THE NEXT DAY passed much as the day before. Again the heat was a powerful presence long before the sun ever lifted itself over the tops of the banana trees. Again I rowed, saw the same sort of palms I had seen the day before, the same sort of villages, the same exotic birds, the tall green grasses at the edge of the river, and the vaguely threatening beige desert beyond. Still cloudless, the sky went through yesterday’s mood shifts as the sun inched across it; fragile at dawn, wounded at noon, intoxicated in the evening. Now and then an island appeared, or a barge lumbering down the middle of the river, or a herd of oxen drinking at the water’s edge. I saw a party of flamingos on the riverbank teetering on pink stilts, stabbing their beaks at the water, their feathers a pale whitish pink, their beaks the size and shape of a lobster’s claw. A child waved boldly at me from the riverbank, and I waved back, but few people seemed to notice me, let alone detect that I was a woman. I spoke to no one.
I rowed more slowly that day, more calmly. From time to time I let the boat drift. I made notes in my notebook but discovered that there was little to write except that I felt a constant combination of fear and exultation at my present situation, that I was making progress, that the rowing was easy, and that the river was — as it had been the day before — very flat and wide. The Nile and its banks changed little from one bend to the next. Floating on the Nile in the 1980s, William Golding wrote with a touch of bafflement and rue, “It is symptomatic of the sameness of the Nile that I found myself struggling to find variety to put into my journal and without much success. I decided to list any stuff there was floating in the water, but there was nothing but the odd clump of ward el Nil.” I, too, saw little in the river but clumps of Ward el Nil, the ubiquitous water hyacinth, which the Egyptians called Rose of the Nile. Aside from the hyacinth, the only thing I saw in the water was the reflection of the palm trees and the occasional mud house crumbling at the river’s edge, the sky, and my own burned and furtive face. Though the Nile was the longest river in the world, I often had the feeling while rowing it that I was sitting alone in a sparsely furnished room. The flat blue sky was the ceiling, the light brown river the floor, the omnipresent glare and the two narrow panels of green on either side the walls. Too, the Nile was quiet. If I spoke out loud to myself, as I admit I have a strong tendency to do, my voice sounded disturbingly feeble and small.
Coptic churches began to appear, the crosses at the peaks of their spires contrasting bravely, even defiantly, with the infinitely more numerous and more popular crescent moons at the tops of minarets. I guessed that I was nearing Naqada, which in the early Christian period had been populated chiefly by Copts. Florence Nightingale, who referred to Egypt as “the birthplace of monasticism,” had stopped here to look at the spot where Saint Pachomius had established one of Egypt’s first monasteries. She was sorely disappointed by what she found. “Here the Christian spirit of zeal and devotion was nurtured,” she wrote. “Now nothing seemed to grow here but a little Indian corn. If the inhabitants were Copts, as most of the people are about there, they had not even a church — worse than the Mahometans.”
By the time I reached Qus, the day was unbearably hot. Just beyond the east bank of the river, a huge gray block of a building appeared, the biggest thing I had seen yet — bigger than the Temple of Kom Ombo. It had many tiny windows, like a prison, and tall smokestacks that sent balls of white smoke into the sky — it was a factory where they made paper from the by-products of sugar cane. Qus was the place where the Greeks had established the city of Apollinopolis Parva. In the Middle Ages it had been an important trade center and the starting point for the caravan route across the Arabian Desert to the Red Sea. It was also once notorious for the huge number of scorpions that could be found there. Now it was just another modern Egyptian city, all smoke and noise and broken streets. I rowed slowly past it and watched the factory smoke dissolving high in the sky.
Red stone cliffs had begun to appear again in the distance to the west, tapering down toward Qena, like the monumental hills in the Nevada desert. Because I had never seen an Egyptian fisherman wearing sunglasses, I had kept my sunglasses in my bag and now my eyes were stinging from the intense light.
In mid-afternoon I stopped on a sandy beach below an island, a wide flat place that, when the river was high, would be inundated with water. The edge of the river was crowded with water hyacinths, and for the first time I saw one in bloom — a pinkish white orchidlike cluster of flowers with a deep purple heart. It was a beautiful flower for a plant that was really nothing more than an invasive weed that had appeared on the Nile some hundred years ago and had proliferated to the point of infestation. Beyond the beach, tiny sand dunes made the vista uneven; ripples of heat rose up from the hot hollows between them. There was beach grass here and the dried brown stubble of reeds, a few thornbushes and furry acacias. Several hundred yards to the west, the line of palm trees began, and far beyond them I saw a faint string of gray smoke lifting into the air, smoke from what was surely a village. The east bank was just a low flat line of palms and greenery. The only people I saw were two fishermen far downriver, spanking the water with sticks, scaring up fish.
I anchored my boat and stepped onto a beach littered with snail shells. After sitting so long on the water, I was unsteady on my feet; everything seemed to sway beneath me. I walked the length of the beach — the length of a football field — and back again, then sat in the shade of a large bush. The shade formed an oval exactly the size of my body, and as the shifting sun forced the shade to slide around the bush, I had to slide with it. A pair of stone curlews, shorebirds slightly bigger than crows, fluttered out of the sky and landed near me on the beach; they had long yellow legs and shocked-looking bright yellow eyes as big as a human’s, and they stared at me in a spooky, hypnotized way. Dragonflies floated drunkenly by. Whole rafts of water hyacinths hurried past like feathery green mattresses set loose on the current. The sky looked galvanized in the east, a broiled grayish white, though directly above me it was turquoise blue. I sat happily for an hour, drank a bottle of water, and tried to figure out where I was. I guessed I was twenty miles or so from Qena. I was exhausted. The palms of my hands were raw. I felt the heat pushing me toward the earth, and eventually I lay down in the sand, using my shoes as a pillow.
Not fifteen feet away from me, two boys walked by on a path at the edge of the river. I positioned my arm over my face thinking, You look like an Argentine; you look like an English, a cat, a bird, and hoped that in my white shirt and loose white pants I looked like just another barefoot Egyptian man having a nap. The boys passed by, never once breaking their steady stream of chatter, never once glancing at me. I lifted my head and watched them go. My boat parked at the edge of the river didn’t attract their attention — it was too common a sight, the sort used by every fisherman in Egypt.
My disguise was working. I marveled at how easy it had been. Having recovered from my initial shock and surprise that I had found my own boat and been able to row out of Luxor in it, I was able to think now, to reflect on what I was doing. Dress in white, wrap a shirt around your head, tuck your hair up, use a local boat, and nobody would notice you were a white woman floating down the Nile through Egypt. It seemed preposterous, but I was so unexpected in this place that it worked. No one cared; no one suspected. I was so inconspicuous that I had begun to feel almost invisible. I thought of the number of Egyptians who had said to me, It’s different for you; you’re foreign; you’re free, and I felt like a spy — outwardly one thing, inwardly another. I was a misfit in the best possible way. I wasn’t supposed to be here, yet I was here anyway, and what was the consequence? It was like being let in on a secret. No one was offended by it, no one knew me, and I had disturbed nothing. I was masked; I had no identity beyond surface; I blended in and so was insignificant.
