WHEN I ARRIVED at Barlooly Island (Amr had described it perfectly: “A sand place island on left side of Nile”), a string of six feluccas full of European travelers had already anchored there for the night, moored along the beach, each boat a mere broom’s length from the next. With their idle sails wrapped tight around them, the masts resembled the spindly limbs of mummies swathed in winding-sheets.
I nudged the sandy shore and sat in my boat, waiting for Amr. I put my hand to the ground and found that the sand here was soft as velour. The sun had dropped behind the banana trees, and the slowly abating afternoon light gave the sky a gentle lavender hue. The desert that had made up the east bank of the river for most of the day had now given way to palms and farmland of varied shades of green, an exact mirror of the west bank. There were no houses visible here, no villages, no minarets, nothing indicative of human community. Several felucca captains were busy lighting campfires in the sand, while their passengers milled about on the small treeless island, smoking pot and drinking beer, snapping photos, checking their cell phones, and looking for private places in which to relieve themselves. Three dreadlocked Nubians tripped past me on the beach brandishing a bottle of raka wine. A few others sang and played bongo drums around a feeble yellow fire. The various parties of foreign travelers kept to themselves. I couldn’t help thinking of the formality and civility with which nineteenth-century travelers in their grand dahabiehs had greeted each other. They were always dressing up in their best evening wear, inviting each other to twelve-course candlelit dinners in the great dining rooms of their ships, to piano concerts on the decks, to champagne parties and teas. Amelia Edwards wrote, “Other dahabeeyahs, their flags and occupants, are a constant source of interest. Meeting at mooring-places for the night, we now and then exchange visits. Passing each other by day, we dip ensigns, fire salutes, and punctiliously observe the laws of maritime etiquette.” Howard Hopley, Edwards’s contemporary, observed that “if you do not fire off a barrel or two in passing a compatriot on the stream, you are voted mean.” Edwards noted, too, that most of the travelers on the Nile at that time were English and American: “In every twenty-five boats, one may fairly calculate upon an average of twelve English, nine American, two German, one Belgian, and one French. Of all these, our American cousins, ever helpful, ever cordial, are pleasantest to meet.”
But all that was finished now. There were very few Americans here, and the novelty of the foreigner on the Nile, the excitement of spotting one of your own kind in such a far-flung place, had long since worn off. Foreign travelers on the Nile didn’t salute each other, were not cordial, hardly even said hello, indeed seemed a bit embarrassed by the sight of each other. They slopped about in cutoffs and flip-flops, unshaven and unwashed, and drank cheap Egyptian beer out of tin cans.
When Amr and Wa’il and Madeleine arrived shortly after I did, Madeleine agreed with me that this seemed too chaotic a place in which to spend the night, but we could not persuade Amr to find a more secluded area. He was afraid to go elsewhere. “Don’t know some people in another place,” he said. “I can’t trust. It not safe. Here is better than another place.” The company of other Aswanian felucca captains was a form of protection. As he spoke, an enormous Sheraton Hotel cruise ship plugged past us, stirring up a rolling wake that caused the entire beachfront of feluccas to rock and teeter.
We didn’t argue with Amr. We didn’t want to upset him. He was too experienced and, now that dark was approaching, clearly too fearful to leave the people he knew. Having agreed that we would stay at Barlooly, Amr and Wa’il moored the boat to the riverbank with a big metal spike the size of a billy club. They furled the sails, tethered the rowboat to the stern of the felucca, then took off their gallabiyas, and, modestly dressed in shorts, waded into the river to bathe. They bathed with remarkable vigor, soaping their entire bodies in a lather so thick they looked whitewashed. They rinsed themselves thoroughly, over and over, with an almost ritualistic repetitiveness. Their fastidiousness was fascinating. To wash his hair, Amr applied a bar of Camay soap to his head like a rasp to a ball of wood, rubbing with such force that his head bounced and bobbed and jerked above his neck. He rinsed his hair so carefully and with such great dousings I thought he might drown. There was something satisfying about watching these two wash. I, on the other hand, had given no thought to how I would bathe. I had been warned so many times not to immerse my person in the Nile that I was reluctant even to wade in it.
Madeleine and I had brought beer with us, which we shared with Amr and Wa’il, and when Madeleine mentioned that we had a little whiskey as well, Amr looked very pleased and asked, “What kind?”—a surprising question from a man whose religion forbade alcohol.
Madeleine said, “Johnnie Walker.”
“Scotch whiskey,” he said expertly and approvingly. “Very good. I can drink anything except Egyptian alcohol.”
