From the Elephant's Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings

  The great souk, the Grand Bazaar, so to speak, still exercises its romantic charm, still swarms with the old inhabitants of Cairo—beggars, soothsayers, sellers of water, musk, perfumes, and spices. It is Aladdin’s cave, and the cameraman went suitably mad over it.

  But for me the richest moments I spent in Cairo were with that extraordinary being, Hassan Fathy,[11] in his eagle’s eyrie high up in the Citadel. I had long known him by name and fame as an architect, and indeed we had common friends. One of them, Dmitri Papadimas, the photographer, was responsible for the precious afternoon with this faunlike old man, who looks a young fifty. Indeed, sometimes he looks a stripling, especially when he bursts out laughing and hugs himself with joy as he recounts some idiocy of the Government or some foolish pronouncement by a Government minister. Fathy’s book Architecture for the Poor is now world-famous, as, indeed, is his model village, New Gourna, in which he demonstrated, as a pilot scheme, what can be done with the simple, eternal, ancient mud brick of Egypt as a housing tool. Great ideas are often the most simple and his book is much more than an architectural manual; it is also an esthetic autobiography, full of felicitous turns of phrase and penetrating ideas about the relation of happiness to architecture, of insight to good living. But a mud brick? It is everywhere, of course, but what Hassan Fathy discovered when he started working with it was that its cheapness could enable the poor of Egypt to house themselves commodiously, and even harmoniously, for hardly any outlay. Nobody today can provide public housing for under $1,200 a unit, whereas Fathy discovered that with his mud-brick technique he could bring the cost down to as little as $500, including kitchen and bathroom. But more exciting, more poetic still, was the link that this technique provided with ancient Egypt, with that violent young queen, Hatshepsut, who was so enamoured of the beauty and use of mud that she allowed herself to be frescoed making the first mud brick—purely as a promotional stunt, I suppose! Would that Fathy’s rediscovery of this ancient building material could receive the blessing of officialdom. As we climbed the last staircase and came out upon the roof balcony of his beautiful house, which is right in the midst of the Citadel mosques, he said: “Look! Two cities, two ways of life, of building.”

  His gesture took in the warm brown girdle of domes that surrounded his balcony, each with its crescent moon—bubbles of infinity set into the regal coronet of Islamic belief, each radiating the magnetism of its ancient faith. Then, turning toward the desert, he pointed to the skyscrapers of the new Cairo hanging in their clouds of dust over the Nile. The comparison was unfair, and he admitted it; the mosque is not a habitation, and a skyscraper is not a mosque. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition was striking and revealed two ways of thinking about life, of living it.

  The occasion was also exciting, for Fathy had just been given an award by the President, and there was some talk of a meeting being arranged between them. There was no doubt that if the Government officially espoused the Fathy plan for rebuilding the villages of Egypt, it could not only prove economically justified by low cost but would actually open a renaissance in peasant architecture that might revolutionize more than Egypt. That night I reread the old architect’s book and prayed that such a wonderful thing might come about. And often in the day to come, I thought of him as we wandered through the elegantly decorated Nubian villages whose buildings had first taught him that one can build anything with mud bricks—even domes on squinches! In my sleep, the young Queen Hatshepsut seemed to appear before me holding a mud brick and smiling. I vowed to take one home with me so that I could wish on it for the poor of Egypt each Christmas Day.

  So the hours in Cairo passed pleasantly, with the feeling that the camera had had plenty of subject matter. The team at last began to feel its feet, to believe that they were really there, living in the shadow of the ancient Pyramids with nothing to stop them from rising at dawn for a ride through the white sweet desert air. For my part, I had discovered the small haunting call of the rock doves—my room opened on the desert pure—and some of the forgotten rhythm of Egyptian time, which is like no other. One enters the slow blood rhythm of the Nile water flowing softly, unhurriedly down to the sea.

  After the frenetic and discordant noises of the capital, Aswan, lying in its quiet shoulder of the great river, seemed as cool to the skin and the mind as lint or some rare lotion distilled from the green fastnesses of this flowing water as it soothes its way down to the sea, its way studded with islands and villages, with margins of desert and oases. The feeling of air and space is wonderful. And here, of course, one makes a really intimate acquaintance with the felucca.[12] Like some great fashion plate, fully conscious of her beauty, she turns and that haunted me while I was here and then continued to haunt my writings long after I had left. We were to have three or four stabs at Upper Egypt before departing. Peter Adam had selected the places where it was most likely that words and music (images and sound) might manage to make a marriage. Film is a cursedly fragile medium, and I was glad that I did not have his worries and preoccupations. But he was a good surgeon. To wake up in the early morning and find myself, after a brief air hop, confronted by the gigantic gorgons of Abu Simbel[13] was rather a clever way of shaking my nerve and seeing whether I could talk sense or would simply babble to the camera, however, I found myself babbling to (I beg the reader to believe this) Mia Farrow under a dusty tamarisk tree, while we both wolfed the nauseous box lunch that the hotel had provided. We had, in fact, run across the bow of a very big craft—a big-budget movie based upon a venerable Agatha Christie novel, and truffled with big stars.[14]

