‘Nice simple loo,’ he said. ‘A wide bore pipe and straight through into the river. No problem.’
Akhmet, our engineer, walked aft along the tram carrying a towel.
‘He is going to have a bath,’ said Alaa. ‘Not very hot, though.’
Maybe we should have hired a tram.
The bargain was struck. Both crews busied themselves with the job of manoeuvring the craft so that a fuel pipe could be joined between them.
‘Why are they taking so long about it?’
‘It is difficult,’ said Alaa. ‘Very difficult.’
I remember coming back from Gibraltar with Force ‘H’ at twenty-eight knots. I was in the destroyer Orion. There was a moderate sea. We manoeuvred alongside the battleship, King George V was it, or Anson? – I could not remember – or Prince of Wales – no she had been sunk by then. But whatever ship it was, we lay, our captain conning his ship by fractions of a degree ten yards from that brutal citadel of armour plate and steel while mail was passed and a fuel line linked. The contrast was entertaining.
I remembered what I had come for. Those deep insights and profound thoughts did seem a little thin on the ground – or water. It had become obvious that I was an observer of the trivial and would have to record it or come home with nothing. It seemed an appropriate moment for learning about trams. After all, they are the powered workhorses of the river. I began to make inquiries, no doubt getting in everybody’s way – but then everybody got in everybody’s way! These craft were not being run by captains or committees or even majority vote. It was all happenstance and worked, which was what mattered. This tram belonged to the biggest sugar company which was government owned. Egypt produces a million tons of sugar every year, refining it from the raw cane in the extraordinary bowels of the engineer who haunted me with his passion. This tram would distribute its hundreds of tons of limestone for purifying juice to half a dozen refineries in Upper Egypt.
‘Bigger than the one we saw?’
‘Much bigger. Newer.’
The tram, when it had shot its cargo, would bring back molasses in special tanks. The company – the government, in effect – had two hundred trams. Who, then, in the long run would pay for our fuel? The taxpayer, I thought, most likely.
However, I was now a little enlightened. Why, this was almost ‘investigative journalism’! I saw now the difference between the government trams, grey painted but rusting and the privately owned trams which went up and down the Nile touting for custom, ready to carry anything from bricks to grain or sugar or straw or crowds of fellaheen on a religious outing. The private trams needed to be seen and had not an assured market. For this reason they were brightly painted and decorated and beflagged. They were covered with advertisements and pious exhortations, the two sometimes mingled for in Egypt you can see ‘God is greatest’ written in the most unlikely and perhaps inappropriate places. Most trams are to be defined by the position of the wheel right up in the bows and by the size of the wheel. Since it is right up forrard, no matter how your cargo of, say, sugar cane towers astern of you, you can still see what is in front. However, a corollary of this is that there is a distance of about fifty yards between the wheel and the rudder it controls. Sizeable chains link the one to the other and consequently the effort needed to shift the wheel and the chain and the rudder is enormous. For this reason the wheel is as large as that of a ship of the line – six or seven feet in diameter. For the slightest change of course you see the helmsman spin the wheel, bearing down with his weight on one side of it. He needs all the mechanical advantage he can get and the big wheel provides it. Power-operated steering would be uneconomical because as usual in Egypt – except when raising large quantities of water – it is cheaper to use human muscles. I had seen one example of a new mark of tram. This was a larger vessel altogether and had the wheelhouse right aft. But it was moored by the root of a bridge which was being built and had been imported specially by the foreign company which was building the bridge. It was, I say, the shape of things to come, and I regretted it, sentimentally. There were in this stretch of the river, a few of the big tourist boats going up and down. They were the modern sort, four-deckers and streamlined. Only once, when we were moored in a creek, I happened to turn round and saw a different tourist boat slide past the opening of it – a large, wooden, fantasticated job which was probably used for the film Death on the Nile. On the other hand, the sight was so brief I wondered if I had dreamed it. Then again, there are launches with awnings overall for day trips and these seem very popular with middleclass Egyptians rather than tourists who prefer to take their whole world with them and, indeed, as we saw, can do very little else. It seems that different governates – what were once called ‘Nomes’ – favour slightly different craft as though natural selection was for once performing its textbook operation.
Yet it is difficult to see any real dividing line between these governates. The division noticeable from the river – and it is only notional as a division – is where the Eastern Desert swerves in and brushes the water then swerves off again. That must interrupt or at least diminish communication along one bank; but then most communication in Egypt from prehistoric times onward has been on water.
I had now become all eyes in my search for interest, however trivial. The stretch we were in was once notorious for its dullness. That decisive-minded traveller, T. G. Bowles, took the ‘Post Boat’ up this stretch and did not think much of it.
As for the voyage, it is dismal beyond expression. The melancholy succession of flat mud banks rarely broken by as much as a single tree, still more rarely by a village, and never by single houses is quite depressing, and offers no inducement to linger, while the crowd of half or wholly naked urchins who at each stopping place howl for bakshish makes one wonder what kind of people it can be that succeeded those who built the Pyramids, and what kind of system it can have been that has thus degraded the inhabitants of the richest soil on earth.
