Clean, well fed and clothed, we looked in on the boat as we passed it. We found Bassem and Azza together with another Director of Culture had turned up from Qena. Their car, still mobile, was at our disposal for the next day. It was strange to realize what a trivial matter the forty miles between Luxor and Qena was by road rather than river. We arranged forthwith to cross the river and see a couple of things in which I had become interested though they are not on the standard itinerary. I only hoped that the increasingly fragile car would be up to it. However, the main road on the west bank is good. We went back to the hotel to find our room agreeably scented by a bouquet of red roses which probably came from the hotel garden. Then we went to dinner. There was no doubt about it. Tourism in Egypt was a little down in the year 1984. There were many empty tables. After that we were both glad to turn in between beautiful cool, clean sheets.
We got up at twenty past seven and checked the laundry in. Breakfast came within minutes of my ordering it. The Old Winter Palace Hotel is much improved and should be preserved among the other archeological treasures of the place. There was fog over the Nile though it was clearing away by 9 o’clock. I couldn’t tell what kind of fog it was but felt sure that dust was a component. It looked like smog. Smog at Luxor! It made me feel that perhaps the year 1984 was a significant date in a wholly unexpected way, the year when the world had reached a critical point and that the whole atmosphere of the globe had changed in one night to reveal its pollution – changed suddenly, as the colour of a liquid changes in a titration. However, by the time we were ready to go out the fog had disappeared and I had forgotten my strange fear. For this day was important to me; and the reason stretched back, to refer to and perhaps include consideration of so many things: the red bricks that used up rich soil and the mud brick so readily available; the immemorial angle which did not exist; the crazy Egyptian building; many things. Let it all emerge as the account goes on.
We went to the car and found that there were now only five people to be accommodated in it, Ann and I, Alaa, Bassem and a new person, one Hassan, who had been seconded to us as cultural persons from the Department of Antiquities. I was a little amused at this for I intended to slant away from ancient monuments and was even prepared if necessary to ignore them altogether. We set off and crossed the river by the antique car ferry. I asked to be driven not to the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings but sidelong, to the edge of the Theban Hills near it. There, clinging to the irregular slope, among holes, ledges, crags and fields of broken stone, is the village of Gourna where the Gournawis live. They are among the most interesting people of Egypt though not necessarily the pleasantest. They are descendants of medieval tomb robbers and have lived there as a group since the thirteenth century. It would pitch the description a little too strong, to describe their trade as a kind of necrophilia. However rumour, a strong rumour which has the backing of many professional Egyptologists, credits the Gournawis with knowing far more about the graves of the West Bank than they are prepared to say. Rumour, a strong one once more, declares that objets have appeared and continue to appear on the market which cannot be accounted for except by the existence of tombs which the Gournawis know about, despoil selectively and keep to themselves. Above all, rumour claims that in order to keep the secret of these tombs the Gournawis have built houses on them and live there, with the family fortune tucked away in a kind of ancient cellar. The more I had read about the Gournawis the more interesting they seemed, since it appeared that for an assured income they were prepared to sit it out, generation after generation in conditions of deprivation and squalor. There was something more. They had been the subject of an experiment and as far as I knew the abandoned apparatus of that experiment was still lying on the west bank, near the Singing Stone of Memnon. Now, with Alaa to interpret, I wished to talk with them. Huge moral questions and hypocrisies were involved. I did not expect to learn much, merely talk to a character or two and get a feeling for the place. Even that was a lot to expect but it was worth a try.
