MY SEARCH for a boat began in Aswan, the southernmost Egyptian city, the starting point of my rowing trip, and technically the beginning of the Egyptian Nile. I wanted a simple fisherman’s rowboat, long and narrow, with room enough to lie down in at night. I had estimated that my trip would take five days at most. Forewarned of the possibility of scorpions and adders along the riverbanks, I had no intention of sleeping on land. For four days, I roamed around Aswan and its islands looking for a suitable boat, searching the riverbanks, crashing through reeds, climbing over sand dunes and boulders, picking my way past bony dogs lying prone and comatose in the baked dust, scouring the mud-brick Nubian villages on Elephantine Island, asking oblique questions, fending off friendly advances, and trying, without luck, not to draw attention to myself.
With unctuous persistence, felucca captains tried to hook my business as I walked by, dancing and clamoring around me like sheepdogs, following me sometimes for a quarter of a mile and so closely that their shoulders repeatedly brushed against mine. Remember me? they said into my ear, though they had never set eyes on me before. Where you are going? Want felucca? Sailing! Special price because you are special! Five bound. Maybe later? Maybe tomorrow? Cataract. West Bank. Why no? The phrases spilled out of them in perfectly inflected American English. At that time tourists were scarce in Egypt because of the rising fear of terrorism, and beneath the suave and chattering bravado the captains’ voices had the despairing ring of the mendicant’s plea. At any one time there might be thirty captains poised on a dock, waiting in vain for work. The very sight of them was coercive. Wondering how they survived, I felt a strong obligation to take their felucca rides. Whenever I declined and walked on, the captains reduced the already pathetically low five-pound fare to three, making me feel instantly stingy, though my declinations were never a matter of money.
As I stumbled through Aswan, dozens of barefoot, cinnamon-skinned children trailed me. Dressed in little more than ragged dish towels, they were big-eyed, auburn-haired, seemingly weightless, and irresistibly beautiful in the rickety, knock-kneed way that newborn calves are beautiful. They had flies in their eyes, and noses running with snot. They had long curling eyelashes and narrow shoulders and tiny, dusty ankles. They wanted money, pens, and candy. “Hello, baksheesh!” they shrieked. “Hello, pen! Hello, bonbon!” They trailed after me sometimes for ten minutes, emitting jagged moans of entreaty, twisting their faces into little Greek masks of tragedy, dancing on the hot stones, and plucking at my hips until I gave them something. Eventually I bought a large box of pens and a bag of hard candy, collected a stack of fifty-piastre notes, stuffed this various arsenal of baksheesh into my pockets, and, like a pandering candidate passing out campaign fliers, distributed it regularly as I skulked through the town.
With a landscape unlike any other on the Nile, Aswan struck me as Egypt’s prettiest spot. Scattered with tiny green islands, the river in Aswan has the feel of a storybook oasis. Its banks, more desert dunes and granite cliffs than farmland, suggest the harsh Saharan void that surrounds the town, underscoring Aswan’s appeal as a cozy refuge. Between the town, on the east bank of the river, and the High Dam just to the south of it, granite bedrock and massive boulders whip to life a river that everywhere else in Egypt moves slowly and uniformly, like an intransigent bank of fog. Six hundred miles south of Cairo, a mere hundred miles from the Tropic of Cancer, home to many dark-skinned Nubians, and marking the border between Egypt proper and its southern ethnic region of Nubia, the city of Aswan feels more African than any other Egyptian town. The place has a sharp-edged clarity, as if chiseled and burned clean by the sun; color glows here with greater intensity than anywhere else in the country. Because it is narrower and because there are many more feluccas here, the river at Aswan appears busier and more festive than it does at Cairo and Luxor. Large white triangles of sail crisscross the river in a kind of jaunty tarantella.
Aswan’s desert air seems to caress the town with warm promise, lending vividness and meaning to manifestations of poverty and human struggle that would elsewhere be considered ugly. The piles of garbage, the heaps of smoldering ashes, the scatterings of broken glass, the architectural rubble, the human excrement, the sun-bleached plastic shopping bags and rusted tin cans that seem to ring all Egyptian villages and besmirch every empty plane between them are, in Aswan, softened by the sheer volume of sun and water, color and air. Here, fishermen’s houses cobbled together out of mud bricks and rusted tin cans appear somehow more ingenious than slovenly, more fascinating than dispiriting. In a little village of Aswan near the Old Cataract Hotel, I stepped on a scrap of shaggy bath mat in the road and realized with a start that it bore in one of its corners a yellowed set of jaws studded with two rows of brittle teeth. In another corner it had a moth-eaten tail. It was not a mat at all but the flattened carcass of a dog, a mud-caked rope cinched around one hind leg, tongue hanging out like a twisted strip of leather. It had been there a very long time. I walked on, fine beige dust splashing up around my ankles with each step, and knew that the thing I had just stepped on would have had a considerably more disturbing effect on me in a cold and rainy climate.
Aswanians had physical freedom, if not economic. The lissome ease with which Aswanian men move seems a direct response to the bright, dancing air. Fat men jiggling up and down on the backs of trotting donkeys manage to look graceful and in control. A man riding a bicycle and carrying enough lumber on his head to build a modest dance floor turns at full speed and without mishap through a crowded intersection, squeezing between a truck and a bus, one hand on the handlebars, the other steadying his boards. He moves with the swift, elegant confidence of a bullfighter evading a bull, though his tires are strained nearly to flatness beneath the weight of his cargo.
