An Egyptian Journal Read online

  Those bleak documents were not all. There are moments recorded from the adventures – one can call it no less – of Messrs Grenfell and Hunt which are brilliantly exciting. One such occurred only on the second day of their excavations. Dr Hunt was the lucky man. He was examining a crumpled piece of papyrus that had been dug out the day before. It contained only a few scarcely legible words. One of them was the Greek word ‘karphos’ and when he saw it I think he must have begun to tremble from the feet up. For he knew that here was treasure. ‘Karphos’ is a very rare Greek word and it means a ‘mote’. He made out the sentence and though the beginning is lost it read ‘… and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote which is in thy brother’s eye.’

  It was, as all the world knows now, a part of the Logia Christou, (Sayings of Christ) and a document older by hundreds of years than any other New Testament extant. It was thought at the time that these ‘Sayings’ were extracted from copies of testaments now lost; but modern scholarship inclines to the view that the four gospels were themselves worked up from such collections of ‘sayings’.

  But whatever the truth of the matter – Egypt must hold many a yet-undiscovered manuscript – these sayings were a prime example for me of the imagined instrument by which I could stare backwards into Time. For I thought, however mistakenly, that the ‘Sayings’ predated the whole paraphernalia of theological debate, of heresy-hunting, of furious bigotry on one side and cynical dismissiveness on the other. In discussing poetry there is an ultimate argument you can use in defence of a particular poet.

  ‘All the same,’ you say, ‘he has a voice.’

  That is it, then, sounding like the still small voice after the tempest, the unmistakable voice of the man who was supreme poet and teacher, whatever else he may or may not have been.

  ‘Raise the stone and there shalt thou find me, cleave the wood and there am I also.’

  The sameness of these two river banks gave me little to do but think. Was this to be fourth time lucky? For the point has to be made again that at the site itself there was nothing to see. The site existed on the map. It was over there to the west, on the fringe of the desert. It would be covered now with drifted sand, the old quarry-like holes of excavation smoothed in with all the rest. My boyhood’s dream – ridiculous, ridiculous! – was of walking there and finding a mound which was elastic to the foot, then drawing forth from beneath the sand a full basket and bringing the basket back to ‘my’ boat and then sorting through….

  The things I have found in that basket! At one time it had been the lost works of Sappho and a mélange of Greek lyric poets generally. Later still it had been Euripides. A statelier dream had been that of finding what has never been found and probably never will be – a native Egyptian History – since history as we understand the word was invented at a much later date. Sometimes it must be confessed, the manuscripts concerned the first few years of Christianity and these oscillated according to the various states of my belief in that matter. For why should there not be an account of the lost years (Jesus in Egypt) as there might be of the lost years of Shakespeare in Italy or the Low Countries? Why should the boy not journey up from Alexandria – I made him study at the university – looking for a wise man as Socrates had wandered in Greece? What did he think of the pyramids, all gleaming white and smooth, then? Did he ever get as far as the City of the Pike? If he did then I thought he would have eaten fish deliberately as he did later in Palestine. In Cairo you can still be shown the crypt of the synagogue in which the Holy Family sheltered, let alone the two different places in which Moses was drawn from the bulrushes! How far up did he go? Did he walk or ride a donkey? Or did he sail up all the way to Luxor then to Aswan and the beginning of the unknown? So I used to wonder about all the unknown years of that short and unique life. Sometimes, when the whole cycle of Christianity had seemed simply too implausible, a fantasy and a ridiculous one from Adam onwards, in a glum way I would unearth documents which proved him no more than a man or perhaps not even that but only a compilation. What a river it was down which I dreamed my way in the ill-defined boat which had no engine to make it shake! What sights there were, what statuary, what buildings, what Haggardesque temples, what dreadful tombs!

  I remember coming to Memphis thousands of years ago in the area opposite where Cairo would be but was yet undreamed of, and for miles the streets were lit with a soft light; and like Odysseus out of sheer curiosity I stole ashore and walked, skin pricking, in the city; for before every door was a small pottery lamp lit so that the whole place shone. But there was no one about. For this was All Souls’ night when the dead walk, and the boy who had gone adventurously forth with his bronze sword in his hand fled screaming back to his boat with the terror of the dead around him.