I looked at my torn hands and the burned tops of my feet; I looked at the boat and the desert landscape and the enormous sky. Why was I doing this? It wasn’t so much to prove to myself that I could do it — I had always known that I could do it — but more to prove to myself that it was not a remarkable thing to do. This was a matter of a calm and civilized river, a boat, two oars, and a knowledge of how to use them. Those were the bare facts, and the most important to me. Everyone had said, You can’t. But so far it looked as though I could. Anything, really, was possible if you cared enough and had the right tools. I have always resented imposed constraints, hated all the things people said one should and should not do. A woman shouldn’t . . . A man wouldn’t . . . People were always conjuring up a wall and telling you to stay on your side of it. More often than not, the wall was false, a cliché, an inherited and unexamined stock response to the world.
I lay back in the sand, fatigue making it hard to move, one burned cheek pressed into the hot dirt. Minuscule ants marched single file across my ankles, and three feet from my head a clamorous reed warbler lived up to its name, but then I slept as if drugged.
When I woke two hours later, I saw the moon beginning to rise over the east bank, a pale white ball lifting over the lip of the palmy horizon. The trees on the east bank were washed orange and red by the light of the setting sun behind me, and the sky just above them was pinkish white. My side of the river had fallen into shadow, yet the earth still sent up waves of hot air. I went back to my boat and decided that this was as good a place as any in which to spend the night. I was in a little cove with a four-foot dune of sand rising above me. Amid tall grass and reeds, the boat was secure and well hidden here.
I lit a small fire, again not for the heat but for the amusement of it, ate some of my provisions, took some photographs, and watched as the blue of the sky deepened to magenta and then to purple and then to navy blue. Again I was truly alone. At Abu Simbel, Florence Nightingale had written of the plea-sure and “power” of being able, for once, to leave her boat and visit the temple “without a whole escort” at her heels.
I was delightfully alone now and exulting in my freedom. No one on earth knew that I was here, and I knew no one. The river, the trees, and the sand I was looking at — it could have been a scene from almost any period in Egyptian history. A great blue heron with a wispy foulard of gray breast feathers picked his long-legged way up the shore and stood patiently in the water not ten feet from me, head lowered, shoulders raised, like an unhappy soldier standing guard in the rain. He turned his narrow head slowly toward me, stared morosely, and looked slowly away again as if to say, There’s room enough here for both of us.
HERODOTUS, who reckoned the Nile was about the same length as the Danube, was a ripping-good storyteller. His work is furnished with extreme characters, bizarre events, power struggles, omens, oracular epigrams, weird coincidences, phenomenal human manipulations of nature, beheadings, poisonings, and, at more than one ancient dinner party, the severed head of a son served up on a silver platter to his own unsuspecting father. Herodotus went * up the Nile in the fifth century BC and was the first outsider to write about Egypt in a systematic way. Many nineteenth-century travelers to Egypt would have read Herodotus the way modern travelers read guidebooks and, like me, would have been intrigued by his general description of the Egyptian people, who, like their river, operated in reverse:
For instance, women attend market and are employed in trade, while men stay at home and do the weaving. In weaving the normal way is to work the threads of the weft upwards, but the Egyptians work them downwards. Men in Egypt carry loads on their heads, women on their shoulders; women urinate standing up, men sitting down. To ease themselves they go indoors, but eat outside in the streets, on the theory that what is unseemly but necessary should be done in private, and what is not unseemly should be done openly . . . Elsewhere priests grow their hair long; in Egypt they shave their heads. In other nations the relatives of the deceased in time of mourning cut their hair, but the Egyptians, who shave at all other times, mark a death by letting the hair grow both on head and chin. They live with their animals — unlike the rest of the world, who live apart from them. Other men live on wheat and barley, but any Egyptian who does so is blamed for it, their bread being made from spelt, or Zea as some called it. Dough they knead with their feet, but clay with their hands — and even handle dung. They practise circumcision, while men of other nations — except those who have learnt from Egypt — leave their private parts as nature made them . . . In writing or calculating, instead of going, like the Greeks, from left to right, the Egyptians go from right to left.
In defense of the value and necessity of his own account of a journey he made in Egypt in 1777 (well before the real boom in Egyptian travel and its consequent avalanche of travelogues and reports), Charles Sonnini wrote with palpable anxiety: “From Herodotus down to Volney, writers of equal celebrity . . . demonstrate the curiosity which [Egypt] generally excited. But this frequence of travelers cannot exclude my pretension to a place among the rest, and I am not to be deterred from speaking of Egypt by the number or renown of those who have trodden the ground before me . . . Objects do not present themselves to all observers under the same point of view.”
No, true, they do not. Take, for example, the disagreement of feeling from Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale in response to the Sphinx. On first sight of the monument, Flaubert nearly came unhinged with excitement. “I am afraid of becoming giddy,” he wrote, “and try to control my emotion.” Nightingale, however, was flatly unimpressed by it, mocked it for its state of disrepair, and wrote with characteristic erudition and contempt: “May a ‘portion for seven, and also for eight’ thereof be mine before I visit the Sphynx again.”
Flaubert and Nightingale were not acquainted and never, as far as anybody knows, ran into each other in Egypt, though during the early parts of their trip they moved through the same neighborhoods at the same time. On Sunday morning, November 25, 1849, Flaubert recorded in his notes, “Arrival in Bulak . . . From Bulak to Cairo rode along a kind of embankment planted with acacias or gassis. We come into the Ezbekiyeh, all landscaped. Trees, greenery. Take rooms at the Hotel D’Orient.” Two days later Nightingale reported, “Before tenwe were anchored at Boulak; and before eleven . . . we had driven up the great alley of acacias from Boulak to Cairo to the Ezbeekeeyeh and the Hotel de L’Europe.”
Nightingale and Flaubert visited the usual places of interest and recorded many of the same details. Flaubert on entering the passageways of the Great Pyramid: “Smooth even corridor (like a sewer), which you descend; then another corridor ascends . . . wider corridors with great longitudinal grooves in the stone.” Of the same experience, Nightingale: “Down one granite drain, up another limestone one, hoisted up a place . . . You creep along a ledge and at last find yourself in the lofty groove.” Nightingale described Saqqara as “a desert covered with whitened bones, mummy cloths, and fragments, and full of pits . . . strewed like a battlefield, so as really to look like the burial place of the world.” Flaubert’s assessment of Saqqara: “The soil seems to be composed of human debris; to adjust my horse’s bridle my sais took up a fragment of bone. The ground is pitted and mounded from diggings; everything is up and down.”