As I walked up and down the river, I stopped each time I saw a boat I liked and struck up a conversation with its owner, and if he seemed even remotely congenial I would eventually ask if I could try the boat for just a minute. The request usually met with a derisive snort of laughter and a long string of questions and jokes. “Only if I can come with you,” the men said. Or, “You don’t know how. I will row you,” or, “Only if you pay me eighty pounds for one hour,” or just plain, “No, madame. You cannot.”
One day I met a young red-haired, blue-eyed, freckle-faced Nubian * who agreed to let me use his boat, until his father found out what he had done and chased him down the riverbank, shouting and cursing and brandishing a bamboo stick. It was a matter of money — the boy, unaccustomed to foreigners asking for rowboats, had neglected to ask me to pay for the privilege of rowing myself around in a very small circle in front of the Old Cataract Hotel. I made up for the son’s transgression by paying the father, who looked as though he wanted to beat me too. In the end I didn’t dare try his boat.
Another hot day in a palm-ringed cove on Elephantine Island, the largest island in the Nile at Aswan, I came upon a young man sitting in a rowboat anchored in the shade in shallow water. He was deeply absorbed in the task of sewing a rip in a dingy pair of boxer shorts and didn’t notice that I had appeared on the riverbank above him. In the cockpit of a felucca anchored not two feet from him, an older man lay on his back napping, one arm slung across his face and his bare toes pointing up into the trees. I sat on a rock above the cove, listening to the smooching sound of unripe dates the size of peas falling into the water from the overhanging trees, until the men noticed me and both sprang up at once and began to shout like hounds heralding an intruder, asking me if I needed a lift across the river for a special price. I approached the men, greeted them, and after some minutes of small talk eventually asked the young one if he thought it was possible to row all the way to Cairo in the boat he was standing in.
“I have done it,” he said, and as if to prove this he sat down abruptly on the thwart. “It took me three weeks to row from Aswan to Luxor.”
In proper bantering Egyptian fashion, which had taken me some time to get used to, I clapped a hand to my forehead with mock astonishment and suggested that three weeks was awfully slow, that a person could drift that distance in less time, which was probably not far from the truth.
“I think I could row it in ten days,” I said, testing his sense of humor. This needling boast was just the thing, for the young man gave his rat-colored boxer shorts a twist and let out a yelp of laughter, and his sleepy-eyed friend smacked the deck of his boat and hooted, “Oh, laugh! It’s fun! For you, madame? Not possible!”
Nubian bongo drums pulsed in the botanical gardens of Kitchener Island across the way. A curious warbler talked loudly in a tree. The young man had a thick face and a bouquet of coarse black whiskers on his chin. His hair was straight and glossy and black, and he wore it in a bowl-shaped cut, a curtain of bangs hanging to his eyes. His teeth, which I speculated had not been brushed since grade school, were the color of unpeeled almonds. His gallabiya was torn and dirty, and that was surprising, for in Aswan even the lowliest laborers always looked recently washed and laundered. He sat in his boat and smirked at me. I asked him if he would sell me the boat. “Three thousand bounds!” he shouted. His laugh was startling, a toy poodle’s high-pitched yip.
“Magnoun,” I said, and the old felucca captain hooted again. “She said ‘crazy’! She is good woman!” Standing barefoot on the deck of his boat, one arm rakishly hugging the mast, the captain asked what country I was from. I told him. His salt-white mustache and handlebar eyebrows twitched with interest. “Ronald Reagan!” he said gleefully.
“Yes,” I said, “and George Bush.”
“John Kennetty!” he said in a trumpeting way. It sounded like a minor challenge. I hesitated, not certain what the correct reply might be. I took a stab. “Richard Nixon.”
“Ibrahim Linkum!”
Curious as to where this would lead, I said, “George Washington.”
The captain fussed with his turban and pointed a crooked finger at me. Gamely he cried, “John Wayne! Beel Cleelington! Gary Coober! Charlington Heston!” categorizing presidents with movie stars in an entirely reasonable way.
In the distance the noontime call to prayer had begun, and though to me this enormous sound was always utterly arresting, like a simulacrum of God himself suddenly descending from the sky, and though it was officially imperative that all good Muslims get down on their knees and pray, the two men seemed to take no notice. I asked the young man if I could try out his boat, but, like so many men in Aswan, he had difficulty understanding what exactly I wanted until I went over, lifted an oar in my hand, and pointed at myself. He offered to row me. I said no. He offered to come with me while I rowed. I said no, I just wanted to try the boat alone for one minute. With stabbing defiance he said, “Fifteen bounds for one minute!” After a protracted wrangle, we settled on a slightly less extortionate five. The young man fell to a crouch in the bottom of his boat and began rummaging in a cubbyhole under the stern, and at the end of a lot of muttering and pawing through a jumble of possessions that clanked and thudded loudly against the hull like chains and stones and empty cans, he withdrew an English copy of Marie Claire magazine. Courteney Cox on the cover. He climbed out of the boat, opened the magazine, and held it up for me to see. Pointing at the English text, he said, “German?”
The magazine had the heft of a telephone book. “English,” I said.
He flipped furtively through the pages, showing me photographs of women in scanty outfits, advertisements for bras and stockings, tampons and vinegar douches. Lovingly he touched the smooth thighs and burnished breasts on the pages, the glazed lips, the bare bellies, and bunchy buttocks with his calloused fisherman’s fingers. He seemed to have fallen into a trance. He gave off the humid scent of wet hay. His black eyes looked feverish as he jockeyed the magazine up to my face. He wanted me to look with him. He breathed down my neck. My presence at his side, though sweaty and dirty and wary and outfitted not unlike a Canadian Mountie, had clearly had an enhancing effect on what were, for him, already titillating images. And seeing these otherwise banal ads through his goggling Muslim eyes, they looked, in turn, weirdly pornographic to me.
