An Egyptian Journal Page 6

  ‘You are making plans,’ he said. ‘It is useless to make plans. What will happen will happen.’

  ‘Not if I can help it!’

  It was a collision, not so much of east and west as of north and south. The south won. Alaa made soothing gestures. Then, ‘You see, it is Friday.’

  Of course. Friday for Muslims, Sunday for Christians – did we have a Jew on board? If so, Saturday would be out too – a four-day week. Through one of our windows I could see the old Nubian Saïd doing his religious duty, with his rump in the air and forehead to the deck. I hoped he knew which was the direction of Mecca. I certainly did not.

  ‘And then too,’ Alaa went on, ‘we cannot go beyond El Minya. They need time to dismantle the water pump and get spare parts. There is no point in hurrying the pump.’

  ‘It is the rhythm of the Nile.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alaa with surprised pleasure. ‘You said that exactly right.’

  We were now, I saw, in banana country – that, and sugar cane. It seemed that Friday meant that people were at leisure – even more leisure than usual for the river banks were more thickly crowded. Here we began to see the coloured dresses more specifically associated, in my mind at least, with middle and upper Egypt, all gaudy nylons, electric green, orange, staring red. The average skin colour was darker, too, moving towards the jet black of Nubia. This darkening of the skin tones down the glaring colours, I don’t know why. They certainly seem to be appropriate.

  So we came to El Minya, Minya for short. I had seen the city from the road years before and we had actually spent a night there, but the water front was dusty and confused and not at all like the comparatively well-ordered city I remembered from before. Here the river swarmed with craft, a good many of them doing the local ferry work, for Minya also has the stump of an unfinished bridge that has been years in the making. Minya is a major ferry-point. There are two mosques and a Christian church lined up above the corniche down which much rubble has cascaded. We tied up once more at what was officially the station of the river police though only the uniforms, the dirty ‘square rig’ of the other ranks, distinguished it from the rest of the river front. As usual there was a guard on duty and he carried a gleaming submachine gun. We had not been tied up for more than five minutes when all the crew, including Alaa but excepting Saïd, processed ashore. The Nubian with slothlike speed arranged some kind of portable pump and proceeded to empty our bilge. We sat around. Then, bored, we walked on the river front. The ferry boats crossed and recrossed, always full and loaded to within an inch or two of the gunwale.

  We sat around some more.

  The sun set dustily crimson beyond the minarets, then as the dusk welled out of every corner and quickly swamped the river our crew came back. There were no spare parts for the pump in Minya. Someone must take the train back to Cairo.

  Listlessly I saw the Nubian Saïd chivvied off the boat to take the train. The crew had the floorboards up in the central cabin and were dismantling the pump in readiness for the spare parts when they came – if they came.

  ‘We need a full day’s travelling from Minya,’ said Alaa. ‘Shasli won’t set out for our next stop – Asyut – if there is any danger of having to stop halfway.’

  ‘Why not? We spent last night nowhere in particular. Why can’t we do it again?’

  ‘Shasli says there is a stretch of river he doesn’t want to spend the night in because of pirates.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘He is.’

  In the end, since we were stuck anyway, I decided we would spend two days in Minya so that I could see what I could, find out what I could. Ann was feeling altogether off colour. I should have to leave her in the boat. Alaa explained that he had contacted the assistant to the Director of Culture for the Governate of Minya but the director himself could not be contacted because he was at home and his assistant was afraid to telephone him.