Where Nightingale was tough minded, unsentimental, and rational, Flaubert was emotional, sometimes prissily melodramatic, and superstitious. Preparing to embark on his trip to Egypt, he was careful to leave his writing desk exactly as he would were he to return to it the very next day, because, as he told his friend Maxime du Camp, “It is unlucky to take precautions!” At the start of his trip he caught a glimpse of a priest and four nuns standing at the entrance to the train station and later wrote of the sight, “Bad omen!” He was so desolate at leaving his mother behind in Croisset that at every stop on the trip to Paris, he considered leaping off the train and returning home. Thirty years later, Du Camp quoted Flaubert as having cried out dramatically in Paris, “Never again will I see my mother or my country! This trip is too long, too distant; it is tempting fate! What madness! Why are we going?” Finally, “after hours of sobbing and anguish such as no other separation ever caused me,” Flaubert mopped up his tears, resolved to go through with it, and spent the next two days in Paris sedating himself with “huge dinners, quantities of wine, whores,” because, as he noted, his “poor tortured nerves needed a little relaxation.” Flaubert was self-conscious enough that even in the midst of a terrible fit of weeping at leaving his mother, he could pause to observe the particular quality of his own voice: “[I] held my handkerchief to my mouth and wept. After a time the sound of my own voice (which reminded me of Dorval * three or four times) brought me to myself.” Flaubert’s self-involvement, his touching streak of youthful vanity, appears again when he appraises with satisfaction the particular way he stood on the deck of the ship that carried him to Alexandria, “striking attitudes à la Jean Bart, with my cap on one side and cigar in my mouth . . . I watch the sea and daydream, draped in my pelisse like Childe Harold. In short, I’m on top of the world. I don’t know why, but I’m adored on board.”
Where Nightingale was physically intrepid and unflinching, Flaubert could be surprisingly delicate. While climbing the Great Pyramid, he wilted and had a terrible struggle reaching the top. “The Arabs push and pull me,” he wrote. “I am quickly exhausted, it is desperately tiring. I stop five or six times on the way up.” By contrast, Nightingale skipped effortlessly up the 450 feet of the pyramid, then wrote dismissively, “As to the difficulty, people exaggerate it tremendously; — there is none, the Arabs are so strong, so quick, and I will say so gentlemanly; they drag you in step, giving the signal, so that you are not pulled up piecemeal. The only part of the plan I did not savour was the stopping when you are warm for a chill on a cold stone, so that I came to the top long before the others.” When it came time to surmount the rapids of the first cataract in Aswan, Flaubert chose to disembark and travel safely overland rather than take part in that potentially dangerous stretch of the journey, whereas Nightingale, who strikes one as willing to try just about anything, hiked up her skirts and faced the cataract passage with glee. When the ordeal was safely over she observed, “The sense of power over the elements, of danger successfully overcome, is . . . one of the keenest delights and reliefs.”
Nightingale wrote long (not to say almost mincing) meditations on the temples and tombs of Egypt; she was so surreally well versed in Egyptian history that she could wander about the country appraising the ancients as if they were long-lost neighbors. She referred to Moses and Plato as “the pair of truest gentlemen that ever breathed,” to Cleopatra as “that disgusting Cleopatra,” to Cheops as “abominable man!” and as for Joseph out of Genesis: “I never could bear Joseph for making all the free property of Egypt into Kings’ property.” Of Ramses II she wrote dotingly, “I feel more acquainted with him than I do with Sethos; and he was so fond of his wife.”
While Nightingale rhapsodized about the art of the temples, Flaubert confessed that the temples bored him “profoundly” and rarely mentioned them but to note the wasps’ nests in their corners, the bird droppings that streaked their walls, the yellow cow that poked her head through the temple door, the man outside the entrance with a jug of milk on his head. Forgoing the temples, Flaubert focused his attention on dancing girls, hookers, and bath-house catamites. He seems to have had a sexual adventure of one stripe or another with every prostitute in Egypt and recounted his experiences with the same elaborate devotion and intimacy of detail that Nightingale granted the kings and gods. He was particularly taken with Kuchuk Hanem, the famous almeh of Esna, whose breasts were “apple-shaped” and smelled “something like that of sweetened turpentine.” Romantic though he was, Flaubert was drawn to the grotesque and the bitter; at times his details are almost clinical. Of one encounter he observed, “On the matting: firm flesh, bronze arse, shaven cunt, dry though fatty; the whole thing gave the effect of a plague victim or a leper-house. She helped me get back into my clothes.” And of another, “I performed on a mat that a family of cats had to be shooed off.”
You would think there could not have been a more dissimilar pair of tourists than Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert, except that they shared nearly as many qualities as they didn’t. Both were brilliant, iconoclastic, sensitive, and impatient with hypocrisy and convention. Neither had any desire to fit the tediously clichéd expectations that society had slated for them. Both were charming conversationalists but prized solitude and generally considered most other people a tiresome distraction. Both were traveling in Egypt during a period of considerable personal uncertainty and self-doubt; both agonized over how they would use their talents and answer their natural impulses — Flaubert’s literary, Nightingale’s spiritual and medical.
Under pressure from his father, Flaubert had briefly studied law, an experience “which only just failed to kill me with bottled-up fury.” He despised the tidy little bourgeois path he was expected to follow, and when his Nervous mother wrote to him in Egypt suggesting that he take a “small job” on his return to France, he replied with annoyance, “First of all, what job? I defy you to find me one, to specify in what field, what it would consist in. Frankly, and without deluding yourself, is there a single one that I am capable of filling?” More than anything else, Flaubert wanted to write; indeed, sitting in his study in Croisset, he had already written two unpublished novels and a handful of short stories. But he was confused about what he would write next and how he would write anything with lasting effect. Doubt tormented him. From Cairo he wrote to his mother:
When I think of my future (that happens rarely, for I generally think of nothing at all despite the elevated thoughts one should have in the presence of ruins!), when I ask myself: “What shall I do when I return? What path shall I follow?” and the like, I am full of doubts and indecision. At every stage in my life I have shirked facing my problems in just this same way; and I shall die at eighty before having formed any opinion concerning myself or, perhaps, without writing anything that would have shown me what I could do.
Three months later he wrote again from Esna: “I think about what I have always thought about — literature; I try to take hold of everything I see; I’d like to imagine something. But what, I don’t know. It seems to me that I have become utterly stupid.” At Philae he wrote, “I don’t stir from the island and am depressed. What is it, oh Lord, this permanent lassitude that I drag about with me?” In a letter to his close friend Louis Bouilhet, Flaubert’s frustration is palpable: “Sitting on the divan of my cange, watching the water flow by, I ruminate about my past life . . . Am I about to enter a new period? Or is it the beginning of complete de-cadence? And from the past I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition.”
