THREE DAYS LATER, when Amr, Madeleine, and I arrived at the police dock at the southern edge of Aswan, the presiding officer was standing barefoot in the bushes at the edge of the dock, chewing on a roasted chicken leg. Plump and mustachioed, shirt untucked, hair hanging in his eyes, he looked like a plumber relaxing at a Saturday barbecue. Egyptian officialdom, in theory so forbidding, religious, and stern, often materialized in such lax and unbuckled guises as this.
We had arrived in Amr’s felucca, towing his little rowboat behind us, hoping to pass inspection and begin our trip to Edfu. It was the twenty-third of April. Amr showed the officer the necessary papers: photocopies of Madeleine’s and my passports and of his absent British friend’s passport, which Amr had used many times to create the feeble illusion of a third passenger.
The officer lovingly licked his greasy fingers one by one, wiped them on his shirtfront, ruffled Amr’s papers, and made a wisecrack about the tiny rowboat we were pulling behind us. He radiated jolly irresponsibility. He could see clearly that there were only two foreign passengers on this boat, and yet he returned the documents to Amr and gave us a prompting wave off with his chicken leg, saying, No problem!
Only blindness in both eyes could have made this officer more amenable. This was a very auspicious start.
We moved away from the police dock, while our officer munched and grinned and tamped at his mustache with a look on his face that seemed to say, God knows if we’ll ever see them again!
As the felucca glided heavily along the riverbank, I asked Amr why so many Egyptian men wore mustaches. He said, “Because they can. It proves they are a man,” and as soon as he said it he seemed to see how silly it was, and his shoulders shook with Nervous laughter as he raised the mainsail.
Amr told us that no felucca in recent times had ever left Aswan towing a rowboat behind it. In fact, word had already got out among the Aswan felucca captains about this unorthodox thing Amr was doing, and the docks were mildly aflutter about it. “Already we are famous,” Amr said. Despite his unwaveringly calm and quiet manner, I could see that he was not only excited but very happy. He had told the officer he was bringing the rowboat to Edfu to have it repaired, but as soon as we were out of sight of the police dock he lowered the sails, and I climbed into the rowboat and began to row downriver.
I was Nervous and dizzy with excitement that morning as I waved good-bye to Amr and Madeleine. Wa’il, the eighteen-year-old Nubian boy Amr had brought with him to assist with the sailing, stood on the deck watching me with teenage skepticism. I had given Amr money to buy us all enough food and water for four days, and he had stowed the food in the cabin of the boat, along with our luggage. We would cook and sleep on the boat. It wasn’t the trip I had envisioned, not the conditions I had hoped for, but I consoled myself with the thought that although I’d be trailed by this trio of chaperones, I was still going to row a boat down the Nile. This was only the beginning. It would have to do for now. Downriver I would find my own boat; I was certain.
The early morning sun was gathering strength, already simmering in the pale blue sky. I had put some fruit and several bottles of water under the deck boards of the rowboat. Though I would have preferred to row all day alone, I agreed to meet Amr several hours later for lunch. Amr was Nervous saying good-bye to me; I could see that he felt responsible. He stood on the deck of his boat with his hands on his hips and a faint frown on his face, as if he expected me and the boat to found-er and sink before his eyes.
I began to row, and in my Nervous-ness I rowed too hard, and within minutes I saw that I was already half a mile ahead of the felucca. There was no wind that day, and while I sped forward on my two lumpy oars, the felucca languished, moving no faster than the river’s gentle current. I slowed my pace so that Amr could keep me in sight, although what I wanted was to forge ahead and be alone. I had the strange sense that I was towing the felucca behind me, that it was weighing me down.
The short buildings of Aswan had all but disappeared, and the cliffs and dunes of the west bank were transformed into open farmland — banana fields and shady palm groves and long flat vegetable patches of a brilliant green. The banana trees were short, not much higher than beach umbrellas, with cabbagey leaves that glinted like glass in the sunlight. Skinny, bare-chested farmers hacking at the earth beyond the shore saw me passing, and, dropping their hoes in astonishment, they ran to the edge of the river and shouted desperately, “Halloo. Come here!” I rowed on.
