We went back into our cabin to read again, when at 9 o’clock, Alaa presented himself and said would we come to his birthday party? We went back into the middle cabin and there in the centre of a low table was a splendid cake with twenty-six candles on it! The Egyptian custom is slightly different from ours apparently, for we all had to link hands and blow, producing a gale that would have blown any smaller cake overboard. After that there was a cutting of the cake and distributing of it and eating it together with sweetmeats of sugar, fat and coconut with spices, Seven-Up and Egyptian beer. Somehow we had acquired another three or four crew members and Rushdie was present also, pallid but restored. It was quite a scrum. Unless Egyptian beer is frozen solid it is not a drink to be recommended. Nevertheless the crew showed surprisingly few inhibitions against this immoral consumption of alcohol. Quite soon, for I believe they all had a low threshold of tolerance, the scene became what nineteenth-century guide books call ‘animated’. Alaa told us of the time when the government suddenly produced a decree that all alcoholic drinks were now forbidden by law and must be taken out of shop windows and destroyed. Nothing happened at all. There was much laughter and a general agreement that no one took any notice of the government. The police? Ah, that was a different matter! The laughter was rueful.
Rushdie began to show us card tricks. Some of our visitors did the same. One tried me with Find the Lady, at which I lost several notional Egyptian pounds. Then Rushdie that man of many talents and sicknesses, sang and played the lute, making – I was told – extemporary verses about the company. These were skolia! I should like to know what he said about me but couldn’t very well ask; and in those cases the truth is impossible. After that, just as elders do when the older children hold a party we thanked Alaa and everybody else and withdrew into our cabin. The ship’s generator continued to run, the laughter became louder and louder long into the night; but it was a happy, warm sound and I thought it was a pity Alaa had not had a birthday at the beginning of our boat trip rather than towards the end of it. If I had had any wit I should have had one myself. So I lay in my bunk, considering the visit of the General of River Police and the way his departure had liberated the spirits of the crew so that they reacted as the grass does when you take the roller off it. The noise seemed so unlike the Nile of Egypt, the Bahr el Nil, that slow, really rather sleepy river and its indolent servants! But there was after all a long history of parties on the Nile – water parties, from the little skiff à deux‚ a noble with his wife holding on to his leg as he wacked his throwing stick at rising geese, right up to full-blown ceremonial occasions with royal barges and full pomp. There was the one which some wise man recommended as a cure for low spirits to some pharaoh or other. He told him to – no. That was on Pharaoh’s ornamental lake, which wouldn’t count as a Nile party, a pity because it’s such a good story. Alexander the Great will have had parties sure enough, he being a partying sort of person, but there was no proof that he had ever been up the Nile further than Memphis. He seems just to have marched through the Delta then gone inland to Siwa. Cleopatra now, she was the one who gave Antony a party and drank those two pearls in vinegar just to show. The really famous party which she gave when her barge ‘burnt on the waters’ and the ‘poop was beaten gold’ and so on didn’t actually happen in Egypt at all but somewhere up in Asia Minor. Hadrian now, he came all the way up to Luxor and will have given many a party on the way up for Antinous, though he was a lonely man and not at all party-minded on the way down. For the slow, sleepy Nile drowned his favourite for him, or his favourite drowned himself, nobody knows the truth of it as is the way with drownings. Wouldn’t Julius Caesar give some notable parties? They weren’t recorded though. Augustus Caesar would have been the only party-pooper though he too knew little of Egypt but Alexandria right down on the coast. At the best of the parties someone would sing skolia the way Rushdie had done, so we were in a very ancient tradition. Out in the middle cabin it certainly sounded as if one or two people’s tongues were splitting what they spoke. But it was all laughter – and one of the most innocent parties of all that long history! There was Saïd as I had seen him, refusing beer and sticking to Seven-Up but grinning amiably at everyone and squatting gently on his heels and rocking. His skolion had seemed to amuse him for he had split from ear to ear at the end of it.