When I poured some whiskey into little glasses I had bought in Abu Simbel, Amr looked delighted. “Whiskey can make me talk more,” he said. Wa’il declined the whiskey and sipped at his beer with dedication but no apparent relish. He was tall and lanky, with fine ankles and a handsome, boyish face. He rarely wore shoes, and the soles of his feet, like Amr’s, were full of large cracks and faults and splits. Though he had brought a gallabiya with him, he seemed to prefer Western clothes, particularly those approximating a Californian surfing style, bright flowery patterns and loose-fitting cottons. He wore wraparound sunglasses, and when he pushed them back on his head he looked like a teenager sitting in a ski lodge in Vail, Colorado. He was shy and literally spoke only when spoken to. Whenever I looked at him, he ducked his head, blinked amiably, suppressed a smile, looked away.
Amr began to cook our dinner on his kerosene stove, which resembled an old tin can. He was efficient and skilled at this deck-top cooking. He cleared a place for a cutting board, and he and Wa’il chopped and minced and stirred, occasionally saying a word or two to each other. When Madeleine and I tried to help them with the cooking, Amr said, “We will cook. Please, rest.” It was dark now, and their brown faces caught an orange glow from the fire as they worked. Wa’il lit several tallow candles and set them up inside empty water bottles to protect them from the wind. His fingers were long and fine, and he handled everything with delicacy and care and seeming reverence, always using just his fingertips when he carried any object.
Amr spread out our dinner on the deck: an egg-and-potato omelette, bread, salty white goat cheese, tahini, and balady salad — a mélange of minced vegetables popular in Egyptian villages. He urged us to eat.
All around us, felucca captains and their passengers were growing slightly drunk. Loud shouts and shrieks of laughter drifted through the soft black air, and little fires glowed orange on the decks, illuminating animated faces, gesticulating hands, mouths releasing spooky twists of cigarette smoke.
I commented on the general intemperance among the felucca captains. Amr said, “It a hard job for felucca captain. Too much responsibility. And they don’t get much money. They hast drink.”
As we ate, Madeleine and I couldn’t keep ourselves from drilling Amr with questions. I was exhausted and still overexcited. Every so often a Nubian man passed by and made a comment about the rowboat, and Amr nodded mildly and continued eating. He was not one to fraternize and even seemed slightly wary of the other captains.
Amr had never been out of Egypt. He wanted to travel but never had the chance to; money, time, opportunity, permission — they were all too scarce here. He fantasized about going to Sudan to buy animals and then walking them all the way back to Egypt in a caravan to sell them for a profit.
“That’s an awfully long walk, Amr,” I said.
“It not long. You go slow. Take the time. Animals is much cheap there ’n here. And you can sell them at Daraw . . .” He waved his arm up the river in the direction of Daraw, a small town not far away that was famous for its camel market. I had seen the market once, a motley gathering of hobbled camels sitting forlornly on their skinny legs. Dark, turbaned men crouched amid them, drinking tea and smoking and spitting through their brown teeth. Some of the men indeed looked as though they had walked all the way from Sudan. They had desiccated, leathery faces, and the way they sat, with their knees up to their chins and their arms around their knees, suggested they would never walk again. A few men huddled around smutty little fires, warming their hands, though the sun had raised the temperature above one hundred degrees that day. Dogs with dangling, swollen teats sniffed at the mounds of camel dung. I saw a man with the anxious face of Richard Pryor shaving a donkey entirely bald with an enormous straight razor. The camels chewed their lips, batted their eyelashes, shifted their great weight, and stared into the dust in the most dejected way. They were skinny and moth-eaten, brutally branded and sweating with fear. Many had deep nicks and wounds on their flanks. Their thighs were no thicker than a human’s. Feverish flies walked boldly across their faces and into their eyes. Every now and then, some camel or other would let out a haunting moan. Flaubert had been so struck by the sound a camel makes that he claimed to have worn himself out trying to imitate it. He described it as “a rattle with a kind of tremulous gargle as an accompaniment.” To me, it was the sound of one of those farcically long plastic trumpets that drunken fans are always arbitrarily blowing into at football games. I never saw any transactions taking place at this market. No one was doing business, no money changed hands, and no one seemed the least bit interested in the camels, although now and then a man would get up and for no obvious reason begin mercilessly beating one of the beasts with a large stick.
Amr told us that he had been invited by one of his passengers to go to En-gland for a month but he had chosen not to go, because, he explained, when people from Aswan went away for a month to another country, they always returned to find their lives more steeped in sadness and longing than they had been before they left. “A month is not enough time,” he said. I asked him where he would most like to go. He said, “If I had a restaurant in New York, I would be rich man in one year. It is my dream.”
The faith in his eyes was heartbreaking.
“What kind of restaurant,” Madeleine asked.
“Nubian.”