The river had a grass-green hue at this hour and felt supple and comfortable beneath me, like a down mattress. On the track that ran along the rubbly east bank at the foot of some sandy reddish cliffs, the train to Cairo clattered and whistled, stirring up a twister of dust behind it. Herons gargled in the bushes overhanging the river. Near noon the call to prayer began to emanate from beyond great stands of banana trees all along the banks; from this distance it was a melancholy lowing sound, warped occasionally by the idle wind. I stayed close to the west bank and rowed steadily while the sun crept higher in the sky. The current seemed to move faster the farther I got from Aswan. I was breathless with expectation, happiness, and anxiety.
A felucca with the 7UP logo on its sail headed upriver along the west bank. No one aboard seemed to notice me. A pump station appeared, and as I passed by it two ragged men lying on its dock sat up and stared at me, and then at each other, and then back at me. They were motionless with surprise. Their turbans were enormous, like stark white pumpkins, and their bony brown knees were like twisted knots of wood. I waved, which seemed to startle them. They both disappeared into the pump house.
A few other boats appeared on the far shore, most of them feluccas. I could see Amr’s sail tacking endlessly back and forth from one side of the river to the other, still at a distance of perhaps half a mile, laboring vainly against the lame breeze. The white of his sail altered slightly each time he tacked, the sun brushing its canvas from a fresh angle. No matter how slowly I rowed, Amr’s zigzagging sail grew smaller and smaller in the distance, and finally I gave up trying to let him protect me with his presence and began rowing at my own natural pace.
Down the middle of the river I rowed, feeling that I was not floating but flying. No one shouted at me because there was no one there to see me. The river was delightfully empty. This was not like any other body of water I had rowed on. I knew how far this water had traveled through time and space, and what in the world it had inspired. Because the Nile idly, mindlessly slid down the incline of the African continent, human beings had been able to develop civilization; sitting on top of this water was like being re-united with my origins. Finally alone on the river, I felt I had come face to face with a famous ghost. I half expected the water to speak or a naked arm to reach up out of the water to grab my oar. I was so Nervous that first morning of rowing that I noticed very little of what was around me. Every few minutes I looked over my shoulder to see what I was approaching downriver. Occasionally a small island of phragmites grass appeared, a slight bend in the river, the minaret of a mosque. Behind me, Amr’s sail had disappeared entirely. I rowed this way, in an overexcited trance, for approximately an hour before I began to feel guilty about straying out of Amr’s sight.
Soon I veered toward the west bank and stopped, pulled the rowboat up onto the sandy riverbank, and sat down under a stand of palm trees in a deeply shaded spot that seemed safely secluded. I was hyperconscious of the possibility that my solitary presence on this beach so far beyond the outskirts of Aswan might be considered — for reasons I might not even be aware of — an affront or a spectacle or an annoyance to any farmer passing by. I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible by sitting slightly behind a stand of phragmites grass, with my back against the trunk of a palm tree. I sat in the heat in a kind of daze of wonder, staring at the shimmering surface of the river.
Not a minute passed before my solitude was interrupted by a tall, gaunt, spectacularly grinning young man who suddenly appeared beside me on the beach — where he had come from is impossible to say. He seemed to have materialized out of the bushes, as Egyptian men often seemed to do. Just when you think you might finally be alone in Egypt, a lurking gallabiya appears amid the phragmites, a white flash of teeth, a blinking golden brown eye. The man stared curiously at me, swaying in his stark white gown, crushing an aloe plant under his bare feet. His grin was enormous. In his hand was a pair of rubber flip-flops. “Bititkallim Araby?” he said.
I said, “Shwaya,” though in truth my Arabic was far less than a little.
