I asked if this was a large factor in Nubian life. Yes, said the President, there were already two Nubian societies trying to get people back to Nubia. It was difficult, though.
But surely the land was drowned? Lake Nasser was hundreds of miles long and many miles wide! Oh no, said the President, the place was not what it looked like on the map. There had been much fertile land in Nubia and even now there was much left. In a sentence, here they were constricted. There the land was so wide there would be room for all. They had not been given enough land. That was the root of the problem. I should contrast them with the Nubians who had been shifted into the Sudan.
I began to realize that the Nubians had not just been shifted from one part of Egypt to another.
‘The Sudan? You think of yourselves as Nubians rather than Egyptians?’
There was a silence. I had to break it myself.
‘I beg your pardon. Of course you are Egyptian and Nubian too as I am English and British.’
All the same it was becoming clear that the Nubians had a profound sense of national identity. The move had not been a migration but a diaspora.
‘Well. What happened to the Nubians shifted into the Sudan?’
‘They don’t want to go back. They’ve been treated properly and given as much land as they need.’
As I looked through the doorway I could see the desert, just across the road. Curiosity and also an urge I could not understand had led me here to ask my impertinent questions. Was it a hangover, some far-off touch from the days when a quarter of the world’s map was red? The strange thing I was beginning to find as well was that Nubians – and this included, indeed started with Saïd, the old man in the boat who told me about Fisher’s Island, and whom I should remember to the last days of my life, waving his idiotic bunch of dusters in the police boat – the strange thing about Nubians was how immediately likeable they were. It was happening here. They were all cheerful even when talking about their shoddy treatment. It was not a complaint but a statement of fact. It was all embarrassing. If I asked myself what I was doing here, I had to reply that I was trying to interview people – I, who had never liked interviews and had come finally to invent the sourest apothegms – ‘Always treat an interviewer as a guest; but remember always that he is not a guest.’ – I who tolerated interviews only as part of a writer’s job! This was tit for tat with a vengeance. How many interviewers had I embarrassed, or refused to see, put them off? Yet the President and his three old councillors were cheerfully smiling and I would have gone so far as to say that they accepted me as having a right to ask questions. Perhaps they were wearily accustomed to government people coming for statistics, sociologists on the prowl, anthropologists trying to integrate, camera teams looking for new angles – perhaps I was only one more fly in their ointment.
‘I have another question. It may seem foolish.’
‘Please.’
‘There is fishing now in Lake Nasser?’
‘Yes. Much.’
It was a technical question really. There was no reason why they should be able to answer it.
‘You used to fish in the Nile. Now Lake Nasser in many places is many miles wide. When the Khamsin blows there must be waves more like the ones we have near Great Britain – sea waves. To them, the waves on the Nile would be ripples. Was this thought of? Are there boats now that can cope with that sort of weather? Were your people taught?’
There was another pause. Then the schoolmaster answered in his careful English.
‘They are not yet ready. As far as I know there are not new big boats. But with the old boats, those of the same size as before, they fish near the land. There is flat water near the land in the bags.’
‘Bays. I think you mean bays.’
‘Yes. Thank you. In bays and inlets. There are many inlets.’
All the same I would have made a bet that the first ten years of spreading water had taken its toll.
‘There must have been many accidents, many losses.’
‘No. Nothing like that.’
But the President was speaking again.
‘There is a thing. I wonder – can you help?’
‘Please.’
‘All we want is a way to go back if it is only for visits. We want a decent road up past Aswan through the desert to where our homes used to be. A bus road. That’s all we want.’
I thought of the good road, the two roads through the Eastern Desert to the Red Sea, the military roads.
‘There is a kind of road to Abu Simbel isn’t there?’
‘But a bus road. That’s all we want. So that sometimes when people want to go back…’
‘It is a request, a plea, a demand, that has to be made to men of power.’
There was much nodding and sounds of agreement.