For her part, Nightingale believed that God was calling her and was confused as to how to respond. She too suffered bouts of depression and anxiety. Like Flaubert’s mother, Nightingale’s parents were concerned about her future and were deeply appalled when she spoke of nursing as her desired profession; most well-off, well-educated British people of the day considered nursing a lowly occupation fit only for the loose, the uneducated, and the intemperate. Yet, from her experience tending to sick relatives and neighbors, Nightingale knew without question that her heart lay with nursing. She was an innovative scientist, progressive, and firmly believed that there were vast improvements to be made in the nursing profession, that a nurse could and should be more than a passive, handholding attendant who simply kept the patient company while he faded and died.
Nightingale’s parents naturally expected her to marry, but, like Flaubert, she balked at the constraints of marriage. Twice during a seven-year courtship, her suitor, Richard Monckton Milnes, proposed, and twice — to her parents’ disappointment and bafflement — she rejected him. Nightingale believed that God intended her to be celibate. (Milnes, it transpires, was a comically improbable figure for such a chaste and high-minded woman as Nightingale. He was reputedly obsessed with sadomasochism, was said to be the owner of the largest collection of hard-core pornography in Britain — in Nightingales, her biography of Florence Nightingale, Gillian Gill calls this stash “the most extreme pornography the world had seen before the invention of film and the Internet” — had a collection of hangmen’s autographs and a bookmark fashioned out of human skin, was gay, and seems to have hosted nonstop Sadian sex parties at his home, an estate he nicknamed “Aphrodisiopolis.” Whether Nightingale was aware of any of these details at the time nobody knows, but she was not imperceptive. Milnes was fat, literary, good natured, influential, generous, and Nightingale claimed to have loved him, though I think she must have suspected something was slightly off about the guy.)
Nightingale claimed that God spoke to her for the first time when she was sixteen; what exactly he wanted her to do for him she didn’t know. In a private journal she kept while in Egypt, she recorded three or four times that God had spoken to her again. Near Asyut she wrote, “God called me in the morning and asked me would I do good for him alone without reputation?” Nightingale’s biggest source of anxiety seemed to be her longtime habit of daydreaming, which in itself doesn’t sound so terrible, until you discover that the daydreams had the quality of full-blown visions, that they were all-consuming, and that they could come over her at almost any time, whether she was alone or in company. Gill describes the dreaming as “a state of absorbed reverie, when for minutes or even hours on end she would be so absorbed in some imagined adventure as to be impervious to what was happening around her.” In contrast to the smooth, entertaining, and lucid letters she wrote to her family, the tortured content of Nightingale’s private diary is startling. Its pages are full of shamed and dispirited comments about her daydreaming. Without revealing the subject of her dreams, she perceived the habit as corrupt, sinful, described it as a “murderer of thought,” an addiction worse than opium, and thought that she was losing her mind. She wrote, “[I] struggled against dreaming as the desert fathers once struggled against erotic fantasies.” Midway through her trip, at Gerf Hussein, she remarked with despair, “Oh heavenly fire, purify me — free me from this slavery.”
If two troubled geniuses ever floated down the Nile, they were Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert. Travel broadens the mind, they say. It also clears it. Among their other reasons for traveling to Egypt, Flaubert and Nightingale came, as many travelers did, as a way of clearing their minds. On completing his trip, Flaubert suddenly felt immense inspiration and wrote joyfully to Bouilhet: “A bizarre psychological phenomenon! Back in Cairo (and since reading your good letter), I have been feeling myself bursting with intellectual intensity. The pot suddenly began to boil! I felt a burning need to write! I was wound up tight.” On March 9, 1849, toward the end of her trip, Nightingale wrote in her diary with calm gravity, “During half an hour I had in the cabin myself . . . I settled the question with God.”
Objects may not present themselves to all observers under the same point of view, but they can sting and stroke those varied points of view to exactly the same effect. Nightingale saw chaos in Egypt; Flaubert saw harmony. Nightingale saw the misery of life; Flaubert saw the glory. Both saw clearly, and both were looking at the same thing. In the end, they saw what they needed to see. Both were devastated at having to leave their boats behind. One wrote, “Leaving our little boat was heart-rending,” and the other, “We left the dear old boat wringing our hands, while we irrigated the ground with our tears all the way to Heliopolis.” (I’ll leave it to you to guess who wrote which.)
Asked whether Egypt had lived up to his expectations, Flaubert responded, “Facts have taken the place of suppositions — so excellently so that it is often as though I were suddenly coming upon old forgotten dreams.” Nightingale, similarly, wrote, “I had that strange feeling as if I had been here before, — it was so exactly what I had imagined, — a coincidence between the reality and the previous fancy, which never comes true with me.”
AT EIGHT O’CLOCK I climbed back into my rowboat, rearranged my food and my water bottles by the intense light of the full moon, unwrapped the shirt from my head, and lay down for the night with my sleeping bag spread over me, and my sweater for a pillow. Less fearful and more tired this night than I’d been the night before, I fell quickly into a sound sleep.
Three hours later, lying on my right side with my face aimed north, my eyes opened abruptly at the sound of water swirling around the prow of my boat, very close to my head — the swishing of an oar. And then something solid thudded with a metallic ring into the side of my boat, rocking me a little. I knew immediately that it was another boat and that there was no way in the world that a person sitting in a boat next to mine could have missed the fact that I was lying here. I could feel whoever it was watching me by the impossibly bright light of the moon, which now was directly overhead. My hands, my white sleeves, and the tip of my nose glowed. Like a rush of electricity a paralyzing fear came over me, and the air around my face suddenly felt intensely hot. I lay immobilized, like an overturned crab unable to right itself. My heart seemed to shake the entire boat with its clacking protest. Was it better to just lie there and pretend to be asleep or to sit up and present myself? It had to be a man, for who else would it be in a boat on the Nile? The suspense was excruciating. I pretended to be asleep, my arms and legs frozen with fear. I felt limbless. A minute or so passed and then, unable to stand it anymore, I suddenly sat upright.
There in a rowboat exactly like mine sat a man and four small boys, their features clearly visible in the moonlight. At my sudden movement every one of them reared spectacularly back in fright, which caused their boat to wobble and bounce on the water.
I stared at them. They stared back at me. And no one spoke for what seemed like a very long time. Finally, though I wanted to scream, I said, “What?” in a somewhat normal tone of voice. Why I said this I don’t know. What else, really, was there to say?
The man peered at me, dumbfounded, wary, absorbing the fact of my voice, my English, my hair that now, unwrapped, hung to my shoulders. He raised a questioning hand. Parrotlike he said, “What?” back at me.
Fear had robbed me not only of my little elementary Arabic but also of my English. “What what?” I said dumbly, raising my own hand.
The man’s face bore a look of tense confusion. His nose and the palm of his hand were khaki colored in the moonlight. He had a luxurious mustache and bright eyes. He seemed to be staring almost in self-defense, like an animal cornered, as frightened as I. “Bititkallim Araby?” he said.
