An Egyptian Journal

  So we drove another forty miles by way of the well of the Hammamat and the well of El Laqeita, I trying to get the Arabic ‘q’ as far down in my neck as I could and only succeeding in making myself feel I had a sore throat. The Kaffir click or the implosive ‘p’ are nothing compared to that ‘q’. But then we emerged from the desert into green and gold, ripe sugar cane and palms, crops inset with shining water. Now, coming from the brown world of the desert with its tumble and jumble, its dried mud and casual drifts of sand the extraordinary neatness of crops in Egypt was startlingly evident by contrast. In Egypt a man puts by habit all that neatness into his crops (no matter how small the patch) which an Englishman or a Dutchman puts into his front garden. It was fifteen or so miles back along the river to Qena and we reached the city by 3 o’clock in the afternoon. This early arrival will show more readily than anything else how easy is the trip through to the Red Sea. Still, if you are a European who regards green fields as the normal way things are, the trip is worth it for the experience of dryness and the discovery of the significance of a well.

  That wonderful well of Bir Umm Fawakhir! It was an investment, of course. Now it served one family and one policeman. But then, when the investment was made it had served the gold mine. Calculations must have been made which do not resound loudly in classical literature. So many slaves, they must have muttered, consuming such and such a quantity of water. But there are flash floods. So it must be a safe and secure source of water in all conditions no matter how deep we have to dig for it and no matter how elaborately we have to cut masonry and fashion a waterproof wall at the top. No water, no gold. Bir Umm Fawakhir was the equivalent of an oil rig. It was not even like those relics of imperial rule, irrigation, dams, railways, roads, which confer some benefit on later generations when the taskmasters have gone and when law and rule, the greatest benefit of all, have collapsed into riotous chaos. When the gold mine was worked out the reason for the well disappeared with the slaves, who were worked out with it. The worst of all fates for a male slave was to be made a mineworker. In the passion for ore, all human feeling was consumed and the slaves were worked to a death which must have been a release from desperate hardship and constant danger. So the ancient well remains there, in working order, perfect, a more vivid and harsh reminder of greed and indifference than any statue of Ozymandias.

  When we got back to the river front we found that Shasli had shifted the boat. Apparently a large tourist boat had passed at speed, made considerable wash and we had bumped the steps. Hani did not need any more tribulations and Shasli had wisely shifted her round the corner fifty yards away from her first berth and tucked her up more or less out of the reach of wash. The kingfisher was still busy, looping and flirting and diving round her. Ann was sitting on the upper deck in the sun and restored to herself. Rushdie however was still on the sick list.

  The car had stood up well to the journey and everyone was in favour of another trip for the next day when Ann would be fit to come. Yet though the car had stood up well, it was frailer, if not older, than we. A gentler and not as lengthy drive seemed indicated. We asked if we might now see something of the life of the local fellaheen.

  9

  Bassem and Azza called for us at a quarter to seven next morning. Ann, Alaa and I embarked in the little car and we drove off through Qena. It was to be, I found, a day of pots. This is not quite fellaheen; and I never succeeded in persuading the Egyptians I met that I really did want to meet men with half an acre and no cow. Perhaps they knew better than I how impossible communication would be, even through an interpreter. Either that or there are none of the examples we had heard so much of, of men, women and children hardly able to live. Did my conductors feel shame at poverty and wish to conceal it from me? Did they feel, as well they might, that it was none of my business since I was in no position to do anything constructive about it? Pots were for craftsmen, not peasants.