While a Nubian restaurant in Manhattan would no doubt be one of a kind, Amr could not by any stretch of the imagination be called a good cook. Though his food was edible, it left a great deal to be desired. He used a staggering amount of salt and oil; after eating his meals, our tongues felt pickled and parched.
With the effect of the beer and whiskey, Amr became marginally more voluble than he had been all day. He smiled and sipped from his glass and proposed a riddle. “You have forty glasses. One is broken. How many glasses is left?”
Obligingly, we pondered the question, and knowing that we had to be wrong, we both said, “Thirty-nine?”
“No,” Amr said gleefully. “Three! Because it was four tea glasses, I said.” He chuckled, tipped back his whiskey, and chuckled some more. “I like that game.”
Amr laughed when we asked him if captains ever brought their wives with them on these trips. “Of course no. There would be jealous and argument.” He laughed some more, and Wa’il, who understood very little English, began to laugh too, caught up on Amr’s rare wave of merriment. Wa’il’s teeth were long and beautifully white, and the way his lips always rested slightly parted over them made him look startled and vulnerable.
Amr made us instant coffee, and a few other felucca men came over to our boat, perched on the gunwales, and, using a pair of Nubian drums I had bought in Aswan, began accompanying themselves in song. These men were all slender and barefoot. They sang loudly, but the cheer and camaraderie they worked to generate felt slightly forced. They wanted too much for the trip to be fun, to make it live up to that prototypical felucca party that captains in Aswan were always mythologizing, the perfect beach party that had happened perhaps once and was never matched again. No one seemed to have a desire to sing, least of all Madeleine and me. Everyone was ready for sleep. One by one, the fires faded and the travelers began to flop down on the decks for the night. The captains sitting on our boat looked crestfallen and began having difficulty completing any one song; each song they struck up simply died out, and they searched their memories for a better one. Glumly surveying the numerous horizontal bodies enveloped in sleeping bags on the decks up and down the shore, one of the men muttered, “It like hospital here. Everyone lying down. And no talking.”
We were an unsatisfactory cargo of boring tourists, nothing like those ideal hard-partying passengers he’d had in the past.
Madeleine and Wa’il prepared for bed. As Madeleine brushed her teeth, leaning over the edge of the boat, Amr and Wa’il watched her as intently as I had watched them bathing. They were fascinated with the entire operation. They were careful not to do what they called their “bathroom” near where farmers lived, and they never urinated over the side of the boat. When Madeleine and I proposed setting up a makeshift toilet with a bucket on the deck, Amr politely protested.
Madeleine and Wa’il spread their sleeping bags on the deck and climbed into them. The clutch of visiting captains, muttering darkly, straggled off in search of something, anything, to entertain themselves. I wanted to go to sleep too, but I saw that Amr, fueled with whiskey, wanted to talk. I wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and listened to him. He sat cross-legged on the deck with a guttering candle near each foot. His yellowish toenails were torn and cracked, warped. In the candlelight his dilated pupils were deep black and his white gallabiya glowed amber. He seemed suddenly very sad. He confessed to me that he had a problem asking for money.
One day the previous winter, he had taken a group of French tourists around Aswan on his boat. An hour, he had told them, would cost fifty pounds, approximately eight U.S. dollars, but the trip ended up taking four hours, because the wind was low and the people wanted to see just one more thing, and just one more thing. When they returned to the dock, the passengers made no move to compensate Amr with more than the agreed-on fifty pounds, and he couldn’t bring himself to ask them for more. Another time, he agreed to take a group of tourists to Edfu — a three-day trip. They told him what food they wanted him to bring, and he went out and spent one hundred and fifty pounds on their provisions. The next day the group came to him and announced that they had found a captain who would take them to Edfu for less money, and therefore they had decided to go with that captain instead. Not only had Amr lost his fare, he was stuck with the bill for the food he had bought for them. Though he said he never liked to argue, he had been so angry that he threatened to take the entire group of foreigners to the tourist police. With much parsimonious protest, they finally produced a mere fifty pounds for his trouble.
From what I had seen, every felucca captain in Aswan was in desperate need of money. The job was difficult, a constant battle to win cash from wary, slightly frightened foreigners. And yet when I had offered to pay him for using his rowboat, Amr had refused to accept my money. He told me he was not good at drumming up business, that he didn’t know how to chase and charm the foreign customers the way the other captains did — didn’t know how and didn’t want to know how. The oily sales pitch was an odious aspect of the captain’s job.
Amr told me that black Americans sometimes came to Aswan to visit a very old wise man who was well read and knew all of Nubian history. “When these American black people, they see the singing and the nice way of life here, when they hear there was Nubian kings and Nubian pharaohs, they want be Nubian.” Some black Americans came and insistently claimed Nubia as their heritage, though they rarely had any evidence of Nubian forebears. A few years before, a wealthy black businessman from New York came to Elephantine Island, got very drunk one night, and stood in the middle of the village shouting at the top of his voice, “I am Nubian! I am Nubian!”