  The crew went ashore one by one and we were left alone. I busied myself with my journal once more, adding up the poverty-stricken list of things I had seen while we lay here, clueless, languageless, engineless. The river had been more various – marshes and the desert, villages, cliffs and quarries. Now there was the ample ferry traffic of Minya and beyond it miles of desert cliff at the top of which, every few hundred yards were caps of harder stone. Between these successive caps the rock was worn away in a gentle curve from cap to cap. Was that after all Dilel Afrit? I remembered seeing those cliffs the first time we had come to Minya. We had left Cairo at dawn and got to Minya so early in the day that it was not worth stopping the night. But on the way back down the valley we had stopped there, spending the night in the Lotus Hotel. We had sat drinking tea in the top floor restaurant and looked at these same cliffs and agreed what fun it would be to examine the overhangs for flints and bones and pots! Surely, we said, prehistoric man must have used those overhangs; but now we were nearer by a mile and knew the overhangs were hundreds of feet up in the air and quite inaccessible. That time, too, we had sat listening to Sadat orating for hours on the tiny black and white television set, talking on and on; and at last our few words of Arabic seemed to be deceiving us – for surely he was throwing the Russians out of the country? We must be wrong – but we were not. It was a triumph for Sadat and for our half a dozen words of Arabic plus a few dozen inspired guesses.

  Now, what we had for entertainment was the ferry. There were two-storey launches chuffing either way. There was a larger ferry to take cars and trucks but it was ‘temporarily’ out of order. There were also a dozen sandals going back and forth and loaded so deeply with people it was a wonder the ripples from passing trams did not sink them. There was, too, constant illustration of the Great Egyptian Mystery. Where do the crowds come from? In Egypt a crowd simply materializes, there is no other word for it. One moment you have empty air. The next moment one car bumps another or some vegetables fall off a truck or a child cuts its knee – you lose sight of the event because there is now a crowd round it ten deep. Opposite us on the other side of the river was a landing jetty which was empty most of the time. But did a sandal with its load touch there and before one crowd was properly off, the jetty would be thick with another one waiting to do the journey back. There was never an empty sandal or two-storey launch moving either way yet the jetty was always empty until the frantic two minutes of loading and unloading. I had a look at the water alongside and decided it was particularly soupy and wondered if this was an effect of the city. The calèche drivers had brought their wretched horses down to the water, driven them in and gone in after them to clean them. It was impossible not to wonder whether the horses were acquiring new diseases or merely exchanging old ones [see plate].

  As dusk fell nothing moved on the water except a huge tourist boat which attempted to come alongside the corniche but found insufficient water and stuck about fifty yards offshore. With night the stump of the unfinished bridge a hundred yards south of us stuck out into the sky with an odd air of pain about it as if sheer suffering kept it in this gesture. I did some more sitting. Ann lay, trying to doze and shivering now and then. The crew came back. They started the generator and the boat lit up from stem to stern. Rushdie was getting us a meal and brewing the bitter Egyptian coffee. We had grasped the nature of Egyptian meals. They are not feasts but they are movable. You could say we ate now and then. But Alaa’s letter from the Chief of Police had done its work. A cable was run on board and we were hooked up to shore lighting. A hose came next and filled our tanks with pellucid water from the water tower. Another hose filled us up with fuel. An officer of the river police, a very young man but in a beautiful khaki uniform came aboard bowing and saluting in every direction. Alaa came too, and explained that he had been unable to contact the Director of Culture. He would try again early next morning. The meal and the coffee were very good. I managed to get some extra things for our bunks – coverlets which helped to keep our heaped-up clothes securely on top of our single blankets. I simply do not know why I had not th
e sense to buy other blankets – it did seem impossible with the crew sleeping rough.

  With free power from the shoreline we ran the generator all night and the boat became almost warmer than we wanted. I stayed awake most of the night so comfortable in the warmth I didn’t mind a bit. Even the dawn chorus from the minarets seemed in better voice and so soothing that I slept after it. Ann was definitely better.

  Alaa came back after breakfast. He had contacted the Director of Culture who had blasted his assistant from Minya to Khartoum when he found how Alaa had been kept waiting. El Minya was ours, we had only to ask. The Director himself, Mr Ahmed El-Sherif, arrived at midday. Tomorrow he would take us for an audience with the Secretary General to the Governor of the Governate of El Minya. Unfortunately the Governor himself was in Cairo otherwise he could imagine nothing that would give him greater happiness than to lay the place at our feet. Meantime, here was an assistant, Madame X, interpreter and guide, and a sergeant of the Tourist Police. Madame X spoke French. What did I want to see? Ann pleaded indisposition but the rest of us went off together.

