Now, for the first time since leaving Cairo – from the terrace of the yacht club at Ma'adi you could just see the very tip of the Great Pyramid and so know that the desert was there – now we had a hint that there had been a western desert tucked away beyond the cultivation of the western bank. For now, to the south (which was west) the huge browny-yellow Theban hills billowed into sight above the horizon. Presently the great bridge of Qena stretched across the water before us.
Akhmet the engineer came rushing up on deck. He was, I thought, about to announce some catastrophe. But he reached into the wheelhouse and sounded our siren. I did not grasp the significance of this and wondered what signal it was. Perhaps those who ride the sea of the Nile have the equivalent of ‘get out of my way because I can’t get out of yours’? But why the engineer?
Alaa explained in due course. Akhmet had been passing ‘his’ village and was letting them know he would be home soon. Then, with the suburbs of Qena stretching along the bank on our left Shasli did the same thing only more prolonged, a blast. The two others, Saïd and Faroz, were up on the fo’c’sle staring ahead at the Theban Hills which sheltered Faroz’ village and suggested the long way up to Saïd’s. Saïd came back to the centre cabin. Before he went below I asked him if he was feeling better. Oh yes, he said, he was nearer home. Shasli slowed then manoeuvred us against some broad steps above which there were trees with fairy lights and loudspeakers and people looking down curiously at our little boat; for this was a place where four-decker tourist boats were accustomed to tie up. It was a park and religious music was being broadcast from all the loudspeakers in the trees. Shasli was ashore, up the steps and out of sight before I could ask him anything.
The engine, which had been idling, now stopped. Faroz and Akhmet appeared in bathing trunks. Before my startled eyes they waded from the steps into the soup, then swam round our stern. I looked to see them collapse, die at once, or bloat or shrivel, or scream then sink, bubbling. But nothing happened. Faroz seized the propeller and shook it. You could hear the shaft knocking about in the stern gland. I went below. Saïd had a floorboard up and there was water in the bilges. I asked Alaa where the best boatyard was and how soon we could get new white metal bearings or at least have the defects assessed by an expert.
He laughed. ‘You are planning again.’
8
We had not been moored more than a few minutes when a procession came down the steps. It consisted of the Director of Cultural Affairs, the Director of the Palace of Culture, a police inspector, a policeman, one actress and one theatre director. The police did their paper duties, whatever those were, and went away. We were invited ashore. Presently the cultural directors said their welcomes and farewells and went away. The actress and the theatre director remained. They proved, conveniently, to be friends of Alaa.
I knew what I wanted to do. One’s image of Egypt is of a long thin valley stretching south from the Delta, and wholly isolated from the outside world. It was a matter that could be vivified by consideration of two pictures. On the one hand, you have consumptive Victorian ladies going into a decline, carefully carried up the Nile to Luxor, where the poor souls hoped, in that milder climate, to be cured of a disease we now know to be a bacillus. The other seems a different planet. It is the picture of other ladies going out to India, their ship touching at Egypt, sliding through the Suez canal and then making the long passage down the Red Sea. It had seemed necessary to me to understand the physical barrier between these worlds, the awful stretch of desert that lay between the River Nile and the Red Sea, the two different worlds separated by the desert, the tawny creature that had looked in on our river, slunk off again and sidled back, always barren and terrible.
There were tracks through the desert for I had traced them on the map. In terms of miles, less than a hundred separated Qena from the Red Sea. Well then. To join as an experience the fresh water of the river, however soupy, to the hot, salt water of the Red Sea would be, I thought, a startling association of places, as unlike any other hundred miles as it could well be. It would be space travel. It would shortcircuit distance. Now I inquired if it would be possible to undertake that journey, east through the desert from Qena. Alaa’s friends nodded. Yes, it would be possible, if that was what we wanted to do. I elaborated, daringly. I had seen on the map that there was a track along the shore of the Red Sea and a second track which came back through the desert to join the road along the Nile, perhaps twenty miles above Qena. Would it be possible to do the round trip? Yes. It would be possible. By car? Most certainly. Well, then.