Amr stared into the tiny glass in his hands. His lips glistened pink in the candlelight. “That man could not make himself known,” he said, and the empathy in his voice suggested a personal intimacy with the haunting sensation of being lost and misunderstood. He turned the little glass around and around in his fingers; the handblown vessel was blue and flawed and full of air bubbles, a coarse, lopsided, hastily fabricated device found in every corner shop in Egypt, and beautiful — to me at least — precisely for its roughness.
Amr told me that of the one million people who lived in Aswan, only twenty thousand were Nubian. Though he was born on Elephantine Island and was therefore Egyptian, he confessed that he often felt sad about the loss of Nubia in Egypt. In the 1970s, Nubia, which was once a string of small villages stretching up the narrow banks of the Nile from the first cataract in Aswan to Dongola in the Sudan, was buried forever under Lake Nasser, its displaced people scattered throughout Egypt and the Sudan. For centuries Nubia had been a source of slaves for the Arab world. In 1777, Charles Sonnini wrote that two Nubian caravans per year arrived in Cairo and that “the number of negroes annually exhibited in the market of Cairo may be estimated at fifteen hundred, or two thousand.” Because of that association with slavery and domestic servitude, Egyptians tended to perceive the Nubian race as ignorant and inferior. Dark-skinned, culturally more African than Egyptian, Nubians had once been the object of considerable prejudice and disrespect in Egypt, and vestiges of that still lingered. Nubians, said by many to be the true pharaonic people, were Muslim, were Egyptian citizens, and yet they would never feel that they were truly Egyptian. Amr was proud of his Nubian identity, yet it cast him as an outsider.
Amr was religious, said he would never drink during Ramadan, and that he believed wholeheartedly in God. “God can make you feel very great if you talk to him enough and you keep Ramadan sacred.” He said some Muslims pretended to keep Ramadan sacred but broke the rules of the fast — no eating, no drinking, no smoking, no sexual contact, nothing that would affect one’s body from sunrise to sunset — when no one was watching them. “But it not important what other people think about you. It is only between you and God. If I go swimming in the river in Ramadan, and I dive down under and I take a drink of the water because I am thirsty, no one will know about it, but God will know. That why I don’t do.” During Ramadan Amr always read the Koran from start to finish. The Koran, he said, contained everything a person needed to know about life.
Amr stood up, scooped a bucket of water from the river, and made tea with it in a tin can on his kerosene stove. He told me a felucca like his cost eight thousand Egyptian pounds without any of the equipment or rigging. In all, a man would need ten thousand pounds to set himself up as a felucca captain. When I asked him what the sail cost, he said, “Nothing. I made it.”
“You have a special sewing machine, I guess.”
He stitched at the air with his fingertips. “No machine; only with my fingers and one needle. And all the time the needle is breaking.”
The canvas of the sail was the thickness of shoe leather, and yet its seams looked factory tight and precise. It was a stunning piece of handiwork. Amr had also made the removable canvas canopy that shaded the deck at midday — a seven-by-ten-foot sheet.
“That looks like a lot of work, Amr,” I said.
He pursed his lips and dipped his chin, and said dejectedly, “I have too much free time,” and he began to roll a joint, an enormous cigarette full of seeds. He offered it to me, and though I loathe marijuana I took a puff to be polite. Amr smoked a bit and his mouth grew dry and his eyes grew heavy. He showed me a brass oil lamp someone had given him and said, “He gave it to me for a president.” I didn’t correct him. Like most Egyptians Amr pronounced the word next as “neckist” and sixty as “sickisty,” and if a person was not on time he said, “You are lating.” He said “oping” for open and when things went wrong he said, “What it’s the problem?” He introduced me to people as a “writer woman,” referred to Elvis Presley as a “singer man,” and when I mentioned Hashem, the gloomy young man I had met on Elephantine Island, Amr scowled and said, “Hashem a liar man.”
He fished his license out of the pocket of his gallabiya and proudly showed it to me. Egyptian men seemed inordinately attached to the official documents they carried. In the photo, Amr’s hair was completely dark. When I commented on how different his hair was now, he said ruefully, “The white hair is new.”
“I’m getting gray hair too,” I said in a feeble attempt to cheer him up.
“I do not see them, Rose.”
The conversation was running out of steam.
“Rose,” Amr said, “how come you know to row a boat?”
“I row at home every day.”
“Why?”
“For fun.”