I must have drifted off at some point for I came to more or less in silence as well as darkness. The generator was off and … no it was not entirely night for there was a trace of dawn in the sky. For the first time in the boat I heard a not unfamiliar sound. In the middle cabin someone gave a huge snore. Far away in the depths of Asyut the muezzins began to call the faithful to prayer. In our boat I believe the call went unheeded.
Between seven and eight in the morning the boat got under way a bit sleepily I thought. Perhaps the boat really was still warm from the birthday party. As for the crew, there was no doubt about their level of tolerance – they seemed distinctly the worse for wear. Faroz, though willing to work, had a green look about him and Akhmet when he saw me grinned piteously and held his head. But there was a bit of wind and a job to do as we went through the lock. The hundred sluice gates were shut, with huge rafts of Nile Roses built up against them. When we came out of the lock on the downriver side, therefore, the current was minimal. The north wind was quite strong and kicking up a bit of a lop through which we slapped pettishly as though the boat had a headache too. Yet it appeared that Shasli now expected to get us to Beni Suef by the end of the day and to Cairo the day after. Shasli had got up late, hence the late start, though he had not had more beer than might be expected of a man content with a mere two wives and thus thoroughly in control of his appetites. His greeting to me had been a little wry. As for me, I felt the virtue of a man who among all these topers had been unable to stomach more than half a bottle of the sweet, sticky Egyptian beer. However, the north wind blew the fumes out of the boat, taking the warmth with it, and out of the crew as well. By midday Akhmet was asking for the engine to be stopped while he changed a filter and Faroz was as busy as ever, cleaning round the boat.
We had the Eastern Desert with us again, the cliffs sidling in towards the river. We were back in that stretch of the country where the cliffs are the main interest with their scatter of strange, black holes. It was difficult to account for the white scratches that led up to some of them. Animals might account for some, rolling stones for others and, of course, men for more. With little to look forward to now as far as the river was concerned I meditated them. It was in this area – or rather the one we had passed through frantically finding a clinic for Rushdie – that some Arabs had discovered the apocryphal gospels of St Thomas. The word was somewhere floating about in the back of my mind. I could see a process but not remember the word, it was foreign and difficult. The book was one I had not seen for many years. It was one of those books on Egypt which had sold me the place while I was still a boy and…
Sebakh!
That was the word, the thing. That was an Arabic word so I had known an Arabic word all along without reckoning it in my scanty store – had a word from way back when Egypt then had seemed as far away as the moon does now. Those Arabs who discovered the Gospels according to St Thomas – of all things they had been looking for soil. It was a trade, an industry. Now I was staring at the black holes and their dependent scratches, their almost inaccessible positions, I saw the picture clearly. All those holes had been inhabited by men of one sort or another for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. Was it not the perfect lair for thieves, hanging over the valley, eager to snatch a living from the wretched peasants who scratched theirs from the fringes of the sown? Later it was men of this religion or that, this sect or that, monks, ascetics, hermits, saints some of them it may be, madmen too, fakirs of Christianity. So each of those holes through the centuries would acquire a thick deposit of refuse, dung, which in time would rot down to soil, very rich and desirable in the infertile desert. To think that so many years of holy poverty and de
sperate asceticism should end up as manure! It was an odd thought and inaccurate, violating Time. Whatever the holy or would-be holy men had done, it was for then. The manure was for now. But to perch year after year like a seabird on a rock, and producing guano! The thought sent me straight back to the uniqueness of Egypt. Generation after generation there had been a craft, not in the digging of relics and treasure but of what they called sebakh. It is the sort of word a boy would remember, the Arabic word or one Arabic word for ‘night oil’, dust rich in nitrogen and therefore useful as an artificial fertilizer.
