An Egyptian Journal

  Now Saïd reclaimed us. He took us to the school where he had learned the craft himself and introduced us to his master, Mustapha. He had four apprentices. He had had more but they had left. The school was dying. ‘Dying,’ I asked, ‘really dying? Coming to an end?’ It was all too true. Mustapha spoke good French and was downright about it. The impulse had come from the Jesuit fathers and ‘the strangers’. It had been a very strong impulse. He showed us the excellent buildings, the elaborate machinery, the two furnaces and western style potter’s wheels. Now there was no more impulse. These were the last apprentices. Soon there would be no one left at all to carry on the work.

  I had to accept what I could not understand. Without the foreigners, the Jesuits, the place would die. One sensed a strange malaise as if some injection of will was necessary year after year. I thought of the houses I had seen, left unfinished, the plans all made and elaborated but unrealized, yet treated as if they had been accomplished. What was it? Had I found something or only imagined it? Does the foreigner with however good a will simply force on the mild and indolent fellah twentieth-century culture he does not want and does not need?

  The storeroom of the pottery was filled with objects. Yes, sometimes it was sent down to Cairo and sold. What would I like to take away? There were many amusing figures but they were elaborate, too elaborate for me to choose as presents. St George on his horse thrust a spear down into a writhing devil. There was something curious about the devil.

  ‘Mais Monsieur, votre diable est feminin!’

  ‘Eh, Monsieur, pourquoi pas?’

  Once more I chose the smallest thing in sight, a tiny pot which was pretty enough. We said our thanks and went away. What would we like to see next? Well, since this was predominantly a Coptic village I would like to see a Coptic church. This was easy. The Coptic church was a house not much bigger than the others and built into them, or they into it. Everything was limewashed and flaking. We went inside, the Muslims of our party waiting courteously outside. The little church was notable mostly for at least a dozen pictures, holy of course, and all of which had been executed locally. A good half of them were of woven material. Unconscious of or indifferent to the fact that the Vatican had pronounced St George a non-person, most of them were of him and his dragon, or devil. Unlike in pottery, the weave of the material was too coarse to reveal the sex of the devil or the saint’s victim which is what it/he/she looked like. I had the uneasy feeling that St George was spearing a maiden rather than rescuing her, a Perseus who had got his maiden and his sea-monster mixed. From this I deduced far too much about the status of women in Upper Egypt. Egyptian males are still in that splendidly innocent stage of feeling that if women are given a limited role in society it is for their own good.

  I asked if there were any more churches about. Of course, said Mustapha, there was the Catholic church with the clinic attached. This was news. Apparently only the religious part of the missionary effort had been dispensed with. We walked to the church outside which children of the attached school were having a break and playing football. A nun from Naples who spoke perfect English took charge of us and showed us the church. To my amazement, in the sanctuary, there against the wall, behind the altar was another example of the Coptic cross, the ankh, and made, I dare swear, by Saïd in his little pottery. It was all pink clay and faint blue slip like the small one I had still in my pocket! I began to question the nun. Yes. This was a Coptic church and a Catholic church. It was officially the Coptic-Catholic church. They were not only in communion but united. They used part of the ancient Coptic language, Ancient Egyptian, in fact, in part of their ritual. I began to understand and admire the worldwide and infinite subtlety of the Catholic Church and its straightforward political sense. It was the meekness of the dove and the wisdom of the serpent. Put at its lowest it was a case of ‘If you can’t beat’em, join’em’. Oh, I’ve no doubt it was all wrapped up in a language of the highest spirituality. In effect, it ducked Nasser’s too inconclusive blow. The Coptic Church was founded by an apostle and therefore acceptable. There were far too many Coptic Christians in Upper Egypt for Nasser to risk offending them. Therefore, join the Coptic Church! The Coptic-Catholic Church stayed and provided the village of Garagus with a school, a clinic and a church.