I said no, I didn’t speak Arabic.
With that figuring Egyptian flick of his raised fingers, he said, “Which country?”
I told him. He leaned closer in bafflement, examining my hair. By now he certainly knew I was a woman. “America,” he said.
“Yes.”
“One person?”
All the clever phrases of self-defense that Madeleine had taught me had abandoned me now. I had completely forgotten how to say My husband is over there behind that bush with a large gun, or, The police are following me and should be here in approximately two minutes. In fact, I completely forgot to lie and said, “Yes, one person.”
He gestured at the boat and asked whose it was.
“Mine.”
He blinked at me, his eyelashes glittering in the yellow light. The children stared in puzzlement and fear, their open mouths four little black holes above their moonlit chins. Seeing me here under these circumstances must have been as odd for them as it would be for a Bostonian to find a crocodile trotting up Tremont Street.
The man leaned forward and looked into my boat, studying my things.
“I bought this boat,” I said in Arabic. My voice sounded thin and terribly distant — an insignificant little cheeping.
He asked where I bought the boat. I didn’t want to say Luxor, didn’t want to tell him I had rowed all that way. I feared he wouldn’t believe me, would think I was mocking him. More than that, I wanted him to believe that I had some association with people in Qena, which was not too far from here. “Qena,” I said.
“Qena,” he said. “You come from where today?”
“Qena. I came from Qena to here. Now I’m going from here to Qena.”
“You?”
“Yes.”
He was incredulous. “Too far.”
Qena was probably less than twenty miles away, not far at all. “Not so far,” I said.
He reached out and gripped the edge of my boat and pulled it against his in a startlingly proprietary way, and the four little boys teetered like tenpins on their perches, their shadows rocking and shifting over the moonlit water, their hands flying up and clutching at each other for balance.
The man had begun to smile, a smile that appeared to me ulterior and full of terrible confidence. His teeth were brilliant in the whitewash of the moonlight. His voice grew eerily soft, and he talked through his smile in a lilting way. “You have cigarette?”
I had cigarettes. Though I didn’t smoke, I had brought a pack of cigarettes with me for the same reason I had brought a box of pens. I clawed through my luggage, my hands shaking, found the cigarettes, gave him one.
“Marlboro,” he said, recognizing the package. “Marlboro. Good cigarette. Shukran geziran. Geziran. Sank you.”
I found my matches and in my Nervous-ness I reversed traditional roles and lit his cigarette for him, horrified at the way the match flame jittered in my trembling hand.
The way he was peering at me was awfully unnerving. He seemed to be thinking, considering his options, relishing the possibilities as he blew smoke at my forehead. I was a mere woman: no threat at all. He looked to me like a demented cat leering at an unfortunate mouse, delighting in thoughts of the painfully perverse tortures he could visit on his hapless prey. In precisely the tone of voice one would use to console a tiny, Nervous child, he said, “Good cigarette. Good cigarette. Good, good cigarette.” He seemed delighted with himself for knowing these words in English. He withdrew a packet of sisha from within his gallabiya and offered it to me in exchange for the cigarette.
I had no interest in this fruity tobacco. “No, thanks. Thanks a lot, though,” I said. “Thanks very much.” I didn’t want him to sense how great my fear was. That was too much information to give away. One person’s visible fear can trigger another’s aggression.
A long silence followed. I was completely unable to gather my thoughts; they were the racing, repetitive, scattered thoughts of a hunted animal. I wanted to get away, to row off in a hurry, but knew that I shouldn’t do anything abruptly or defensively for fear of attracting from him precisely the sort of behavior I hoped to avoid. The last thing I wanted was for him to panic. I felt thoroughly powerless and at his mercy. With false and quavering cheerfulness, I said, “What is your name, sir?”
“Mahmoud.”
“Very nice to meet you, Mahmoud.”
“What your name?” he said. I told him. “Nice to meet you, Mister Rose.”
“Not Mister,” I said absurdly, “Miss,” and the little boys collapsed in a startling sudden laughter that rang sweetly in the soft light. Did they understand English?
Mahmoud put his face near mine. “You have camera?”
“No, I don’t.” Of course I had a camera, but no longer my cheap Polaroid.
“No camera,” he said ruminatively, breathing through his teeth, taking pride in the sound of his few English words. He was smart, had already picked up a few phrases from me. His voice seemed to have assumed a gloating tone.
“Are these your boys, Mahmoud?” I said pointing at them. They were small and thin, like most Egyptian boys, and they were all dressed in ghostly white gallabiyas.
Yes, they were his boys. In Arabic, I asked each boy his name and age, and Mahmoud answered for each of them. The boys giggled, happy at being noticed, quizzed, and identified. There was a box of pens near my feet under my sleeping bag. I found the box and handed it to the boys. They giggled some more and held the pens appreciatively up to the moonlight.
“So many boys, Mahmoud,” I said spryly, though my mouth was dry as limestone. I was so afraid that I was having trouble speaking.
“Yes, many boys.” He had a creepy way of breathing through his teeth. He raised both hands at me and said, “I need money.”
The statement struck me as so shockingly ominous that all I could do was ignore it, pretend he didn’t say it. With thoroughly counterfeit casualness, I asked one of the handful of questions I knew how to ask in Arabic, “Inta min ein, ya Mahmoud?” — “Where are you from, Mahmoud?” — as though we were a couple of genteel travelers casually meeting at an embassy cocktail party.
“Qena.”
“And you’re on your way home now?”
“Home,” he said, a word he clearly didn’t know. Without precursor and in a voice that sounded almost menacing in its softness and clarity he said, “I love you,” and leaned back slightly as if to bring into better focus the effect of this generous statement.
It’s curious how in certain circumstances those three much-desired words can sound so ominous; curious, too, how transporting are the physical effects of fear. Petty bodily discomforts — a scraped knee, a bruised toenail, blistered hands, a sore shoulder — all that is rendered nonexistent when challenged by the pain of brute fear. My heart seemed to vibrate. I seemed to have lost all motor control. My thoughts were hopelessly scattered, and what little intelligence I had once possessed had now abandoned me. With heavy dread I envisioned having to stab this man with the knife I had hidden in the bow of my boat. I had told myself the knife would come in handy for any number of daily functions, but at the back of my mind I knew I might need it for just such an occasion as this. Before lying down to sleep, I had opened the knife and placed it beside my pillow. Now, blazing moonlight notwithstanding, I was so blind with fear I couldn’t see the knife anywhere in the bottom of the boat.