‘I have no power. All I can say is that what I write may be read by men of power, though I do not know if they will nor what they will make of it. But I will write what you say in a book. I will say that the Nubians of Kalabsha ask for a decent road back to where their homes used to be. It’s all I can do but I will do it.’
You would have thought by the happiness and laughter that the road had been built there and then. We all shook hands with each other.
It may have been silly. Yes, perhaps it was. Nevertheless I record here a plain statement of what my Nubian hosts want and hope it may be printed in a book with a photograph of Kalabsha – and perhaps the President and his council – on the page facing. Does this kind of thing ever do any good? The long and complicated levers of power have never been accessible to me. I have never known even where to look for them.
Now the party showed us round. We saw a craft centre where a young lady as black as a piece of coal and far shinier presented me with some colourful raffia work. There was a reading-room full of children with plenty of books. The President explained that they had two languages, Arabic and Nubian. But Nubian has never been written down. (Forward, the Bible Society!) The children had to learn to read and write Arabic. In the home they still spoke Nubian.
We gave the President and the schoolmaster a lift to the next village where he introduced us to families in two houses and explained that we had already been given tea. So we were only given soft drinks. The houses were simple. The walls were rendered so I was not able to find out what was underneath but they didn’t seem to be built of mud brick [see plate]. They were simply furnished too. There was none of the heaped-up gear I had seen in the other houses, none of the rubble, none, you would have said, of the poverty. The people and the children were happy. It seemed that this happiness was an act of God as far as Nubians are concerned. They are happy no matter what. The children were charming, unafraid and playful. It was of course a holiday, nevertheless everyone seemed genuinely glad to greet a stranger.
So we took photographs, said our inadequate thanks and left. On the way we found that the camel drove had been, as it were, tapped all along the road [see plate]. Here and there were trucks still loading camels, their owners having forestalled the Esna market further north. Getting a camel into the first truck he has ever seen looked like an all-day job. It should be noted that the camel market was at Esna-on-the-Road. The rest of Esna is a large city with a barrage on the Nile but the main road avoids it.
At Kom Ombo-on-the-Road we turned off towards the Nile. Indeed if it were not for the riverside temple tourism would ignore Kom Ombo altogether for it is a manufacturing town and even dustier and uglier than Qena. We reached the temple and paid for tickets then went in. We – I was about to say we were unlucky, but the word would have been a foolish one. The bad luck was or had been somewhere else. We found that the end of the temple away from the river was out of bounds. It looked like a play being performed. There was the high façade of the temple and there on the top was a brilliant cast. They all wore brilliant uniforms up there, and in Egypt uniforms for top people are very brilliant indeed. Alaa found from a tourist guide that a tourist had fallen off that façade and been killed. Whe
n? About twenty minutes ago.
The speed with which a crowd gathers in Egypt! And this one, gathered by car from every quarter! The poor creature’s body was being given more attention than a VIP.
‘Man or woman?’ I said that because somehow I had assumed it was a man.
‘He doesn’t know.’
I had a sudden shuddersome awareness of fate, bringing him – yes, I was sure it had been a man – bringing this man at his own considerable expense to Egypt for a holiday – all the excitement of travel – getting him here to the temple – had his wife come with him, or had she stayed in that tour boat moored out there? No, dear I don’t think I’ll come – another temple – I’ve a bit of a headache. And he, solicitously, oh then I’ll stay, keep you company! But she wouldn’t have that and neither would fate, taking him by the hand, leading him up to that high platform above the façade….
The trouble with a storyteller is he can’t even grieve without watching himself grieving. Why expect truth from such a creature?
