ON THAT SECOND MORNING of rowing, I passed a mosque with a tall yellow minaret towering above the palm trees. Now and then I saw feluccas on their return trip to Aswan, empty of passengers and making haste along the far edges of the river, riding the reverse currents with their sails on a broad reach. Occasionally two feluccas sailed side by side and lashed together, on a run with their sails extended on either side of them, like the wings of a great bird, doubling their sail power. They moved quickly, and I was relieved when I realized that Amr’s return to Aswan, though it would be against the current, would be faster and easier than the trip down to Edfu. At the moment he was laboring far behind me, just as he had done the day before, his sail a bright speck forlornly zigzagging in the glittering distance.
I rowed on and lost Amr completely. The day was still and hazy, and by eleven o’clock the heat was immobilizing as a straitjacket, and the sky was a sickly swimming-pool blue. Farmers along the banks of the river forced their horses into the water to cool them off. Dogs wandered into the river and sat down up to their necks, blinking grimly in the terrible sunlight. I saw an old man sitting naked at the edge of the river, idly toying with his penis before plunging into the water to bathe, and near him a younger man standing in the water with a fishing pole. Women in black walked slowly along the riverbanks with jugs on their heads, disappearing in and out of stands of eucalyptus trees, and all along the banks I saw children tending fires in fields, burning the stubble of crops — a diabolical job to have to perform in such heat. The fields were rectangular and evenly divided by irrigation canals and mounds of black earth. Beyond the fields were the caramel-colored hills and the huge expanses of roasting desert rubble. There were mud-brick villages here, with houses painted yellow and blue, and men riding donkeys, and crumbling mud-brick walls, and brown sheep trotting through the dust beneath stands of date palms. I saw a white camel lying near the riverbank with his nose lifted high in the air and a man in nothing but an enormous white turban and white underwear standing scarecrow-still in the middle of a flooded field. I saw mud-brick graves in the distance — rectangular mounds of earth with palm fronds stuck into them as markers — and boys carrying hoes on their shoulders and girls carrying brittle cornstalks on theirs. These were exactly the scenes of ancient Egyptian life depicted over and over on the walls of ruined temples. A gunshot rang out in a banana grove, and a hundred white birds flew up out of the greenery with sharp cries of alarm.
Wherever you were on the Nile, what-ever you saw along the banks, the ever-present ridge of the desert loomed beyond the greenery, walling the floodplain on either side, a long chain of hills both east and west, often with pale chutes of sand spilling down them, blown in from the desert beyond. The burned desert cliffs were a constant reminder of how tenuous was the strip of green at the water’s edge, how dependent it was on the constant flow of the river.
There were more people along the banks than there had been the day before — still I was surprised that I had seen so few. Egypt occupies an area of one million square miles, only 5 percent of which is habitable, which means that these narrow banks of the Nile should have been among the most densely populated places in the world. Where were they all? They must be beyond the trees, I decided, sitting in their houses or quietly doing their farming, just as they’d been doing for thousands of years. Now and then when I saw spirals of smoke rising from small villages beyond the banana trees, I wanted to stop, beach the boat, and go have a look. But it was illegal for foreigners to venture alone into this part of the country, and, worse, as a foreign woman alone I knew I would arouse such curiosity and chaos that stopping would bring me nothing but trouble. Occasionally a man on the riverbank noticed my face and in pure curiosity and wonder howled for me to stop, and sometimes the man would even run along the riverbank following me and waving. But I kept moving.
At midday I stopped to rest on a small barren island in the middle of the river. I sat in the hot sand. The sun bounced off the water and into my face. I could feel the heat on my tongue, in my ears. The world was a furnace. Everything smelled toasted and dry. When I took off my head covering, I could smell the sun baking my clothes. My hands were blistered and raw; the calluses that had formed on my palms at home in my regular life of rowing had not been nearly enough protection from so much constant friction.