  We came away and walked for a while in the environs of this ‘Village’ of seven thousand souls. We passed an old man sitting by the roadside and Alaa said that he was one hundred and thirty years old. It must be a very good clinic. The fields round about were beautifully planted and you got the feeling that the difficulty would be to stop things growing rather than bring them on. Even the clover was standing up in great green bushes rather than behaving as plants of a proper creeping habit. As for the palms they seemed to soar away up out of sight so that all we had was a green sky.

  I thought now that we had done our day among the fellaheen. Indeed I was beginning to feel that either there was no such thing left as a poor fellah or that they were being concealed from me. We walked back towards the village. We were surrounded by the most bursting fertility imaginable. There were groves and avenues of massive palms over wheat, sugar cane, clover, spinach, onions, beans, kale, cabbage and a dozen others that I could not identify.

  Where, oh where was the filthy dirt of place and people which books and some American friends had promised us? Was I, by their standards, just as dirty and so unable to appreciate Egyptian dirt? In the village the two of us agreed we were at ease. Yet we knew of some sociologists who had given up after two days and gone back to their universities rather than put up with the ‘squalor and filth’ of an Egyptian village! True, things were untidy, but broken down rather than decayed or rotting. A square of about twelve yards on each side contained old women, children, chicken, dogs, a cow, two donkeys and a camel. The road was uneven with heaps of dust and rubble which the bright sun had dried and disinfected. The whole village was like a place that had been lightly bombed and shot up and left to recover by time and sun, the inhabitants being content to accept the result whatever it turned out to be.

  I expected us now to return to the car, but no. Saïd, the first of our two potters was to give us a meal. We were, therefore, to be subjected to the ordeal which Mr Fisher of ‘Fisher’s Island’ had refused. We turned into an entry between two houses which I thought was a way through. When I saw that the way was blocked off I began to retreat but Alaa hissed, ‘It’s his house!’ I stayed where I was. The narrow, roofless entry was at once a living room and a kitchen. A long, low table stood on the right-hand side. Women, children and, it seemed, babies, were cooking at it. On the left, the other side of the entry, steps led up to the further roof. Beyond the steps was a low door through which we went into comparative gloom. Here were three beds arranged against two walls and Saïd pushed a table into the angle between two of them. He, and a young relative brought chairs. Opposite the table on the other side of the room was another bed. But this was of solid brick and heaped with all the junk from a pottery. At one end of the bed the junk had cascaded to the floor and spread there, forming the usual scree of rubble, which added to the unevenness of the earth floor and took up perhaps two square yards of it. We sat round the table on chairs and beds and two young men, perhaps of Saïd’s family, brought a basin, a ewer and some napkins. One held the basin while the other poured water over our hands in the biblical manner. He and they then brought in food. It was a huge spread. There was a great bowl of chicken, sauces, soup, pasta, sunbaked and oven-baked bread. We ate as well as we could in the unfamiliar way. Saïd brought a single tumbler full of water and set it on the table. Ann and I contrived to avoid it without attracting notice. There was sweet tea, which we drank.

  All this sounds attractive, and it was. But the surroundings were not. It was not a case of ordure but of ‘ordures’ in the French sense, junk and waste, rubble, cracks and stains and asymmetry. It was not shit but the indifference and the untidiness of whole generations. That brick bed was covered with a load of broken pots, dr
ied lumps of unfired clay, rusted implements and a scree of dusty rubble which had not been touched since the Jesuits left. In the village we had seen that nothing was ever repaired if it required the minimum of technology beyond the local skills: naked wires hung loose; sockets pulled out of a wall stayed that way. We said our thanks and walked out into the entry where the women had waited until we had finished our meal in order to eat what we had left. This sounds worse than it was since by the laws of hospitality Saïd had provided us with far more food than we could possibly eat. He had also entertained us with a discourse on hospitality. Perhaps he thought, being foreigners, we needed it.