So up we drove in that extremely dead piece of land, rock, rubble and dust. Once again, while Ann and I had been luxuriating in the Old Winter Palace, Alaa had contrived to do some spadework and knew which among the houses to approach. There were perhaps half a dozen which by their gaudy advertisements were seen to be those where replicas of famous objets were made and sold. Each of these houses, of course, was rumoured to produce at an appropriate moment an ‘original’ offered secretly and illegally for sale. We were ushered into a house and seated in the guest room where a low divan ran right round the wall. We were given tea while someone went to fetch the Head Man of Gourna. He was large and imposing, wore the usual galabia and turban and wished to give us food which Alaa was able to decline on our behalf without it seemed, giving offence. The Head Man asked us out into the main passage of the house and caused chairs to be brought. We were given an exhibition of how to work alabaster by a craftsman. More tea was brought. The Head Man proved to be a Hajj which originally meant someone who had made the trip to Mecca but now was applied to any elderly man of sufficient dignity. Perhaps air travel has cheapened what was once a distinction. The Hajj asked me what I wanted. I told him I had heard many things about the Gournawis and their difficulties. Could I ask the craftsman some questions? The Hajj agreed.
‘Where does this alabaster come from?’
‘There is a place five days’ journey by donkey into the desert.’
‘Is that where the pharaohs got their alabaster?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is it a difficult journey?’
The man shrugged, spreading his hands.
‘Well, could I go there; or rather could this young man Alaa go there if he wanted to?’
‘Yes. But only if someone went with him to show him the way. It is not an easy journey. In the season of the Khamsin it is dangerous.’
‘Do you always use this steel tool?’
‘I always use this tool.’
‘We are told that the pharaohs had no steel for tools. Do you know how their pots were made?’
‘I suppose they used other things. Wood. Stone.’
‘Who fetches this alabaster?’
The man giggled.
‘I do.’
‘Is the mine secret?’
He giggled again.
‘No.’
‘You like it in Gourna?’
‘Of course.’
‘There is not a single growing thing for miles, not even an onion! Everything has to be brought from down by the river. Here…’
The Hajj interrupted.
‘Things would be better for us it if were not for the government. They hedge us round.’
‘The government wanted you to move years ago. There was some sort of village built for you back there, down by the river. It is fertile land. Yet none of you would go. Or if some did, presently they came back here where there is nothing and left the new village empty.’
‘That was long ago,’ said the Hajj. ‘Also the houses were inferior.’
‘How?’
‘They were made of mud brick.’
‘What is wrong with mud brick?’
‘It is for very poor fellaheen.’
‘What sort of houses would have persuaded the Gournawis to move?’
‘Proper houses,’ said the Hajj. ‘Houses made of concrete and red brick like in the cities and towns. Not mud brick.’
‘I have heard it said that you were unwilling to move because you would no longer be able to carry on this trade.’
‘What trade? What trade do you mean?’
‘This one, the making of objects in alabaster.’
‘We could have carried on our trade anywhere. The tourists would have come to us. But, in fact, the government is moving us now. To proper houses.’
‘I had not heard that.’
‘They are already building a school for our children.’
‘When will it be finished?’
‘Who knows? They’ve bee
n talking about bridging the river for the past fifty years. Come, I will show you the school.’
Ann, I, Hassan, Alaa, Bassem and the Hajj piled into the little car. We set off across the empty plain. It was the top of an armant, a geological formation named from another just like it to the north. It was a mile or two square and lifted up – lower than the Theban Hills but still higher than the fertile plain by the river. There was no soil anywhere. Except in the actual path it had been dug into a series of exploratory pits. They were ancient burial pits, I think. The plain itself, the holes and the path were thickly strewn with lumps of rock up to a foot in diameter. It seemed to me that nothing but a tracked vehicle would be any good in such a wilderness which was a less penetrable terrain even than those of Beni Hassan or Tell el Amarna. Bassem drove straight into this appalling mess. The car lurched and bumped, rocks struck the sump and burst like bombs. The exhaust fell off. Bassem and Alaa descended and tied it on with string. The car bumped a little further and the exhaust fell off again. At this, even Bassem admitted defeat. A quarter of a mile ahead of us there was indeed a skeleton building of concrete with a few red bricks showing. It was right in the middle of the wilderness of stone. It was the school with no sign of any building activity near it. It was not finished. It was hardly begun.