I raised my watch ostentatiously to the neon moonlight, faked a yawn, and with mock surprise and as much of a display of informal calm as I could muster, I said in English that he could not possibly have understood, “Wow! Look at the time! Ten o’clock! So late! Ho-hum. Guess I’d better be moving along,” when in fact what I wanted was to clock the man in the mustache with the butt of my enormous oar and shriek, “Don’t you fucking touch me!” My racing thoughts were studded with horrid scenes from my shattered imagination: chief among them was the picture of my own body floating facedown in the river at sunrise for a flock of flamingos to find. I wanted to tip my oars into the water and race off, but my anchor was embedded in the sand. I would have to climb out of the boat and unhook it. How to do this without alarming Mahmoud?
I feigned boredom and ease, looked idly around at the moonlit water, tried smiling at the kids, gave their father a few more cigarettes.
“Thank you, Miss Rose,” he said.
“Well,” I said, to move things along, and slowly I disentangled myself from my sleeping bag, stood up, and stepped from the slender bow of my boat onto the sand. I pulled up the anchor and said something ridiculous like, “Beautiful moon,” when in fact the moon I had so admired when I first lay down seemed grotesque to me now, revealing me flagrantly, betraying me, illuminating Mahmoud’s eyes and teeth and lips, making the water hyacinths look grisly and the sand lewd. If it hadn’t been for the moon, this man would never have spotted me.
I got back into my boat, slowly packed up my sleeping bag, and just as I began with pathetic hope to settle my oars into place and make my getaway, Mahmoud stepped lithely out of his boat and into mine, his authoritative weight jerking my boat into deep rocking.
My heart plummeted. Mahmoud sat down on the thwart. “I take you in Qena,” he said, pointing at his chest and adjusting his gallabiya between his knees in preparation for rowing.
I thanked him for the offer, said it wasn’t necessary. Again he informed me that he would take me to Qena, indicating with his strong hands flashing in the light that he could row very well. In Arabic I said, “No, thanks. I can do it. There is no problem.”
He sat breathing and grinning and thinking. “I take,” he said, pointing at himself again.
In an instant my fear was overtaken by anger. This is something that happens with me — if frightened and beset enough, I can become infuriated, and my fury fuels an almost supernatural determination and strength. I had no intention of letting Mahmoud frighten me further, no intention of letting him control me.
“Get out of my boat,” I said in English.
He hesitated.
I raised my hand between us and waved at him. “Out. Out. Get out now. I’m going. I don’t want you to help me.”
To my surprise Mahmoud stood up and stepped gracefully back into his own boat. My boat was partially wedged against the riverbank by his. I said briskly, “Go on. Get out of the way. Good-bye. Push me off. I’m going.”
“Dilwati?” he said.
It was eerie the way his smile glowed in the repulsive moonlight.
“Yes, now.”
“Miss Rose.”
“Push me off,” I said. “Come on.”
Freed from the bank, I began to row, my oars making futile slaps at the clumps of water hyacinth and the stringy river grass; the boat was mired in the shallow water. I set my bare feet against the steel ribs of the hull and yanked at the oar handles, pulling with so much force that the boat suddenly lurched into the stream of the river.
To say that I rowed frantically does my frenzy no justice. My fatigue was gone, replaced by a roaring furnace of energy. I pulled faster and harder than I ever imagined I could. The wind had picked up slightly during the night, and the river had begun to resemble a mountain lake, the surface gone jagged with tiny ripples and waves. An occasional small whitecap flared and curled into itself. The air was blood warm and the moonlight followed me in a hideous jiggling trail of yellow. With each pull of the oars, an involuntary and audible huff of effort and horror escaped my mouth, and when I realized that Mahmoud had decided to come after me in his boat I cried out, “Oh, Christ!” in a little wail of desperation that the wind instantly snatched away. I pulled harder.
I could make out the outlines of Mahmoud’s boat a hundred yards away, the silhouettes of the four boys. I was moving so fast that I was actually stirring up white wake. I saw a light amid the trees on a sizable island in the middle of the river, but I knew that Mahmoud would reach me by the time I got to it. No matter how fast I went, Mahmoud would be able to go faster. Rowing was his life. This was his river. If I was headed for a large jagged boulder just beneath the surface of the water here, I wouldn’t know it, but he would. He would know every quirk and current and swirl of the river.
I had rowed six or seven hours already that day, and the palms of my hands were bubbled and shredded. I knew that no amount of raw adrenaline strength would get me out of this. And then I saw the dark form of Mahmoud’s boat stop and veer away toward the shore. My heart leaped. He was relenting. He had given up. I was free of him. I rowed harder for several minutes. But before long, I saw unmistakably that he was coming after me again. He had only stopped to get rid of the boys, who had been weighing him down.
My fear, and my anger, doubled. “Goddamn him!” I said. He was determined to catch me. I knew that he would. We rowed this way for what seemed like an eternity but was surely no more than ten minutes. I rowed blindly, certain that my life was over, looking left and right toward the riverbanks for any sign of light or life. I could hear Mahmoud shouting at me through the wind, “Blease! Miss Rose, blease stob! Blease!”
I knew that my body would be found the next day in one unpleasant state of corruption or other. I have often hoped that in the last minutes of my life, I would have at least one or two profound and meaningful thoughts, but all I could decipher amid the jumble of disjointed notions that spun in my brain was that I would rather have a crocodile end my life than some crazy man. The suspense — not knowing what he wanted or what he planned to do — was so excruciating that finally I stopped rowing. I would face him. I would challenge him and get the whole thing over with. I stopped my boat and shipped the oars. Where was that fucking knife? My mind spun and tumbled. If he touched me, I decided, if he did anything that I felt was a violation, I would kill him. Without question, I would make every attempt to kill him. It was the first time in my life that I had resolved to take another person’s life in order to spare my own, and the feeling that accompanied that decision was the lowest and loneliest and most dismal I have ever experienced.
Mahmoud glided up alongside me and grabbed my gunwale again with that catlike swiftness and determination. He was breathless.
I considered lifting one battering ram of an oar and heaving it butt first into the spot between his eyes, a blow that would certainly disable him. “What do you want?” I said. “What? What do you want?!”
“Miss Rose!” He was gasping.
“What?” I said furiously. I had a weird urge to stand up in the boat. “Money? Is it money?”
He leaned very close. I could almost smell his mustache. “Money,” he said. “I need money.” He held the edge of my boat with both hands. I wanted to smash his fingers. I slapped his hands off. He laughed.
I reached around for my knife. “How much money?” I said, one of the more asinine things I’ve ever said. Under the circumstances, why bother to ask how much? Why not just hand him my entire wallet, which was sliding around beneath my feet somewhere? “How much?” I said, hoping that money was all he wanted.
“Ten bound, Miss Rose.”
The words landed against my face with the sting of a brisk slap. I stared at him. Ten pounds was little more than three U.S. dollars. Could it be that he had chased me all this way, abandoned his young boys on a darkened riverbank, gone quite far out of his way at the end of what had surely been for him a very long workday to ask me for a mere three dollars? Not possible. There had to be more. I fumbled around for my wallet and fished through it for a ten. The conspicuous thickness of the bills in the fold looked almost vulgar in the moonlight. I thought how absurd this fussy, selective formality was. Mahmoud could, if he wanted to, simply reach over, pluck the whole thing out of my hands, knock me over, and the job would be finished. He’d be rich, and I’d be con-ve-niently dead.
