Dark Star Safari

3. Up and Down the Nile

The Philae, a river cruiser, lay aslant of the bank, captive in her mooring lines in the winter sunshine at Aswan on the Nile — yes, Heart of Darkness opens something like this. I really did suspect that I might be headed to a dark place and as with all long trips I fantasized that I might die there. Last night’s rain had freshened the air and turned the riverbank to gleaming paste. Fellaheen with fishing poles stood in mud to their knees and other muddy men were calling out, ‘Felucca ride! Felucca ride!’

A young man in a grubby white gown said to me, ‘We go. Nice felucca. We find Nubian banana.’

‘Nubian banana?’

‘Big banana,’ he said, and made an unambiguous gesture near a portion of his grubby gown. ‘You come with me. Big banana.’

He went on flattering himself until I said, ‘Oh, bugger off.’

His sort of importuning was common in the tourist-haunted parts of Egypt where I regularly saw visiting men and visiting women tacking in quaint feluccas at dusk towards the less-frequented parts of the Nile embankment, where unobserved in the shadows of overhanging ferns, they would find the Nubian banana.

I had been told to board the Philae at noon for the scenic trip downriver to Luxor, where the boat stopped and I would continue. I planned to keep going, overland, in Africa, on the longest road trip of my life, over the frontier to Wadi Halfa and Upper Nubia and beyond to Dongola and Khartoum, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and deeper south to Malawi, via Zomba and Limbe, where I had lived so long ago, to see what had happened to Africa while I had been elsewhere.

I had come here from Cairo in a sleeper on the night train. The taxi driver had asked for fifty Egyptian pounds (about $12). I offered him thirty, assuming he would negotiate as all the others had done, but instead he became peevish and indignant and lapsed into a lofty silence, no haggling at all. At the station, which was very crowded with commuters and cars, he became ridiculously attentive, he bowed to me, he insisted on carrying my bag, he parted the crowd, he found the right platform, the Aswan train, even the section of track where the sleeper would stop. So I handed him fifty for the extra attention he had given me. He scrupulously fished in his purse and gave me twenty pounds in change and thanked me in a sneering way. I tried to hand the money back to him. He touched his heart, waving away the tip. Wounded feelings had turned him into a paragon of virtue.

Yet I had been so touched by the trouble he had taken, and his elaborate courtesies that I persisted, and it became a charade, face-saving on both our parts, as I pursued him down the high road, so to speak, insisting he accept the tip. At last I uttered the right formula, Ashani ana (‘For my sake’), and begged him to accept, and he took it, holding the money like a trifle, his favor to me: a very clever man and a lesson to me in Egyptian pride.

Rameses I Station, usually called Cairo Railway Station, is a century old, like the railway system itself, which stretches from Alexandria on the shores of the Mediterranean, to Aswan on the Upper Nile, at the northern edge of Lake Nasser — the border of Sudan on the south side. The design of the station is of interest, and it has been said that it represents the epitome of nineteenth-century Egyptian architects’ desire to combine classical and Islamic building styles, in response to Khedive Ismail’s plan to create a ‘European Cairo’ — Moorish meets modern.

Kings, queens, princes, heads of state, and generals have arrived and departed here. One of Naguib Mahfouz’s earliest heroes, the ultranationalist anti-British rabble rouser, Saad Zaghlul, escaped an assassination attempt at Cairo Station on his return from one of his numerous exiles, in 1924. Given Egypt’s history of dramatic arrivals and departures the railway station figures as a focal point and a scene of many riotous send-offs and welcomes.

The best story about Cairo Railway Station, told to me by a man who witnessed it unfold, does not concern a luminary but rather a person delayed in the third class ticket line. When this fussed and furious man at last got to the window he expressed his exasperation to the clerk, saying, ‘Do you know who I am?’

The clerk looked him up and down and, without missing a beat, said, ‘In that shabby suit, with a watermelon under your arm, and a Third Class ticket to El Minya, who could you possibly be?’

To leave the enormous sprawling dust-blown city of gridlock and gritty buildings in the sleeper to Aswan was bliss. It was quarter to eight on a chilly night. I sat down in my inexpensive First Class compartment, listened to the departure whistles, and soon we were rolling through Cairo. Within minutes we were at Gizeh — the ruins overwhelmed by the traffic and the bright lights, the tenements and bazaar; and in less than half an hour we were in open country, little settlements of square mud-block houses, fluorescent lights reflected in the canal beside the track, the blackness of the countryside at night, a mosque with a lighted minaret, now and then a solitary car or truck, and on one remote road about twenty men in white robes going home after prayers. In Cairo they would have been unremarkable, just part of the mob; here they looked magical, their robes seeming much whiter on the nighttime road, their procession much spookier for its orderliness, like a troop of sorcerers.

I went into the corridor and opened the train window to see the robed men better, and there I was joined by Walter Frakes from St Louis, an enormous man with a long mild face, and a smooth bag-like chin, who found his compartment small, ‘but what’s the use of fussing?’ He was traveling with his wife, Marylou, and another couple, the Norrises, Lenny and Marge, also from St Louis. They too were heading to Aswan to meet a boat and take a river cruise.

‘And if I don’t get a decent bed on that ship I’m going to be a wreck,’ Walter Frakes said. He was a very gentle man in spite of his size, which I took to be close to 300 pounds; and he was kindly and generally uncomplaining. All he said in the morning was: ‘Didn’t get a wink of sleep. Tried to. Woke up every time the train stopped. Must have stopped a hundred times. Durn.’

I had woken now and then as the train had slowed at crossings, or at the larger stations. There were sometimes flaring lights, barking dogs, otherwise the silence and the darkness of the Nile Valley, and a great emptiness: the vast and starry sky of the Egyptian desert, and that road south that ran alongside the train, the only road south, as Mr Tilohun had said, the road to Johannesburg.

In the bright early morning I saw a sign saying, Kom-Ombo — 8 km, indicating the direction to its lovely temple with a dual dedication, to Horus, the hawk-headed god, and Sobek, the croc-skulled deity. Another sign said, Abu Simbel Macaroni, and depicted its glutinous product in a red bowl.

