New Gourna is immediately recognizable. It is signed all over by Fathy’s particular vision. There is everywhere the sophisticated use of mud brick, use of the vault and the dome. There is a sense of grace and fitness [see plate].
We were invited into one house. The owner, or rather one should say squatter, for only Gournawis should live here and this man was from Cairo, showed us first into one of the rooms which were Fathy’s architectural unit, his invention. It uses a vault for a ceiling, not a simple arch but half of an ellipse. Such units could be multiplied to taste. They could, literally, be made by a man from the mud round his feet. Here there was a row of four units faced by another four. One unit might be the home of a poor man. It needed no wood. If he prospered he could join a second unit to the first. Not all these eight units were occupied as far as I could see. The one we entered had much lumber stored in it. Our host led us into another part of the house. This was a courtyard with six palm trees and a hand-pump for water. He led us up stone steps in the wall to a flat roof level with the palm fronds, where the Colossi of Memnon looked across a field at us [see plate]. There were tourists gathered round them but none looking at New Gourna. This roof, which certainly needed rafters or it would not have born our weight, was delightful and a place to sleep during the day in hot weather perhaps under an awning. The house expanded from the original units was unquestionably more fitted to an extended family or a prosperous man than to a poor fellah. The way led round three sides of the top of the courtyard wall to a kind of penthouse, a small sitting-room – best room, probably, for it was filled with the family treasures. The wife and her sister (or perhaps second wife) welcomed us proudly. They showed their treasures, the suite of furniture gaily decorated, a rosewood side table, a richly boxed and bound Koran, pictures and knick-knacks. It was the opposite of Hassan Fathy’s ideal but all the garishness of the room could not spoil the quiet beauty of the courtyard with its palms and the ingenious idea of a walkway round the wall of the court. We were given tea in a matching set of porcelain cups and saucers. By fellaheen standards our host was wealthy.
Between the Fathy houses and the Colossi of Memnon the authorities have built a new school. For an institutional building in concrete and rendered brick it is not so bad – dull, uninspiring but neat. It does at least have vertical walls and more-or-less exact right angles. Two hundred yards from it is the original school that Fathy built entirely of mud brick. It is a coherent, modest and attractive complex. Indeed, for me at any rate there is so clearly a special and indefinable grace inherent in a Fathy building that I have been at a stand, trying to decide how much is the material and how much Fathy. My conclusion is that the material is the style is the man and the choice of it his individual genius. Nevertheless, his school has been abandoned. The authorities made a claim that one wall suffered from rising damp and had water under it, a most unexpected phenomenon in an Egyptian flood-plain. However, since the high dam at Aswan has been built the plain does not flood. Yet the authorities in a gesture either of monumental sharp practice or stupidity at once abandoned the old school and built the new one with a speed only to be explained – it was after all in Egypt – by their extreme relief at getting rid of a complex worthy of its setting!
Fathy’s achievement at New Gourna fell so far short of his ambition for it that he considered New Gourna a failure. I do not see how it can fail as long as what he built is visible among the other monuments of that extraordinary plain, with a clear message for those with ears to hear.
There’s no doubt that we were getting choosy in the architectural sense. There are many acres of interesting architectural junk strewn round Luxor, and for my money, not many successes. Now we turned away from Fathy’s mud brick ‘failure’ towards the other masterpiece in this wilderness of carved and uncarved stone, Hatshepsut’s Temple, lying in its horizontal and ascending layers against the cliff.
It is one of the few ‘Pharoni’ buildings which acknowledges the presence of the landscape and fits humbly into a gigantic cliff which it can imitate but not outdo [see plate]. The pyramids of Giza and the pyramids of Zoser and of Meidum are the others. The pyramids of Giza admit the necessity of a certain grossness in that illimitable space where anything smaller would be pitiful. Moreover as you watch the cliffs of the Eastern Desert move past you between Cairo and the High Dam, hundreds of miles to the south, you see time and again the very shape of pyramids suggested in the natural angle of rest of the stony screes. Sometimes, indeed, corries will diverge from the top of a cliff and make an angle a thousand feet tall which is that of the great pyramid. The best of Egyptian architecture learned from nature and followed it. So now, in the Temple of Hatshepsut the other physical component of the barren land, the layered quality of alluvial rocks, was imitated and reduced to a geometrical suggestion of it. This was a woman’s approach, and sympathetic.