But not if I killed him first. And I would kill him first. I’d stab him or club him or drown him.
As I clawed at the wad of Egyptian bills, Mahmoud muttered, “America good country. Good cigarette. I love America. I love you,” in that monotonous way.
I plucked up a twenty-pound note. “Here, Mahmoud. Here’s twenty. Take it.” The bill fluttered in my trembling hand.
Mahmoud gasped at the sight of the twenty. “Ya saalam!” he cried. “Miss Rose! Sank you! Oh, Miss Rose!” He was breathless with shock and happiness. He took the bill, kissed it, touched it to his forehead, kissed it again. “I love you! I love you!” he said. His boat clanked against mine, rocking us both. He smooched loudly at the money between his words of thanks. “Sank you, oh, sank you, Miss Miss Miss Rose.”
He was drunk with glee. I pushed his boat away and said sharply, “Khalas! It’s finished. Go back to your boys.”
“Boys, yes.” He grinned. “Good-bye, Miss Rose. Good-bye!”
To my shock and dismay, he gathered up his oars and began to row upriver again, staring and grinning as he went. I watched as he hurried away, his white figure bending forward with each pull of the oars. I could hear him crying in the moonlight, “Miss Rose, good-bye, good-bye,” in an almost beseeching voice that shrank to a cat’s wail as the distance between us grew. He thanked me until he disappeared.
I sat in the boat in a state of confusion and disbelief for several minutes. The blood that had seemed to drain from my body during this race now rushed back in a hot flood. When Mahmoud was finally out of sight, my fear suddenly increased. I was in the middle of the river, it was midnight and now quite windy. Qena, my final destination, was approximately fifteen miles away; I could faintly see the green neon lights at the tops of the minarets in the suburbs of Qena. Far from being a comfort, the proximity of the city seemed threatening, full of Muhammads and Ahmeds, Mahmouds and Husseins, with their questions and probings, their jokes and their tricks. I was completely rattled. The world felt upside down. Which was the river, which was the sky? Despite the big moon, it all looked black to me now.
I was alone, but there was no guarantee that, drawn by the memory of all those bills in my wallet, Mahmoud wouldn’t get smart and come back to finish the job.
The act of rowing now was a palliative, a distraction. I rowed steadily for another hour and a half, maybe two hours, the minarets and lights growing larger and more numerous as I went. I could hear late-night voices in dimly lit areas along the riverbanks. I didn’t relish the thought of arriving at a dock in Qena now and having fifty men question me in the middle of the night. I decided to stop just before the city in a cove where I would be invisible, preferably hidden by some trees. I rowed as quietly as I could, trying not to attract attention or stir up any barking dogs.
A mile or two above Qena, I found a dense overhanging tree whose branch tips bent low into the water. It was a dry, thorny tree weighed down with dust and cobwebs and rotting moss. In daylight these trees had always reminded me of death. I wanted to be able to row out of my resting place instantly if necessary. Putting the anchor down would only slow my flight if I had to hurry off again in a chase. I got the brilliant idea of simply catching my boat securely on the heavy branches of this tree and letting the current pin the boat to them. That way I could leave my oars in the water and at the ready in the event of another bad encounter. But the current here was stronger than I realized, and before I could stop it, my boat had been pushed deep into the tree’s tangled branches, so deep that the branches formed a thorny cage around me, making an instant getaway impossible — indeed making a getaway of any kind impossible.
The boat was thoroughly stuck in the arms of the tree. I was trapped. I sat there for a minute with a weary hand over my eyes, sighing, my fingers trembling. And then I found myself standing up in a tangle of branches and cobwebs, the floor of the boat teetering beneath my feet. When I grabbed on to a branch and tried to pull myself out of my little cave of thorns and branches, dead leaves and dusty hunks of moss and lichen came showering down onto my head. In the commotion the hull of the boat clanged against a thick branch and rang out like a marimba in the dark, frightening several dozen egrets and kingfishers who’d been snoozing in the top of the tree. All the birds flew up at once, clacking and shrieking indignantly like murderous chimps in a bad zoo. The racket was so loud I was certain the police or some other form of trouble would descend on me momentarily. Every move I made kicked up another shower of debris and ripped fresh thorn holes in my shirtsleeves and hands. Finally I blundered free and into the current of the river. I was clammy with sweat, and cursing aloud in a voice wavering close to tears, and all the while the ice-blue stars glittered and the yellow moon glowed steadily and the river flowed in its lazy, undulating, eddying way.
I was bereft. I moved on, looking for coves, testing spots beneath overhanging palm trees and finding nothing suitable. And I began to question what it is in me that wants to scare myself this way. In a kind of hysteria, I sputtered out loud to myself, “You fool!”
I didn’t want to be seen, but neither did I want to be too far from the comfort of the bright lights, which shone on the water just around a bend not a hundred yards from me. (I didn’t know then that these lights belonged to the Qena tourist police station.) Finally I found a spot in a cove safely out of the current and hidden from above by a dense thicket. It was two o’clock in the morning. I threw my anchor into a clump of weeds and just sat there, deciding that if I had to stay awake until sunrise with my knife in my hand, that wouldn’t be so terrible. I was completely enervated.
I sat for an hour, lighting cigarettes and puffing grimly at them, keeping myself company with their little red glow. Eventually, not caring anymore what happened to me, I lay on my back in the bottom of the boat. The gentle current pulled the boat this way and that, causing the stars overhead to wheel left and right like the moving image of a night sky in a planetarium. The boat rubbed against the tall grasses, making the sound of a hulking person walking through a meadow. Frogs clacked near my head, large birds let out sudden yelps in the bushes, crickets stitched and complained, and dogs let out random yips in the distance. The tree above me hummed with bugs. The water rippled and rilled. Everything seemed like a sign of an impending intruder.
I covered my face and head with a shirt to defend myself from the mosquitoes that were crazily strafing me, and finally I fell into a comatose sleep, waking every half hour to discover that I was still alive, then sleeping again, sweating beneath my sleeping bag, not caring about the cockroaches — or perhaps they were scorpions now — that skittered over my fingers.
At five o’clock I woke up and started off down the river again in the milky morning, bleary-eyed and miserable. I glided past the blazing police station, where a few young officers were just beginning to climb out of big canvas tents, and a few others in disheveled uniforms were sipping from mugs and rubbing their eyes. The station sat above the river on a small hill; I rowed by beneath them, directly under their noses. They didn’t notice me.