Date palms in clusters, orange trees, low boxy houses, donkey carts piled high with tomatoes, the occasional camel, the men in white gowns and skullcaps, the boys walking to the fields carrying farm implements, and the wide slow river and the flat bright land shimmering under the blue sky. This was new Egypt but it was also old Egypt, for I had seen many of these images in the Cairo Museum — the adzes and mattocks the boys carried I had seen looking much the same, and the same heavy browed bullocks I had seen hammered in gold or carved in stone I saw browsing by the river; the same dogs with upright tails and big ears, the same narrow cats, and had I seen a snake or a croc they would have had counterparts in gold on a chariot or else mummified and moldering in a museum case.

Some of those cap and gowned men were seated in groups eating pieces of bread loaves the same shape I had seen in the museum removed intact, solid and stale, from ancient tombs; the same fava beans that had been disinterred from crypts were being gobbled up from wagons of men selling foul, the stewed beans that are still an Egyptian staple. The same-shaped ewers and pitchers and bowls I had seen as old artifacts were visible here in the hands of women faffing around at the kitchen doors of their huts.

The Nile was near, about 300 yards from bank to bank, slow moving and light brown, showing clouds on its surface, with green fields on either side, some with marked-out plots and others divided into date plantations, hawks drifting over them on the wind currents, and in the river feluccas with sails — impossible to see these sails and not think of gulls’ wings. And then, as though indicating we were approaching a populous place, there was a succession of cemeteries, great long slopes of sun-baked graves, and the grave markers, small rectangles set into the stony ground, with raised edges, like a whole hillside of truckle beds where the dead people lay. Beyond the next hill was Aswan.

This easy train trip south from Cairo to Aswan had rushed me 500 miles into Africa, almost to the far edge of Egypt, to the shore of the lake — Lake Nasser — that borders the Sudan. With a visa I could have got a ferry down the lake and nipped over the border: a boat left the High Dam every week, bringing workers to Wadi Halfa, in Nubia. But I had no visa yet.

Aswan was mainly a bazaar and a destination for tourists heading for the ruins. But it was a good-natured bazaar, divided in half — local people buying melons and grapes and fava beans and coffee and spices, and tourists haggling over plaster images of the pyramids and the Sphinx, and Nefertiti, brassware depicting King Tut’s shiny face and colorful carpets, walking sticks and T-shirts. Egyptian tourist kitsch is to my mind the ugliest in the world, and some of it ambitious too: expensive malachite funerary urns, scale-model sarcophagi complete with model mummy, stone carved cats and hippos.

Heavily armed policemen were all over the place. There was a reason, especially here. Temples and ruins and tourist destinations were often targeted by Muslim extremists. There were attacks inside railway trains, and many shots fired into First Class from beside the tracks as the Aswan train made its way south — shooting into First was the best way of hitting a tourist. But there were kidnappings too, and ransoms paid. Egypt, especially the Nile Valley, had a reputation as a danger zone.

There were metal detectors at the entrances to most buildings, though they were seldom used and seemed more symbolic than practical. Perhaps they didn’t work? Certainly the electricity supply was unreliable and there seemed to be a labor shortage. The armed men, with assault rifles slung at their sides, meant to reassure the tourists, simply looked sinister and added to the atmosphere of menace. The touts and curio-sellers were persistent, nagging, stalking, tugging sleeves, there was donkey shit everywhere and the sound of car horns and loud music playing at the tape-and-CD stalls, and pestering beggars, lepers, and the usual naggers from restaurants and coffee shops snatching at passersby. The bazaar and its density of hangers-on and hawkers have their nearest analogue in an American shopping mall — just as diverting, as much a time-killer and a recreation. The pedestrian zone, the food court, the wedged together shops of the mall, all have their counterparts in the Egyptian bazaar, which may be dirtier, smellier, and noisier, but is much cheaper and better-humored.

My hotel was on the river, walking distance from the train station. Gull-winged feluccas on the sparkling Nile, hawks overhead, crows, breathable air, a clear sky, and as many as 300 riverboats moored for the Nile cruises to Luxor. But business was poor — there were more boats than there were mooring places or piers, they were piled up and double and triple parked. It was early February, low season, and because tourists confused Israeli and Palestinian violence with much-more-placid Egypt, they were avoiding the Nile cruises.

I had breakfast, bought some amber beads in the bazaar, and did the Al-Ahram (English edition) crossword puzzle in the sunshine, sitting on a bench.

It was then, setting down one answer (it was aa, a Hawaiian word for a certain kind of cindery lava rock) that I was approached by the young man in a grubby white gown, who said to me, ‘We go. Nice felucca. We find Nubian banana.’

There were plenty of takers. Young women, singly or in pairs, being sailed by Egyptians, singly or in pairs, at sundown had to know that they were doing something that no Egyptian woman would do without understanding that they were putting themselves completely into the hands of these young men — these priapic young men.

While watching the feluccas tacking into the darkness into crepuscular copulations, I was approached by a big dark man.

‘I am Nubian,’ he said. ‘Mohammed.’

Another unambiguous flirtation, I was sure.

‘You ever been to Japan?’

‘Yes, I have — several times.’ Thinking: an ambiguous flirtation, then.

‘You like?’

‘Japan? Lots of people. Very expensive. Unlike Aswan — not many people. Very cheap.’

‘I am a tour guide here for ten years for Japanese people,’ he said. ‘I hate Japanese people. What is in their heads? What is inside? They are …’ But he didn’t finish the sentence. He winced, searching for words. ‘I hate to be a guide for them. Something is wrong with Japanese people.’

‘Maybe they are not like you,’ I said, trying to calm him.

‘They are not like me. Not like you. Not like anyone.’

‘You think so.’

‘I know this!’

To a Nubian such as Mohammed the Japanese were weird, mask-faced, backward-looking, strangely attired, oddly aromatic and inexplicable; much as a Nubian might seem to a Japanese. It was not for me to arrange for the twain to meet here in Aswan, but as a matter of fact there were a great number of Nubians here, who had been uprooted and rehoused because of the disruption of the High Dam and the lake that emerged.