  We drove first of all to a field of pots. Was it not in a potter’s field that Judas hanged himself? In my small experience he would have found it difficult to find a convenient tree for this field was treeless, grassless and bare as the desert. It was in the outskirts of Qena and visible first by the mountains of sherds that had built up over a period of many years. But as we parked I found the phrase ‘The House of Pots’ spring into my mind. I don’t think it comes from the Bible. Perhaps it’s somewhere in The Arabian Nights, but wherever it comes from it is notably explicit. Here, in this potter’s field, all the houses were houses of pots because they were built of them. They were not built of sherds. They were built of whole, or nearly whole pots [see plate]. Some were houses for living in. Whether you worked at the wheel or the furnace or more menially pounded clay into a consistency which your betters could fashion as required, you had a house of pots. These were flagons, which would hold, I suppose, four or five gallons. We were introduced to the manager of the pottery and I asked at once how they came to build houses out of pots instead of mud brick or burnt brick, since the field was obviously prosperous. The manager explained that they only used pots which cracked or were holed in the firing. If they used whole, unblemished pots built into the wall the change of temperature between day and night would cause them to explode. That was why, as we would see if we looked closely, that in all those superimposed rows of pots that went to make the walls of houses there would not be one without some ventage of air from within; not through into the house but from within the pot. Here, suggested Ann, was the original cavity wall [see plate]. It seemed ideal for the purpose, cool in summer, warm in winter, and smoothing out the difference between day and night. With a thatched roof, the pots made as good a house as you would wish unless your ambition was a villa. True, these houses were after all no more than huts; but their unusual construction, their irregularity and necessary individuality, together with their grouping into a village gave them great character if not charm. After all, except in rare and catastrophic floodings when no building could be guaranteed to stand against a torrent of muddy water sweeping down from a wadi, they were good enough in that climate under a sky so seldom clouded. For all these huts were roofed. That is a most important point. They had good, wooden rafters and above the rafters a thick layer of sugar cane reed. Ten years before, seeing houses, or huts rather, without roofs I had supposed it to be because in a rainless area roofs are unnecessary. I envisaged the happy Egyptians or Nubians as we had increasingly to call the people in this area and further south, sleeping in their huts under a starry sky as the Bedouin were supposed to have spent their nights crouched by the camp fire under bright constellations, busying themselves in the invention of astronomy. But no. Anyone, Egyptian, Nubian, Bedouin, will get himself a roof if he can even if no more than a canvas one. Even in the boat we had found how, after a hot day then sunset, a clear sky had let the heat pour away upwards and leave us shivering. Yet we had a wooden deck between us and the icy points of the stars. How much quicker then, how much deadlier must be the flow of body heat from poor devils insufficiently fed at the best of times, lightly clothed, and with not a cloud in the sky to give them cover! Where the Nubian or Egyptian has no roof it is because he cannot afford to get himself one. Wood has always been expensive in Egypt. There are no forested borderlands. It is all either farm cultivation or desert. Yet so poor must be a proportion of the fellaheen they cannot even afford the few pence for a load of river reed or cane to heap across the odd corner of a mud hut. Such poverty is difficult to credit; and it was that side of Egypt I planned to reach without, I had better say straightaway, succeeding. Here, the thickly roofed houses of pots were a sign of great prosperity. The Egyptians have always been justly famed for their mastery of stone; but their natural, their inevitable homely craft is with clay or mud.

  In one of the huts a potter obligingly performed his dextrous bit of magic which never fails to satisfy the beholder and perhaps the practitioner too [see plate]. How the seed of clay grows, buds, flowers, fruits and collapses; it seems to perform of itself, the p
otter’s hands merely serving to support and show it off as a mother will show off her baby. We tore ourselves away or were torn away and visited the huge kiln which was also constructed of pots, at least on the outside. We saw the ancient hill constructed of pot fragments, so that remembering ‘Cocking-Troop’ and ‘Ceramicus’ I asked if it had a special name but as usual, Arabic was not all that forthcoming. It was called in Arabic ‘The Heap’. I had been told that Arabic has so many alternative words for things – sixty, I seem to remember for a sword – that the learner is instantly lost among them, which is one reason why I had never even begun to learn the language; my experience in Egypt led me to think that the words are so common as to start life threadbare. We also saw the well. There was no stone about this one and no steps down. But it gave us our first glimpse close-up of that other indigenous Egyptian ability, the working of wood when they can get it. For the windlass had no metal at all, neither bearings nor handle. The bearings were wood but could stand an enormous weight. The drum round which the palm-leaf rope was wound was a cage of battens stuck into or through each other. It looked flimsy, crazy and as if it would come apart at any moment; but it was at once ancient and efficient. This mixture of the haphazard and efficient, the apparently ramshackle, is typical of Egyptian peasant craft. It does not occur to them that a pleasantly symmetrical piece of primitive machinery would be more agreeable to work with. Let the thing do its job; and there was no doubt that its job was precisely what this thing could do. For as we watched, a man turned the cage and wound the rope up. There appeared on the end of it not a bucket but a basket with about half a ton of clay in it which had needed to be kept wet and cool through the night. So we said our thanks and left them at it, having taken photographs this time with a film that actually was advancing.