He asked my name, where I was from. When I asked him if he spoke English, he gasped, wrung his hands, slapped his forehead, hopped on the aloe plant, shook his shaggy head, and giggled — an imaginative, energetic demonstration that English was wholly impossible for him.
I had enough Arabic phrases to last me about three minutes of vacuous small talk. We staggered along this way, bleating at each other, for ten, repeating much of what we said three or four times and making extreme gestures with our hands. His name, he said, was Hussein. His speech was so slow and his grin so credulous and inane that I began to wonder if perhaps he was a touch simpleminded. He inspected my boat as if he had never seen a boat before, nodding and gasping in surprised curiosity and rubbing his hands together. He asked me where I had come from, and when I said, “Aswan,” he didn’t believe me, though at this point it could not have been even four miles away. He wanted to know was I alone. I said I was not. My friends were behind me and would soon be arriving. He pointed at the binoculars in my boat. I got up and handed them to him. He raised them to his face and peered through the wrong end of them. I turned them the right way around. When he saw what an amazing thing the binoculars could do he nearly dropped them, as though they had suddenly burst into flames. Crouching on his haunches with his rubber sandals in his lap, he turned the binoculars over and over in his hands, saying, “Ya saalam!” and making a great show of his wonder at this magical instrument. He lifted the binoculars gingerly to his face again and slowly, carefully, fixed his sights on a felucca that was just rounding a bend upriver. His mouth hung open in wonder as he stared, his damp lips and enormous white teeth gleaming beneath the huge eyes of the binoculars. His bushy Afro, a hairstyle rare in Egypt, had a bowl-like dent in it at the back of his head and was studded with bits of dried leaves and straw, as though he had pitched backward into a field.
This wasn’t the first time I had met an Egyptian who had never seen binoculars before. In Luxor, at the peak of the hill above the Temple of Hatshepsut and the Valley of the Kings, I had one day come upon a lone elderly man resting on his haunches in the shadow of a rock. He put my binoculars to his eyes and, on spotting a friend who stood magnified at the bottom of the hill, he said in conversational voice, “Ya, Ragab!” and stretched his arm out and groped at the air in an attempt to touch the friend who appeared so miraculously close.
I looked at Hussein, trying to determine who or what he was and thinking that he seemed gormless enough to be harmless as well, when all at once he announced in shockingly perfect English, “Well, well. Lookie here. Here comes my boat.”
The English he had spoken was not only excellent but colored with an intentionally comical southern slant, the menacing drawl of a bandit. “You do speak English,” I said.
“Of course,” he said. His grin was slippery and sly.
“And you’ve looked through binoculars many times,” I said.
“Of course.” He handed the binoculars back to me with a dismissive toss, then threw one of his flip-flops up behind his back and caught it as it came down in front of him, a jazzy, vaudevillian gesture that he had obviously practiced many times. His laugh was self-congratulatory and aggressive. In an instant his entire affect had been transformed. The gawking, dim-witted rustic I had thought I was looking at had suddenly been replaced by a sardonic, sophisticated wise guy. “I’m a felucca captain,” he said. “That’s my boat coming to get me.”
“So, you tricked me, Hussein.”
“Ha-ha!” he said, relishing the trick.
“Why did you trick me?”
“For a joke!”
“Egyptian men like to joke.”
“You don’t like it?”
I shrugged. “Some joking is fun, and some joking can be a little hostile.”
“Jimi Hendrix,” he said.
“Yes, you look like him.” He did, remarkably; he had the big teeth and the big mouth, the colubrine eyes and lanky legs, and his rumpled Afro had popped straight out of the 1960s. He launched into “Voodoo Child,” again in perfect English, swaying his hips and hitching his shoulders with excellent rhythm, his long hands fanning the air in an elegant and humorous hula motion. “Well I stand up next to a mountain . . .” As he sang, stark scraps of morning sunlight sifted through the palm fronds above us and danced across his gown like light projected through the ragged ends of a film reel. His voice was beautiful, and I thought of the fat waiter in the floating restaurant saying, “Nubian love to sing!”