“Fun.” I could see him sincerely wondering how such a useless expenditure of energy could be fun. “Where you row?”
“Narragansett Bay, near my house.”
“It’s water there is salt water or Nile water?”
“It’s the ocean, so it’s salt water.” I asked him what Nile meant.
“Nile mean soft.”
“Fresh?”
“What it’s mean ‘fresh’?”
I explained what freshwater was, and he repeated the word a few times. I asked him if he had ever been to the ocean. He said, “One time I been in Red Sea. I was very hot. I saw so much water. I think oh, good, so big, so nice. I want to wash. I jump in with soap, and” — he made a vigorous scrubbing motion, which in any other person would have been comical and exaggerated, but which in Amr I knew was a literal demonstration of his bathing technique — “oh, terrible. I cannot wash. The water is heavy. It hang on me. Soap can do nothing. Like a stone.” He laughed, shook his head, drew a finger-sized twig from the pocket of his gallabiya, and began to chew on it.
“What’s that,” I said.
“Toothbrush.”
He got up and began to wash our dishes in the river.
What was it about Amr that so impressed me? He was straightforward, unself-conscious, and unhurried. He was good- natured and gentle. He knew how to listen. He was not preoccupied with making people like him. And he was patient, a great gift that had not been bestowed on me.
I said good night to him and headed for my sleeping bag, alongside Madeleine’s. Amr and Wa’il had laid planks across the deck of the boat to create enough room for all of us to lie down comfortably, and on the planks they laid cotton-batting cushions, like small futons. Wa’il lay flat on his back with his arms folded across his chest like a mummy, his nose pointed at the sky.
The moment I crawled into my sleeping bag, my ankles and wrists began to prickle with sunburn, a needling sting that was not unpleasant. When I shut my eyes, the day that had just passed loomed in front of me, the flashing green water, the palms, the broiling sun, the constantly changing color of the sky, the flapping oars and slightly rocking little boat passing down the wide flat corridor of the Nile. The images were so vivid I opened my eyes. Above me the stars were so bright and so numerous that the sky seemed to tremble with the ice-blue weight of them.
Dogs quibbled in the dark distance. Donkeys screeched in hysterical fits that sometimes lasted a full minute. Herons squawked and muttered along the riverbank. Fish — or perhaps some other, more sinister creature — splashed and gurgled around the hull of the boat. At 4:45 a.m. the call to prayer began in the many mosques of nearby Kom Ombo, an insistent din, like the throbbing discord of a bees’ nest. Many voices vibrated from the same general vicinity, no two in step with each other. Technically, believers were required to rise and begin praying now, but not a soul in the camp stirred. Amr and Wa’il and all the other felucca men snored on. I was always a little disappointed that the call to prayer never seemed to evoke any immediate response from anyone I had acquainted myself with in Egypt. I, however, was highly conscious of it, even enamored of it, and had fallen into the habit of humming its pleasant tune, probably blasphemously, under my breath wherever I went.
It was delightful to be sleeping on the Nile under the open sky, yet still I was nagged with dissatisfaction, with a feeling of incompleteness. I wanted to be here alone. I lay on the deck plotting what I would do when I left Amr in Edfu, determined that I would find my own boat, and soon I fell asleep with that Islamic tune running through my head.
When I woke the next morning, Amr was sitting propped against the mast in the withering sunlight with a doleful look on his face.
“Rose,” he said.
“What is it, Amr?”
A long torpid silence followed. “You has any aspring tablets?”
I looked at him — the squirrel’s hair, the chipmunk cheeks. He had drunk three cans of beer and two glasses of whiskey, and his hangover had taken the form of a headache so large it was, from where I sat, nearly audible. The whites of his eyes, always a bit yellowish, this morning were the color of mustard and were laced through with scarlet fractures. His eyes looked scorched. His mouth looked bruised. White hairs had begun to sprout on his dark chin. It was another utterly windless day, and I knew that Amr had long, hot, tedious hours of drifting and fruitless tacking ahead of him.
I rummaged in my bag for aspirin. My rear end was sore from so many hours spent on the hard seat of the rowboat the day before, and my neck was stiff. I gave Amr two aspirin and took two myself.
As I walked up the beach past the line of feluccas to find a place where I could wash with a bottle of water, I heard a voice behind me say, “You don’t say good morning to me, Miss Rose?” I looked over my shoulder and saw that it was Hussein, the man who looked like Jimi Hendrix, unreeving his mooring line and grinning insolently at me.
“I didn’t see you,” I said.
“Unfriendly lady.”
It was too early in the morning for this silly nonsense. “Well, Hussein,” I said, “since you didn’t say good morning to me either, I think it might be fair for me to say ‘unfriendly man.’”