“Let’s go,” I said, anxiety in my voice. The young man was twice my size. He dropped the magazine into the bottom of the boat, snatched up his undershorts, held them to his mouth, and snapped the sewing thread with his teeth. With an awkward little one-footed hop, he tried to pull on the shorts under his gallabiya, hooked his big toe on the waistband, stumbled, jigged about in the sand, righted himself, and tried again. I climbed into the boat, and he untied the painter and pushed me off with his foot.
I rowed out to the middle of the river, which was quiet now in the midday heat, while the two men looked on, up to their hairy shins in water and daintily elevating the hems of their gowns to keep them dry. They watched nervously, as if anticipating having to catch me in a neck-breaking tumble.
Beyond the shade of the cove, the heat of the sun directly overhead was so intense it seemed to affect my hearing, rendering the swilling of the oars in the water surreally loud. In the stark sunlight, the water was the color of mercury. Batlike green bee-eaters darted over my head like gaudy bits of paper caught on a wind. The fat magazine was slippery under my feet. I gave it a kick and sent it flopping into the bow. The sun that day seemed full of vengeance, intent on punishing every living thing. Gusts of heat came off the dunes with the force of a fire draft. I let myself get snagged on the river’s current for a moment, floated quickly downstream twenty feet, and climbed back up with stiff slow pulls at the oars. The oars were long and unwieldy. The boat moved heavily. It was portly and thick planked, hard to maneuver, and much bigger than I needed. Yet it was immensely exciting to be alone, finally, in a boat on the Nile, like that dream of stepping off a towering cliff only to find that you can fly.
IN THE THIRD WEEK of November 1849, Gustave Flaubert and his friend the photographer Maxime du Camp arrived at the port of Alexandria with the intention of renting a boat and crew and sailing up the Nile. Several days later Florence Nightingale and her friends Charles and Selina Bracebridge also arrived at Alexandria intending to do the same. Egypt in 1849 was still at the relative dawn of its popularity with European travelers: Thomas Cook’s steamship package tours hadn’t yet arrived; some Egyptians had never seen a white woman before; and for a European a trip on the Nile was still an exotic adventure. The novelty of the Nile experience for Edwardian travelers like Flaubert and Nightingale is best understood in light of the fact that between the years 646 and 1517 Egypt’s Islamic rulers had closed the country to virtually all outsiders. A few traders and pilgrims managed to enter the Nile Valley during this thousand-year period, but reliable information about Egypt was scarce. To the average European, the place was as arcane and mysterious as the moon. In 1517 when Egypt fell under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, it became more accessible to Europeans, and by the eighteenth century several Europeans succeeded in traveling up the Nile all the way to Upper Egypt. * The site of the ancient city of Thebes was lost to the world until 1707 when a French Jesuit, Claude Sicard, positively reidentified it. The British adventurer Richard Pococke, the Swedish scientist Frederick Hasselquist, the Danish artist Frederick Lewis Norden, and the French naturalist Charles Sonnini all traveled to Egypt during the eighteenth century and returned to Europe with detailed accounts of what they had seen. * Constantin Volney’s record of his travels in Egypt and Syria deeply impressed Napoleon and helped in part to inspire the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the resultant boom in Egyptology.
The sudden European preoccupation with Egypt was prompted not only by literary accounts and Napoleon’s Description de L’Egypte but also by the rarely seen antiquities and obscure artifacts that travelers were bringing home with them. Visitors to Egypt returned with trunks full of mummies, painted sarcophagi, stone carvings hacked off walls, hieroglyphic tablets, statues of Egyptian gods, and funerary furnishings lifted from pharaonic tombs and burial chambers. Dazzled by all this rare and mysterious loot, collectors and antiquarians began hurrying up the Nile searching for more. The craze for things Egyptian grew so great that one wealthy British collector, William Bankes, bothered to have an entire obelisk uprooted from the Temple of Isis at Philae, had it dragged back to En-gland, and propped it up in his garden in Dorset. Soon entire nations began engaging in the plunder.
Intent on modernizing the country, Muhammad Ali, who became pasha of Egypt in 1805, called on foreign experts for technical and political advice. In exchange for their guidance, foreign consuls were freely allowed to excavate Egyptian archaeological sites and remove the spoils to museums in their own countries. In 1815 the Italian strongman Giovanni Belzoni went to Egypt and, under the aegis of the British consul, within a mere three years found the opening of the second pyramid, discovered the royal tomb of Seti I, opened the Great Temple of Abu Simbel, and recovered the statue of the Young Memnon. Belzoni shipped off to En-gland every movable thing he found — as well as a few things any sane person would have considered immovable, including William Bankes’s six-ton Philae obelisk. In 1821 Belzoni’s collection of Egyptian antiquities was put on display at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. The show was a roaring success: on opening day alone nearly two thousand people paid half a crown apiece to look at Belzoni’s trea-sures.
Before long, people like Flaubert and Nightingale could visit the Louvre and the British Museum and see firsthand what manner of wonders the Nile Valley harbored. Jean-François Champollion’s deciphering of the newly rediscovered Rosetta stone gave meaning to what they saw — until then even the Egyptians themselves had lost all understanding of ancient Egyptian writing. When Edward Lane’s exhaustive An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians was published in London in 1836, it met with such fascinated demand that its first printing sold out in two weeks. And when the enormous obelisk from Luxor (230 tons; 75 feet tall) was shipped to France and installed in the Place de la Concorde in 1833, Egypt was firmly locked into the European imagination.