Hussein was an actor, worldly and ironic, and he had a chip on his shoulder. He had tricked me, I knew, as much in bitterness as in fun. More than one felucca captain in Egypt resented the foreigners they served. It was understandable: they earned a marginal living facilitating the leisure of privileged people who came to bask in the exotic scenery and mysterious history of Aswan; people who stayed in five-star hotels that the languishing locals in their dusty flip-flops were not allowed to enter; people, pale and plump, who had enough money to bask in a false superiority yet haggled ferociously over pennies with their malnourished hosts; people whose opinions and desires meant more to the local authorities than those of any tax-paying Egyptian citizen. Fear of the unfamiliar made the foreigner wary and — when hounded and harassed for money, as too often in Egypt they were — rude. Their rudeness in turn made the captains defensive. The foreign tourist (and there was, really, almost no other kind of foreigner here now) was a crucial economic engine but for some local captains a source of irritation. Until 1952 and the victory of General Nasser’s revolution, Egypt had for two thousand years been ruled by foreigners. Foreign rule was finished, but the foreigner still enjoyed the benefits of a sort of economic colonialism. Flaubert’s “It is unbelievable how well we are treated here — it’s as though we were princes” was simply another way of saying, We can get away with anything here! The condescension Hussein showed me was likely an echo of the condescension he received.
Hussein’s felucca approached the shore carrying another Nubian captain and four white passengers. Not far behind them I saw Amr’s sail rounding the bend. I climbed into the rowboat and began to row downriver.
“Hey, wait a minute, lady,” Hussein said. “You can meet my pals.”
I wasn’t enticed. “Maybe another time.”
Hussein tsked theatrically. “Not friendly.”
“Maybe we’re well met,” I said.
He grinned fatuously, his chestnut-brown chin glistening with perspiration, and after a blinking pause he said in that stagey panhandle accent, “Varmint.”
The word and the way he pronounced it surprised and impressed me. It wasn’t clear whether he meant it as an epithet or as a random demonstration of the breadth of his English vocabulary. It struck me suddenly as funny, this big-haired barefoot Nubian in a long dress standing at the edge of the Nile and speaking like Billy the Kid. I stopped my oars, unable to resist the challenge. “Critter,” I said.
Hussein smiled. “Vermin.”
That was a good one too, and I laughed at the stupidity of the exchange. Hussein laughed too.
“How do you know those words, Hussein?”
“Passengers from Arkansas. I studied hard.” He climbed onto the deck of the felucca and began to sing and dance again, and this time the dance really was a silly taunt. I rowed away feeling duped and foolish for having been drawn into Hussein’s game. He had played the guileless hayseed so cleverly and well that I fell for it. I had to admire his intelligence and his verve. No one executed pranks and jokes better than the Egyptian men.
At midday the brilliant sun gave the blue sky a smoky yellowish tint. When I seemed once again to be out of range of people, I changed my shirt for a lighter one, momentarily bobbing down the middle of the river in my bra. In the minutes that I lost sight of other human beings, I felt particularly elated, my whole body fluttering. As the hours passed and no disaster had reared its head at me, I began to relax, and in relaxing I seemed to regain my senses. I noticed the surface of the water, how it spun and gently swirled. I noticed the increasing heat of the sun roasting my ankles and the backs of my hands, the weight of the oars and the bubbling flop of the water as I pulled the oars through it. I saw long-legged, big-eyed birds picking their way along the shore and more birds soaring in slow, heavy flocks from one side of the river to the other. The river had narrowed slightly below Aswan. I approached a large island. From my feeble attempts to surmount the Cataract Islands, I knew that at the head of any island the river becomes flat and glassy, a faintly perceptible backwash of repelled current roiling up on itself. I knew that as you begin to head downriver past the top of the island, the current picks up speed, squeezed as it is between the mass of the island and the bank of the river. I steered myself into the rushing current, shipped the oars, and sat back for the ride. I loved the feeling of being carried so swiftly past the tall Nile grasses and short banana trees on the back of all this twisting green water that for so long had cut through Egypt’s griddle of a desert. It was breathtaking, like the sensation of jumping naked into ice-cold water.
