Down the Nile - Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff

219 Pages·2007·1.01 MB·English

by  Mahoney Rosemary

Copyright © 2007 by Rosemary Mahoney
All rights reserved.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
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New York, NY 10017
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First eBook Edition: July 2007
Excerpts from Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour, by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Francis
Steegmuller, are reprinted with permission of McIntosh & Otis, Inc. Copyright © 1972 by Francis
Steegmuller.
ISBN: 978-0-316-00732-0
Contents
Copyright
The River That Flows the Wrong Way
Aswan
The First Small Boat in Egypt
The Cataract Islands
At Elephantine
Hoda and the Women
Not Floating but Flying
Maritime Etiquette
A Night at Silwa
Luxor
A Boat of My Own
Alone
Fear Afloat
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
FOR MADELEINE STEIN
ALSO BY ROSEMARY MAHONEY
The Early Arrival of Dreams
A Year in China
Whoredom in Kimmage
The World of Irish Women
A Likely Story
One Summer with Lillian Hellman
The Singular Pilgrim
Travels on Sacred Ground
The River That Flows the Wrong Way
O
N THE DAY that I hoped to buy a rowboat in Luxor, Egypt, I was awakened,
as I had been every morning in Luxor, by a Koranic antiphony drifting from the
Islamic boys’ school next door to my hotel. With all the zeal of a Baptist
preacher’s, a young boy’s amplified voice shrieked repeatedly in Arabic, “There
is no God but God, and Muhammad is his witness!” and a shrill chorus of his
schoolmates howled the words back at him. I got out of bed and went to
thewindow — at 7:00 a.m. the glass was already warm as an infant’sforehead —
and discovered that during the night many colorful cloth banners had been strung
above the corniche, Luxor’s Nilefront boulevard. Inhand-fashioned Arabic
characters, the banners read, “Welcome Mister President of the Government,
Muhammad Hosni Mubarak, the Leader of Our Victorious and Progressive
Destiny.” Scores of teenage Egyptian soldiers in black uniforms, woolen berets,
and white plastic spats lined the avenue in theninety-eight-degree heat, more or
less at attention, rifles at their sides, evidently awaiting the president’s arrival.
Profiting from a police barricade, the usually hectic street was, for once,
mercifully quiet. Across the glittering ribbon of the Nile, the Temple of
Hatshepsut and the Valley of the Kings lay blanketed in the pink morning light.
I dressed and went downstairs to the lobby, where the hotel manager and two
of his employees sat shoulder to shoulder on a couch before a flickering
television. All three men wore white turbans and gray gallabiyas, the traditional
Egyptian gown, and, in one of the more baffling manifestations of traditional
Egyptian fashion, heavy woolen scarves wound around their necks, as if against
an arctic wind. No matter the time of day, the lobby of this hotel was always
exceptionally dark, and through the gloom the three men looked like
consumptives recuperating in a sanatorium. They were watching an American
film in which jeering, sweaty-faced Confederate soldiers were busy abusing a
group of morose black slaves.
With an apology for interrupting their entertainment, I asked the hotel
manager why President Mubarak was coming to Luxor that day. Without
looking away from the television the manager replied, “To open new hospital
and sex tomb.”
I studied his long brown nose, his luxurious black mustache. Surely I had
misheard him. “Sorry,” I said, “to open a what?”
“Hospital and sex tomb,” he said dully, scratching his chin.
The hospital sounded likely enough, but the idea of a “sex” anything being
publicly celebrated by the Egyptian president was preposterous. In this Islamic
nation, sex, strictly forbidden outside marriage, was not a subject for public
discourse or civic celebration. Human flesh, particularly women’s, was to be
concealed, and though in Egypt the assumption of the veil at puberty was
officially a matter of individual choice, many Egyptian women wore the hijab,
the veil that fully concealed the head and neck, and a surprising number wore the
more forbidding niqab, a drape that covered mouth, nose, forehead, sometimes
even eyes. Chaste Egyptian women were reluctant to have their photograph
taken, because multiplying and displaying their image in this way was
considered unseemly. Before my first trip to Egypt, I had been counseled to keep
my arms and legs covered, not to wear shorts, and never to touch a man in any
way except to shake hands. I had been endlessly informed by people who had
experience in the matter that purity, chastity, and piety were Egypt’s prevailing
sentiments, and that foreign women who came to Egypt and dressed in a
provocative way (there are, in fact, many who do) would be considered
promiscuous, unprincipled, fair game for harassment and disrespect.