Never having been to Qena, I knew little about the city and nothing about its waterfront. I could see the Qena bridge, a long flat span supported by enormous concrete pilings. I pulled the boat up to a flight of stone steps that led up the tall bank, and sat there watching the rising sun slowly illuminating the red line of cliffs across the river to the west. Covered with an integument of pale yellow pollen, the river looked sad and dirty here. Once it ran under the bridge, it would turn to the left and begin the great Qena curve, the largest turn the Nile makes in all of Egypt, a turn so sharp that for a brief span it actually flows southward. I could see the start of the curve just beyond the bridge.
I sat in the warm morning air, jangling with fatigue and trying, without success, to calm down. I watched a kingfisher efficiently kill a minnow by banging its head repeatedly against an iron railing at the edge of the steps. The kingfisher was a murderous bird, a kind of flying jackknife.
I shut my eyes and thought about Mahmoud, my nighttime visitor, and I felt uneasy and somehow embarrassed. What, actually, had Mahmoud done? He had asked me some questions, had said that I was beautiful, that America was beautiful, and that he loved me (I later learned that in Arabic there is little distinction between the words like and love), which was nothing every other man in Egypt hadn’t done. He had chased after me when I tried to leave him behind, which was nothing every other man in Egypt hadn’t done. He had climbed into my boat, and when I asked him to get out he promptly did as I asked. He had offered to row me to Qena — an attempt at an honorable way of earning a little tip, which was what every other man in Egypt would do. They would row you twenty miles for a tip of three dollars; they would walk two miles carrying your three suitcases on their shoulders for fifty cents; they would stand all day on one leg for a dime if you asked them to. Mahmoud had asked me for three dollars. He had demanded nothing. He had very little English and therefore no graceful or subtle or polite way to make himself understood, to make himself human. He had obviously had no contact with foreigners and so had no knowledge of how to charm or disarm me. Scores of Egyptian men had accosted me in Luxor and Aswan, Abu Simbel and Cairo, saying suggestive things, saying they loved me, asking me to dance, touching my arms, asking me to have sex with them, pulling a million tricks to get me to part with my money and myself. It was annoying at times, but it was all a clumsy expression of friendliness, of boredom, and of grinding poverty. It was all rather harmless, a game. And what had Mahmoud done? Less. He wanted a paltry three dollars. What was that? A pittance. I had given little Egyptian children more than that at one sweep, had countless times spent more than that on a beer or a cup of coffee. Mahmoud had four boys to support and surely a wife somewhere. He probably lived in a mud-brick hut with a dirt floor and a bamboo ceiling and spent his days hauling at fishing nets for pennies a day. Mahmoud had done nothing; he had not even touched me. In desperation he had followed me. He had wanted a mere three dollars, and yet in defensiveness and fear and ignorance of who he was, I had resolved, with a brutal fury I had never known I was capable of, to kill him.
I felt ashamed. That fear and violence had sprung from my imagination, from suspicion, from misunderstanding, from the lonely foreign setting and the absence of the sun. I think it’s not unfair to say that if I had been sleeping in a rowboat on an American river — the Hudson, say, or the Colorado, or the Mississippi — my fears would have been more founded, and my morning would perhaps never have come.
When the sun was solidly in the sky and the day in Qena had begun, I gathered up my possessions and stepped onto the dock. There was no one around to give my boat to, and so I decided to just leave it there on the dock for some lucky fisherman to find. I hated leaving it. I had gone to such lengths to find it. It had carried me this far and felt like a friend now, with its goofy red hearts, its pink graffiti about Allah, its cockroaches, and its tattered lining of plastic grass. I tied the boat up beside a decrepit steamer with twisted iron rails. I had come to love the enormous oars so much that I wanted to take one home with me, but I left everything as it was and walked up the steps to find a narrow road and an empty car sitting at the curb with its motor running, its driver’s door open, its hood up, and no driver in sight.
I walked away from the river in what my map recorded as the direction of the town. Qena was small and depressing. Visitors only came here to see the Temple of Dendera, a relatively minor attraction situated on the other side of the river. They stayed for a day, then went away again. The buildings of Qena were brown and dusty, with broken windows and above-ground sewage pipes connecting them. A little girl standing in an alley saw my face, and her eyes widened in fear and she ran away. Eventually I came to a hotel and found a man sleeping in a van with “Tax” written on the side of it. I woke the man and asked him if he could take me to the train station. He was so startled at the sight of me that he couldn’t speak. I was probably the only foreigner in Qena that day, if not that entire week. He opened the door for me, I climbed in, and we headed off down the rutted road. The van didn’t seem able to go above ten miles an hour. After five minutes or so, I asked in Arabic, “Is there a problem with the car?,” a phrase I had learned by listening to Madeleine.
“There is not problem,” the driver said anxiously, predictably. “Not problem.”
There was, of course, a problem, but I didn’t care.
I sat on a broken bench on the platform at the Qena train station waiting for the morning train to Cairo. A dozen policemen in ill-fitting tan uniforms wandered around the dust-brown train station. Their shirts were three sizes too small and their trousers three sizes too big. They wore flip-flops and tan berets made of felt shoddy. They walked in a shuffling way. A skinny man went by carrying forty loaves of pita bread in his arms, a stack of warm flat disks like a pile of old magazines. Heavy black-veiled village women with plump fingers and hennaed wrists sat impatiently on wooden benches eating pumpkin seeds, spitting the shells onto their swollen feet. They had gold teeth and flashing eyes rimmed with kohl, fat tobacco-brown cheeks and the bulky arms of professional wrestlers. They wore big golden rings and bracelets and earrings. They talked loudly.
Amr must have been nearly back home in Aswan by now, back to the leaden routine of his life. I thought of how he had said with such sadness, “That man could not make himself known,” when he spoke of the American businessman who had come to Elephantine Island and insisted that his origin was Nubian. Amr had become a friend to me. Though we came from such different places, though he was an Egyptian man and I was an American woman, he had been able to make himself known. Because he had been able to tell me who he was, what he felt, what he thought, I had been able to accept him, even to identify with him. Mahmoud had had no such luck, and so he had embodied all that I feared, all that others had told me I should fear.
A tiny barefoot boy of perhaps four or five jumped off the platform into the track well below the platform, ran across the tracks, and climbed up the other side to the opposite platform. As he climbed he held the hem of his gallabiya in his teeth to keep from tripping on it. His parents didn’t seem to care that he was playing on the train tracks, though the arrival of the train was imminent. He skipped around on the platform, lifting his gown over his head, gleefully revealing his tiny naked body, then jumped bravely onto the tracks again and crossed back to his family. When he sat down on the bench, his father began to slap his little head in a brutal, ceaseless way. The boy howled. His tongue was crimson in the sunlight. Tears streaked his little cheeks.
“Travel does not make one cheerful,” Flaubert wrote during one of his depressions on the Nile. Travel never makes one cheerful. But it makes one thoughtful. It washes one’s eyes and clears away the dust.