Today, I thought, things had changed beyond measure. The abundant fertility of that soil was now evident to the very edge of the water and the urchins might be seen passionately playing football wherever there was a space for them.
The tram to which we were hitched was loaded with the soft limestone of the mountains over to the east. I knew it was soft because I broke a piece off the cargo and crumbled it easily between two fingers and a thumb [see plate]. No wonder it was destined to purify sugar. It seemed less a stone than a spice or even an eatable.
We came to Balyana and cast off from the tram for it was stopping there. Shasli pushed ahead. Plainly he scented his home comforts at Qena. Immediately the scene was obscured by our long tail of dense, black smoke. I stopped peering at Balyana which did not seem worth more than a glance, and went below, where I was told that Saïd now had tonsillitis. Poor old man, the devoted journey after dusters and subsequent wild pursuit in the police launch had done for him. He was looking very miserable. I exerted all my will on this momentarily malleable crew member and got him to go and lie down on his bunk. It was not that he went off duty, for the distinction in Hani was without a difference. No one was ever on duty except the man at the wheel; but then no one was ever off duty either. They just did, more or less, what was to be done and at varying speeds. The lad Faroz – Aladdin – was officially cleaner, but handed, reefed and steered, if by reefing may be understood rearranging the long cushions which had been placed in more leisurely days on the upper deck for lounging passengers. He also cooked, as did Akhmet the engineer. Poor Saïd on the other hand, aged and ill, did nothing but stand about and go on the occasional useless errand if we chanced to be tied up at a town. It was wholly bad luck that he got left behind and exposed to the elements in the police launch. Shasli, of course, did nothing but steer and give orders which was fair enough since he was the Reis. Rushdie steered, cooked, studied business management, taught elementary hieroglyphics, played the lute and occasionally sang. He had other talents which had not yet emerged. But what proper syste
matic naval arrangements could be made with such a job lot? It was no good saying they were efficient. The boat did not allow efficiency. On the whole they had kept her running but only just and with intermissions. As for Shasli, I swear he was now overrunning the boat and our tail of smoke was a quarter of a mile long and almost as wide.
Alaa emerged from the fo’c’sle and said that he thought the old man was bad. I asked what help we could get in those parts. Apparently there was a hospital at Nag Hammadi and one at Qena. What we must do, I thought, if he got no better, was to put him into one of those hospitals and collect him on the way back. I even considered leaving someone to look after him and wondered who could most easily be spared but came to the conclusion that that someone was myself. That day, for some reason, Rushdie cooked us a colossal lunch.
After the lunch I was watching the now fertile east bank – the tawny desert had slunk away again – when I saw a ‘Return of the Native’. It was remarkable. There was a mud cliff about six feet high, some trees and among them a long straggling village. A procession was moving under the trees. Everyone was dressed in the standard costume native to Egypt, with much brilliant nylon. But leading this procession with children dancing round him was an elegant young man in a western business suit of light grey and very, very sharp with flared bottoms to the trouser legs. His hair was set carefully. He carried a small suitcase while a little boy struggled after him with another. It was without doubt one of those moments when the son of the village comes home from foreign parts having, let us hope, made his modest fortune perhaps as a construction worker among the rigs and who was now all set to become the great, rich man in his village. It was as clear as an illustration in a book, this glimpse of a process, the man returning with city shoes already dusty as the bus which had brought him home went trundling back along the bank. Well, I thought to myself, you have seen it, you have seen the historical process which is remaking not just Egypt but the whole Arab world in one way or another, possibly for the better. It could not surely be for the worse. But could I, in my unwritten book, give that scene the importance it deserved? Probably not. After all there had been that other Arab in the foyer of the Sheraton. He was just in from the desert, you could see that clearly enough, but the modern desert with its land-rovers, roads, airfields and imported water. He had come in to shop and now was carrying back his purchases. Some of them were in the suitcase he carried. The suitcase was of shiny gold.
There was another barrage at Nag Hammadi. It was identical to the one at Asyut, one hundred sluices with a lock-gate on the western side. We approached it at speed as Shasli wished to get in before the lock-gate shut for the night; and as we entered the lock there came a thunderous knocking sound from under our stern. We stayed in the lock for hours, it seemed, but no one bothered to go below and examine the stern gland. When we came out of the lock it was to the same thunderous accompaniment from our wretched screw. I felt a mixture of fury at the sheer incompetence of this ship-handling, which would inevitably mean a shorter trip altogether, and a gloomy satisfaction at seeing my prognostications fulfilled. We had a malaise, it sounded to me, somewhere between the screw and the engine and the possibilities were multiple. Knocking and rattling as we were, Shasli manoeuvred us to a berth. The crew set to work excavating round the engine and Alaa came presently with the news that, ‘The bearings have gone’. That settled it, I thought. We should simply have to hire a car – but not a bit of it. Shasli wanted to press on regardless, knocking and all. The whole crew were now within reach of their homes and were not going to be thwarted by anything as trivial as an engine dancing in its bed. This was the nearest my minder and I ever came to an outright quarrel. I pointed out that this breakdown was not like the others. To carry on might well finish the boat off completely. To this, the answer that filtered through to me from Shasli was as before: why should I worry? It wasn’t my boat. After a row, we reached a compromise. Alaa would ring the owner in Cairo and suggest that a new set of white metal bearings should be flown or trained up the Nile to Nag Hammadi. So Alaa went off to find a phone and Ann and I sat speechless.