And yet, having spent a total of three and a half months in Egypt on three
separate visits, I could not deny that, although I always wore long trousers and
long-sleeved shirts and conducted myself as decorously and seriously and
modestly as my reasons for coming here would allow, I had never visited any
country in which sex had so often arisen as a topic of conversation; had never
witnessed more bald nudity (including not one but two men openly masturbating
on city streets, dozens of bare breasts proffered at the howling mouths of infants,
men and children freely relieving themselves wherever the need struck them);
had never received so many offhand proposals of marriage and professions of
love from mustachioed strangers, more swaggering requests for a dance or a
kiss, more offers of romantic dinners; had never been the target of more wolf
whistles and catcalls and distinctly salacious whispers emanating from behind
dusty clumps of shrubbery. Nowhere else in the world had a smiling stranger
approached me and a friend on a busy street and said, “I want fuck you,” with
the idle geniality one might extend in saying, “Looks like rain.”
On the hotel television a mounted Dixie soldier rattled his musket at a
handsome slave and jeered, “Git workin’, boy! This ain’t no holiday.”
The three Egyptians stared at the screen in slack-jawed wonder. Their bulky
turbans were silvery in the electric blue twilight. I saw that it would be futile to
try to get to the bottom of what the hotel manager was telling me about the
president’s visit to Luxor and went out the front door into the stunning Egyptian
sunlight.
I HAD COME to Egypt to take a row down the Nile. My plan, inspired by a love
of rowing, was to buy a small Egyptian rowboat and row myself along the 120-
mile stretch of river between the cities of Aswan and Qena. This was a trip I’d
been considering for more than two years, since my first visit to Egypt when I
caught a glimpse of the Nile in Cairo and realized in a moment of deep
disorientation that it flowed northward. At 4,163 miles from its southernmost
source — a spring in a tiny village in Burundi — to its debouchment in the
Mediterranean Sea, the Nile was the longest river in the world. It rubbed against
ten nations. Some 250 million people depended on it for their survival. It had
fostered whole cultures and inspired immense social and scientific concepts:
astronomy, height measurement, square measurement, mathematics, law and
equity, money, civic order, and police. And it flowed north, which truly
surprised me. That it surprised me was equally surprising. For years I had known
about the many explorers — John Hanning Speke, Richard Burton, David
Livingstone, and all the rest — who had headed south into deepest Africa
searching for the Nile’s beginning. For years I had known that the Nile flowed
into the Mediterranean Sea on the north coast of Africa and not out of it. The
only explanation I can offer for my astonishment at the sight of the Nile flowing
northward is a simple touch of obtuse provincialism: I had never seen a river
flowing northward and therefore must not have believed in my heart that it was
truly possible. (I was later comforted to learn that Pharaoh Thutmose I, who had
spent years ruling life along the Nile, was exactly as obtuse and provincial as I.
When he traveled to Mesopotamia in the sixteenth century BC and saw the
south-flowing Euphrates River, he was stunned, describing it in his notes as “a
river that flows the wrong way, so that boats go northward when they sail
upstream.” Similarly, he dismissed the entire Persian Gulf with the epithet, “the
sea of the river that flows the wrong way.”)
The north-flowing Nile that I saw in Cairo was wide and coffee colored and
dumpy, with piles of trash spilling down its eastern bank with the distinct look of
having been recently unloaded from a municipal truck. Some of the trash was on
fire, sending into the air slender strings of fishy-smelling yellow smoke. This
urban strip of river — crowded with powerboats, ferries, tour boats, private
yachts; spanned by four or five great bridges; and lined with skyscrapers and
luxury hotels — was nearly the very end of the great Nile River. It was
understandable then that it looked worn out, congested, and a bit abused. For all
its fame and legend, it looked no more or less majestic than the Ohio River
creeping through Pittsburgh.