  We drove then, first through more suburbs of Qena and then by a complex of smaller roads to the village of Garagus. It was like every Egyptian village I had seen and was to see; not so much dirty as untidy, for who minds a bit of dried cowdung and dried straw about the place? [See plate.] The hot sun of the near-tropics had disinfected everything, or so it seemed. The houses were quite clearly built and intended to stay up until they fell down, which some of them had done here and there all in one piece but more often bit by bit, a wall cracked open, a gap, a scree of white rubble which seemed the hallmark of village life outside a house or indeed, inside it. Mark you, this is not dirt. It is clean rubble and the inhabitants seem to take the rubble for granted and it never occurs to anyone that rubble can be shifted. There were as usual crowds of children, all cheerful and interested in the strangers, crowds of grown-ups and, as it seemed to me, even bigger crowds of assorted animals. It seems that Egypt is fertile at every level. A village would be a town anywhere else and not just the capital but every city in every province is bursting at the seams with a population the average age of which seems far younger than our own. Either I had too little diagnostic ability which is very likely or the signs of the celebrated Egyptian diseases were nowhere in sight.

  As I said, it proved to be our day for pots. We were met by a potter who seemed no different from any other villager. He wore a galabia and close turban. He was a Coptic Christian. He took us down an alley to his workshop. As we passed down it a fly took off from the wall on our right, circled my head then settled back on the wall again. I say this because it reminded me of what had been missing in our experience. The famous, the notorious flies of Egypt had been absent. Now it was towards the end of February but we were, on the other hand, not so far from the tropics. I realized with confusion that we had seen no flies and precious few other insects, including the infamous domestic ones. The air had been clear of the swarms which had been alleged to haunt the head or other part of every living creature. I could only guess that this was the result of use and over use of DDT and other inventions; so that if there are few flies and fleas it is the obverse of the coin that has the decline of the Farmer’s Friend on the other side of it. I saw the same thing happen in Greece twenty-five years ago. What a balance to have to keep! Meantime the rare fly had settled back on the crumbling, limewashed wall and we had entered the potter’s workshop. He had many objects on his shelves. The floor was concrete, not rammed earth, and the shelves were of valuable wood. More than this on one side of the alley which I now perceived to be a dead end and the potter’s personal property rather than a passage, he had an electric furnace. The whole place was his and his galabia and turban were marked with dried clay to prove that he worked there. He had a few words of English but more of French. Chairs were produced and tea. Explanations began but were confused. He talked about the fathers. The village was more Coptic than Muslim. He showed us his stock. The crowded groups of pottery on the shelves contained Christian saints and crosses; not the western or eastern cross but the ancient Egyptian one, ‘Pharoni’, the symbol of life, the ankh, the cross with the loop at the top. There were many pots and jars and figurines, some made with great deftness. Apart from the ankh there was nothing particularly Egyptian about the technique or the matter. All the objects were in raw, red clay and waiting to be dipped in a slip and refired. The translated or partly translated conversation confused me. At first I could not understand the frequent references to ‘the fathers’ and ‘the strangers’ but soon certain things became clearer. There had been a settlement in the village of Jesuit missionaries. Thirty years ago some ‘French strangers’ had arrived and stayed. They were potters and, at the Jesuits’ behest, it seemed, they started to teach the locals their skill. So this then was not indigenous. Hence the un-Egyptian styles to say nothing of the few words of English and French. Saïd, for that was his name, explained that the ‘strangers’ had ‘gone away’. They had sold all the equipment of the school to the locals. And then? The locals had continued to run the school. Was Saïd part of the school? No, he was not, not any more. He liked to be his own master. He had set up on his own. He had had an apprentice but young people today were very difficult. Meanwhile, would we choose whatever we should care to carry away from his stock?