Alaa came back. The owner had said, Push on and see if it gets any worse. So that was that. There was nothing for it but bed, where at least we were both beginning to sleep warmer. In the morning the pre-dawn chorus seemed more prolonged than usual, aimed, I thought, at the very large Christian church alongside which we were moored. The Reis, eager now for his home at Qena, was up before anyone else and got away in the semi-dark as he might well have done on other days if his sails had not been woven of Egyptian patience. Now, apparently, that patience was threadbare. The propeller shaft bounced and banged deafeningly under our cabin. I stared out of our stern window and could see nothing but the usual black smoke. We were doing our best speed, something like ten knots, and it was a toss-up whether the propeller shaft or the engine would smash first. I thought moodily of the ship which broke her propeller shaft in mid-Atlantic, stabbed herself with the broken end and foundered slowly. At least we weren’t at sea for all their silly names for the Nile! The propeller shaft would chatter for a while like teeth as if it were cold rather than hot. Then, as if trying to jump about to get warm, it would imitate one of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, the final prestissimo. I got up. Ann was endeavouring or pretending to sleep through it all and thus be somewhere else – home, perhaps – but I don’t think she was really succeeding. Then, just when I was thinking that the only thing left to do was to abandon ship, the Reis knocked a knot or two off our speed, the prestissimo became a gallop and the black smoke astern became a cloud of white steam. I say the Reis knocked off our speed but this may have been done by the engine itself in a desperate attempt at self-preservation. Then it, or the Reis, slowed down still more. He was trying to find the speed which would do the least damage and so enable the boat to get him home. He achieved a node among our vibrations in which the engine did not clatter or chatter its teeth but kept them too tightly clenched as if in permanent anguish. It was better for us, I suppose, but you could still feel the boat suffer.
I turned away from our boat with much determination. There was, as far as I could see, nothing to be done. At Qena or Luxor if we were still afloat, I thought, there might be a boatyard capable of doing something. Meanwhile, the only way to make use of our progress was to ignore as much as possible this horrid vibration through the soles of the feet and continue to watch the river and the countryside. There was, for example, that fisherman. He had his blessedly vibrationless rowing boat holed up among tall, flowering reeds. As we passed he hauled up his fishtrap, which was like an openwork dustbin of thin wire, and lo, he emptied a small fish out of it. Then we came to fishermen and boys, two by two, one of each in successive rowing boats and they all had long, thin rods out over the water; and like rodmen everywhere, not catching anything. I thought then and still think that I’ve never seen anyone with a rod catch a fish. The rodman is stasis, permanent gesture, meditation. Take the hook off the line and you would suppose yourself passing a series of Buddhas. In this stretch of water, oddly, there was no net fishing at all. There must be a reason for the change but it was not in my competence to discover one. Rushdie appeared with breakfast. It was bread, cheese, slices of cold sausage all washed down with mineral water. Before we had finished, he brought us cups of tea, the surfaces covered with a close interference pattern.
We wrapped up and went on deck. There was sun and wind, sparkle. We were, I thought, turning to the qibli – gibli in the local dialect. In other words, we were turning to the south which was really the east. Bahari, or north, was increasingly to the west of us: for we were beginning to enter the huge turn, the kink the Nile makes which is such a plain feature on the map. I ought to add that this was the morning on which our loo came clean and we were able to pump river water through it. All the vibration of our careless speed – beggars on horseback – had achieved what neither we nor the crew had been able to manage. Every cloud has a silver lining and so on. So we sat on deck,
and turned more and more to the qibli with the morning sun straight ahead of us. The wind breathed wooingly for a change so that at length both of us unwrapped cautiously. There was no doubt about it. The weather was changing with the bend. Had we reached the point where the warm south really began? There was much life about on the nearer, eastern, I mean northern bank. It was often intimate. At that time of the year, Egyptians wear a vest and long Johns under the galabia. The long Johns have no fly. An Egyptian about his early morning business pushes the long Johns to his knees as he squats and lets the galabia spread round him. Away it all goes and as he is in a tent he is happy enough performing in broad daylight and within a few yards of other people. Sometimes a second galabia is worn under the top one. Ann said that our Reis, sophisticated man that he is, and living as he does on tourist boats, had his galabia made of modern material with rayon in it. She added that the shoulders and sleeves were of a modern cut. Women’s costume was changing in these parts. They sometimes wore trousers tight to the ankle but under a calf-length skirt. The colours were ever more garish, the faces ever darker. Here, too, there were scarecrows, not metaphorical but real; and either I only just noticed the custom or they were the first to be used between Alexandria and Qena. It seems odd; for an agricultural country must surely be up to every dodge in the battle of the fields. Perhaps the population lower down the river and in the Delta is so dense the birds don’t get a chance. The whole area of the Big Bend seemed prosperous with here and there a quite large villa. Some villas actually had steps going down to the water and a moored boat.