My romantic impression of the Nile had been informed by the paintings of
David Roberts, the nineteenth-century Scottish artist who depicted the Egyptian
Nile as a lagoonish idyll of soft-sanded banks, mirror-still coves, stands of
tasseled reeds, oxen lazily grazing in the shade of slender date palms, barefoot
women balancing water jugs on their heads, and sails flushed pink by a tropical
sun setting enormously in the distance, which distance was always punctuated by
either a colossus, an obelisk, a minaret, or a pyramid. Roberts had depicted the
Nile that way because that was the way the Nile looked when he saw it in 1838.
On that first trip to Egypt, in 1996, I boarded a cruise ship in Luxor, steamed
southward up the river, and found on the second day out that, without my having
registered the gradual change, we had somewhere along the way shed Luxor’s
modern urban shabbiness and glided into the precincts of a David Roberts
canvas. From the luxurious deck of the ship, it struck me one evening that I was
looking at an ox, palm trees, sandy banks, mirror-still coves, water jugs on
women’s heads, pink sails in an archaeological distance. I saw flamingos and
storks, soft colors, an explosive sunset, obelisks and minarets, and now and then
a ruined pharaonic temple. I saw no skyscraper and only several buildings that
could be truly termed modern. But for a few power lines threading in and out of
the tops of palm trees, an occasional plastic water bottle bobbing on the current,
a motorized water pump, and a handful of water jugs made not of clay but of
aluminum, there was little in the rural Nile landscape to suggest that nearly two
hundred years had passed since David Roberts visited Egypt. Beyond Egypt’s
cities, the Nile was much as I had always envisioned it — a rare instance of a
fantastical preconception matched by reality.
I was charmed. With a score of middle-aged Spaniards sunbathing on the
large deck behind me, I leaned against the ship’s railing and watched, entranced,
as the Nile slipped by. The wide river and its green banks looked old and placid,
inscrutable and inviting, and yet it was all as distant and inaccessible to me as it
had always been. Unable to leave the ship, with its planned itinerary and guided
tours, I realized I might as well be watching this wonder from behind a glass
wall. What I wanted, really, was not just to see the Nile River but to sit in the
middle of it in my own boat, alone.
I BEGAN ROWING some ten years ago when I lived on a small island in
Maine. Forced to ferry myself over the water, I found that I enjoyed the task.
Rowing was a peaceful, meditative activity, and the constant movement — the
inherent mobility — of the water was enthralling. Land was stationary and
always belonged to somebody. Water, on the other hand, was free. It moved and
shifted and traveled. It was volatile, and when aroused it could be unforgiving. I
found it frightening and a little bit thrilling to think that the water that throws
itself against the coast of Kennebunkport in July might feasibly be the same
particular water that laps at the crab-covered rocks in Bombay Harbor the
following March. And it pleased me to realize that I could sit in a small boat and
propel myself across all this hugely moving water with an engine no more
powerful than my own two arms. One day I told the woman who owned the
island I lived on that I planned to row across Penobscot Bay to another island
two or three miles away. She protested, said it was impossible, made me promise
her I wouldn’t try. I promised, then did it anyway, and having successfully done
it, I wanted to do more, to go farther, to row elsewhere. I rowed wherever I had a
chance — in Boston Harbor and Central Park and a lake in southern France. I
rowed on the Charles River in a carbuncled dinghy, while the elegant fours and
eights speared by like airborne swans. I rowed on the Aegean Sea and on a pond
in Oregon.
These days I live at the edge of Narragansett Bay. I row here too — up the
Seekonk River one day, down to Occupessatuxet Point the next. Often I row my
boat into the middle of the bay, ship my oars, and sit back to see where the tide
and the current will take me. I do this, I know, not because it’s peaceful but
because there’s an edge to it — it can be peaceful, yes, but it is never truly
relaxing. I do it because there’s an element of surrender in the exercise, an active