We drove towards the Temple, or perhaps it would be better to say that we now clanked towards it. Bassem’s car was like a boxer who has unquestionably lost the fight on points and may now not go the full fifteen rounds. When we arrived in the area before the Temple precincts which was devoted to tourist trinkets Bassem discovered that the car would no longer move in reverse. This was awkward since at the same time Alaa found that tickets for entry to the Temple were only to be procured a mile or so back along the road by which we had come. He, Bassem and Hassan contrived to get the car round by sheer muscular force while Ann and I waited in all the privilege of age. Hassan, who spoke no English, found friends and talked to them. Alaa and Bassem clanked off to get tickets. Ann and I sat side by side in the sun on the low wall of the temenos, though its position is dictated more by reproduction antikas than sanctity, and waited. We were visited by a procession of sellers of antikas, which was a rewarding experience. Taken all in all they went the full gamut. Conspiratorially and in succession they produced genuine objects! The first produced from his sleeve the clay head of a noble which he pointed out was genuine because the dirt was still clinging to it. The next tried us with a too large soapstone scarab in which the cuts of a steel saw blade were clearly visible. After that we were offered any quantity of blue beads, which by sheer coincidence I happened to know were exported from Germany and strung in Luxor. The best way to deal with this salesmanship is to treat it as a joke which you are sharing with the seller. The final effort and, in my view, much the most effective came from a man who positively sidled up to us. He came close, secretively produced from his robe a six-inch square of cartonnage with the edges authentically broken but leaving in the middle sufficient space for the pharaoh and queen who faced each other there. The man thrust this in my face and hissed: ‘Smell mummy!’
The car had been gone a long time. We wandered off and looked at more objects. When the car came back nobody wanted to visit the Temple, not even us. There is a psychological limit to what you can see, think, appreciate, in one day. However there the tickets were so in the two of us went for a short and unhappy visit. Half the temple was out of bounds because of Polish excavations or restorations – the temple is very heavily restored indeed – and I had a brief, pointless shouting match with a guide or guardian of which I am now ashamed and cannot account for. So we came back, feeling that the Temple of Hatshepsut is best seen from a distance where its relationship with the mighty cliff above it can be appreciated. We found that the car had disappeared so we went to the Thomas Cook Rest House for orange juice after orange juice, and the car came clanking back again. They had had a puncture on top of everything else. What else did we want to see?
The orange juice had been somewhat restorative. When I explained that I did not want to go to the Valley of the Kings, every face seemed to light up. But I had never been to the Valley of the Queens – faces fell – and we must subscribe to the equality of the sexes and the right of women to have their graves gawped at; but that would be all, I promised. After that we would call it a day. So the car with its tired load creaked and clanked through the stony landscape under the
wonderful cliffs, then climbed into the Valley of the Queens, which had not a tourist in sight and only a solitary ticket collector. All the tombs were closed except two, which we visited dutifully. One was full of really lovely wall paintings, though I, at least, seemed to be seeing them from a great distance. The other tomb wasn’t worth being buried in. I have forgotten which was which. However we had visited the Valley of the Queens.
The car when we moved off was now making much the same noises as the boat’s engine when the bearings ‘went’. Where there was a slight descent in the road it moved quite well though noisily. I think the exhaust had fallen off again and not been replaced. A tail of smoke – surely the emblem of Golding in Egypt? – was polluting the air of the Valley of the Queens. It was fortunate for us that the way to the ferry was almost all downhill, because a couple of slight ascents demonstrated that the car was within minutes of its end. It was like pushing a current and the smoke blackened. One might almost have expected to see a police car emerge from it with Saïd waving a bunch of dusters. There is nothing quite so inducive of frivolity as a day among the tombs. Slowly, carefully, Bassem manoeuvred the car to the ferry. He stopped and the car continued to shudder. We descended. Alaa explained that we two had better go on across. They would wait with the car, as not being reversible, it would have to be pushed on and off the ferry. We are of the age to accept this kind of get-out gracefully. In a sentence, aware of the trauma that faced them, we left them to it.
The day had been unaccountably exhausting seeing that we had walked so little. We made full use of the comforts of the hotel. We bathed, dined, sat on the garden terrace, where the scent of the roses ascended to us through the warm evening air. The Egyptian experience was becoming more and more various. How to get the lot under one hat? There was a great defect in width of sympathies, I thought. I could not spend any time in the Old Winter Palace without returning in imagination not to ancient Egypt but to the Victorian and Edwardian days when these quaint and spacious hotels had been filled with people so, so … different ! Then there was the new museum with its solitary mummy, which stirred in me childhood terrors and fantasies. The temple next to the museum was being eaten slowly, but not so slowly, from the ground upward by rising salts from that filled canyon with its clays and earths and pebbles and gravels and evaporites. And Hassan Fathy with the key to a better Egyptian life there in his hands but frustrated at every point by the very Egyptian-ness of the Egyptians…. There were the Nubians, too. I wanted to see the villages, meet the Nubians; and they would add another tangle.