  And now we were slapping down a quite different river through a bit of a lop and leaving a long smear of dirty smoke behind us. I brooded for a long time through that chilly afternoon as we moved up on the Oxyrhynchus I knew now I should never see.

  15

  Once more Shasli got us moving next morning before 6 o’clock. This was not an emergency. It was sheer eagerness on his part to get back to Cairo and find out when his tourist boat would be ready for him. It was evident that he had not found the crew to his liking and his accommodation aboard our small craft had been unsatisfactory to a man of his dignity. Poor man, that same dignity had not allowed him to share the fo’c’sle with the rest of the crew so he had found a variety of sleeping places, a tram perhaps, or the guest room in a village. Once or twice he had slept in the wheelhouse which was shorter from one side to the other than his length and must have been a kind of ‘little ease’ for him. That could not have helped. Even at Alaa’s ‘birthday party’ he had veered from lofty isolation to ingratiation. He was, after all, in control of the crew to some extent and he was not the sort of man who could be matey one moment and give orders or rebukes the next. It was not really surprising that he wanted the voyage done with as soon as possible. Now, from south of Minya he was aiming at what may be called our home port, the Yacht Club of Ma'adi, south of Cairo but still in the suburbs. We passengers were happy in the thought of baths and that product of western high tech, beautiful loos. I spent the morning jotting down odd scraps of information that I had forgotten to put in my journal. I recorded how during one of our breakdowns, when moored by a reedy bank, a fellah had risen, as it commonly seems they do, out of the earth and shown me one of the reeds saying it was papyrus, but it was not. I had seen papyrus growing in botanical gardens, and, for example, in the Fountain of Arethusa, Syracuse, Sicily. I suppose ‘papyrus’ has become the common Egyptian word for any riverside reed. It is odd how after nearly two thousand years of complete indifference to any Egyptian history that predated the founding of Islam, a common adjective now known to all was ‘pharoni’. In fact anything old at all was now called ‘pharoni’, even a particularly inadequate wine, which must have been matured for a week or two until it was considered dynastic.

  There was no doubt that the closing of the barrages was having an effect. As we sped down the river on our last lap I noticed here and there coigns of the bank which I remembered from passing them on the way up. Here I could see that in mimicry of the old seasonal flood the water was indeed rising. Mud beaches had disappeared. Grass was now sticking out of shallow water. Water buffaloes were half-walking, half-swimming to higher ground. It was a reminder of what Egypt had once been, the river’s seasonal orgasm of fertility, now not to be seen again until silt has filled Lake Nasser and men, if there are any left, witness the next ‘geological event’. There were small events, too, that had occurred in the apparently eventless countryside. In one area the place seemed served by no animals other than milk-white asses. These, perhaps being frisky by nature, had their forelegs hobbled when not in use; I had seen one being loaded with the usual huge bale together with a medium-sized fellah. Meanwhile his woman held the creature’s head. When all was arranged she bent down and unhobbled the forelegs. The as
s flung himself free with a single bound and broke into a wild gallop. The woman went base over apex in one direction, the bale and the fellah flew off in the other. The milk-white ass galloped into a field of beans and disappeared. Then, as so often, though our progress had seemed slow before, now it seemed too fast and before we could see what had happened we were past and gone.

  I added a note to my cherished understanding of the river and its traffic. In this rainless area since the air is dry there is less weight in the wind for a given speed. That is why sailing boats on the Nile can set a larger area of sail than would be possible for the same waterlength in a wetter climate. I thought it possible that the extraordinarily tattered old mainsails they wore were not a sign of poverty so much as frugality. Why use a good sail in light airs when you can make do with a worn out one? I thought that possibly after we left and the summer advanced, with the hot Khamsin really blasting from the southwest, the traffic would not stop but set new white sails that would hold the wind without splitting. Then there would be high jinks and white bow-waves on the river and those ferries would need more than an inch of freeboard!