  The most important sites are tombs to the south of Beni Hassan on the other side of the river. We drove through the city then on to the main road and stopped to examine a Mameluke Palace, which by now had been turned into tenements. It was an elaborate structure, with lots of marble courtyards and patios and galleries. Minute shops huddled close to it. Then we drove south for about twenty kilometres along the side of a canal in sugar cane country. I looked at this canal until it became ordinary to me. It was a canal, that was all. Idly, I asked Alaa which canal it was and he said it was the Bahr Yusuf [see plate]. I was moodily and quite illogically vexed. For this Joseph’s Canal is alleged by all persons like myself who prefer a good story to literal historical accuracy (whatever that may happen to be) is, I say, alleged to be the very canal that Joseph – he of the coat of many colours – built for Pharaoh. They say – that lot say – that it isn’t Joseph’s canal but a canal built by a much later Joseph. Did you ever hear anything so silly? Before I had seen it I had already made up my mind that even if it wasn’t biblical Joseph’s actual ditch, his must have lain along the same line so what’s the odds? You put a canal in the best place for it so the later one was no more than a restoration of the original. I had promised myself such a thrill at seeing it; but now I had been looking at it for twenty kilometres and made it so ordinary to myself that my promised frisson was entirely lacking.

  But still, it was Joseph’s Canal. It was, I think, a greater, a more impressive, a wilder leap of the imagination than the pyramids. There was and is a great depression in the desert on the western side of the Nile opposite Cairo. This is the Fayoum, between twenty and thirty miles square. Right back in the earliest pharaonic days someone conceived the idea of deflecting surplus flood water from the river into that depression and then – here is the leap – of letting it out again into the Nile when a flood was inconveniently low. But this join between the main stream and the Fayoum could not be made down by Cairo. The main stream for obvious hydrostatic reasons had to be tapped hundreds of miles to the south so that the gradient of the canal would be so gradual the water would be controllable. So there the canal is, huge in length, vast in scope and breathtaking in the sheer imaginative size of the conception. Now here it was, a canal like any other and I found I had to screw my wits up to remember what it was I was looking at. This was Joseph’s artificial river (to match his granaries) which turned the Fayoum into the first man-made lake.

  At last we turned left across the canal and towards the river through much fertility. There aren’t many crops they don’t grow in Minya. The handout lists sugar, cotton, soya beans, garlic, onions, vegetables of all sorts, tomatoes, potatoes and grapes. I add to these the clover and wheat that I saw with my own eyes. The crops are so much better than the houses! So many houses, imposing or would-be imposing brick buildings are unfinished and left so. Here and there even the land was left overgrown and gone to waste. That in the supreme and historical treasure of Egypt is preposterous. I asked about this and got one of my few Minyan insights. Apparently the fellaheen are deserting the land in droves. They can make more money in the cotton factories or sugar factories and there aren’t enough of them left to till the land. Those who are left demand such high wages that ‘the landowners cannot afford to pay them’. Worse than this from the government point of view, fellaheen sneak off if they can, somehow get abroad to other richer Arab countries where they do the dirty work in oilfields and the like. Then they come back home with a bit of money which enables them to escape the old backbreaking toil with a hoe and open a small shop or some other minute sort of business.

  All this means, said Alaa that the price of food increases. Now in Egypt, only the relatively well-to-do can afford it. This leads, he said, to trouble.

  ‘What trouble?’

  ‘Riots.’

  ‘Not recently, I hope.’

  ‘A month or two ago.’

  The village towards which we were driving, Abu Qurgas, was Coptic Christian. In what I supposed was a graveyard, crosses remained in position if they were made of metal but if they were wooden the cross members were all torn away.