12
Next day I had come to myself again. Bassem’s car was in dock. The crew of Hani were either visiting their families or holed up with the propeller shaft and trying to fit a rubber collar to it! Ann felt she would like to spend the day in the hotel garden. So I hired a car for Alaa and myself and set out briskly once more, to fill in a couple of gaps. I had never seen the temple at Kom Ombo, and though by now I was not a temple-fancier, that one was said to occupy a particularly spectacular position at the water’s edge. We could, I thought, combine this with a visit to one of the Nubian villages which had been built for them when the rising waters of Lake Nasser covered their homes. I had seen one of the villages from a distance. Now, with Alaa to interpret, I thought I might be lucky enough to find someone I could question. There are several of these villages and the nearest though not the largest was Kalabsha about a hundred kilometres up river from Luxor. We set off at about 10 o’clock. The first point of interest was another phosphate factory like the one the other side of the desert on the Red Sea coast. So they will use artificial manure to replace some of the silt that no longer covers Egypt but settles on the bottom of Lake Nasser. The balance sheet for the High Dam and Lake Nasser is still being drawn and no one knows what the result will be, but my guess is that it will be a close-run thing. Lake Nasser is terrifyingly big. If the dam burst or was broken deliberately the Nile Valley, that is to say Egypt, would be scoured into the Mediterranean. As it was now it covered the homelands of hundreds of thousands of Nubians, who had all had to be settled elsewhere.
At Esna we saw the famous camel market [see plate]. Hundreds of camels were being sold, some for work but most for slaughter. There were trucks waiting from as far away as Cairo and Alexandria. In common with all Third World peoples these traders and their customers had little thought for the camel’s comfort. The worst sight I saw this time was two camels roped down in a truck too small for them so that they could neither stand nor kneel. However I suppose the feeling, or view rather than feeling, was that they were meat already.
A little further on we came across a huge herd (if that is the appropriate collective noun) of camels being driven north. They had made one of the longest herding treks left in the world, all the way through the desert from south of Khartoum [see plate]. The escorts were a number of genuine-seeming Sons of the Desert who could have ridden straight into a story by P.C.Wren. They all rode camels and flourished long sticks as a substitute for the long rifles which had been taken from them at the border. Their leader was a really magnificent sight. He and the camels were enough to stop the traffic though they were off the road. Soon there was a row of car-people busy photographing camel-people. At this, the magnificent leader rode forward, shouting insults at the photographers. He was a noble savage, and he scared everyone back into their cars.
We reached Kalabasha at about 12 o’clock. It is really a collection of ten villages grouped round a central, mainly administrative nucleus. This complex was set up by the Egyptian Government in 1963. We were lucky. The day was the Prophet’s Birthday, everyone was on holiday and the Mayor, or President of the whole area, was very willing to talk. We sat in his office and were given tea. Several members of his council were with him, one a schoolmaster who spoke fair English. I asked what proportion of the population was too young to remember Nubia. For no one under twenty could possibly remember the move down the river to a new country. The President replied that there was indeed a large number of inhabitants who could not remember the land of their fathers but he had no statistics immediately to hand. However, I had noticed had I not that they had plenty of children! I had indeed. Kalabsha seemed even fuller of children than an Egyptian village. I asked if the older people remembered their villages with regret, seeing that the government had built them a brand new one. Oh yes, said the President simply. The older people did remember their villages with much regret. But then the waters had risen – he paused, made a wide gesture – had risen and risen and there was nothing to be done. Nothing. The schoolmaster agreed. He said it was a great pity but nothing could be done. You could not argue with water; and then, there was the government. He and the President agreed solemnly. Yes, there was the government. They made no criticism, just acknowledged the existence of the water and the government. I asked if they had had water piped to the villages in Nubia. No, said the President. The women had fetched water from the Nile. But I was right to ask that question. He knew what I meant. The government had been good and they were very grateful. Kalabsha as I had noticed had water piped into the town and the villages. It came from the water tower at Kom Ombo and had been purified. There were many stand-pipes and some people had water piped into their houses. I said that I appreciated what a blessing pure water was. All the way up the Nile I had seen women coming down to the river [see plate]. They had not just fetched water, they had done the washing, and had scoured dishes, in fact I could not begin to number the things I had seen the women doing! This made everyone laugh. Well, said I, what I had seen was that the waterfront was a meeting place for women. It was partly a place for work but quite evidently it was a place to gossip and tell the news, a place for children to play where their mothers could watch over them. It was a most important place in a woman’s life. Did not these stand-pipes and this water piped into the houses, though in themselves benefits, did they not mean that the women lost something by it?
There was more laughter. Women were women said the Pre
sident, and Nubian women would find somewhere to gossip no matter what. The only difference was that now they made groups at the standpipes or at the door of the house. All that women had lost was the labour of bringing the full pots back from the river. Then too they had a large community hall where the women met when they wanted to. Did they want? Oh yes!
I asked what the population did in the way of work, skills and professions. Fifty per cent, said the President, were craftsmen of one sort and another. Twenty-five per cent worked on the land that the government had given them. Had they enough land? No one ever had enough land! But really, the government had not given them enough. Besides they did not live on or beside their land. The lucky ones had only a kilometre or two’s donkey ride to reach their patch but the unlucky ones had to ride as much as seven kilometres. In any case I could see the desert close at hand could I not? There was simply not enough land to be farmed near the complex. In fact some of the old people had already left Kalabsha and gone back to the high land near where their villages had been and were living there. Contrary to what one might expect, many of the young who had never known Nubia now wanted to go back there.