By the time Nightingale and Flaubert made their journeys to Egypt, a few steamships had already been introduced to the Nile, but for most foreign travelers the custom was to head for Boulac, the port of Cairo, and select a dahabieh, a private cruising boat, from the many available for hire there.
By all accounts Boulac was a tumult of vermin, shysters, hucksters, thieves, and fleas. There boats arriving from Upper Egypt unloaded exotic merchandise — hippopotamus hides, elephant tusks, monkeys, ostrich feathers, rubber, pottery, livestock, slaves, ebony, and nearly everything else imaginable — from the farthest parts of Africa. Passenger steamers and mail boats from Alexandria also disgorged their cargo there; the docks crawled with stevedores, merchants, captains, sailors, and hurrying travelers. With the hired assistance of a dragoman — an all-purpose interpreter who would explain, intercede in, and arrange all the practical matters that might arise during the long trip on the Nile — the traveler would brave the chaos of Boulac to inspect the boats on offer, while the dahabieh captains and their crews looked on, hungrily hoping the foreign customer would choose them and their vessel for the well-paid three-month journey up to the second cataract on the Sudanese border and back.
The hiring of a dahabieh was nearly as much an ordeal as any other task in the long Nile journey and often took several days to accomplish, with the most difficult moment being the settling of the rental contract. Captains and dragomans were famous for driving a hard bargain. Contemporary Baedeker’s guidebooks warned the Edwardian traveler, “The Egyptians, it must be remembered, occupy a much lower grade in the scale of civilization than most of the western nations, and cupidity is one of their chief failings.” In a letter to his mother Flaubert wrote, “I’m going to Bulak to see a few [boats]. It is no slight matter . . . Most dragomans are appalling scoundrels.”
The dahabieh of the mid-nineteenth century was similar in design to the boats used by the pharaohs, a long, many-compartmented sort of floating house that could be either rowed or sailed. The largest of them reached one hundred feet in length and twenty feet in width. At their prows they had places for a dozen oarsmen who would row, galley fashion, when the wind failed. The boats were flat bottomed and shallow, had two masts and a lateen-rigged mainsail so enormous in relation to the size of the boat that the slightest puff of wind gave it sufficient force to carry the boat against the Nile’s current. The cabins were built on the deck toward the stern, and above them was a higher deck accessed by a short flight of steps. Passengers only were allowed on the upper deck, while the lower deck was reserved for the usually flea-ridden crew. The kitchen, a shed equipped with a charcoal stove, was situated toward the front of the boat, away from the passengers’ cabins.
Amelia Edwards, who traveled up the Nile in 1872 and wrote a staggeringly detailed account of her trip, including every hieroglyph she studied, every snack she ate, and the number of steps at the Temple of Horus at Edfu (she counted 224), offers in her book, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, probably the most thorough description extant of a Nile dahabieh:
A dahabeeyah [has] four sleeping cabins, two on each side. These cabins measured about eight feet in length by four and a half in width, and contained a bed, a chair, a fixed washing-stand, a looking glass against the wall, a shelf, a row of hooks, and under each bed two large drawers for clothes. At the end of this little passage another door opened into the dining saloon — a spacious, cheerful room, some twenty-three or twenty-four feet long [bigger than the dining room in my house!], situated in the widest part of the boat, and lightened by four windows on each side and a skylight. The paneled walls and ceiling were painted in white picked out with gold; a cushioned divan covered with a smart woollen reps ran along each side; and a gay Brussels carpet adorned the floor. The dining table stood in the centre; and there was ample space for a piano, two little bookcases, and several chairs. The window-curtains and portieres were of the same reps as the divan, the prevailing colours being scarlet and orange. Add a couple of mirrors in gilt frames; a vase of flowers on the table . . . plenty of books, the gentlemen’s guns and sticks in one corner; and the hats of all the party hanging in the spaces between the windows; and it will be easy to realise the homely, habitable look of our general sitting room . . . Another door and passage opening from the upper end of the saloon and led to three more sleeping rooms, two of which were single and one double; a bath room; a tiny black staircase leading to the upper deck; and the stern cabin saloon.
Though not all dahabiehs were luxurious enough to accommodate a grand piano, the general design of these boats was fundamentally the same, and even the most modest of them offered surprising comfort. Floating down the Nile in a dahabieh was a bit like floating down the Nile in a brownstone.
After sufficient inspections, the travelers would select a dahabieh, have it submerged in the Nile for twenty-four hours in order to drown the fleas and rats that had taken up residence during its idle period at dock, and finally they would board the ship and make themselves at home. Nightingale and her friends rented a particularly elegant dahabieh for thirty pounds a month, a very high price for the time. “We shall have been on board a week tomorrow,” Nightingale wrote to her mother, “and are now thoroughly settled in our house: all our gimlets up, our divans out, our Turkish slippers provided, and everything on its own hook, as befits such close quarters.” Of his slightly more modest ship Flaubert wrote, “It is painted blue; its rais is called Ibrahim. There is a crew of nine. For quarters we have a room with two little divans facing each other, a large room with two beds, on one side of which there is a kind of alcove for our baggage and on the other an English-type head; and finally a third room where Sassetti [his Italian servant] will sleep and which will serve as a store-room as well.”