The Arabs, the Egyptians who dug for it, were thought to be the lowest of the low and their name showed it for they were called the sebakhin, dung-diggers. Of course they were not much interested in anything else that the cave held, old bones and pots. Nor was it at all a question of caves only. In the rainless – or nearly rainless – climate of Egypt, wherever there had been humans living there would be rich layers of sebakh, villages, towns, cities, caves, single farms, the stuff was everywhere, and the sebakhin dug it. Sometimes they dug legally with a paper from the government to protect them; but as often as not, they dug illegally and then whatever treasure they found as well as sebakh would turn up later on the market. Early on they did untold damage to the literature of Egypt, for when they came on a papyrus scroll they tore it into pieces, since selling each separately was more profitable than offering the document intact. That was what the white scratches up to the holes in the rock signified, not animals but man, and not holy man but a dung-digger on the lookout for his peculiar loot.
It is lofty to prefer a tattered scrap of papyrus to a pot of gold. But since the sebakhin were commonly digging round the sites of abandoned cities in the fringes of the desert it is not surprising that most of the voices recovered from Egypt have come to us that way. Much must have been wasted – perhaps ninety per cent but there is one sense in which what we have left is more than enough. There are tens of thousands of papyrus scraps that have not been published because they are not worth the trouble, but they are, nevertheless, too valuable to throw away. Perhaps it is the thought that by some statistical freak, one day they may repair a hole in another document not yet extant.
This side of archeology appealed to my boyhood’s mind as much and more than the other, the discovered pot of gold. The name was ‘Oxyrhynchus’. It was the site of a city, lay on the fringe of the Western Desert, was now ten miles from the main stream of the Nile. I had wanted earnestly to visit it during the last half century or so and I had already passed it three times without doing so. On the way upstream only a few weeks before we had spent the night at a place as near the site as the river went; but there was darkness, a wilderness of canals and crops and fellaheen who would strike out at the stranger in the night with a flail and ask questions afterwards. That impassable countryside stretched for ten miles between me and the desert, too far to walk, too late to walk, too dangerous, and in a word, folly. The other two times I had passed nearer in a car, but fleeing from the bakshish boys and not really coping with a number of pressures. Now we were about to go near again. Oxyrhynchus had perched on the edge of the desert looking down on the ancient Bahr Yusuf. The Egyptians called it Behneseh. It was anciently the capital of a nome or governate. In 1897 Messrs Grenfell and Hunt, scholars and archeologists, started work there. It was not a site from which to expect jewels and gold, but they had not been at work more than a few days when they reached treasures that blazed, though in the mind’s eye. For whatever reason the ancient Oxyrhynchites had thrown out old books, or scrolls, or sheets or notes with the rest of the rubbish. Mounds of paper – papyrus – were dumped, sometimes thrown out of wickerwork baskets, and sometimes thrown basket and all from the edge of the ‘tell’ of sebakh that grew higher and higher and swallowed up what paper was not already covered by drifts of sand. That was another reason why one part of my mind, and that the sensible one, told me that a visit would be pointless. The site had nothing to show now but a few grey and brown lines of wall. Of all the sites in Egypt of such importance it was probably the least spectacular to the outward eye.
I remember during World War II there was a mountain of books collected for the troops and it could not be found storage space. It lay by the Great Western Railway and rotted in the rain, a sad sight. But Oxyrhynchus had the sun. Nothing rotted or decayed. When the two scholars first walked over the sand they actually found they could detect papyrus underground by the elasticity of the sand under their feet! The baskets with their loads of official and unofficial rubbish were still in place. Here and there they had only to scuff with their boots to turn up a layer of papyrus. This was a city of educated men, of administrators who spoke and worked in the language of diplomacy and business – Coptic for the locals, Greek for the outer world, and later, Latin for the orbis terrarum.
What is there about Greek that makes it so immediately attractive? Is it the fact that even if we have not studied it most of the letters are the ones we are accustomed to use in our own alphabet? Has propaganda affected us? Are the huge names sold to us so early, Homer, Plato, Aeschylus, Thucydides, that we are conditioned to bowing down as it were before the altar of an unknown god? For one small boy it was so; and I cannot have been much more than ten when I read my first bit of Greek and was hooked. The phrase is carved above the Pump Room at Bath and you can see it now if you choose. It is, though I did not know this, a phrase from Pindar, Ariston men hudor. Well I knew about aristocrats and I was precociously familiar with hydrogen and hydrates and hydroxides so I saw it meant ‘Water is best’ and an Ancient Greek had spoken to me in his own tongue.