So it was arranged. We would set out at crack of dawn in the morning.
We returned to the boat. Rushdie, I learned, was in his bunk, sick. Saïd, having taken up the floorboards, was sick too. Ann admitted that she was feeling off colour. I was surviving. Alaa was surviving. So were Faroz and Akhmet, both of whom had immersed themselves cheerfully in the Nile water. I sat on deck in the sun. Alaa was below, tending our two sick men. Ann sat with me, wondering how long it would be before she had to take to her bunk.
We were treated to a splendid sight. Akhmet appeared on deck, said his goodbyes and strolled away up the steps. He carried a small suitcase. He was dressed as usual in western style but this was such a sharp suit he was wearing! It was a wonder he didn’t cut himself on it or at least nick any passerby so rash as to brush against him. It was an exact repeat of that village scene we had watched a little further downstream – the return of the native in all his sophisticated splendour to dazzle the stay-at-homes. In my mind’s eye I could see the procession and the little boys who would compete to carry his suitcase the last quarter of a mile from the bus to the mud hut on the crumbling bank.
Akhmet was hardly out of sight when he was obliterated from consideration by the appearance of Faroz, now no longer in a tracksuit and playing the part of Aladdin but positively en prince. He wore a light blue galabia as a foundation. Over this was a darker blue outer garment open down the front. He had topped everything off with a turban of positively brilliant blue. He displayed himself before us with the unconscious self-satisfaction of a peacock then wafted up the steps and disappeared. He had no home locally so we could only suppose that he planned to make some section of Qena’s population happy.
I think Ann saw it first, or perhaps we saw it together, a wonderful black-and-white bird working the waters along by the bank; and now, in our and its time of tranquillity, it was willing to work the waters even before the steps of the park and the kiosk. There was no doubting for an instant the nature of this bird. It was a Nile Kingfisher [see plate]. The black-and-white markings were so distinct and methodically distributed that the bird seemed to be chequered. As far as body, wing and head were concerned it was all kingfisher, undoubted in shape, quite, quite unmistakeable, even to the straight, powerful beak. What was different was the tail, long as the body, spreading in a fan for flight and again, black and white. We sat perfectly motionless and it hunted the river past us. Its method was to fly along about five yards from the bank in a series of loops, swooping down to the water and up again. At the point where these loops joined, points as it were, of suspension of the chain of flight, the bird would hover, peering down. Here it would perform its characteristic manoeuvre, impossible to our native kingfisher with its stubby tail, and still hovering, with flirts of its spread fan of tail feathers it would spin on its axis, still peering down and round on every side. Then it would swoop away again in another loop, or perhaps drop on a convenient branch, or, as often, drop on its prey. When the Nile Kingfisher drops he hits the water with a heavy, almost clumsy action and a sound like the fall of a small axe. There he was then, in that brilliant sunlight, looping along the side of our craft and the steps and the bank, hovering, spinning, diving, sparkling it seemed, in his clean black and white. For the time we were able to watch him he was worth our journey.
Alaa appeared and reported on his patients. Rushdie was not so good but Saïd was determined to avoid hospital and reach his
family in Aswan in one way or another. I said that with the engine in the state it was we could not possibly get the boat beyond Luxor. In that case, said Alaa, Saïd could leave us for the time being, take a communal taxi and go home.
We found Reis Shasli who insisted on buying us tea. Reis Shasli was a rich man. He had a house not a hundred yards from where we were sitting. His wife lived there. Well, one of his wives. He had two. Generally, one wife lived there in Qena and one down in Cairo. He had two children by one wife and three by the other. They were both Qena girls and had shared a house for some years without difficulties. Of course, he himself was away from home a lot of the time. When he had been on the Alexandria to Cairo run, and then the Cairo to Aswan run, having one wife in Cairo and one in Qena had been very convenient. We agreed it must have been. While Alaa translated all this, the Reis kept bowing round the circle as if he were conferring favours.
