I thought. It was wickedly entertaining to guess that each of the crew – except perhaps Saïd – was inspecting his life hurriedly for moments they were accustomed normally to forget. Fortunately as visitors from Mars we passengers were watertight, pure in thought and deed. I debated taking him at his word and raising the question of the engine bearings, but as I was thinking of it he put down his teacup, shook me by the hand, crack, crack and went away. The crew began to babble and laugh like when teacher is out of the room.