Going by the popular contemporary handbooks for travelers in Egypt, the storerooms of those ships held saddles, bridles, umbrellas, telescopes, measuring tapes, flags, rifles, pistols, mosquito nets, charcoal, candles, mustard, easels, art supplies, twine, bedsheets, tents, thermometers, barometers, musical instruments for the crew, and a great deal of food and alcohol. Supplies recommended by one Baedeker’s handbook included “1 doz tins condensed milk, 1 tin tapioca, 2 tins julienne soup, 13 lbs of bacon, 15 lbs of ham, 2 tins of ox tongue, 3 tins preserved meat, 1 bottle worcestire sauce, sardines, 60 bottles of medoc, 36 medoc superieur, 35 bottles of res voslauer, 25 bottles of white voslauer, 20 bottles of beer, 1 bottle of brandy and cognac each, 1 bottle of whiskey, one bottle vermouth, a little champagne for festivals and the reception of guests.”
In addition, the early Nile tourists dragged a shockingly hefty supply of books with them. (Napoleon and his men had carried on their trip a library of five hundred volumes.) Murray’s Handbook of 1858 recommended:
vols. ii and iii of Larcher’s Herodotys; Champollion’s Phonetic Systems of Hieroglyphics, Letters, and Grammar; Pococke; Denon; Hamilton’s Aegyptaica; Savary’s Letters; Clot Bey’s Apercu Generale de L’Egypte; Gliddon on the Hieroglyphics; Mengin’s Egypte Sous Mohammed Aly; Robinson’s Palestine and Mount Sinai; Stanley’s Sinai; Lane’s Modern and Wilkinson’s Ancient Egyptians; Hoskin’s Ethiopia; Col-o-nel Leake’s, Lapie’s, or Wilkinson’s Map of Egypt; Captain Smyth’s Alexandria; Wilkinson’s Survey of Thebes; Costa’s Delta; and Parke and Scoles’s Nubia; to which may be added Burckhardt, Laborde’s Petra, Ptolemy, Strabo, and Pliny.
A dahabieh provided great comfort for its passengers, but the crew — usually ten or twelve Egyptian sailors, the rais (captain), a cook, and dragoman — were generally expected to sleep outside on the lower deck with no pillows or mattresses and nothing for warmth but one rough blanket apiece. While the passengers enjoyed sumptuous dinners prepared by the cook, the crew ate little more than gruel or bread. It was written into the rental contract that the crew should be allowed to stop at certain towns along the way in order to use the ovens of the local bakers so they could store up a load of fresh bread for themselves.
Once the dahabieh was registered with the authorities in Cairo and fitted with an identifying pennant, the travelers were free to set sail out of Cairo and up the river.
It never surprised me that Gustave Flaubert might want to float down the Nile. He was a man who deeply disliked his own country, had a longtime love of things oriental, was interested in the baser aspects of humanity, and was capable of writing in a letter to a friend that women generally confused their cunts (his word) for their brains and thought the moon existed solely to light their boudoirs. Florence Nightingale, however, was another case.
As a child (and, I am embarrassed to say, well into my teen years), I thought Florence Nightingale was a fictional character — the “Lady with the Lamp” of idealized storybook illustrations, afloat on the same cumulonimbus of wonder that carried Snow White and Cinderella. She was a mythological emissary from heaven, pure and incorruptible, ageless, parentless, and glowingly good. Then I got a little older and Florence Nightingale got real, transmogrifying into a historical figure; yet still she was selfless and holy and good, and therefore my attention tended to shut down at the mention of her. I had the impression, founded on precious little, that Nightingale was unworldly and dull, circulating within her tiresome purview of bedsores, disinfectant, wound dressings, and germ theory. In adolescence I preferred Amelia Earhart in her flaming plane, or Harriet Tubman who had dug her way out of slavery with a soupspoon (not, of course, quite what Harriet Tubman had done, but such was the vague and slightly fantastical quality of my perceptions), or the more modern Angela Davis who picketed a TV station with a gun hidden in her huge hair, or Annie Oakley who could shoot a bullet through the eye of a needle — I preferred them all to the blameless Nightingale in her pale green sickroom.
Naturally, then, I was stumped when, several days before I left for Aswan, I found in a Cairo shop a book titled Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile, 1849–1850 by Florence Nightingale. It struck me as uniquely unlikely, like finding a book called Mother Teresa’s Personal Guide to the Mississippi, or Notes on the Volga by Grandma Moses. I thought it had to be some other Florence Nightingale. It wasn’t. I opened the book to its dead center and read:
We saw the whole crew start up, fling down their oars, and begin to fight violently . . . howling and screaming and kicking, the boat of course drifting down upon the rocks meantime . . . Out rushed Paolo with an ebony club, — which I had bought from the Berber savages coming up the cataract . . . [and] fell upon the mass of struggling heads, and began to belabour them with all his might, so that I thought he would have broken in their skulls. He was alone against the eleven, but he did not seem to think of it, though he was generally a great coward.
and then, of a group of Ethiopian slave women:
They were sitting round their fire for the night; they came out to beg of us, and, in the dusk, looked like skulls, with their white teeth; they set up a horrid laugh when we gave them nothing: our guide poked one with his stick, when it was sitting down, as if it were a frog.
I bought the book, and as I read it a remarkable person emerged from the traducing haze her legend had engulfed her in. I was struck by the force of her writing, by its bristling intelligence. Nightingale’s powers of description rivaled many of the known writers of her day, including Flaubert’s. Written chiefly to family and friends in En-gland, the letters revealed a curious, keenly observant mind and an enormous range of knowledge. Nightingale was already well traveled before she went to Egypt, spoke several languages, and was astonishingly well read. She was adventuresome and passionate. She had, above all, a wicked sense of humor, which surprised and delighted me. Her characterizations were sharp, subtle, often comical. Her interests were many and various: artistic, philosophical, spiritual, and temporal.