We had an awful night; the dawn found us still sleepless and I felt in no state to face the perils of the desert, but the attempt had to be made. Ann sensibly decided not to come. The rest of our party turned up at half past six; and this was an example of such un-Egyptian punctuality that it gave my thoughts an even graver turn towards the seriousness of our expedition. Yet the party wore ordinary clothes. The car was small and flimsy and I could not see it dealing well with rocks and sand. Nor was it large enough to contain us all. ‘All’ consisted of the theatre director Bassem, the actress Azza, Alaa, myself and Saïd, at least for a mile or two. We took him to the ‘taxi station’, wished him a pleasant journey and turned to our own more dangerous one. We picked our way through Qena which is a big city of extraordinary ugliness. A side road took us out into the plain. It was bare as the plain of Akhetaten. Bassem’s car was making heavy weather of its load and I wondered what would happen in more difficult country if the car gave up. There was a railway track by the road, but after a while there were no rails on it, only stones. The hills drew in to the road on either side, low and certainly not very impressive. Now and then huge trucks rumbled past, coming or going. At least their vast tyres fitted them for the desert. We came to and passed a petrol station. A very small tree, carefully watered, grew by it. The track for the railway vanished.
This was ridiculous. The road was very nearly flat with only the merest suggestion of ascent about it. It wound and bent and wriggled but not excessively. We passed two shacks and some machinery which might have been an oil rig. Near the shacks was a patch of carefully watered vegetables but with no apparent source for the water. I was able to consult the map easily, for our ride so far was smoother than the ride in the boat. The temperature was comfortable. In the map I could make out ‘Bir–’ something or other. ‘Bir’ means a well.
We wound on between rounded hills which did not seem to get any more impressive. We were in Bad Lands and the hills were set in plains of dried mud of absolute flatness. How else, after all, can mud dry out when the water is gone? What was evident was the mechanism of Egypt’s occasional catastrophes.
We passed through an area of sand then moved a little more steeply up into the hills. At last the road was doing something. We were approaching a very mild example of a pass; and here at the pass was the only striking ‘geological event’ of the journey. The strata were upended suddenly, weathered by wind rather than rain into fantastication like the ‘Manueline’ architecture you get in Portugal, at Batalha, for example. We wound down through this fantastication and behold, the Red Sea appeared, quietly, uninterestingly, uneventfully, a flat stretch of the usual stuff and not very colourful either. Looking at it ruefully as we approached I could not discount the possibility that some innocent imagination of my childhood had prepared my unconscious for a sea which was actually red. The road flattened again and we drove sedately to an open gate across the road where traffic police stopped us and inspected Alaa’s papers, which were in order. So we drove into Port Safaga on the Red Sea.
It has to be said that Port Safaga is a dreary dump. It is mostly a camp for sailors and surrounded by high barbed wire. It is in fact a barracks. Much had now been made plain to me. There had been a track through the Eastern Desert; but now that track was a first-class military road. By its means Egypt could shift men and supplies to Port Safaga and so station part of her navy in the Red Sea just across from the entries to the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba. But in 1984 most of the harbour installations seemed to be derelict, or so badly maintained as to be useless. Yet the port was ringed with pits for anti-aircraft guns, which were in position and manned, their muzzles pointing eastwards. When Israel and Egypt made peace, work had stopped, leaving the military road for anyone who was curious enough to use it. Only the guns were still manned just in case. Also, and this is another great truth about armed forces in peace time – you have to find something for them to do. So there they were, sitting round their guns, or drilling with indifferent success behind the high barbed wire.
We did an obligatory wander along a shelly beach picking up the odd pebble then drove on again. There was some slight interest after all in these weary miles, these quantities of desolation, this emptiness. It was like space travel in that there was a point not to be grasped. One was doing something and nothing.