I sat on this tiny island in a kind of stupor, smelling the smoke from the brush fires across the river. The biggest bee I had ever set eyes on landed on my thigh, seemed to doze drunkenly there for a moment, then picked its way toward my knee, stumbled, dozed a bit, and eventually rolled off and fell to the sand with a tiny thump, where it lay shocked to stillness by the heat and the glare. The river was completely flat — no ripples, no eddies — and looked as heavy and gray as mercury; it seemed miraculous that the water wasn’t boiling and steaming in the heat. Green bee-eaters flew low over the water. Doves hooted sadly in a withered thorn tree. I saw a crested lark and a tiny Nile Valley sunbird, bright blue and shimmering like a hummingbird, with a long forked tail and yellow stomach, and another tiny brown bird with a slender, upward-pointing tail like a twig. A brilliant green lizard with a brown stripe down his back skittered over my foot near the edge of the water. Lapwings chipped anxiously in the grassy shallows on the east bank of the river. There was no shade on this island. The heat worried me; my rear end burned from the hot sand beneath me. (In 1799 members of Napoleon Bonaparte’s company recorded the effect of the heat in this part of Egypt: “If, at midday, one remains for a minute in the same place, or walks slowly, a burning sensation is experienced in the soles of the feet that is stinging and insupportable — relief cannot be obtained by marching quickly.”)
I got up and walked the two hundred feet to the other end of the island, which had its own little sculpted dunes and wind-scoured hollows and a few stunted starving shrubs. I saw snake tracks purled into the sand and huge ants skidding single file along a sand dune; the ants were so light they left no tracks at all. The only sign of human industry on this island was a small stone wall crumbling on itself and enclosing nothing. It could have been a year old; it could have been four thousand years old. It was impossible to tell here. A rickety white-muzzled dog on the eastern bank wandered over and began barking hysterically at me across the water, curling his lips and baring a row of pumpkin-colored teeth. The force of his barking caused his paws to slide backward in the wet sand. Eventually the dog exhausted himself and wandered away to a lonely part of the beach and began yipping halfheartedly at nothing.
Two men in a fishing boat farther down the river banged on an oil drum to frighten fish into their nets; the sound vibrated in the heat. I drank a lot of water and took a photograph of myself, holding my camera at arm’s length — evidence for a later time when this episode would surely seem like a dream. Looking at that photo now, I see a solitary, roasted, unbalanced-looking person standing between two dunes, scowling into the camera, a flat blue strip of river beyond, above that a dark low line of green, and above that a blue sky of tremendous depth. My face is greasy with sweat, my hair matted flat by my hat, my lips burned and chapped, my eyes fried and bloodshot. I look hollow cheeked, wary, and obsessive.
Soon, Amr’s felucca appeared in the far distance, and I climbed back into my boat and moved on.
That evening as the sun began to set, we were nowhere near the next appointed camping place and had to stop at a place called Silwa, near Silsileh, at the base of an enormous sand dune. This made Amr unhappy. The day had been long and suffocatingly still. Because his boat had moved so slowly, I had lost him for hours and had even turned my boat around and rowed back upriver again to find him. I, for one, was delighted to be stopping in this lonely, beautiful place at the foot of a tall, white sand dune. The sand here was the softest I had ever walked on, like powdered sugar, and it slid straight into the river with no intermediate berm of earth or beach grass. The slope reflected the setting sun in a brilliant gold, the sky was nearly mauve, and the fronds of the palm trees looked blue on the west bank of the river. But Amr was disappointed with the place and kept looking upriver to see if any other Aswanian feluccas might come straggling down to provide familiar company for the night. We were very alone in this place, there was no protective cove, and Amr felt we were too exposed to the wind should it come up in the night. A small village lay nearby; that, too, made Amr uneasy. He didn’t know the people there. “Cannot trust” was what he said, and when Madeleine, cramped and restless from two days sitting cross-legged on the sailboat, disappeared into the banana groves for a walk, Amr anxiously watched her go, fearing she’d meet a robber or a mountebank or some other misfortune. I tried to assuage his fears, reminded him that Madeleine’s Arabic was excellent, and that she was strong and had been all over Egypt on her own.
The sun was falling low in the sky, touching the tops of the palms now, enormous and flaming. As we prepared the boat for the night, a pathetic metal felucca, all rust and dents and shredded patchwork sails, crossed the river from the west bank and bobbed up alongside us. Its captain was a ragged, whiskery, middle-aged man wearing an enormous pair of eyeglasses, like an aviator’s goggles. He muttered a few words to Amr from his seat in the stern of the boat. The lenses of his glasses were so thick they were almost opaque; they refracted the sunlight in a distracting, prismatic way. Many older Egyptians wore these government-issue glasses, and their clunkiness, their utilitarian crudeness, always made the wearer look vulnerable and weak and a little bit wounded.