Sudan was just at the other side of the lake, and there was a clear link, culturally and racially, with greater Nubia, the coming and going, the language most of all. No one said to me here as people said all the time in Cairo, ‘This isn’t Africa.’ This was Africa, and Aswan was full of relocated Nubians, whose villages had been inundated by Lake Nasser.

At noon that day I boarded the Philae, a lovely river cruiser with a capacity of about 100 passengers, and there were almost that number on this down-the-Nile trip, lots of Germans, some British and Americans, Egyptians, Dutch, and one Indian family, two adults and a small badly-behaved boy, the only child on the boat, who was bored and whiney the whole trip.

Recreational history, what most sightseeing amounts to, the History Channel in 3-D, to justify the enormous gourmet buffets and fabulous dinners and drinks on the upper deck: this was the mission of the Philae contingent. I had been on only two other cruises in my life — the luxury Seabourn Spirit (‘Your caviar will be sent to your suite shortly, sir’) and a Turkish junket in the MV Akdeniz which had delivered me to the coast of Egypt, with 450 courteous Turks, reminiscing about the Ottomans and wishing the Khedive still had the whip hand.

Wealthy people too lazy to read love cruises for the anecdotal history and archeological chitchat that later serve them to one-up their listeners in boasting-bouts after they go home. The Nile cruise passenger is someone in the process of becoming a licensed bore. The apprenticeship is filled with exploratory questions in the realm of Egyptology, much more than just the correct pronunciation of Ptah and Hatshepsut.

‘So the common people weren’t allowed to enter the temple?’ and: ‘Which one is Horus?’ and the recurring question of the tourist on the Nile, ‘How in heck did they manage to lift these things?’

Now and then the queries were detailed: ‘You mean there’s more than one Ptolemy?’ to which the answer was ‘Zayre was feefseen’ — and Ptolemy the math whizz wasn’t one of them.

Or: ‘How many centuries did you say?’ and the answer: ‘Seerty.’

The more meaningless the question the more detailed the interrogation, and the cruise passenger would just nod when the answer was delivered.

A woman on the Philae, for reasons of her own, kept asking the onboard Egyptologist, ‘Is that fronic?’

And the answer was sometimes yes, and sometimes spelled out on the item in question, the two hieroglyphics indicated in the cartouche, Per and Oni, meaning Big House, or Big Structure, or King, Pharaonic.

One night in Aswan I went by felucca to Elephantine Island, while in the distance midstream more feluccas, Egyptians at the tiller, were steering foreign women into the darkness and the quality of light gave the expression ‘being spirited away’ a definite meaning. The island was a gift to Horatio, Lord Kitchener, for mercilessly putting down the rebellion in the Sudan, a massacre known as the Battle of Omdurman, which was belated revenge for the Mahdi’s decapitation of General Gordon. Kitchener turned Elephantine Island into a botanical garden, which he could view from his villa. Some of the palms and plumeria and exotic shrubs still flourish, but what is most remarkable about the island is that from the east bank there is a view of the cliff-side town and the bazaar, and from the west, across a stretch of river, just sand dunes, long monumental sand pistes of smoothness, suggesting depth in the way it lay in wind-swept swathes, scooped and carved, like trackless snow-fields tinted pink and gold at sunset, awaiting skiers.

My felucca sailor dropped me in the dark at the east bank, below the town where, at the limit of the bazaar, I spotted an imam in a white gallabieh standing at the gateway of his mosque. But it was too dark for me to see the outlines of this place of worship. As I walked closer I saw it was not an imam but a priest in a white cassock — what’s the difference? He was standing at the gateway of his church, inhaling the night air. Seeing me, he beckoned with a benign wave of the hand.

He was Benito Cruciani, from Macerata in Italy, and had come here to Aswan by way of the Sudan, where he had stayed for nine years until he became ill and was invalided out.

‘I was in Darfur,’ he said — a remote district in the western Sudan. ‘The Africans used to throw stones at me. But when I said, “I am not American, I am Italian,” they stopped.’

He was a Comboni father, the order named for Daniel Comboni, whose motto ‘Africa or death’ was prophetic, for in the event he achieved both simultaneously, dying in the Sudan in 1881. Father Comboni’s plan was ‘Save Africa through Africa,’ which seemed a gnomic way of expressing a missionary intention. In fact, such priests made few converts, taught by example and were watched closely by the Islamic Brotherhood, less robust than in Cairo but robust all the same. That is to say, unbelievers were now and then made an example of by being murdered.

‘Your name, Cruciani, sounds like “cross” in Italian,’ I said.

Yes, he said, it was a deliberate construction, Cruciani was a Florentine family associated with the Crusades, and six centuries later he was still a crusader (crociato), promoting Christ in an intolerant Islamic fastness.

‘I want to go to the Sudan. I’m still waiting for my visa. Any advice for me?’

‘You are alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘We say, “Mountain and sea — never travel alone.” ’

‘A proverb?’

‘Not so much a proverb as a rule you should obey.’

‘I don’t have much choice.’

‘So my advice is — pray,’ Father Cruciani said. He then beckoned, Italian fashion, dog-paddling with one hand. ‘Come.’

He stepped inside the church and just as I entered I heard a great booming muezzin’s voice calling the faithful to pray, ‘Allahu akhbar!’ As this reverberated in the crypt, Father Cruciani showed me the under-altar effigy of St Teresa, the saint’s life-sized figure in a glass coffin. While we were looking at it four youths in blue and white school uniforms crept towards it and stuffed some notes through a slot in the coffin.

‘So they will pass their exams,’ Father Cruciani said and made a satirical face.

Outside I said, ‘No one is very upbeat about the Sudan.’

He said, ‘Wonderful people. Terrible government. The African story.’