“Well met,” he said tartly, parroting what I had said to him the day before, and again we both laughed at the stupidity, and at the strange intimacy, of our exchange.
I went off up the beach thinking, So much for maritime etiquette, and within half an hour I was back in the rowboat pulling myself down the river once more.
IN 1878 Baedeker’s Guide to Lower Egypt offered this bit of advice to the prospective visitor to Egypt:
The traveller can hardly be recommended to start alone for a tour in a country whose customs and language are so entirely different from his own; but if he has been unable to make up a suitable party at home, he will probably have an opportunity of doing so at Alexandria or Cairo, or possibly at Suez or port Said. Travelling as a member of a party is, moreover, considerably less expensive than travelling alone, many of the items being the same for a single traveller as for several together. Apart, however, from the pecuniary advantage, a party is more likely to succeed in making satisfactory arrangements with the natives with whom they have to deal.
Most nineteenth-century travelers followed that advice, traveling in parties of anywhere from five to twenty, and because the Nile was navigable only four months of the year, most flocked to Egypt during one season. Lucie Duff Gordon, a British writer who went up the Nile in 1862, remarked in her letters, “See what strange combinations of people float on old Nile. Two Englishwomen, one French, one Frenchman, Turks, Arabs, Negroes, Circassians, and men from Darfour, all in one party,” and, further, “Thebes has become an English watering place. There are now nine boats lying here.” Edward Lear, the British painter and writer of nonsense verse who first went up the Nile in 1849, wrote to one friend, “You cannot imagine the extent of the American element in travel here! They are as 25 to one English. They go about in dozens & scores — one dragoman to so many — & are a fearful race mostly,” and to another friend he wrote, “Every day brings heaps of people here . . . As far as English company goes, there is no lack of it.” Florence Nightingale lamented the great number of travelers on the river. Arriving at Aswan on her return trip to Cairo, she noted, “There was such a ‘ruck’ of English boats there — all the N___party and a thousand others — and nothing to eat, for they had devoured everything like locusts, even all the rice and milk of Syene [Aswan], that we turned savage and sailed before sunrise.”
Newly rediscovered, Egypt drew all manner of adventurers and artists, botanists and scientists, academics, entrepreneurs, and oddballs. Some came in the hope of making money in the antiquities trade, some because they had come into a sum of money and needed a way to spend it. With a female companion, Lucie Duff Gordon went to Egypt in 1862 in the hope that the Egyptian climate would ameliorate the symptoms of tuberculosis; she stayed seven years and eventually died in Luxor, where she had established herself as a kind of medicine woman and savant. She had begun smoking cigars to ease her coughing, found she quite liked the taste of them, began smoking them regularly, and was not the least perturbed by the shocked reactions she received at this habit. The English traveler Howard Hopley, who stated his own purpose in Egypt as merely “health and relaxation of mind,” described the first of his two dahabieh companions as a middle-aged Englishman “bent in the journey on catching rare birds, and stuffing them, on collecting insects, reptiles, and eggs, on the study of hieroglyphics in general, and particularly on cramming-up in the Theban dynasties,” and the second as a “stout and enterprising American, bent on getting thin by exercize.” Hunters came for the great number of birds to be had along the banks of the river. Hopley wrote with disgust of one Englishman in particular who seems to have run amok with his gun:
He had brought from En-gland a little mahogany boat fitted with a swivel-gun, wherewith he waged flagitious warfare with whole commonwealths of unsuspecting geese and spoonbills — birds whose peaceful manner is to assemble by myriads on the shoals and sand banks left high and dry in mid stream . . . Hidden in the hollow of his boat, which looked like a waif on the waters, he would quietly float down until the current had borne him within murderous range, then let fly a pound or two of buck shot slap into the midst of the astonished assembly. The effect was prodigious; not so much in the matter of killed and wounded — though he is said to have bagged a hundred at one blow — as in the noise and whirr of the discomfited legions taking flight in a general sauve qui peut . . . He also fell foul of flamingoes and storks and other harmless birds of singular grace and beauty. The published account of his prowess while on the sacred river is as follows, all within two months be it understood: — Total, 5576 head; namely, 9 pelicans; 1514 geese; 328 wild ducks; 47 widgeon; 5 teal; 66 pintails; 47 flamingoes (!); 38 curlews; 112 herons; 2 quails; 9 partridges; 3283 pigeons; and 117 miscellaneous.
Others went to Egypt in pursuit of larger prey, particularly the crocodile. Much as Hopley was horrified with the slaughter of birds, Amelia Edwards was horrified by the slaughter of crocodiles: “That a sportsman should wish for a single trophy is not unreasonable,” she wrote, “but that scores of crack shots should go up every winter, killing and wounding these wretched brutes at an average rate of from twelve to eighteen per gun, is mere butchery, and cannot be too strongly reprehended; year by year, the creatures become shyer and fewer.”