  The generally held view of the Nile – no – my preconception of the Nile had given it a muddy bottom. How should it not be after those ages of seasonal silt? I had been wrong. Wherever I saw boatmen poling their boats along as they sometimes did not only close to the bank but out in midstream they had been shoving against something harder than mud. Once, when we had been swept on to a reef, our engine dead for lack of fuel, I had seen a lightish-coloured bottom rise nastily to within a foot or so of the surface. Indeed, with the soupy Nile water and the then light, I could not have seen it at all through more than a foot of water. Again, as we knew from bitter experience, a boat going aground in the Nile does not slither to a stop. She hits with a jarring crash and if she does so after that, does so in a series of bumps. It may be that in days when each year brought down inches of silt the river did in fact have a muddy bottom. But even if the silt did still come down, the current, now kept to a relatively narrow channel by the control exercised on it by the high dam, has scoured it clean. The Nile seems to have some kind of hard pan down there. It cannot be rock, so high in the canyon! It must be rafts of gravel, or sand, or boulders, all now concreted and rock hard. It would not be easy to anchor in midstream and we had never seen it done. The grapnel that Shasli had begged from a tourist boat had been used to make a shoreline fast, had been dug into a mud beach or bank and never dropped in the water. After all, the bank is always within half a mile at most and if you break down, what with the interplay of wind and current let alone the assistance of a passing tram and pirate you don’t need to.

  It was a mixed morning. When I could no longer remember things for odd jottings I tended to brood on the difference between anticipation and actuality. Common sense told me that if the two had been identical I need not have undertaken this journey at all but could have written the whole thing comfortably at home. On the other hand it was arguable that I had imprisoned myself in a boat rather than set myself free to do whatever I wanted wherever I wanted, had crawled hundreds of miles along this ditch in both directions with most of Egypt reduced to two banks so high you could rarely see over them. By not taking the trouble to learn more than a fraction of the language I had condemned myself to receive processed and filtered information. True, my forehead was minimally more brazen. I did dare to ask questions. I could now look the crew in the eye instead of smiling uneasily in their direction out of a sense of the false position I had put myself in by having no authority; or been put in. Perhaps, I thought, now I am about to return to a car – the westerner’s natural home – things will be different!

  We were back in red brick country where every few hundred yards the chimneys of kilns smoked away and the red brick came down to and tumbled into the river where the sandals waited. It was depressing to realize how much good earth was being hardened irretrievably into brick and how the rash of building with all the wrong angles would continue to spread. I suspected now that I had identified Egypt’s prime difficulty. It was indifference, malesh, don’t bother to complete a job because it is impossible to complete it and in any case it doesn’t matter.

  I suspected that the Secretary General’s ‘bricks’ not yet built but remaining to be built out of desert sand were a mirage. As for the mud brick arches for the fellaheen, no one would use them, for when you got down to it, except for the rare bird like Hassan Fathy – were there any others? – no one would bother.

  It was just about then that I received the news that the crew’s loo had packed up finally which was why we were moving towards the western bank. We made fast, of course, in a brickyard. Out went the gangplank, down tramped all the crew. With the exception of Shasli they were dressed western style, ready for the sophisticated living of the metropolis. They wandered about, looking for cover. Shasli simply beamed in the general direction of the boat, spread his skirts, was tented and contented. It occurred to me that I was not helping the rest by staring at the brickyard out of our window. I withdrew abruptly and struck my head, hit the base of my skull. Ann made soothing noises while I swore.

  ‘Base of the skull?’ said Ann. ‘That’s where people are always being struck by a blunt instrument. You do it with a boat.’

  I was reminded of something else. Oxyrhynchus now lay behind us. Did it matter? Malesh.

  The crew returned much more cheerful than their expedition would seem to warrant. I canvassed the centre cabin for breakfast, a meal which I was gradually discovering is a very late importation into Egyptian comprehension. Saïd was in the kitchen area. What would I like then?

  I knew that to ask for eggs and bacon was asking for the moon. I managed in my kitchen Arabic to ask if we could have coffee and bread and butter and marmalade. There was, however, no marmalade. It had been popular with the crew. There was no jam. I did not know the word for honey. I therefore stuck my thumbs in my ears, and waggled my fingers as fast as I could, meanwhile making a buzzing noise. Saïd looked staggered for a moment or two, then he burst. He became a real Nubian who has found a joke. He took it into his body and soul. He howled with laughter until the tears streamed down his black face. I returned to our cabin wondering what would happen next. Presently there was a tap at the door. It was Saïd with our breakfast. He was still grinning; but miraculously standing among the pile of Arab bread, was a small pot of honey.