In a little corner of the rescued and reconstructed Temple of Isis at Philae, in the river south of Aswan, was a bull in stone, the image of the god Hapi — or Apis — surrounded by protective snakes. Apis was the sacred bull of Memphis, associated with the river and so with fertility, and worshiped as the god of the Nile. Nearby was the image of Osiris, god of the earth, in his candle-pin headgear, personification of the Nile, the flooding of the river symbolizing his rebirth; his features were smashed, and so were those of Horus, its falcon face obliterated by fanatic Early Christians. There was lots of Napoleonic graffiti on the walls. The Nile cruise past Egyptian ruins is an experience of obliterations and graffiti. Over 150 years ago, the young Gustave Flaubert lamented these very things in a letter to his mother. ‘In the temples we read travelers’ names; they strike us as petty and futile. We never write ours; there are some that must have taken three days to carve, so deeply are they cut in the stone. There are some that you keep meeting everywhere — sublime persistence of stupidity.’

The human faces were scratched away, the gods’ images were chipped off, the walls have been stripped and chiseled into. But though the experience of the ruins is the experience of millennia of vandalism the proof of the strength and glory of the ruins is that they are still beautiful, even cracked and defaced and scribbled on.

The tall pink granite obelisks that you see in London and Paris and Central Park originated at the ancient quarry outside Aswan where work in stoppage shows the famous Unfinished Obelisk. This stone pillar, eighty feet long, distinctly geometric and symmetrical, being chopped from the granite ledge, lies partly hewn, being gaped at and trodden upon by bewildered admirers.

‘It was all by hand!’

‘Maybe they just got sick of working on it.’

‘How in heck did they manage to lift these things?’

An Egyptologist was saying, ‘So Osiris was killed by his evil brother Seth and cut into fourteen pieces. One of them was eaten by a fish, and Isis used it to revive Osiris and give birth to Horus. Which one, do you think?’

His leer suggested the obvious answer but speaking for the group one passenger asked, ‘Any crocs in the river here?’

The answer was no, none here, none even downstream at Crocodilo-polis — though one had been kept and worshiped at the temple there, as the cat — image of the goddess of joy and love — had been worshiped in the temple at Bast. The big crocs these days lazed on the banks of the White Nile, in the swampy Sudd in the southern Sudan and even farther upriver at the source of the Nile, Lake Albert and Lake Victoria. The crocs here had been long since made into handbags and belts.

We visited the High Dam and Lake Nasser, we waited until our flight was canceled to Abu Simbel, 200 miles south at the border of the Sudan and the head of the lake.

The pleasantest aspect of the river cruise was the combination of gourmandizing and sightseeing, gliding with the current and stopping every now and then at a resurrected ruin. And I liked the ruins most for the way they were overrun by the rackety bazaar, not just curio-sellers but browsing donkeys among the pillars, and goats in the roadway; hawkers’ stalls in the foreground and Ptolemaic colors on the sheltered upper parts of the temples, still bright after thousands of years. Kom-Ombo, where the Philae stopped the first day, was an example of these features — the bazaar, the ruins, the chewing animals, the loud music, the double shrine of Horus and the croc god represented by mummified crocs inside the temple. Kom-Ombo was not just temples but a small town and its name, meaning ‘Pile of Gold,’ was both flattery and mockery, and the temples looked more appropriate as part of the life of the town rather than fenced-off museum pieces. They did not gain dignity in being reconstructed; they looked false and approximated.

The town itself with its Nubian name was ancient.

‘Who lived here way back?’

‘Many bibble.’

The walls of the temple at Kom-Ombo were Egyptology in pictures, history and culture. As a reminder of the wisdom and skill of the Egyptians, one wall depicted medical instruments: pliers, forceps, knives, hooks, suction devices, the paraphernalia for carrying out serious surgery, possibly more surgery than was being carried out in the present-day Kom-Ombo General Hospital. Childbirth was illustrated in one hieroglyph. I sketched a picture of the Eye of Horus, which in a simplified form became the symbol (Rx) for a prescription. Elsewhere on the temple walls were representations of the natural world, vultures, ducks, bulls and hawks, and farther on, warriors, and a whole pantheon of the Egyptians’ enemies, including an unmistakable Negroid head and torso, a fierce warrior with the heavy-lidded gaze of the Nubian. It was wonderful to see such black assertive faces glaring from the walls of these ancient temples, like DNA in bas-relief, proof of the power and persistence of the African.

We floated onward in the Philae, nibbling delicacies, sipping fine wines, leering at the honeymooners on board, dodging the boisterous little Indian boy. We got to Edfu. ‘The temple of Edfu serves as a latrine for the entire village,’ Flaubert noted in his diary in 1850. But it was disinterred and tidied up and is said to be the best preserved temple in Egypt.

Until the later nineteenth century, all these temples were torsos, broken up and fallen, just smashed up carvings and fat pointless pillars, scattered in the Upper Nile Valley. ‘There is always some temple buried to its shoulders in the sand, partially visible, like an old dug-up skeleton,’ Flaubert wrote. The great delineator of wrecked Egyptian sites, David Roberts, loved the ruination and in 1840 he said they seemed to him much more beautiful half-buried and bruised. They reminded him of Piranesi etchings of the Forum in Rome.

I saw what he meant when I came across a ruin in the middle of nowhere — a brilliant image, the lovely carving fallen and forgotten in the desert, a much more dramatic subject than a rebuilt temple teeming with hot-faced and complaining tourists. Flaubert took a delight in reporting how dilapidated the temples were, because he was not in search of ruins, he much preferred the oddities of the Nile journey, and dallying with dancing girls and prostitutes. Twenty-seven years after Flaubert visited, another traveler reported that the 2000-year-old Temple of Edfu was being dug out and had begun to look like its old self, as in the festival days of Edfu’s greatness, celebrating the enactment of Horus avenging his father Osiris by stabbing hippo-bodied Seth.

In a new interpretation of these images, Horus is seen by some astronomers as the representation of a failed star in our solar system. The Egyptians had seen this so-called brown dwarf in the skies at its perihelion, or visible swing of its orbit, spinning round our sun beyond the known planets. This massive phantom star, out there unseen in the wilderness of space, crucially controlling our own planet, is only one aspect of the Dark Star Theory.

The Greeks learned how to make columns by studying the symmetry of Egyptian pillars like these at Edfu. If a temple is buried deeply enough and the soil is dry and no archeologist or treasure hunter disturbs it, there is a sort of preservation in that very neglect. The Temple of Horus looks whole, cathedral-like in the way the pillars soar, some friezes still retaining the red flesh tones on human figures and bluebirds and green snakes coiled on the upper walls. At the main gateway the upright falcon Horus, its eyes the sun and moon, stands sentinel, its halo the disk of the sun god.