The effect of so many enthusiastic tourists took its toll not only on the wildlife of Egypt but on Egyptian art and architecture as well. Every traveler who wrote of his experience in Egypt complained that others before him had carved their names into the stones of the temples and tombs. “The scribbling of names is quite infamous,” Duff Gordon wrote. “Beautiful paintings are defaced by Tomkins and Hobson, but worst of all Prince Puckler Muskau has engraved his and his Ordenskreuz in huge letters on the naked breast of that august and pathetic giant who sits at Abou Simbel. I wish someone would kick him for his profanity.” Flaubert was likewise irritated by the graffiti. “In the temples,” he wrote, “we read travelers’ names; they strike us as petty and futile. We never write ours; there are some that must have taken three days to carve, so deeply are they cut in the stone. There are some that you keep meeting everywhere — sublime persistence of stupidity.”
Fifteen de-cades later those names are still there. At Philae you will find, as Flaubert likely did, “GODFREY LEVINGE 1833,” at Abu Simbel you’ll see “LECAROS 1879” carved deep into the right shin of one of the seated colossi, and at the Ramesseum there’s the particularly large and beautifully carved “DEGOUTAN THEDENAT 1820.” Graffiti has been appearing forever in Egypt in hieroglyphic, hieratic, demotic, Greek, Latin, Arabic, French, and English. After a long enough lapse of time, a name carved into a stone becomes less offensive, becomes simply part of the history, another archaeological detail. At the Temple of Khnum on Elephantine Island, I was fascinated to see these ancient Greek words carved into a block of the nilometer: ΔIMITPIOY KAI [EP]MIOY KAI TON AΔEΛΦΟI — “of Dimitris and Hermes and the brothers.” Long before Godfrey Levinge and Degoutan Thedenat, Dimitris — whoever he was, in his tunic and sandals — had had that universal human impulse to commemorate his presence, and thereby elevate his status, at the phenomenal sites of Egypt.
Edward Lear chose to commemorate his journey in Egypt in pictures and words. In 1885 he wrote a letter to Amelia Edwards in the hope that she, who had published an immensely successful account of her Nile journey, could help him publish his Egyptian journals. * He told Edwards that he had kept a “detailed diary daily from almost hour to hour,” called the diary “photographically minute & truthful,” and noted in exasperated self-defense, “It is hardly worthwhile adverting to the remarks of silly=narrow folk, who say ‘Oh! The Nile!’ as if anything new could be written about that river!! —”
By the time the nineteenth century rolled toward its end, it would indeed have seemed that nothing new could be written about the Nile, for nearly every foreigner who traveled in Egypt wrote a book’s worth of letters and notes about the experience. Amelia Edwards, Lucie Duff Gordon, Gustave Flaubert, Florence Nightingale, Wallis Budge, Edward Lane, William Thackeray, Howard Hopley, and innumerable others — they all boarded a dahabieh, set off upriver from Cairo, and wrote it down. They all commented on the hectic streets of Cairo, the beggars, the slave markets, the Mosque of Sultan Hassan. They all wrote about the difficulty of passing through the turbulent first cataract at Aswan and all admired the skill of the Shellalees who steered the boats through it. They all wrote about climbing to the top of the Great Pyramid at Giza. They all wrote in rapturous detail about Karnak and the Valley of the Kings and commented with dismay on the huge number of one-eyed, nine-fingered Egyptian men. Nightingale wrote, “The number of one-eyed men you see is frightful.” Edwards reported that in a crowd of ten thousand Egyptians at the marketplace at El Minya, “at least every twentieth person, down to little toddling children of three and four years of age, was blind of an eye.” Howard Hopley noted that three of the crew on his boat were missing a forefinger and two were missing an eye. “Sooner than serve as a soldier,” Hopley explained, “a man will cut off his finger or pluck out his eye. For the latter mutilation, though, he is mostly indebted to his mother; she squeezes, as they say, some herb-juice into the orbit, and the eye withers up. As to the former, it is an old custom — old as the palmy days of Rome, when men were wont to cut off their thumbs from the same motive.” Of the crew he shared with Flaubert, Maxime du Camp remarked that all but three of them were missing a forefinger; two were also one eyed. All the foreign travelers wrote about the Coptic monks who lived in caves in the cliffs above the river and how they would rush down naked when they saw a boat approaching and swim out to collect alms from the travelers. (Flaubert was delighted by these swimming begging monks; Nightingale, with her pride and concern for Christianity, was disgusted, not by their nakedness [she was, after all, a nurse] but by their begging and by their reputation as thieves.) They all brought trunks of books with them, and all seemed to be able to read several languages, including Hebrew and ancient Greek. They all raved about the beauty of the Temple of Philae — many of them even set up bedrooms within it and lounged about there as if in a London hotel. Lear’s party hauled “luggage, beds, cookery things” up to Philae and “swept out rooms in the great temple, & have been quite comfortable in them during our stay. 3 or 4 English boats have generally been on the island, so we have had dinner parties, & music every evening nearly.” They all wrote about the rapacious tomb robbers of Qurna who lived like ghouls among skulls and bones in the dusty tombs of western Thebes and made their living selling mummies and looted antiquities. They all said the moonlight on sand looked like snow. Flaubert: “so bright on the sand that it looks like snow.” Nightingale: “it is exactly like snow.” Lucie Duff Gordon: “snow.”