  We washed at a hand-pump in the next alley. These pumps, raising water from a few yards down will make an enormous contribution to the improvement of the country’s health. Perhaps they were the reason why we were not in fact seeing as many obviously sick people in the village as travellers used to claim. In Garagus the children were mobile, cheerful, looked healthy, and apparently might live to be a hundred and thirty! The incidence of sickness had seemed to strike more severely among our crew than the villagers we came across ashore. But it was too small a sample for statistics even if I believed in them. A more cogent observation was that during my lifetime there had been a force at work which I have never understood and never heard identified. It is an anti-economic force which has made nonsense of predictions. As a country gets poorer it becomes better off. We are poorer and better off. So are France, Italy, Greece and Egypt, countries on which I have tried, so to speak, to keep my eye. This is a paradox in action. Or perhaps the explanation is that economics as a theoretical study, passionately engaged in, argued, fought over, deeply examined and massively documented will one day join the list of other studies with a like relevance to the truth: phrenology, palmistry, flat earth geography, and haruspication, the divination of the future by examination of entrails.

  We walked back to the car. It was early evening. Children, men and women were sitting on the hard, dry earth of the street. They were all weaving mats and twisting rope from the dried leaves of reed. In some places old bits of machinery lay round them where the machine had, as far as one could see, lain down and died. Machinery, it seemed, was at greater risk than people. Perhaps Bassem’s car had caught an infection? We walked towards it. We were privileged in the company of local people so the inhabitants observed us courteously, with a mild and perhaps amused curiosity. No one seemed to wish us ill, from the man who was a hundred and thirty years old to the little girl, called so exotically ‘Rosalind’ after Mrs Jimmy Carter. The otherness of the village was in its casual attitude to things, to physical objects, and it was made most striking by that same spirit of indifference to untidiness so complete as to be raised to a fifth element, a gentle chaos. We said goodbye to our potter host and bumped away in the failing car under a sunset that covered the whole sky. When we came back to the boat and entered our cabin we said nothing to each other for some time but sat opposite each other on our two bunks; and then we both confessed that the same thought had struck us as we entered our spartan but crowded cabin; what neatness, what cleanness, what utter luxury we have the good fortune to live in!

  10

  From Qena to Luxor is about forty miles. We got away at 6 o’clock in the morning and the air was bright. The Theban Hills rose higher and higher. Shasli was pushing the boat again and the engine was dancing in its bed, the propeller shaft doing a Dervish dance. There was no question of getting used to the noise. Noise and vibration were one and the same thing so that you could not tell if you felt the constant shudder through your ears or your feet. It encouraged us to go on deck. The usual north wind was blowing, but now from astern. Above Qena the river turns back on its course and ‘bahari’ really is north. The sun rose higher and almost immediately we were in subtropical weather again. Suddenly we were both of us overwhelmed with a positive lust for Luxor, hot baths, clean sheets, leisure, space, privacy. We went below for all the dancing deck, got down a large suitcase, filled it with laundry, changed into clean clothes and put others in a second suitcase. We planned an orgy of cleanness and prayed that the boat would hold together at least long enough to get us made fast alongside in Luxor and a bit of our own kind of civilization. Then we climbed back on deck, not so well wrapped up this time and willed the boat forward. The Theban Hills closed in on the right hand. A large sugar factory appeared on our left. To the right again and moored in an elbow of water were two very large tourist boats. They might reasonably be called ships. They were both burned out. On one, the upper deck had crumpled and collapsed. The other was all in one piece but burned and stained everywhere down to bare metal. It looked like a child’s toy that has accidentally fallen in the fire and been raked out next morning with the ashes. I thought them a poor advertisement for the tourist trade and wondered why they had not been towed away – they were both afloat – and put in a shipyard or breaker’s yard, but no one could tell me. Alaa said they had been set on fire by electrical faults. He also said there were no casualties.