At two o’clock I stopped, reluctantly, and waited for Amr. When the felucca finally lumbered up, drifting on the current, its slack sail sadly hanging like a bedsheet on a clothesline, Amr greeted me with a mix of anxiety, relief, and amusement. He stood on the deck and looked me up and down, searchingly, as if checking to make sure I had incurred no wounds or bruises or psychic trauma. “You has any problems, Rose?” he said, lifting me out of the rowboat and onto the felucca by the hand.
I told him I had had no problems what-ever, that so far the rowing had been easy, and we laughed about how slowly the felucca moved on a windless day. After anchoring the boat, Amr and Madeleine swam off of its stern. Madeleine, a professor at the American University in Cairo, was brave; warnings of snail-borne schistosomiasis and other dreaded Nile diseases worried her not a bit. She had been in Egypt for three years, long enough to imagine that she had developed Egyptian immunities, and imagination alone seemed to have been sufficient to keep her free from exotic ailments during her years here. I had known Madeleine for nearly fifteen years. I admired her for myriad reasons, not least of which was that she was adventurous and fearless. She had bought a car in Egypt and thought nothing of driving it across the Libyan desert all the way to the Siwa Oasis, or across the Sinai Peninsula, or, perhaps most dangerous of all, through the demented, traffic-crazed streets of her own neighborhood in Cairo.
I watched with fascination and dread and a little bit of envy as Madeleine and Amr splashed around the boat. Like most Egyptians, Amr swam in a hectic, slapping way, not fussily cupping his hands the way Madeleine did, but kicking and thrashing, as if sheer motion would keep him afloat. I was reminded of Florence Nightingale’s description of the Nubian swimmer: “They do not swim as we do, but with their shoulders and arms out of the water, beating the water with their arms.”
Amr cooked eggs and potatoes on a kerosene stove in the well of the boat, and we huddled in the shade of a canvas awning strung up over the deck and silently ate our lunch from tin plates. At this hour of the day, the heat was so intense it seemed to stop time. The bland yellow sky was like a smothering mask descending over the face of the desert. The big leaves of the banana trees glared and dangled. The long-legged birds cooled their shins in the shade. The banks of the river had become rotisseries of broiling vines and vegetation. Even the water, reflecting the sun, looked hot.
As soon as I finished my lunch, I climbed back into the rowboat and headed down the river. Amr had planned for us to spend the night at Barlooly Island, just north of Kom Ombo, and we agreed to meet there at around six o’clock. I tried to assure Amr that if he lost sight of me temporarily, he shouldn’t worry; I would never be far ahead of him. He smiled in resignation, wished me luck, and began gathering up the lunch plates. I headed off again, thinking how curious it was that while Nubian women were expected to stay in their houses, Amr seemed to see no real moral problem with my casting off down the river in a boat. If a Nubian woman took it upon herself to do the same, she would face unbearable opprobrium.
The farther I rowed from Aswan, the fewer people I saw. All day I had seen not a single woman. The river was the men’s domain but for the necessary washing of pots and clothing, which the women attended to crouched in the sandy shallows in their long black robes and veils, scrubbing furiously, chins between their knees. In all my time in Egypt, I had only once seen a woman swimming in the river. And never had I seen a woman operating a boat, large or small. But that was nothing so new, for it’s generally true that just about anywhere in the world watercraft are operated chiefly by men. On an average Saturday in any average New En-gland harbor, it’s just as rare to see a woman proceeding alone in a boat. Why that is, I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s because women don’t know that it’s fun. Perhaps it’s because they don’t know that they can.