Some images were defaced. In the past, tourists broke off pieces of Egyptian sculpture to keep as souvenirs — Twain describes an American chipping off a chunk of the Sphinx. But in Edfu, defaced was an exact word: it told perfectly what had happened to the depictions of these soldiers and workers and striding women on the walls. It was so consistent and stylistically similar as to seem like a sort of negative sculpture, the art of obliteration. As striking as the images of gods and humans and animals on this temple — and it was a theme throughout — was the vandalism: defaced human heads, scratched-out hands and feet, chopped off legs, hacked off bodies, everything representing flesh was chipped away, even the heads and hooves of animals. Headdresses, the hats, the cloaks, the costumes were left, so that in a particularly pretty sculpture of an elaborately dressed prince, all the finery would be intact but the face would be scooped out and the hands scraped off.

‘Done by early Christians,’ was the usual explanation. But Muslims deplore human images, and so it might have been the effect of fanatic Islam. But the Muslim Egyptologists denied that, and insisted that the Christians — and especially Christians from Ethiopia — were to blame for these amazingly methodical defacings.

‘Maybe not out of anger,’ Fawzi, one Egyptologist, said. ‘Maybe because the Christians had been persecuted. Maybe to obliterate pre-Christian history.’

But he admitted that no one knew. What fascinated me was the care that the defacers had taken. They had not wrecked the temple or gone at the wall with sledgehammers. They had poked away at these carvings with care bordering on respect, and you had to conclude that they could not have done any of this in this way, removing little, leaving so much, if they had not felt a certain terror.

But now no one knows, and as with the Napoleonic graffiti, which has acquired significance over the years, the defacings are as fascinating as the finished sculptures, giving the figures the weirdness and mystery of a mutilated corpse at a crime scene.

Syrians, Asians, and Nubians were pointed out on the temple walls, and while the Egyptologist was explaining their features and their characteristic clothes, some of the cruise passengers were becoming impatient, jostling in the little cluster of concentrating and querulous tourists to ask a supplementary question: ‘Which Ptolemy was that?’

At last when Fawzi was done, the question came: ‘What about the Jews?’

It so happened, Fawzi said, that for the length and breadth of the Nile Valley, from the Delta south to Upper Egypt and into the dark pyramids and temples of Nubia, there was no mention of the Jews, nothing of Israelites, and even when captives were shown, their religion was not indicated; they were merely a mass of undifferentiated pagan prisoners. There are pot-bellied hippos, and bat-eared jackals, there are plump-lipped Nubians, and Asiatics squinting across the millennia, but there are no Jews. And there are whole dynasties of pharaohs depicted, but not even the faintest trace of Moses on an Egyptian wall.

So he said. But there was a group of people whose generic name, ‘Other siders,’ or ‘Crossers over,’ occurred now and then on Egyptian tombs and temples and in papyrus scrolls. The pharaonic word for these people was Apiru or Habiru, and was derived from an Aramaic word, ‘Ibri’, which meant ‘one from the other side.’ It is not a great phonetic leap from Habiru or Ibri to Hebrew, a crudely descriptive name (like ‘wetback’ for Mexican), for people who had crossed the water, in this case the Red Sea. And the word for Hebrew, in Hebrew, is Ivri.

Some of these migrants (‘Habiru, in cuneiform sources’) found employment doing the heavy lifting on building projects in the eastern Delta. The Egyptologist K. A. Kitchen described them in his life of Rameses II, as ‘displaced, rootless people who drifted or were drafted into various callings … Lumped in with the Apiru generally were doubtless those who in the Bible appear as the Hebrews, and specifically the clan-groups of Israel.’ Those people had been resident in the eastern Delta since the time of Jacob and Joseph, when their forefathers fled to Egypt to escape famine.

That I found out later. While I listened to Fawzi’s explanation, someone saying, ‘I guess it’s all a riddle,’ a woman approached me and hit me on the arm.

‘Hey, that’s a dandy idea!’ She was from Texas. I had seen her on the boat, looking unsteady. She had a new hip. New hips are common on cruise ships and among cruise passengers chit-chat about hip surgery is frequently audible.

‘What is?’ I said.

‘Little old notebook to write stuff on.’

I shut my notebook and held it like a sandwich.

‘Little old pen.’

I had been doodling, a hieroglyphic, a squatting man in a stool-shaped hat, one knee up, both his arms crooked and raised above his head in a gesture of amazement, as though saying, ‘This is incredible!’ This lovely compact and comic image was the hieroglyphic for ‘one million.’

The woman punched my arm again as a sort of compliment and when she moved off, favoring one leg, I wrote, Hey, that’s a dandy idea …

Some aspects of the touristy Nile cannot have changed much in a hundred years. There are no taxis in Edfu, only pony carts and they clashed and competed for customers, the drivers yelling, flailing their whips, maneuvering their carts, scraping their wheels, and there was something ancient, perhaps timeless, in the way a driver — my Mustafa, say — turned, as the pony trotted towards the temple, and demanded more money, double the price in fact, whining, ‘Food for my babies! Food for my horse! Give me, bleeeez!’

The most idyllic stretch of the Nile that I saw, an Egyptian pastoral as serene as any watercolor, lay between Edfu and Esna. Afterwards, when I thought about Egypt I always saw it as it appeared to me that hot afternoon from the deck of the Philae. Fifty miles of farms and plowed fields, mud houses and domed mausoleums on hilltops; fishermen in rowboats, in the stream of the river, and donkeys and camels on the banks, loping among the palms. The only sounds were the gurgle of the boat’s bow wave, the whine of locusts, and the flop and splash of the fishermen’s oars. The sky was cloudless and blue, the land baked the color of biscuits and with the same rough, dry texture, as though these low hills and riverbanks had just come out of the oven. The green was deep and well watered, the river was a mirror of all of this — the sky, the banks, the boats, the animals, a brimming reflection of everything, near and far, an ambitious aquarelle that took in the whole visible peaceful landscape.