  It was the inevitable present-giving, and very difficult. You do not want to take something of value and in any case are never going to be able to fly the stuff home, let alone carry it around Egypt; but what to do? I took refuge in the dishonesty of praising enthusiastically the smallest and cheapest object in sight. It was an ankh in red clay. Saïd rushed away and came back with a duplicate but one which had been dipped and fired in blue slip. I have it on my desk as I write this and can just decipher the name ‘Garagus’ on it. ‘A present from Garagus’, then, or from ancient Egypt, blue colour and all, courtesy of the Jesuit fathers, and the strangers.

  Saïd led us away to see some of the other local crafts. He introduced us to a carpenter who took us into his house where his daughter was weaving carpets on a loom. She used very thick material and her carpets were heavy. At least, I thought, we would not be forced to carry a carpet away with us! She explained that some of her patterns were traditional but not all. She had been encouraged to follow her fancy. So some patterns she thought up herself. Others she took from pictures she had seen, ships or planes or cars or actions which looked interesting but incomprehensible in the newspapers she could not read. I asked who had made the loom, and of course it was the carpenter. He hurried us round the dark rooms of his house, all three of them, and showed us the furniture piece by piece. Like God he had made everything. I think he had made the house. Next he led us away to a kind of den or alley which ended in a pit. There was a loom built over and across the pit. A woman sat under it. The loom was built in the same way as the windlass of the well at the house of pots. That is, it was built of adzed rather than sawn timber, joined with mortice and tenon and trenailed. It was functional and since the tolerances were much narrower than those necessary for the windlass, altogether neater and more elegant. This elegance, as if by nature, had transferred itself to the woman. She was middle-aged with a naked, aquiline face and splendid nose jewel of silver. Her hair
was covered with a purple veil, her dress was green and red and purple, there were silver bangles on her arms and ankles. She squatted in the pit under the loom and made motions of pass with her dark hands so that the loom performed its magic before her. Huge skeins of dyed silk hung on a beam above her head. The colours looked gaudier, more brilliant if you like, than vegetable dyes to me, but I was not informed enough to be sure. It would only have needed vegetable dyes to complete this exquisite picture of a craft where the wood and the thread and the woman and everything were local. I asked where they bought the loom and got the answer I was expecting. The carpenter had made it. By now all of the village who could had crowded into the alley and were pressing forward to the pit. This was an exchange of interest. We were exotic to them and the weaving in these circumstances was as exotic to us. Everyone was happy. Alaa and I produced our cameras and the difficulty was to prevent people posing. Nobody wanted to look natural but like people who are having their pictures taken and are therefore important. As I backed away from the alley and the pit I was bidden to look in a door. Here squatted a very old woman and she was spinning thread. Once more her machine was an example of the carpenter’s work. It was pinned together. Take a heap of kindling, sharpen the ends, bore some holes then stick the lot together and you have a machine for producing balls or long skeins of thread out of a mass of coloured wool. It was again something that had to be seen to be appreciated, believed. Surely all this stuff appears as by nature (or electronics) on the shelves of a shop! Yet no, for here it was, straight off the animal’s back and then by way of the old woman’s hands and then by way of the magically passing hands of the carpenter’s daughter and – hoopla! Here there was a carpet, a magic carpet. I shall never stand on a carpet with the same indifference to it again. I asked the carpenter and the village generally – who had followed in a flood – how long the village had been weaving and where they learned it from and everybody laughed. This whole set-up went straight back to the pharaohs they said, for that is how I translated the cries of ‘Pharoni! Pharoni!’ and romantic or not I was prepared to pocket my scepticism, confused as I was by the history of the pottery, and believe them.