‘How long has the government been building this school?’
‘A year.’
‘How will children get there?’
‘A school bus!’
‘Through all this?’
The Hajj waved expansively at the wilderness.
‘All this will be cleared.’
It was a task to be equated with building a pyramid. There seemed nothing more to say.
We bumped back to Gourna, thanked the Hajj and said goodbye to him. He gave us his parting explanation. ‘We would be willing to leave here at any time. We know the government wants us to leave. Every year they think up regulations to make life more difficult for us. We are not allowed to build anything new and we cannot alter anything already built. The government forbids us even to dig a hole for a privy. All we can do,’ he spread his hands and smiled expansively, ‘is to wait for them to build us a new village of red brick and concrete round the new school.’
It all seemed very calm. It seemed what is sometimes called timeless. The Hajj strolled away to his house. The young man Hassan bought buns. I took a long look at Old Gourna, scattered haphazardly as tombs might be scattered against the layered hill. It was evident that some of the ‘houses’ were hardly even huts. They were more like minimum structures put up to stake a claim. The village was rich by Egyptian standards yet some of the building was more hopelessly ramshackle than anything I had seen in hundreds of miles of travel. It was impossible not to wonder what these dusty shelters hid. It was a strange complex of forces into which I had tried hesitantly enough to force my way. In one direction, where the village was linked by rumour with the whole international world of smuggled antiques or faked antiques, I would make no progress, could not expect to. That was a blank and impenetrable wall. In any case, I had no very strong feeling for either side in the argument, believing that faking antiques is illegal rather than wrong. But in the other direction, and this was the one which really interested me, the intransigence of these few villagers of Old Gourna, or if you like, their refusal to be driven forcibly from their homes, had affected the whole country. It had been one of the factors which had ruined a great enterprise in Egypt. It had set back the work of a man who might have changed all those crazy buildings with their erratic angles, their staring red brick, and hideous inartistry. There had been a stubborn war waged round that layered hill where the ignorant and greedy Gournawis clung to the only thing they knew. It may be that to move them would not be worth the trouble even in archeological terms; the discovery of the odd tomb probably already exhausted of its treasures. But the Gournawis must have been helped in their resistance by men higher up, by men of power, men with much to lose, men who were expert in manipulation of the vast delaying power of Egyptian bureaucracy.
Alaa said, ‘Where now?’
‘I want to go and see what there is left of the work of Hassan Fathy.’
11
Hassan Fathy was, and is, at the time of writing, a member of the Egyptian upper class. He had, he says, two dreams in childhood: one was to sail round the world on a yacht with a full orchestra; the other was to build a village where the fellaheen could live in comfort, beauty and cleanliness. His father had large estates but disliked the country and avoided it. Hassan Fathy himself claims that until he was twenty-seven he never set foot on his father’s estates. However, he studied architecture and when qualified was given the job of overseeing the building of a school at Talkha, a village in the Delta. He says that the squalor of the place haunted him. One of his father’s farms lay nearby and he went to look at it and was appalled by the experience.
He determined to design a method of building that would be available to the peasantry. It would have to cost next to nothing. Burnt brick was too dear, and, as we had seen, by a fortunate coincidence, red, burnt brick is ugly. So Hassan Fathy experimented with sun-dried mud brick and found, as had been known for thousands of years but had dropped out of architectural practice, that as a building material in a dry climate it was unbeatable. What was more, in Egypt every peasant had an infinite supply of this same stuff lying in his own fields and on the river bank.
Hassan Fathy knew that mud brick would not use up the valuable red clay of the Nile Valley. Theorist that he was, he began to philosophize about the building of simple houses out of mud brick. To build so was to be connected with the simple things, such as sun, water, earth, was to create a home aesthetically from the very elements among which a man lived.