Esna had always been a stopping-off place, even when the temple lay buried, ‘to its chin,’ as one Victorian traveler wrote. The ruination had not made it less popular. The advantage of a mostly buried temple like this was that a visitor had a close-up view of the upper parts of the massive pillars: the great sculpted capitals and the interior ceiling showing papyrus leaves and ferns, grasshoppers, the symbolic garden easily visible, with zodiac signs, the enormous scorpion and the ram-headed god, Khnum, to whom the temple is dedicated.

The young sensualist Flaubert — he was only twenty-seven — went to Esna in search of a celebrated courtesan, Kuchuk Hanem, ‘Little Princess’, and her famous dance, the ‘Dance of the Bee.’ Esna at that time was the most vicious town in Egypt, filled with prostitutes who by law had been rounded up and rusticated there from Cairo. Flaubert found Kuchuk Hanem, she danced naked for him, among blindfolded musicians.

The Dance of the Bee has been described as ‘essentially a frenzied comic routine in which the dancer, attacked by the bee, has to take all her clothes off.’ But in the word bee there is also a distinct allusion, for it is an Arabic euphemism for the clitoris. Flaubert slept with the dancer and minutely recorded in his travel notes the particularities of each copulation, the temperature of her body parts, his own performance (‘I felt like a tiger’) and even the bedbugs in her bed, which he loved (‘I want a touch of bitterness in everything’). In every sense of the word, he anatomized his Egyptian experience and he became an informal guide and role model to me.

At Esna, Flaubert made two memorable entries in his diary. At the temple, while an Arab is measuring the length of one of the exposed columns for him, he notes, ‘a yellow cow, on the left, poked her head inside …’

Without that yellow cow we see nothing; with it, the scene is vivid and complete. And leaving Kuchuk’s room after the sexual encounter he writes, ‘How flattering it would be to one’s pride if at the moment of leaving you were sure that you left a memory behind, that she would think of you more than of the others who had been there, that you would remain in her heart!’

But that is a lament, with the foreknowledge that he will be quickly forgotten, for later he concedes that, even as he is ‘weaving an aesthetic around her,’ the courtesan — well, whore — cannot possibly be thinking of him. He concludes: ‘Traveling makes one modest — you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.’

After the Philae docked, I went ashore and walked through the little town to the enormous and now fully exposed temple that lay in a great square pit, as though quarried from the earth. The painted signs of the zodiac were beautiful, the columns massive and intact. It is a late, Roman era temple, but the Egyptian style is that of a thousand years earlier, the worst damage is the façade, bullet-pocked by French soldiers who took pot-shots at it in the 1840s, plinking away at the magnificent edifice for the sheer hell of it.

A bazaar clustered around it, narrow lanes, screeching traders, children and animals crowding around.

I went back to the Philae. I finished Flaubert, I started Heart of Darkness, which I was to read twelve more times before I got to Cape Town. Lolling on the upper deck I realized that the Philae was not the Roi des Belges, but rather one of those ships — very few, in my experience — that I wished would just keep sailing on, with me on board, bearing me onward to Khartoum, and southward through the Sudd; into Uganda and the big lakes, pioneering a water route down to the Zambezi.

‘Just yourself this evening, sir?’ Ibrahim, the waiter, asked each night at dinner.

I smiled: Yes, just me and Joseph Conrad.

‘Going to Cairo afterwards, sir?’

‘Yes, to get a visa. Then I am heading south. To Nubia. The Sudan. Ethiopia. And beyond, I hope.’

‘Alone, sir?’

‘Inshallah.’

‘Business or pleasure, sir?’

‘Both. Neither.’

‘Very good, sir. An adventure for you, sir.’

Ibrahim was the soul of courtesy. They all were, really, full of compliments. It is well known that the staff on cruise ships are helpful and friendly because they are hustling for tips. They smile and banter so that you will reward them. I smile; you give me money.

Tipping confounds me because it is not a reward but a travel tax, one of the many, one of the more insulting. No one is spared. It does not matter that you are paying thousands to stay in the presidential suite in the best hotel: the uniformed man seeing you to the elevator, inquiring about your trip, giving you a weather report, and carrying your bags to the suite expects money for this unasked-for attention. Out front, the doorman, gasconading in gold braid, wants a tip for snatching open a cab door, the bartender wants a proportion of your bill, so does the waiter, and chambermaids sometimes leave unambiguous messages, with an accompanying envelope, demanding cash. It is bad enough that people expect something extra for just doing their jobs; it is an even more dismal thought that every smile has a price.

Still, on the Philae, the waiters had a cheerful, even celebratory way of working, as though they were acting in an Egyptian comedy; and in such a country, where a schoolteacher earned $50 a month, they probably needed tips just to get by.

Although I was alone at my table, I was one of a hundred passengers — mainly those plump rich amphibious-looking people for whom travel is an expensive kind of laziness, spent in the company of other idle people to whom they relate details of their previous trips. ‘This reminds me of parts of Brazil,’ and ‘Now that, that could be Malta.’ They were American, British, German, with a scattering of South Americans, and of course the gloomy Indians with the boisterous child. The Americans on board could be divided into young friends traveling happily together, contentious aged couples traveling alone, and honeymooners, three pairs, everyone’s favorites.

I resisted mocking them because they were generally harmless and most were committed to geniality, but except for one friendly pair of honeymooners who insisted that I dine with them from time to time, I always ate alone. As for the others, trying to recall them, I only see them eating — feeding-time was always closely observed on shipboard, and they were at their most animated then. The table of older German blonde women, exquisitely dressed; the four German men who were always so curt with the waiter — and one was actually named Kurt; the young American couples, distressed by the news of the failing stock market; the hard-faced woman and her bosomy husband, each seemingly midway through a sex-change; the Indian couple and their bored bratty child.

Of the Germans, the sextet of older, occasionally exuberant blondes, like the reunion of a chorus line, interested me most, because they were traveling with a Levantine doctor. We were on the upper deck one day, having a drink, and he said to me, ‘My field is reconstructive surgery.’ I turned to the women who were talking and sunning themselves, in that odd heliotropic posture of sunbathers, canted against the sun, grimacing and just perceptibly turning.