It was Greek mostly that turned up at Oxyrhynchus. Somehow in my mind’s eye the scraps of papyrus, ripped in two most of them, as if it was not enough merely to throw away a book but you had to ‘kill’ it too, just as they ‘killed’ pots in pyramids by breaking them, the papyrus scraps had acquired an extravagant power as if some form of magic inhered in them; or as if that grace which informs Egyptian goldwork was to be found in next-to-indecipherable ink! Sometimes a scrap of paper was a whole sunburst. It might be Sappho:
Some say the fairest thing on the black earth is a host of horsemen, others of foot‚ others of ships: but I say the fairest sight of all is the one you love.
And,
I remember Anactoria now, far away; whose gracious step and radiant glance I would rather see than the advance of the Lydians and the charge of mounted men in armour.
I was therefore, you may say, in the habit or under the compulsion of remembering a place I had never seen, a kind of Adlestrop of the mind, haloed Oxyrhynchus. It seemed an instrument through which one could gaze directly back through time.
Yet there is what one might call an inherent absurdity about the place. For the name means ‘Sharp-nose’, or ‘Pike’. When Typhon, whom the Egyptians had called ‘Set’, had killed Osiris he cut up his body and threw it in the Nile, the grey green river down which we were now moving with our clattering screw. The great religious centres all down the Nile were each organized round a shrine containing a piece of the body. At least this was so in thirteen of the fourteen of the shrines. However, the exotic and complex nature of Egyptian belief is shown in a further detail, for Oxyrhynchus was the fourteenth place and it did not contain a piece of the body, everyone agreed, for the fourteenth piece was the penis of Osiris and a pike had swallowed it! This is why, of course, the place was called ‘Pike’ and the whole story must have been true because no priest in Oxyrhynchus would eat of the pike, which had become divinely unclean! I had often wondered what the early Christians made of it. There must have been zealots and bigots among them, people willing to cross the river to the eastern cliffs and live in holes in the rock. For them, in the passion of a new belief everything else must have been swept away. For them there would be no elaborate exegesis of the Osiris story. It would be dismissed as a string of pagan obscenities.
There were other Christians about the place as well only they were not zealots and
did not live in holes in the rock. We know about them because their traces are to be read in the papyri. It has been said that Christianity was watered by the blood of the martyrs, those who refused to conform. What uneasy people they must have been to have about in that indolent land, people stubborn, anguished, heroic and maddeningly incomprehensible to those who said: ‘But look ! All you have to do is drop a pinch of incense on the altar of the Divine Augustus! It’s really a political gesture – you don’t have to believe anything!’
It must have been horribly magnificent and sordid. We read on the papyri the other side of the story – read the words of those whose belief was not perfect, those who could not wholly believe they would step through the stroke of the sword or the jaws of the wild beast into paradise. For in the days of the persecutions, when to sacrifice to the Divine Emperor was no more than a way of saying you would obey the law, those suspected of Christianity had to attest their loyalty. We have their attestations from Oxyrhynchus where the pike swallowed the penis.
To those chosen to superintend the sacrifices at the village of Alexander-Island, from Aurelius Diogenes, the son of Sabatus of the village of Alexander-Island (being about seventy-two years old, a scar on the right eyebrow). It has always been my custom to sacrifice to the gods and now in your presence in accordance with the decrees I have sacrificed and poured libations and tasted the offerings and I request you to countersign my statement. May good fortune attend you. I Aurelius Diogenes have made this request.
Then there is the official confirmation and signature below.
‘I, Aurelius Syrus, as a participant have certified Diogenes as sacrificing with us.’