As for the temple, or what we were allowed to see of it and what we were inclined to see of it, I don’t say it isn’t a good temple as temples go [see plate]. Oh yes, it has a good position some fifty feet above the river and twenty yards from it. There were working sandals out there in the river and alongside the scree of broken stone which leads down from one end of the temple to the water. It seemed odd to be looking at sandals from that angle. They looked smaller and had nothing to do with the temple. It seemed inadequate, the temple I mean. What is an adequate temple? After all, there were the hieroglyphic inscriptions, walls of them. The entrance looked Ptolemaic. Sebek (Sobek, but what’s the odds?) appeared to share the temple with Horus. I found myself remembering the place named ‘Horus’ in a certain Egyptian city and wondering if that’s what it was. This end of the temple – the Ptolemaic end – was much lower than the other end where the gaudy uniforms were now dispersing.
Alaa asked if I wanted to climb up to the top of the other end where the unfortunate tourist had been killed. I shook my head. We watched the Nile for a bit, I sitting on the low parapet above the scree of stone. Here the Nile was narrower and the current faster. Our boat would never make it, I was quite sure. I began to agree with myself that I had seen enough Egyptian temples, one time and another. It was that complete emptiness. How long ago did the rite of deconsecration evolve? Was it no longer ago than Christianity? And there was much restoration and reclamation going on. I thought to myself why can’t people let monuments decay naturally? They rebuild temples but let Fathy’s school and houses fall down.
Out in the river there was a floating crane with its grab down. I asked Alaa to find out about it, for one rusty corner of a wreck showed above water. It had been a tourist boat he said at last. Unlucky place for tourists, Kom Ombo. Had there been any casualties? No. No casualties. That was the third wreck I had seen in the Nile which had no casualties! But after all, with tourism among the top three money-spinners for the government should we, I wondered, ever have known that accidents do happen to tourists if we had not arrived in time to see that gaudy cast on the top platform and been forbidden to approach it? So we drove back in the taxi with utility music going on from the tapedeck. On the way through Kom Ombo we took in some unpaying passengers because as the driver said we were good men and they were good men and we wouldn’t mind. So I sat in the utility music and Arabic chat which I couldn’t understand and lost a chance I suppose of Getting to Know the People. Instead I was thinking about the temple (having really not bothered to see it) and wondering why temples did not seem much like Rider Haggard’s view of them. In him, of course, there is usually a wind that blows for no reason, or a wonderful light and an unearthly voice, high and pure. Then there’s the puzzle of a temple dedicated to Sobek and Horus – to a hawk and a crocodile. Of course, say sympathetic historians, people didn’t really worship a crocodile but the idea of the primeval being in the primeval water, and the hawk is a symbol of the spirit, like the brass eagle which does duty for a lectern in Christian churches. You can get away with any belief provided you split it small enough. For a thousand years Christians have worshipped in the same way a man being tortured to death on the gallows. Perhaps people have to have something to look at. Even Buddhism, which insisted on having nothing to look at, has got so far as having a very elaborate art surrounding the nothing.
So back we went to the Winter Palace. Ann was well rested so we went for a walk in Luxor, agreeing that it might well be the last time we should see the place. It’s a bit different, that. You can quite easily accept the idea that you’ve seen a place for the first and last time, but the last time on its own, yes, that’s different.
However, we had a stroke of luck which cheered us up. We discovered a newly opened shop which actually sold books in European languages and not just guide books. We stocked up then and there for the return journey down the river. One of the troubles with air travel is that you can never take enough books to read. Sometimes I fall for the old traveller’s trap and take one of the great unread Good Books – Finnegans Wake or Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic, which of course I can no more read in a hotel bedroom than in my own house. So I still pine for an unread Small Book and read the instructions on my airline ticket or a newspaper several weeks out of date. The ones we bought were Small Books all right so I won’t name them but they were PRINT.
It was a subtropical night and pleasant. But there was still that strange haze in the air, now illuminated by the lights of Luxor, or maybe lit from within by some meteorological effect. We went back to bed and so strong was our hunger for PRINT that before we went to sleep we had each read one of our new books, thus wasting them, since they were not worth keeping and we should throw them away. I remember thinking that we had seen plenty of books in Kalabsha but nowhere else.