  We went down to the ferry and climbed aboard. I saw that the engine had been designed some forty or fifty years ago by my brother-in-law, which completed my feeling of fantasy. The ferry chugged downstream for a quarter of a mile then turned in behind an island and butted the further bank. This was steep sand and we had to jump. A huge, streamlined tourist boat was moored a few hundred yards further along the bank and seemed empty. We walked through scrub and sand to a causeway that led into a more fertile area, perhaps the most fertile bit I had seen to date. There was a water pump further on which served this area and gave it water and enough to spare. So the half a dozen green fields of beans and vegetables were running with water all channelled in the old manner, a miniature demonstration of the system which the pharaohs or their viziers invented. The area was heavily screened off by date-palms and felt cool. One small field was under water entirely with some crop only just showing above the surface. There were a few large, white birds picking about in the water and on the banks. They were the Amis des Paysans, or mock ibis, the Farmer’s Friends. I asked about them, ‘investigatively’ and found that they are decreasing in numbers because of the build-up of insecticides. Here too, in this little paradise!

  The causeway led on to a resthouse, then across desert and an increasing slope. We came to the foot of the desert cliff, that same escarpment which had stalked us, brown beast that it was, all the way from Cairo and would stay with us in this river valley as far as we chose to go. The causeway bent upward sharply, smooth portions interspersed with groups of ‘donkey steps’, deeper than steps for men but the rises no higher. The tombs I had come to see – or rather the tombs thought suitable for me to see – were visible as square black doorways high up in the cliff. We toiled up, rested on seats provided thoughtfully at the halfway mark then braced ourselves and reached the level path along which are set the tombs. The tour from the tourist boat was already there but just finishing and turning to go down back to the sunlit boat, a perfect model of itself in that clear air. The tombs are of much importance to Egyptologists for the light they throw on conditions during a troubled period of history, though to the ignorant eye they are less impressive than the ones at Luxor in the Valley of the Kings. They date from the Middle Kingdom and are painted with all kinds of secular events. The paint is not as vivid as it appears in illustrations. But the subjects are interesting and the Department of Antiquities in association with the Governate of Minya province has cared for them elaborately, and for the visitors as well, since they have filled the grave shafts with sand and gravel and made them safe.

  Here Madame X began to speak. Dear lady, years of guiding, do what she would, had given her set speeches a degree of flatness that combined with the slight echo to make them as soporific as informative. She spoke the French of Egypt and wh
en she had finished she did it all over again in Arabic for the benefit of the rest of the group. I nodded my way busily through the French. Outside the brightly lit doorway the tourists were now visible making their way back down the path. Beyond them the tourist boat lay, waiting for some child to give it a shove or see if blowing would make it move like a real steamboat. It was so streamlined. The glass and metal of the hull was sheer and there was simply nothing to break the monotony of glass, metal, glass, even her upper works. I saw, suddenly that she was all wrong. This was fashion and nothing but. It was like the absurd streamlining of cars that are never going to benefit more than about one per cent from it. She was a river boat confined to a narrow river. She had no storms to face, no waves bigger than ripples. Her greatest inconvenience would be the wash from some sister ship. Well then, why was she not fantasticated? She should be a barge fit for Cleopatra or a whole group of international Cleopatras and burn on the waters with gold and purple and red. As for all that glass: every window should be graced by a window box and her upper works green with scented shrubs.

  I came to with a jerk to find that I had been nodding busily through the Arabic version intended for everybody but me. At the end I carefully asked an intelligent question to show I was with the party; but an awful possibility presented itself to me. Was I in fact a philistine? Would Schumann have dismissed me? Or would he have dismissed the tombs? They had some degree of interest about them after all. The particular one we were in was illustrated copiously, as they used to say of books, by various martial arts; from which it had been deduced that the local magnate had got as close as he could to having his private army. And so on. The trouble with so much Egyptology is that of necessity the story is often conjectural because hard evidence is difficult to come by. The links are almost always so tenuous and since the strength of a chain is that of the weakest link….