In Egypt, Nightingale disguised herself in an Egyptian woman’s robes and veil and visited a mosque, where she was jeered at by Egyptian men, an event that prompted her to write, “I felt like the hypocrite in Dante’s hell, with the leaden cap on.” She went to the catacombs in Alexandria “which, after those of Rome, are rather a farce.” She shot the rapids of the Aswan cataracts in her dahabieh, visited a harem with unabashed enthusiasm, examined nearly every tomb and temple in Egypt with the dedication and understanding of a true Egyptologist, dined with German counts and Belgian scholars, and rode a donkey across the desert. “The donkey is very small and you are very large . . . You sit upon his tail; and as he holds his head very high, you look like a balance to his head . . . You set off full gallop, running over every thing in your way, and the merry little thing runs and runs and runs like a velocipede.”
Far from being an insufferable saint, Nightingale was a woman of deep opinions, discriminating, decisive, and sometimes unkind. Her observations could be harsh but were clear eyed and unsentimental. She was also democratic. If she was capable of writing this of the Arabs: “an intermediate race, they appeared to me, between the monkey and the man, the ugliest, most slavish countenances,” or this of the Nubians in Aswan: “Troops of South Sea Savages received us . . . not shiny as savages ought to be, but their black skins all dim and grimed with sand, like dusty tables, their dirty hair plaited in rats’ tails, close to their heads, naked, all but a head veil. I heard some stones fall into the river, and hoped it was they, and that that debased life had finished,” she was also capable of criticizing her own beloved Anglican Church, after having visited one in the Coptic quarter in Cairo: “One’s feelings towards the Anglican Church are very different when she is hiding in corners, struggling with the devil . . . to when she is stretched out in fatness, with the millstone of the richest hierarchy in the world about her neck, and the lust of the world tempting people to make her a profession and not a vocation.”
Florence Nightingale was so interesting, daring, and intelligent that reading her letters I had begun to feel, by comparison, frivolous, meek, and not terribly bright.
MY SECOND NIGHT IN ASWAN, I sat on a pier in the dark, staring at a small rowboat docked between two huge feluccas, feeling anxious and foolish and depressed that I still had no boat. The river and the town seemed to vibrate with joyful shouts and laughter and winking yellow lights. Bats skittered around the shadowy trees. Herons muttered and screeched in the reeds. Cruise boats lumbered into Aswan like drifting carnival rides, with their thousand lights blazing, their horns bellowing, and their names — Seti First, Papyrus, Nile Sovereign, Seti Two — emblazoned on their chins. The ships docked six deep along the ghats of the east bank, while above them loud music blew out of the shorefront restaurants — the mannish voice of Oum Kalsoum throbbing in competition with Michael Jackson and Elton John. At night the Nile looked dense and black and slippery as motor oil; three feet from me, big silvery creatures that could only have been fish jumped spookily in the water with a lot of plump splashing. They jumped and disappeared so quickly it was hard to see exactly what they were.
As I stood on the pier fretting and musing and muttering to myself, a young man in a dark gallabiya came up behind me and said, “Something you need?”
I was tired and didn’t want to answer him, didn’t want to go through the list of questions, the ridicule and banter and haggling over money. It was wearing, like being poked in the face all day with a sharp stick. How many men had I spoken to about boats? Fifteen? Twenty? All of them had rebuffed me. And I was growing weary of having to be secretive and evasive, of telling people that I wanted the boat not for myself (wanting it for myself was too outlandish) but as a surprise for a nonexistent husband who was perpetually asleep in the hotel. It was ten o’clock but the sun’s heat stored in the granite boulders along the riverbank still wafted up into the night air in suffocating gusts. My damp blouse clung to my back.
I explained to the man that the boat I was looking at was not unlike the boat I had at home, that I liked rowing and hoped to try rowing around Elephantine Island while I was here in Aswan. I stared at the stars, bracing myself for the verbal pokes and slaps, but the man remained silent. Without asking how old I was, where I was from, or whether I was married, he said softly, “This is my boat. You can using it any times. It is always in docked across in front of Oberoi Hotel. You don’t need ask. Just take if it is there.”
The pier was illuminated only by the dim lights of restaurants on the bank above it, and it was difficult to make out the man’s features in the moonless night. His words carried trust and respect and were surprisingly devoid of the usual distancing banter, the jokes, the sexual innuendo, or mention of money. He spoke gently and slowly, and I sensed from the tone of his voice that it wasn’t a ruse, that his offer was sincere. He was a felucca captain, he said, and didn’t use the rowboat much. His name was Amr Khaled. He didn’t ask me my name or whether I knew how to row. He expressed neither doubt nor prying curiosity. That made him an odd Egyptian, and interesting. I thanked him for his offer, said I would take him up on it. Excusing himself, he left me there. This was odd too. No Egyptian man had ever left me standing anywhere; usually they hung around as long as they could, waiting to see what would happen next with me. In Egypt I was forever in the position of having to bring the conversation to an end and make my retreat.