  So with coffee and bread and honey we slid past the gleaming quarry of Tura and watched the awful suburbs of Cairo with its high-rises for workmen come inexorably nearer. It was desirable but not really welcome. It was welcome but not really desirable.

  I learned why we had missed Oxyrhynchus again. The nearest town to the site is Beni Mazar, ten miles from it on the river. The ten miles did not matter for we could have hired a taxi, there being a road. But Alaa, to whom I had not confided my inexplicable desire to see a place where there was nothing to see, had asked Shasli to moor us away from the river police! So, somehow all things had not come together. Malesh, malesh better that basket of the mind.

  Ann and I busied ourselves packing. We loaded the waste-paper bag with good bad books and a couple of bad bad books. I took the ugly pottery heads we had bought from the tourist kiosk in El Minya and shoved them in among the litter of bottles and tins in the galley. I did not like to throw them in the Nile but they were too heavy to take home by air. We were badly enough off as it was, for luggage space.

  We got into Ma'adi at about midday. I went round, giving the crew presents of money since we were not in a position to give them anything else. They seemed friendly and regretful, told us that they would willingly come with us again ‘next time’. Saïd, wise and happy old man, grasped both my hands in his and said with profound seriousness:

  ‘English troubles all long time away.’

  We waited for the owner of the boat, Dr Hamdi. When he came I gave him a rundown of the virtues and vices of the boat, which must have been useful. The way to find out
what needs doing to a boat is to give it plenty of exercise and we had certainly done that. Then transport was provided for us by Alaa’s extended family. We drove to our hotel through Cairo rush-hour traffic, which has not much to do with the rhythm of the Nile or any other kind of rhythm. In Cairo the only way to stay alive in traffic is to be just as crazy as everyone else.

  Anyone who has ever unpacked after a month or two in a boat will know what a mess we were in. Indeed, one of the troubles when you have lived out of suitcases is not so much to identify laundry and get it done as to identify the few things that don’t seem to be dirty. You end, generally, by bundling the lot irrespective into a laundry bag and hoping what you have on will last you until the rest comes back. Of course in Egypt laundry does not take long. If the practitioners of the ancient art of washing clothes knew what possibilities of delay are inherent in the transaction I have no doubt they would perform exquisite delicacies of procrastination but fortunately they don’t. The sun is always there so washing-by-return seems as natural to them as provision of umbrellas to us. Even so, the larger hotels, mindful of their international status, have managed to extend the period artificially and a fellah and wife will do the job faster in the country than a steam laundry in the city. I have always been faintly suprised to find myself how pleasant cleanliness is, for the detailed cleanliness which civilization has come to demand is not only boringly repetitive but is also unnatural. I would not go so far as to stand up and be counted with Dr Johnson, who declared that he had no great love of clean linen, but I am, for example, unable to see why advertisements can talk about restoring the natural oils to a body after insisting that you wash off your own. In any case the human body and any other body is such a continent of warring tribes, of infestations and defenders, of symbiotic creatures that go unheeded because they are so small they go unnoticed, of near-autonomous congregations all working on our behalf by a self-regarding benefaction there seems little point in demanding a physical purity which at best is notional. So I at least, as far as my own crumpled linen was concerned was content to be led by the nose and continued to regard clothes as wearable so long as I could not smell them. This set us free to elaborate the transition from ship to shore. It seemed reasonable to do this by treating Cairo itself as if it were some place to be investigated – we had, after all, landed there. We would spend the rest of the day – one foot still at sea, one foot on shore – trying to find some observations that might be regarded as new, interesting and helpful to the traveller. In this respect, unfortunately for me, Cairo has been worked over year by year and inch by inch. So we set out with Alaa into deepest Cairo much as an English botanist, an amateur one at that, would enter a Sussex woodland and hope to find a species of plant that nobody had ever noticed before [see plate]. We went straight to the most touristy bit of all, the bazaar. We had tea in an alley which every tourist will remember because it is what you expect. The difference was that we were the only tourists present and listened as we waited to an extraordinary old woman talking to some dozen or so young Egyptian men, who were enthralled. They grinned or laughed every now and then. The old woman wore the costume of the country but her face was uncovered.