13
We had breakfast at 6 o’clock since we wished to set a good example to the Reis and start early on our trip back down the Nile. I was depressed by our failure to get further than Luxor. We were now faced by a return at such speed as the boat could attain – taking advantage of what current there was – in order to get the boat back to Cairo without letting down the owner, who had much need of it by a particular date. I thought it possible that if I was firm enough I could hold up our headlong progress long enough to get ashore for a quick look and fairly lengthy meditation at Oxyrhynchus. But apart from that it ought now to be hell-for-leather all the way. We were at the boat by 7 o’clock.
Akhmet was fiddling with the engine. Apparently he had spent very little time at ‘his’ village. Instead he had spent two days lovingly fitting a rubber sleeve in place of the metal bearings! I was at pains to admire this but privately gave the rubber twenty minutes’ wear before the shaft wore through it. Faroz looked a bit pale I thought. However Rushdie had tidied our cabin and it looked neat enough. So we sat and talked to Alaa of this and that until Reis Shasli turned up at 10 o’clock. He had spent his two days in Qena and seemed tired and morose. A salacious rumour pervaded the boat to the effect that he had found both wives in residence, et cetera. So we cast off and moved away downstream. In general Egyptians are adept at keeping small engines going by the use of bits of wire, odd wooden pegs and elastic bands. But the boat’s engine was heavier than that. I did not think the rubber sleeve was muting our noise much though it may have altered the pattern of our vibration. Then, not a mile from our starting point, the propeller shaft thudded its way through the sleeve and commenced the familiar banging of metal on metal. The only thing to be said for the boat was that it seemed to perk up when facing homeward the way a horse smells the stables and it even managed to produce an extra knot or two as if the favourable current was not only adding to our speed but encouraging the engine. I was still provoked and unable to understand why nobody had got new metal bearings flown up from Cairo. Perhaps, I thought, the engine was so old that bearings for it were no longer obtainable.
There came a loud yell from the fo’c’sle. br />
‘It is Rushdie,’ said Alaa, frowning and shaking his head. ‘He is suffering from kidney trouble. I had better go and see.’
There was another yell, louder this time. The Reis turned up the Arabic Three Blind Mice. Alaa disappeared into the fo’c’sle. The Theban Hills were sliding past at a quite respectable speed. Really, it did seem as though the engine was helped by the current – more speed for the same effort – but that was impossible! Or was there some help from The Shallow Water Effect?
Alaa reappeared.
‘Rushdie will be better soon,’ he said. ‘He has been like this now and then since he was a child.’
What with an exhausted Reis and a sick cook we were a ghastly crew. Ann had not been well. Saïd, who would rejoin us at Qena, had been suffering in one way or another and perhaps we should never see him again. The only really healthy people were Alaa, who is never sick, and the two who had bathed in the awful Nile waters, Faroz and Akhmet. I went on deck and found Akhmet sitting in the wind. The useless sleeve, so swiftly worn through had dispirited him.
‘Next time,’ he said, ‘get a better boat.’
‘With the same crew?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not the Reis. Me and Faroz, we’re all right.’
It was true they had worked hard, particularly Faroz. So had Rushdie come to that. The Reis had only run us aground once, which in a river of the Nile’s length and shallowness is pretty good.
The wind was strong, for as we stood north we were adding our speed to it. I went below and into our cabin, where Ann was three-quarters of the way through her second book. What is sometimes thought a vital piece of equipment for the literate (ability to take in a page at a glance) is a serious defect in the traveller. I begged her to slow up but she said she couldn’t. I didn’t feel like reading myself. I sat on my bunk, therefore, and tried to bring some order into this at least partly crazy experience. How the devil could I get a book out of it? We were retracing our course through waters we already knew. That sameness which had inevitably been part of our experience of the river on the way up would be increased on the way down. On the other hand was the need for speed – Reis Shasli had sworn you come down the Nile in half the time you go up it – and on the other hand there was the need for interesting experience. Well. There was still Oxyrhynchus.