However, when it came to putting this aesthetic proposition into practice he came up against an apparently insurmountable difficulty. He built country houses in mud brick, but for the rich! These houses were very little cheaper than those made of brick. The paradox lies in the unique nature of Egypt herself. She is always short of timber. We had seen the wretched attempts at roofing that the poorer fellaheen make with bundles of river-reed laid across the crumbling corners of mud shelters. Fathy’s houses were only for the rich because the wood for ceilings and roofs was so expensive. What he had tried to work out for the very poor was in danger of becoming an up-market fashion for the rich. How, then, even if the peasant built his walls of mud brick was he to afford the wood, the rafters, to lie across them? Sometimes even the few pence necessary for buying and carrying reeds was beyond him. The rafters might as well have been made of gold. On top of that, World War II came and wood in Egypt was wholly unobtainable.
It sounds ridiculous; but Hassan Fathy rediscovered the arch. He found arches functionally alive and well near Aswan in Upper Egypt, at the First Cataract in the Nubian village of Garb Aswan.
Now, with the arch revealed as a viable construction in mud brick the problem of the expensive, wooden rafters was solved. He determined to preserve what was good about this method of building and get rid of the squalor, the roofless hovels in which men, women and children shivered all night and died of cold if they were not already poisoned by the filthy waters of the Nile and its canals.
Then he had what must have seemed a great stroke of good luck. A Royal Decree expropriated the land on which Old Gourna stood as the result of a tomb robbery so blatant that it could not be ignored, even in Egypt. A ministerial decree followed, which expropriated the very houses of the village so that the Gournawis would be forced to move out of the ancient graveyard. One million Egyptian pounds was the estimate for building them a new village by traditional, that is, concrete and red brick, methods. Hassan Fathy had proved that mud brick was cheaper. He was appointed architect, a committee chose a new site that was well away from the tombs and on agricultural land down by the river. The land was purchased from the owner of it by order.
His ideas, like his intentions were so good! From the other side of t
he Red Sea he imported the system of ventilation of the mud hut by convection, which cools the air. It is the system of wind towers or those wind funnels which were once used in the days of sail to ventilate sailing ships in the tropics. He was going to dig a lake to keep children out of infested waters. He would organize the houses round communal squares because that is how an Egyptian peasant feels society even if he cannot say so. In this new village which was to be populated by seven thousand mainly illiterate people he built a theatre. There was, or there was to be, a Coptic church, a Turkish bath, a police station, a dispensary. There was to be a women’s social centre. There was a market place, a khan.
How much was ever built? In his book on the subject, there is at times a certain vagueness of tense which reminded me of the Secretary General. Certainly the photographs that remain show a great deal of charming and gracious building. But he was not dealing with the average Egyptian peasant. He was dealing with Gournawis on the one hand and people who wanted control of a million pounds on the other. He was hindered at every turn by the government, by the contractors, by the workmen and not least by the Gournawis, who after a while became active in sabotage. Hassan Fathy built a dyke to protect New Gourna from the seasonal flooding of the Nile. Despite all the delays, the bribery, the malice, the ignorance and sloth he was getting forward a little. The Palace became interested, a thing in those days of great moment. He was summoned to explain his theory and practice to the King. On his way back from the palace he saw a poster, ‘The Great Mire’. It was only an advertisement for a film, ‘but it gave me a nasty feeling’. A message was waiting for him when he returned home. The dyke had broken and mud brick New Gourna was flooded. He hurried back to Luxor. He found that a deep wide trench about eight metres across had been dug through the dyke. He found that the Gournawis had refused to work on the dyke and when ‘driven to it’ had widened the breach with their feet rather than help repair it with their hands. As Fathy says, everybody obeyed the heads of the families and they were tomb robbers. ‘They had no intention of giving up their nice, profitable squalid houses in the cemetery with treasure waiting to be mined under their floors to move to a new, hygienic, beautiful village away from the tombs.’