  Luxor was barely recognizable. The corniche was hidden for a mile by craft of all descriptions, but tour boats, of course, predominated, sister ships to the ones burned out and I wondered what their passengers made of the spectacle. The smaller craft were a nondescript multitude; ferries, open motor boats, a private yacht or two, launches of the river police, feluccas of several sizes. There were also the big sandals which would take those people who had the taste for it and the leisure still further up the river to Esna, Edfu and Aswan. But those sandals as I remembered seeing them years before were only the same as the working ones of the lower river in build. Not for them the worn paintwork, the patched and tattered sail and ragged crew. Here the crew would consist of one elegantly galabia’d Reis with a small boy for his total crew. The boy would be done up to kill. As like as not he would wear a rose-coloured galabia and a rose-coloured turban to top it off. Clothed thus, he would enchant and appal the tourists by climbing to the very tip of the tall and slender yard by means of wooden footholds conveniently placed. I suppose his function under sail was to serve the indolent tourist with sherbet or beer or wine or anything else he wanted. As for the foreshore itself, today when we had tied up by the police station to a pontoon, we found it had been worked over extensively. Here and there were attempts at ornamental planting; but most of the actual slope of the corniche was now occupied by restaurants and cafés and night clubs. It was a considerable change brought about in ten years. But we did not stop to examine it. Once made fast, we rushed ashore with a perhaps impolite haste and hurled ourselves into the Old Winter Palace Hotel. We told our Minder the crew could do what it liked for a day or two as far as we were concerned and then did our best to forget the boat. We found a room with a view of the Nile and the hills. It had a bathroom where the water did not have to run for more than five minutes before coming hot. We had midday baths.

  It was a long bathing time and a long lunch. We emerged at last and wandered for a while. There were new hotels, high-rises that dominated the corniche and the temples. We declined tickets for the son et lumière, good though it was said to be, and spent most of the day sitting behind the hotel in the garden which is now very well looked after and pleasant. Here, in the sun, sheltered from the wind and watching bees among the February roses, hollyhocks, pansies and tobacco plants, thyme and sweet peas it was possible to forget the Nile. This was in fact one of the things for which our Victorian predecessors had come.

  The other thing they had come for was health, here in the Old Winter Palace and up at Aswan in the Old Cataract Hotel. It was extraordinary. People with ‘weak chests’ or, more critically, people ‘in a consumption’ came to Luxor to get well, if they were fortunate and privileged. But if you talk to the European women who live in Luxor today – archeologists or wives of artists and archeologists – you find they constantly suffer from chest complaints, which only clear up when they leave. The first time we were here, Ann went down with a severe cough. All the European
women in sight rallied round. Without exception each one had had the same cough and each one had her own remedy ready in a bottle. The idea that anyone ever went to Luxor for his or her health and found it there seemed preposterous to me. In Upper Egypt when the wind blows from the north it is cold. When it blows from anywhere else it is full of dust. I believe that those people who brought a ‘weak chest’ or a ‘consumption’ here simply died of it, the poor things, so far from home.

  This time, however, we were both in reasonable health. Before dinner, we went for a stroll along the corniche again. The Temple of Luxor had not improved, I thought [see plate]. There was still about the building that ineffable air of having outstayed any welcome the town was prepared to give it and of only waiting for the arrival of the removal men. The dark brown stone has the same influence as the famous ‘dark brown poetry voice’ and the whole thing has not even such a doubtful claim to attention as the Temple of Karnak’s gigantism. There are three things which have improved in Luxor. One is undoubtedly the calèches. At last, the oriental love of decoration and finery has found a proper object. The vehicles shine now with intricate brass all a-glitter in the lights of the corniche [see plate]. Some are real museum pieces, elegant even in their showiness. The horses seem less decrepit and are furnished with parures of brass and perhaps silver. Another improvement is the complete absence of the bakshish boys, who used to make such a bore of themselves on the corniche whenever they saw some obvious tourist. The third improvement is the new Luxor Museum. If you are pressed for time in Luxor, don’t bother about the Temple but concentrate on the museum. It is the best Egyptological museum I have ever visited. The objects seem to have been selected as much with an eye to their aesthetic merit as for their archeological importance. They are splendidly placed and expertly lighted. It is worth insisting that for the visitor to Luxor the museum is a ‘must’.