With my spirits buoyed, I went into one of the many riverside restaurants along the corniche to get something to eat, and realized too late that I had blundered through the back door of the restaurant and landed in the kitchen, where two elderly men in white turbans sat at a table dicing a pile of vegetables. A third man was bent over a stove beneath a mantilla of billowing steam, stirring two pots at once. The kitchen was low ceilinged and hot, and under the fluorescent lights I saw that it was in a state of great disorder. Boxes and sacks of produce lay willy-nilly across the cement floor: a glittering crate of small fish the size and color of pigs’ ears; a wooden box that resembled a birdcage full of tiny strawberries; baskets of damp greens, sacks of onions; a papery pile of garlic; tubs of olives. Wilted lettuce leaves had been crushed and mashed underfoot, and the place smelled not unpleasantly of vinegar and boiling oil. A small black-and-white television parked atop a refrigerator showed a tiny soccer game going on in Morocco. An electric fan atop a crate of beer breathed slack gouts of damp air in the direction of the stove.
The two elderly chefs stood up at the sight of me. With the retrograde gallantry characteristic of Egyptians who had learned their English in the days of King Farouk, the taller one bowed and said, “Good evening, Miss Madame. Welcome in Aswan. Very it’s plea-sure. Where you are come from?”
I told him I was from the United States of America.
“Beel Cleelington!” he said.
With a paring knife in one hand and a muddy tomato in the other, the shorter man stepped forward and added wryly, “Monica!”
Neither of them looked anything like a chef. They looked like two dandy charlatans in a French farce. They wore billowing trousers that narrowed at the ankles, large headdresses, and silken vests. They had long, well-groomed mustaches. For want of anything better to say I said, “Do you like Monica?”
They let out a ripping shriek of laughter that plainly meant, Are you nuts?
“Monica mumtaz!” they cried. Monica is great!
The man at the stove, who seemed to understand little English, turned from his pots in recognition of the word Monica and grinned and nodded and raised his ladle in salacious assent. All three men were hot faced and cheerful. The short one asked, “Cleelington good president?”
I said not a bad president, not a great husband.
“Heelary,” the tall one said darkly.
My face was blanketed with sweat and dirt after a day of wandering up and down the river, and having stumbled in out of the darkness I felt wan and naked under the bald lights. The shorter man signaled for my attention with an important wave of his knife. Speaking carefully and with authority he said, “Beel Cleelington is likes young girl. She is beautiful. Older man always is likes the young girl. Since ancient time. Cleelington don’t not do nutting new.”
Undeniable truths.
The taller man smoothed his great mustache and said, “Heelary got boyfriend too.”
They all smiled with delight, their coconut-colored faces gleaming with perspiration. My sudden appearance had presented them with an excellent opportunity for laughter, jokes, and flirting, the favorite Egyptian preoccupations.
I said good-bye to the men and went around to the proper end of the restaurant, which was actually a floating barge with a roof of palm fronds. From the restaurant deck, I could see cruise ship deckhands in blue sailor blouses, carrying heavy boxes and bundles of supplies on the napes of their necks, bounding barefoot up the gangplanks.
I sat at a table, and a fat, very tall waiter brought me a menu that included, among other items: lamp meat, grilld pigeon, balady salad, stuffed pigeon, roast lamp, snaks. Every dinner no matter only six bound total. The waiter stood at my side with his notebook poised, reading the menu over my shoulder, as though he had never seen it before. He wore a maroon dress shirt and a skinny black necktie fixed in a Windsor knot. Before I had a chance to order my meal, he informed me that he had been married and divorced twice. I offered my condolences. He giggled nervously. He had the merry eyes and plump, slightly rueful face of Jackie Gleason. As if to quell any doubts about his marital expertise he said quickly, “Both divorces was not because of a problem with me.”
I ordered a beer, he went to get it, and on his return he explained, without solicitation from me, why his job was difficult. “The Koran says you cannot involve yourself with the alcohol. You cannot even serve it to other people. But I have to go to the money. The foreign people drink the alcohol and have the money, so I serve it to keep my job.”
I asked him what he thought about people who drank alcohol. Diplomatically he said, “Madame, it is different for the foreigners.” I told him that I had noticed a lot of Egyptian men in Aswan drinking beer. “They are not Egyptian,” he corrected me. “They are Nubian.” And he glanced behind him at a lone middle-aged man sitting at a table in the shadows, drinking beer and smoking. The man sat slightly slumped, his head hanging low, his watery eyes blinking and muddled, his cigarette a damp stump between his fingers. He looked miserable and distracted and swamped with worry.
“Nubians drink?” I said.
With neither disdain nor admiration the waiter answered, “Nubian peoples always like be happy and singing and drunk. I am not Nubian.”
Later that night, I found it too hot to sleep, decided to wander around the Aswan souq, the crowded shopping district, and fell into a conversation with a young man working in a shop full of cheap wooden carvings, Nubian drums, hammered brass plates, glass perfume bottles, garishly painted papyrus, and Formstone imitations of pharaonic sculptures: Akhenaten, Anubis, Nefertiti, the owl, the cat, the ram, Toth, Seth, Mut, Nut, Tut, Ra, and the rest of them. The same dusty clutter being sold by the truckload to tourists all over Egypt.
The young man wore not a gallabiya but the shiny rayon trousers and polyester dress shirt that seemed to be the uniform of many young Egyptian shopkeepers, an approximate stab at modern Western style. We sat on the doorstep of the shop and watched a man selling perfectly spherical watermelons off the back of a wagon in the busy square. Predictably, the conversation turned to sex. The young man told me he had had an affair with an English woman whom he loved. He had had sex with her, though they were not married. “I was twenty-two the first time I made sex,” he said. After a long pause he added, “Now I am twenty-eight.”
Foreign women who dressed in scanty clothing he did not respect. “I would try to touch them and make sex with them,” he said. “When I see foreign men and women friends greeting each other with huggings and kissings here in the market, I think they are like animals making sex in the street. Egyptian people would never do this.”