I was struck by their similarity — the sharp noses, the smooth cheeks, the tight eyes, the bright brittle hair — and I realized that he was traveling with his patients, all of whom were so pretty he, not they, deserved the compliment. This peculiar revelation seemed to me a great subject for a story: say, a young man’s involvement with a much older woman who looks thirty, traveling with her plastic surgeon. To calm myself with the illusion that I was working, I began writing this story. This is my only story. Now that I am sixty I can tell it … As the days and weeks passed, the story became by turns melancholic, comic, reminiscing, and consolingly erotic.

Inevitably, on the Philae, there was one of those helpfully nosy couples who asked all the questions the rest of us did not dare to ask for fear of revealing our ignorance. ‘How in heck did they manage to move those things?’ and ‘Is that fronic?’ were two of their questions. The wife interrogated the women, her husband badgered the men for information.

‘Do you work?’ the bullying wife asked the shyest-seeming woman, one of the petite and pretty honeymooners.

‘I’m a prison officer,’ the new bride said.

‘That must be so difficult!’ was the predictable rejoinder.

When the honeymooner said, ‘Oh, no. We have some wonderful inmates’ all conversation ceased.

The nosy woman’s husband, an irritating old philistine, who looked like Piltdown man in a golf cap, kept saying to me, ‘I guess I’ll have to read one of your books now.’

I begged him not to, in a friendly way. One thing I had learned about traveling with lots of other people was that it was usually a good idea to hold my tongue. The talkers were self-advertisers, people to avoid, along with the networkers, the salesmen and the evangelists; the quieter ones were often worth knowing, but in any case I regarded the whole boatload as one of the sights of Egypt, like the fat stone hippos and the mummified cats and the pesky curio-sellers. I guessed that after Egypt I would not see many more tourists.

None of us knew much about Egyptology, we were hazy on dates, ‘My history’s real shaky,’ was as common a remark as ‘How in heck did they manage to move those things?’

For me this was a picnic, and I suspected my last picnic before plunging deeper in Africa. This was comfortable undemanding travel among mostly companionable people, and if it was true that we didn’t know much about Egyptian history, neither did the Egyptians. It would have been very tedious if some pedantic historian had been on the cruise, correcting impressions and setting us straight. I preferred listening to the improvisations:

‘They must have used those for climbing up the wall.’

‘I imagine they took baths in that thing.’

‘Those ruts were probably made by chariots, or wagon wheels of some kind.’

‘Looks like a kind of duck.’

‘That’s definitely fronic.’

Some countries are just perfect for tourists. Italy is. So are Mexico and Spain. Turkey, too. Egypt, of course. Pretty big. Not too dirty. Nice food. Courteous people. Sunshine. Lots of masterpieces. Ruins all over the place. Names that ring a bell. Long vague history. The guide says, ‘Papyrus’ or ‘Hieroglyphic’ or ‘Tutankhamen,’ or ‘one of the Ptolemies,’ and you say, ‘Yup.’

But what you remember most is the friendly waiter, or the goofball with the mobile phone on the camel, or the old man pissing against the ancient wall, the look of a tray of glossy pomegranates in the market, the sacks of spices, the yellow cow ruminating in the temple, or just the colors, for the colors of Egypt are gorgeous. Edward Lear wrote in his diary on the Nile, ‘Egypt is at least a land to learn color in.’

What was I doing? Making progress, I felt. Proceeding from the shore of the Mediterranean, via the Pillars of Hercules, by degrees, deeper into Africa. Travel is transition, and at its best it is a journey from home, a setting forth. I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease with which a person could be transported so swiftly from the familiar to the strange, the moon-shot whereby the New York office worker, say, is insinuated overnight into the middle of Africa to gape at gorillas. That was just a way of feeling foreign. The other way, going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and my passport, was the best way of being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back.

Close shot: me rowing hard, sweating like a galley slave. The camera draws back, revealing that I am on a rowing machine. A wider shot: I am in an exercise room; wider still: I am on a boat, the Philae, near a window. The camera rises from me rowing on my machine and focuses out the window, finding a man at his oars on a rowboat on the Nile, rowing in the same rhythm.

We came to Luxor, Thebes, the Valley of the Kings, the dream of Egyptologists and fidgety tourists, for even if you know nothing you can still gape at the beauties and listen to recited facts, that the sun is born in the morning as a beetle — the scarab; becomes the god Re at noon, and reigns until night falls, becoming the god Atun. How you can read the Profession of Sinlessness — the Negative Confession, the pharaohs listing all their good deeds on the wall of the tomb. Sun imagery blazed everywhere in the form of solar boats, sun disks on the heads of compound gods, orbs over doorways. The Egyptians saw such power in the sun they called themselves ‘cattle of Re.’

But I most remember the graffiti, the vandalism, the names of ancients chiseled into the tomb walls, and that of the French army, the English nineteenth-century travelers, the crazed Copts, the defacements of the iconoclast Akhnaton who decided to be a monotheist.

And the gravel crunching sandals of the old German professor in the tomb of Amenkopshef, as he approached the glass case and leaned over, saying, ‘See the shy-eld.’

A clutch of little bones and a crushed skull.

‘Is a moomy.’

Indeed it was a mummified foetus.

I remember the tomb of Nefertary, the Nubian wife of Rameses III, not for the many years and many millions in its restoration, nor the svelte Nefertary in her see-through gown and tattooed arms (a wide-open eye on each arm), playing a board game, and the jet blacks, bright colors, storks, beetles, cobras, greens, reds, yellows.

What I remember is that tickets were scarce and the visit was limited to ten minutes and that among all these scenes in the depths of the tomb, the attendant approached me, whispering, ‘You must go now! No, okay, stay three minutes more,’ and putting his hand out for baksheesh.

At Karnak, great city and temple complex, nothing on earth like it, all those columns, I remember mainly the images of honey bees — Nesrut Bity — (King Bee) — symbol of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt — painted high on a roof truss and how the bee thoraxes and legs were defaced. Flaubert said that Karnak looked like ‘a house where giants live, a place where they used to serve up men roasted whole, à la brochette, on gold plates, like larks.’