  It seemed strange at the time but, actually, given the gigantic and somewhat horrific sculpture of the Abu Simbel group, the meeting was most appropriate, for however magnetic the site, the sculpture, in the esthetic sense, is what Noël Coward[15] would have classified as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Indeed, there is something about the colossal effigies of Upper Egypt that fills me with an uneasy sense of…foreboding, I might say. One feels they exist in some leaden brooding dimension full of their own Saturnian weight. They are preoccupied with the inertia of death, the way the little kings and queens are in their precious mummy wrappings—cocoons of immortality. In Egypt, matter counted for little, it was not manipulated with pious lust, with a sensual feel for its nature. The statues sit there in monolithic glumness, brooding forever upon the penumbra of death. The occasional human touch is so very welcome—the realization that even great kings, like small children, were allowed to take their toys to bed with them, and thence into the darkness of the grave. But the obsessional preoccupation with non-being is finally wearying—think of the vivid prolixity of Indian or Greek sculptural idioms and then return to these huge glum telamons! Yes, it was appropriate that some of the great public tacks and falters and surges at the behest of the river winds. The tall lateen seems to reach for heaven. As the river winds vary hardly at all in their general pattern, these lovely craft seem to perform simple Euclidean maneuvers on the green water, leaning their cheeks close into the wind. The sunsets, with feluccas moving across them on patrol or tacking into the eye of the sinking sun, are as unforgettable as ever. Even the noisiest of tourists feels a sudden stirring in his spirit as he watches the scene from his balcony or from the little belvedere of the new Cataract Hotel (another disgraceful piece of architecture, by the way).

  But another surprise for the newcomer is to encounter the Nubians on their home ground, so different are they from both the Bedouin and the town Egyptians. They are great big brown men and wonderfully beautiful women, who exude a calm and grace that is quite at ease with itself, quite unflurried. Their faces, carved in chocolate, are full of intelligence and, strangely enough, humour; laughter is very near the surface, and the white ivory smile of Nubia is something one does not easily forget. They open their arms to welcome you to their country and say, in a deep rich bass, the word “Hullo!” It means everything connected with welcome, this great big brown “Hullo.” You hear it uttered from feluccas that cross you on the river; yo
u hear it in town; everywhere, the brown “Hullo.” But apart from this impression of being among intelligent, unflurried human beings, one sees that here the hotels and tourist agencies really work. These people are as intelligent as they are beautiful. How terrible that so many of them have eyes missing—the dreadful scourge of ophthalmia still visits the poor of Egypt. Two of the boatmen who took us for river trips were quite blind, and each had a small boy to help him. But they were efficient and competent and took the wind on their cheeks in a professional way, to gauge its direction and speed. The villages were a delight, and these people reminded me of stories I had read of the South Sea Islanders before the arrival of the missionaries.

  But after a few days filming among these poetic islets the producer decided that we must shorten rein. After all, we had not come to Egypt to painstakingly photograph everything but to attempt to trap that elusive wraith, the spirit of place. Images of the silver screen should be wandering about these haunting sites—spitfire Bette Davis, effervescent Peter Ustinov, and David Niven,[16] who was my mother’s pinup boy for the last ten years of her life. Indeed, it’s to Niven that I owe the fact that she actually read a book by me. She had always found them too dull and heavy going, until one day I showed her a fan letter from the star praising the books and saying that someone else would only play Mountolive over his dead body! That electrified my mother. She read everything, and, seeing Niven in all the roles, she naturally found that it was peerless stuff. Thank you, David Niven!

  By now, however, the time had begun to count us down, and, thanks to the good judgement of Adam, we were able to take the pulse beat of Idfu and Kom Ombo during the course of a long and blazing car ride along the steep banks of forgotten canals where the ancient wooden water wheels (the sakieh of Egypt that, in the folklore of the land, always whisper messages to the wind) groaned and creaked and shrieked like banshees. A late descendant of Cleopatra’s asp in the form of a toothless cobra obligingly hissed at the camera in the bewitching precincts of Kom Ombo, with its moving and, for once, very human cartoons. Here one felt the spirit lift, for virtue and immortality were being poured out of jars like wine, like nectar! There was faith and gaiety and movement being expressed. What a change from the other sculpture!

  The winter sun beats down upon the bronze hills where the great Theban temple of Queen Hatshepsut stands—the mountain shaven like a skull. In this dryness there are no echoes; shout if you will! The universe seems padded like a studio. Another memory: rowing about in the violet ruins of Philae watching the sunset drain out of the sky. One curious water bird watched us, but said nothing. At Idfu, a buzzard flew out of a tower with a terrific flap of wings. These Egyptian moments existed like the wing beats of birds from some forgotten civilisation, from some period existing outside the human imagination. Luxor and the ruins of Karnak strengthened one’s attachment to the place, and also one’s distrust of the institutionalized monumental masonry devoted to Ramses II. So much banality, so much repetition. Why? I think the answer is, really, to give the artisans something to do. Otherwise they would have caused political mischief, as the unemployed have always done.

  The last quiet days at Luxor were a sort of happy fulfillment, for the camera boys pronounced themselves content. In fact, of course, Adam’s troubles were only just beginning; on him lay the responsibility for assembling and tailoring all the various elements into something coherent, true to its objective and also easy on the eye. I was glad that I did not share the weight of this responsibility—my part was done. But I had found myself a little Hassan Fathy mud brick from Gourna (the domain of Hatshepsut) and had slipped it into my suitcase. I could always wish him luck on that, I felt.

  Cairo awaited us now, and the characteristic pandemonium I have already described, but at the heart of it there were now kindly officials we knew who greeted us warmly. One felt at home.

  And so ended the great adventure. At Heathrow, they were curious about my mud brick. “Is it very old?” they asked. When I said no, indeed it was very new, they lost interest. At Orly, on my way home to Sommières, the lively eye of the French customs man gazed at it in a world-weary way. “Was it something to eat?” he asked. When I said no, he waved me through in a resigned sort of way. The little brick lies before me as I write these lines. A tourist souvenir? No, something more.[17]

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