I pointed out that when different cultures met, misunderstanding and suspicion were bound to arise.
He stared stonily at me, as if he had suddenly lost his hearing. Since he seemed to have set the parameters for a certain level of frankness in this conversation, I pressed on, explaining that some people in the West had similarly disdainful views of Arabs, believing that Arabs were backward, fanatical, and rapacious.
The shopkeeper’s face went dead, and in a voice gone childlike with disbelief he demanded, “Because of why?!”
Knowing it was risky, I repeated for him something a disgusted Australian woman had said to me that morning: They are pigs! They throw their garbage in the river! They brutalize their animals and defecate in the street! They treat their women like beasts. They won’t eat pork because they think it unclean, and yet they will sit in the middle of a stinking rubbish pile with their children!
The man looked shocked, as though I had reached over and slapped him square across his plump cheek. Confusion brewed behind his face. He seemed to be waiting for the voice of outrage to catch up with him. Presently it did. “But our way is the right way! It is in the Koran!”
And he began to speak at great length in a humorless, resentful, persecuted tone. He spoke of holiness, law, right actions, the Prophet, honor, and God. As he talked, I found myself tugging the sleeves of my blouse lower over my wrists. He told me that there was prostitution in Egypt but that if you visited a prostitute you would gain a bad reputation. If his sister had sex with a man before she was married, he said, he would kill her. I asked him if he was serious. He was completely serious; he would not hesitate to take his sister’s life. I asked why. “Because she has no future and has shamed my family’s name.” When I ventured that this seemed extreme, illogical, and not terribly humane, he talked on, as though he hadn’t heard me. “If your wife is not a virgin and you find out, you can kill her. For your pride.”
“So you kill her, get arrested, go to jail, and then your life is over too.”
“I don’t care. No one would blame me.”
“But you were willing to take such a risk with the English woman you loved and were not married to.”
He gave me a look that said, You fool! “She was foreign!”
“She was a woman.”
“It is not the same for her. Her family wouldn’t care.”
“If a woman’s virtue is so important in your eyes, why would you not respect that same virtue in any woman you loved, no matter where she’s from? Don’t you care?”
I had begun to sound like an overearnest youth counselor futilely laboring in a reform school. I wanted very much to get out of this conversation.
The shopkeeper squirmed on the stoop, clucked at my stupidity, and looked around the market with impatience. He spat into the dust in front of the shop. He pouted and sulked. He had no answer. I had offended him. I looked into the square, wondering what to do next. Nearby a barefoot boy with huge hands, a brass pinkie ring, and red polish on his nails was wrestling with the puffy snout of a hobbled camel twice his height. The boy pried open the camel’s jaws, and with the sweeping gesture of a man throwing water on a fire he sloshed a jug of water down its throat. The camel smacked its bewhiskered lips and did a little tap dance of protest on the broken pavement.
The young man turned toward me again, inspired with a new idea. “Some foreign women are evil!”
“Evil?”
He glared at me. “They show their flesh to tempt us on purpose, even during Ramadan.”
I was preparing to tell him that some foreign women didn’t understand the importance of covering their bodies while they were in Egypt, and then I thought, Why explain? It seemed hopeless in the face of this universal age-old contradiction: women were calculating temptresses whose sexuality needed to be stifled at any cost, and yet they were the object of constant speculation, interest, and discussion. They alone were to be blamed for the thoughts and desires and irresponsible behavior they provoked in men.
Encouraged by my silence, the shopkeeper posited some hypothetical questions: If my husband had sex with another woman and I found out, what would I do? If my husband had taken a drink and in a weak moment had sex with another woman, what would I do? If my husband had an affair with a woman, and I didn’t know about it, but he confessed it to me, what would I do? If my husband had been seduced by a wicked woman whose fault it was, and I found out, what would I do? He had devised so many intricate and specific moral dilemmas that it was as if, after studying the subject in great depth, he was now about to prepare a Koranic treatise on it. On and on he hypothesized about infidelity and adultery, while I stared, beleaguered, at the camel’s spindly legs.
Finally, when the shopkeeper ran out of depressing variations on marital transgression, I asked him why he was asking me these things. His answer was “Heelary Cleelington is a good wife.” I asked him if he would question an Egyptian woman in this manner. He simply laughed in a way that meant, Of course not!, and it dawned on me that in the Islamic scheme of things, the breezy eagerness of so many Egyptian men to talk about sexual matters with me and other foreign women could have been interpreted as a supreme insult.
On my way back to my hotel that night I came upon a very old woman sitting barefoot on a street corner selling small cones of paper filled with peanuts. She was tiny in her black veil and gown. Her bare ankles against the concrete of the sidewalk were no thicker than the handle of a hockey stick. She moved slowly, arranging and rearranging the cones in her wicker basket with delicate care and attention. Her head looked heavy on her thin neck and slight shoulders. She wore a big pair of horn-rimmed, government-issue eyeglasses that in their weightiness resembled a chemist’s protective goggles. The street was dark and dirty. I gave the woman two pounds for two cones of peanuts. Nearly blind, she lifted the paper money to within an inch of the enormous lenses of her eyeglasses and scanned it until an expression of guarded satisfaction appeared on her face, then she adjusted the glasses with both hands — money clutched in one of them — and nodded at me without a smile and went back to adjusting the cones.
In my hotel room, I ate the roasted peanuts and realized that the old woman had fashioned the paper cones from lined notepaper covered with a grandchild’s penciled math homework — 3 × 11 =3, 3 #215; 12 = — an act of recycling thrift that I found inexplicably moving.