I rowed steadily for four hours. There is something deeply soothing about rowing, the sense of freedom and isolation it creates, especially when the water is calm, as the Nile was. Any body of water is a kind of no-man’s-land. On water there is really no such thing as trespassing, and in a rowboat there are no traffic laws to speak of. Your boat is your nation; what-ever happens while you’re in it is between you and the water that carries you.
Small flocks of pelicans and terns flew low over the water, up the middle of the river, racing toward me in curiosity, then up directly over my head against the backdrop of blue. The sight of these speeding birds made the world seem open and huge. I liked the fact that in a rowboat I was constantly facing backward, surveying the landscape I was leaving behind, watching it recede, like the melancholy view from the rear door of a caboose. The landscape changed little: banana trees on the right, the pale brown hump of the desert in the distance beyond the greenery, high desert hills on the left, tattered date palms slanting over the river, tall yellow grass, yellow patches of sandy beach. And the silvery avenue of water gently twisting and turning through it. Occasionally the palm trees that had walled the river disappeared, and then I could see east and west for miles, across low farmland, all the way to the horizon. Two camels slumped along across an open plain, gliding and bobbing like sea horses straining forward underwater; a walking camel always appears to be enduring great pain and hardship with noble resignation. Smoke from sugar factories lifted gauzily into the sky. Here, approaching Kom Ombo, Egypt was nearly as flat as Holland.
And then the Ptolemaic temple at Kom Ombo appeared in the crook of a wide bend in the river, and I stopped rowing and let myself drift, watching the temple grow slowly larger as I approached it on the current. Massed and crumbling close to the edge of the river on the east bank, the pretty sandstone temple (Florence Nightingale, expert on ancient Egyptian architecture and far more discriminating than I, had slapped Kom Ombo with the label “stupid temple” and moved on to the next), with its columns and porticoes, stood gold against the hard blue of the afternoon sky. The sight of an ancient Egyptian monument from a distance is always at first slightly surreal, like a mirage or a photographic image that has strayed out of a book and superimposed itself onto real life. On seeing it, you feel at first a little flustered and confused and think not so much of the object itself but of the reproductions you’ve seen of it and of the thoughts and emotions those reproductions once inspired in your imagination, then gradually you grasp that what you’re looking at is real, an object before you that you can walk up to and touch. When Napoleon’s soldiers, who had never seen a photograph of any kind, rounded a bend and caught sight of the Temple of Karnak for the first time, they were so moved by the marvelous sight that they burst into spontaneous applause.
A year before, I had walked alone through Kom Ombo temple. The temple is devoted to Sobek, the crocodile god, and to Horus, the god with a hawk’s head. It is full of crypts and passages and gateways, shrines and the usual huge columns. While I was always impressed with the size, the age, the workmanship, and the beauty of the ancient Egyptian monuments, I was never entirely drawn in by them, never lingered over the hieroglyphic texts or the depictions of one fine-featured god fitting an ankh into some other fine-featured god’s mouth — perhaps because the history of Egypt was too vast and sweeping and epic. No matter how hard I tried to arrange the dynasties and the succession of pharaohs and gods in my head, I found it impossible to keep them straight. I never knew who was historical and who was mythological. The endless facts I read in guidebooks, the recitations I heard from guides, tended to sit in a tangled muddle in my head. More than the monuments and the kings and the gods, I was interested in the history of the simple Egyptian people, how they had lived their days. I didn’t care much about Sobek and Horus, but I liked knowing that wealthy women in ancient Egypt had been obsessed with beautifying their hair and had regularly rubbed it with all manner of curious potions — hippopotamus fat, powdered donkey’s teeth mixed with honey, the juice of juniper berries — and they decorated it with fine combs and flower blossoms. Sometimes they shaved their heads completely and wore wigs. I liked knowing that the prophet Muhammad was fond of cats and that he preferred to cut off the flowing sleeve of his robe rather than wake a cat that had fallen asleep on it. I liked knowing that when an Egyptian house cat died, the entire house-hold shaved their eyebrows in mourning; when a dog died they shaved their entire bodies; and when an important man died, his female relatives smeared their heads and faces with mud and marched around the town beating their bared breasts. I was delighted to know that in the embalming process, the ancient Egyptians pulled the dead man’s brains through his nose with an iron hook, and that at the end of a nice dinner party it was the custom for a man to wander around the room carrying a small coffin containing the image of a corpse, showing it to each guest and exhorting, “Look on this body as you drink and enjoy yourself; for you will be just like it when you are dead.”