Back in the car we turned inland again to make our way by a different track back to the Nile Valley. We came to a gold mine, unmarked on the map, and modern. It had been closed down by Nasser like so many other things. He closed it down because it was foreign owned. The watchman at this place told us the old Roman mine was further on, by the next well. So on we went and the village of Bir Umm Fawakhir, a single house on the side of the road and a shelter for a policeman on the other, sat more or less in the middle of yet another mud plain. A hundred or so yards away was a stone structure something like an air raid shelter and I thought this was a building put up by the Department of Antiquities to house the ancient Roman well. Sure enough, it sheltered the well but the Romans had put it there and left, it seemed, earlier in the day for there was nothing at all to indicate the age of the building. We bought preparatory orange juices at the house which acted occasionally as a café then walked over to the well. The well of Umm Fawakhir is a most impressive structure in a downward sense. The bore is about five yards wide and more than three hundred feet deep. This central shaft is surrounded and strengthened by masonry and at one side there is another shaft, impeccably cut in rock with a winding stair from top to bottom. Every fifty or so feet down a large opening between the shafts gives light to the feet of the intrepid and increasingly weary traveller; for to go down is almost as wearisome as to come up, which I did myself after getting no more than halfway down. I do not claim to be a connoisseur of wells but certainly this was an unusual structure and splendidly built. Alaa, who went all the way down assured me there was still water at the bottom. He also said glumly enough that today in Egypt nobody could build anything as good as that. In fact, of course, the Egyptians didn’t build it, the Romans did. I saw, too, the reason for the massive wall the Romans had built at the top. A flash flood would fill the well with mud if that wall wasn’t there. We went back to the café since a well is a well is a well however splendidly built and had some tea brewed, I should think, from Roman water so to speak.
I still had to see my ancient gold mine and the slave huts. The son of the house was a small, good-looking but dirty boy. Evidently water was for drinking. He wore an immense turban and one side of his face was badly bruised. He had run into some rocks while chasing an antelope on his bicycle or so he said. However, he would show us the gold mine and the huts. We drove off down the road. The boy declared we must go further on then further. I doubted the wisdom of this but the boy was now in control. After a mile or two he bade us stop. Instead of gold mines and huts I found we were now to inspect graffiti, which were not what I had set out to see [see plate]. However, there’s no denying they were interesting enough. Some were ‘Pharoni’ – hieroglyphic records of the regiments which had been stationed there in the reign of such
and such a pharaoh, all as untouched as the well and done earlier that day, in the cool of the morning, perhaps [see plate]. They seemed to me – and this, of course, is a matter for Egyptologists – to be less literate than the many we had seen years ago at Aswan on the rocks of the island of Sehel. Some were graffiti in Greek and Latin, records of tourist names mostly. Here and there among the others and sometimes over them, were modern scratchings, and it wasn’t much good talking about vandalism with three thousand years of it staring us in the face and an infinity of rock all round. When is a door not a door? When it’s a-jar, said the child’s riddle. When does vandalism turn into archeology? Later in the same day as far as I could see. But tourists! Had they felt the same silly urge to make a connection between the Nile Valley and the Red Sea, even remoter in their time – well, earlier in the day – than in ours?
The boy wanted to show us more graffiti further on but we stuck and said it was the gold mine and the slave huts or nothing. So the small villain had us turn round and drive right back to Umm Fawakhir’s Roman well, where he got out and pointed. The huts I had wanted to see were no more than two hundred yards away. I walked over to them, but the boy now wanted us to see the House of the Count or the White House. This was built and inhabited once upon a time by the owner of the modern gold mine, but the owner had ‘gone away’. We refused to visit it so the boy turned away saying that the huts and the mine I had wanted to see were a mile up the valley but there was no point in looking at them. They were just the same as the ones we could see in front of us. He then withdrew with such money as we gave him, much of it in sheer amused exasperation and be it said admiration. He had used authority very expertly and should go far if he doesn’t break his neck chasing antelope or get himself murdered by a tourist. The most memorable bit of that desert crossing was after all the magnificently built well of Umm Fawakhir. A day in the desert, even on a highroad, makes you understand what a well is.