At the 3000-year-old Mortuary Temple of Medinet Habu, commemorating the victories of Rameses III, I watched a group of Spanish tourists do a double take, first shock, then fascination passing one wall, as they discerned the depiction of hands and penises being cut off captives — the tourists peering at the great stack of dicks carved into the temple wall.

‘Paynees,’ one man murmured softly, putting his knees together.

I remember the Rameses temples of course, the howling statues on the plain, that alarmed the Greeks, and the melancholy trunkless legs of Rameses colossus that inspired Shelley to write ‘Ozymandias,’ one of my favorites from Poetry Corner. Flaubert camped in Luxor, too.

But as impressive as anything else in Egypt in terms of obsessive continuity over the centuries was the sight of the dark bump and bruise on the forehead of devout Muslim men, from striking their head on the mosque floor — the alamat el-salah, ‘mark of prayer,’ colloquially called a raisin (zabibah) in Egypt. For it was here in Luxor in 1997 that Islamic fanatics appeared suddenly at a temple in Luxor and opened fire on some tourist buses. Fifty-seven tourists died in this outrage. A month after I left the Nile six German tourists were taken hostage in Luxor, as well. The kidnapper was said to be a nutter, and the hostages were released after a week, but more incidents were expected.

One day at the Temple of Hatshepsut, a name I could only utter by slowly syllabicating it, I found myself saying, ‘How in heck did they manage to move those things?’ I took this as a sign that it was time to move on.

Because of the terrorist threat, a convoy left Luxor for the coast every morning, thirty cars and buses, led by speeding police cars, across the Eastern Desert, about 100 miles to Port Safaga, and another thirty to Hurghada, on the Red Sea. For about two hours the desert was flat and featureless, then there were low hills like rubble piles and heaps of stone, and finally tumbledown mountains of brown boulders, among which Bedouin children in dark gowns scampered, herding goats.

On the barren coast of the deep blue Red Sea the town of Hurghada sprawled, a Russian resort with all that that implied — cheap hotels, tourists in tracksuits, terrible food, joyless gambling halls and hard-faced hookers. Here and there were luxuriating Romanians and budget-conscious Poles and backpackers who had lost their way. There was nothing but sunshine here and somehow that glarey light made the tacky hotels look uglier.

‘In nineteen-eighty this was a Bedouin village,’ a local man told me.

I had found a nice hotel at the most southerly dune of the district, a place with the fetching name of Sahl Hasheesh, the epitome of splendid isolation. Though the place was arid, hasheesh in fact means greenery, and sahl means coast (thus Swahili means coastal people).

‘You can relax here,’ the manager said.

I thought: I don’t want to relax. If I wanted to relax I would not have come to Africa.

‘You can rest.’

To me, travel was not about rest and relaxation. It was action, exertion, motion, and the built-in delays were longueurs necessitated by the inevitable problem-solving of forward movement; waiting for buses and trains, enduring breakdowns that you tried to make the best of.

‘You can sit on the beach. You can go for a swim.’

To someone who lived half the year in Hawaii, doing such things here seemed perverse. The Red Sea in February was cold, ‘sand’ was just a euphemism for gravel and sharp stones, the wind was strong enough to snatch at my clothes.

What about a ship? I thought. I called an American travel agency in Cairo. The agent, a vague English girl, confused by my request, said she knew nothing of ships.

‘But how about a Nile cruise?’ she inquired.

‘Did that.’

‘Or you could visit Cairo and see real dervishes.’

‘We have dervishes in Hurghada.’

She couldn’t help: no brochure for ships, though the Red Sea must have been full of them. I went to Port Safada. No ships to Djibouti, only a ship full of hajjis to Jiddah in fanatic Arabia.

Back at Sahl Hasheesh the kindly manager could see I was agitated.

‘Just relax. Have a nice time.’

‘I want to be on the move.’

‘Where to go?’ He laughed.

‘Well, Cape Town eventually.’

This left him puzzled. It is always a mistake to try to explain plans for the onward journey. Such plans sound meaningless, because they are so presumptuous. Travel at its best is accidental, and you can’t explain improvisation. One day I got sick of being becalmed in Hurghada and, more worrying, I was told that the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha was about to begin. This six-day Feast of the Sacrifice commemorated the Lord’s providing Abraham with a ram to replace Isaac on the sacrificial altar (corresponding to Genesis, 22: 6–14). Six days of everything closed. I decided on an impulse to call the Sudanese again.

‘Your visa has been approved,’ a man named Adil told me.

But the border was closed. I would have to fly to Khartoum. I went into town to get a ticket. With me in the line was a friendly voluble man, also buying an Egyptair ticket. He had the squarish head of the urban Egyptian, and chubby cheeks and gray eyes, and a stockiness that gave the illusion of bad posture. His name was Ihab.

‘Like the captain in the novel.’

‘What novel? Like Ihab in Holy Koran.’ He wiped his sweaty hands on his shirt, darkening the smear that was already there. ‘My name mean “gift.” ’

‘You come from Hurghada?’

‘No one come from Hurghada,’ he said. True, the resort town had been a Bedouin village twenty years ago, but Bedouins were always on the move.

‘Egypt, then?’

‘I am hate Egypt.’

‘Why?’

‘I am tell you tomorrow.’

Tomorrow?

Before I left for Khartoum I called the American consul general there whose name had been given to me. What was life like in the Sudan?

‘I’m not allowed to live here,’ he said. ‘I live in Cairo. I just fly back and forth to Khartoum. Going back to Cairo tonight.’

‘I’m wondering about traveling outside Khartoum.’

‘I’m not allowed to travel outside Khartoum, for security reasons.’

‘Have American citizens been hassled in the Sudan?’

‘Hassled? Well, one was picked up by security police a few months ago and interrogated, and I’m afraid tortured, for three days.’

‘That sounds awful.’

‘That’s the only complaint we’ve had, but as you can see it’s a pretty serious one. I am obliged to tell you this.’

‘Did they let him go?’

‘Not at first. Only after they subjected him to a mock execution.’

‘Something I would like to avoid,’ I said.