Like many of the ancient monuments in Egypt, the temple at Kom Ombo had been protected for centuries by sand that had blown in from the desert and covered the place nearly to its roof. To me, the most memorable thing in the temple was the vivid depictions of medical instruments carved into the walls. There were scalpels and forceps, pincers and pliers, and sharp-looking items so intricate and modern in appearance they were almost frightening.
I had gone to Kom Ombo temple alone, but as I walked through its dark rooms I had met a South American couple who had hired Leila, a nineteen-year-old Egyptian woman from Cairo, to be their guide. I walked along with them as Leila explained the temple’s various architectural features. Leila was tall and hefty in jeans and running shoes and a long denim smock that hung down to her thighs. She wore heavy makeup and a mauve cotton scarf draped over her head like a veil. She was amiable but had a habit of repeating herself in a way that was almost Tourettic: “At one time the temple was used by Coptic Christians, so when it was used by the Coptic Christians the Coptic Christians made graffitis,” and, “This is the room where the pharaoh kept the oils. Why the pharaoh kept the oils here? The pharaoh kept the oils here because this is the room where the oils were kept by the pharaoh,” and, “This picture is two thousand years old, you see. So, two thousand years old. Imagine. Two thousand.”
When I asked Leila when exactly the Coptic Christians had defaced the images on the temple walls, she looked at me in puzzlement and said, “Um . . . When exactly the Christians did the defacings of the images? The Christians did the defacings of the images eighty years before Christ.”
I told Leila, gently, that that was not possible.
“Um . . . So, then the Christians did the defacings of the images eight years after Christ?”
Also quite impossible.
“Well,” Leila said with a sporting shrug, “I think it was eight hundred years after Christ that they did the defacings of the images, because I know they was here and they did this damages of the defacings of the images.”
I hadn’t had the heart to tell Leila that eight hundred years after Christ was also not possible, since by that time the Christians had all but been driven out of Egypt. Leila carried on. “Madame, can I ask you one question? Where I can buy American clothes? Real American clothes?”
I suggested she try some shops in Zamalek, a fashionable neighborhood in Cairo. She flapped her hand at me. “Pah! Those clothes is only fakes made in Turkey!”
How could I explain that most American clothes are not made in America, that they’re made in China and Venezuela and Cambodia and a host of other countries that would in no way appeal to Leila as sources of high fashion.
Leila stood in front of the wall of ancient surgical implements and said with passion, “I want American jeans and real American T-shirts!”
When I told her that I thought the best cotton in the world was Egyptian and that I liked Egyptian bedsheets, the look in her big black eyes said, Christ, what a bumpkin! “You got any American clothes you don’t want, madame? Maybe I can buy them off you.”
I asked Leila what size she wore. She turned slightly, lifted her smock to show me her considerable rear end, then looking me up and down she snorted and said, “Nahp! You got no clothes that fit me!”
Now, a year later, I was rowing past the temple in the smallest boat in Egypt, moving along the Kom Ombo curve, a nearly ninety-degree turn to the west. The river was very wide here, and off to my left the Libyan desert looked enormous and empty, its sandstone ridges and cliffs the color of rust. I rowed and watched the temple shrink as it receded, and remembered a comment that Flaubert had made about the temples and stones of Egypt: “Stones that so many people have thought about, that so many men have come to see, are a joy to look at. Think of the number of bourgeois stares they have received! Each person has made his little remark and gone his way.”
I worked my oars steadily in that picking, crablike motion and was happier than I had been in a long time.