Every one of them wrote about, and reserved their greatest outrage for, other travelers who left Egypt with filched mummies and antiquities stuffed into their luggage, and then all of them eventually, inevitably, came up with excuses for why they too were justified in making off with one little antiquity or two. Writing to her husband, Lucie Duff Gordon confessed unabashedly that an ancient stone lion she had shipped off to him from Egypt was stolen. “I stole him for you from a temple, where he served as a footstool for people to mount their donkeys. A man has stolen a very nice silver antique ring for me out of the last excavations — don’t tell Mariette * . . . My fellah friend said, ‘Better thou have it than Mariette sell it to the French and pocket the money; if I didn’t steal it, he would’ — so I received the stolen property calmly.” Nightingale reported ruefully on the state of the private tombs, “They are vexation of spirit, for they have been cruelly mauled,” yet in the next paragraph she added with innocence and no self-reflection, “I bring home some little figures found in the tombs.” As early as 1818, Edouard de Montulé wrote of the looted tombs with despair, “If any perfect ones still exist, I sincerely wish they may escape the research of the curious antiquary . . . for the sarcophaguses and mummies which they contained would inevitably take the road to London or Paris.” Before long De Montulé himself took off for France carrying a beautiful double sarcophagus within which lay the well-preserved mummy of an ancient woman. At Luxor, Amelia Edwards pondered this strange contradiction:
The whole plateau is thickly strewn with scraps of broken pottery, limestone, marble, and alabaster; flakes of green and blue glaze; bleached bones, shreds of yellow linen; and lumps of some odd-looking dark brown substance like dried-up sponge. Presently someone picks up a little noseless head of one of the common blue ware funereal statuettes, and immediately we all fall to work grubbing for trea-sure . . . And then, with a shock which the present writer, at all events, will not soon forget, we suddenly discover that these scattered bones are human — that those linen shreds are shreds of cerement cloths — that yonder odd-looking brown lumps are rent fragments of what was once living flesh! . . . We soon . . . learned to rummage among dusty sepulchres with no more compunction than would have befitted a gang of professional body-snatchers . . . One looks back afterwards with wonder, and something like remorse . . . but so infectious is the universal callousness, and so overmastering is the passion for relic-hunting, that I do not doubt we should again do the same things under the same circumstances. Most Egyptian travellers, if questioned, would have to make a similar confession. Shocked at first, they denounce with horror the whole system of sepulchral excavation, legal as well as predatory; acquiring, however, a taste for scarabs and funerary statuettes, they soon begin to buy with eagerness the spoils of the dead; finally they forget all their former scruples, and ask no better fortune than to discover and confiscate a tomb for themselves.
Most of these nineteenth-century diversions and concerns are essentially nonexistent for the modern foreign visitor in Egypt. Hunting is now forbidden; there are no crocodiles remaining in the Nile; there are so many guards about that you couldn’t possibly carve your name into a temple wall or even quickly spray paint it; the streets of Cairo are still hectic and filled with beggars, but the donkeys and camels have been replaced with French and Japanese cars; the first cataract has been shut down by the High Dam and so the Shellalees have gone out of business; there are no slaves for sale and nothing you could really call a harem; camping at the temples and climbing up the Great Pyramid are strictly forbidden; it is rare to see a one-eyed, nine-fingered Egyptian (though a notable number of Egyptians suffer unfortunate eye diseases); the tomb robbers at Qurna have been effectively shut down (though occasionally on the mountaintop above the Valley of the Kings, you’ll meet one of their skinny barefoot bandy-legged descendants limping along, usually drunk, in a tattered gown and dusty turban with a little faience torso in his pocket that is unquestionably a fake); there are no antiquities left to steal, and besides you’d go to jail forever if you tried to take one out of Egypt. Across the span of a hundred and fifty years, only one thing has truly remained the same: moonlight still makes the Egyptian sand look like snow.