Amr answered the man, and the captain, emitting a constant flow of soft utterings and moans, climbed up onto Amr’s deck with a cotton bag slung over his shoulder. He moved slowly and carefully, as if to keep from stubbing his toe or stumbling in his blindness. Amr knew the man; they shook hands. He was here to sell us some marijuana, which, though illegal, was beginning to seem ubiquitous in Upper Egypt. This man was a kind of floating, boat-to-boat drug dealer. He fished in his canvas bag for his paper pouches full of weed and pulled out a purse, a screwdriver, a bottle of water, a newspaper, and a length of rope, all the while grimacing and muttering beneath the bulwark of his goggles.
His boat was full of junk: tin cans, old newspapers, coils of what looked like telephone wire, a cooking pot black with soot, a wooden stool with only one leg, rumpled clothing, and cardboard boxes. Rust had reduced the steel deck top to a fine brown lace. Amr took two pouches from the man in exchange for two ten-pound notes. The drug dealer, still muttering and moaning to himself like a roosting dove, gathered up his personalties, returned to his boat, and without a word of good-bye drifted slowly away. His boat sailed in a limping way. Long shreds of torn cloth hung like wet stockings from his slack sails. The sails had been patched in a hundred places, and his mast was battered and shaky.
Amr and Wa’il dipped tin cups into the river and drank. This practice had always fascinated me and given me pause, and yet this day, desperate to wash, I thought that if Amr and Wa’il could drink from the Nile, I could certainly bathe in it. The water at the edge of this pretty dune was tempting and warm, very clear and surprisingly soft. Standing beneath the prow of the boat, I took off my clothes and with a bar of soap I waded into the warm river in my underwear. Amr and Wa’il stayed politely behind the stern of the boat while I washed. I stood up to my neck in the water. It was thrilling to stand in the Nile, and as I washed I tried to frighten myself with images of a ravening crocodile’s needle-nosed snout rearing up out of the water in front of me, jaws ajar to reveal a dark, tunnel-like throat, long palate, and fleshy yellow gums studded with a million triangles of razor-sharp teeth.
I washed quickly and stepped onto the shore to dry myself.
Amr was quiet that evening. The day had been difficult for him, sitting for eight hours in the boat with his hangover, moving very little, drifting maddeningly, constantly tending to the tiller as to the arm of a doddery old woman, baking in the suffocating heat, and worrying about any impending disaster that he would have to answer for. He prepared our evening meal in silence, and when Wa’il opened the valve too wide on the stove and gassy orange flames shot up toward the boom above their heads, Amr reprimanded him sharply, the first display of impatience I had seen from him.
We ate our dinner quietly, and gradually Amr relaxed. Knowing that I had once been to Lake Nasser and Abu Simbel, he asked me what these places — the places his grandparents had come from — were like.
Abu Simbel, 250 miles south of Aswan and 100 miles south of the Tropic of Cancer, lay in the world’s biggest middle of nowhere. Only one narrow road led from Aswan to Abu Simbel, and at the time that I visited the town, this road, for some vague security reason, was closed to all but the most necessary traffic. I made the fifty-minute flight in a small airplane full of French schoolteachers who stampeded the boarding gate and nearly poked each other’s eyes out fighting for window seats so they could look out at absolutely nothing. There was not a single thing to be seen in the desert south of Aswan. From Aswan all the way to Abu Simbel and beyond, the landscape was lunar looking, a great plain of rough red sand dotted now and then with craggy little hills of what looked like lava rock. That desert had none of the elegance of the big-duned deserts of Libya and Morocco. It was all rubble and ruin. Of course, there was Lake Nasser to look at: another great, flat, mirrorlike plain devoid of any signs of life or activity — no ships, no lakeside greenery, no lakeside buildings, not even any waves. Nothing. And everywhere you looked the view ended at a hazy, sour-yellow horizon.
The town of Abu Simbel reminded me of a western American ghost town: it was made up of one or two streets, with a few skinny men walking idly up and down them plucking at their crotches. Others in bulky, ragged head wraps big as hatboxes sat crouched on their haunches at the side of the road, watching tumbleweeds roll by and taking refuge in the scanty shade of shrubs dwarfed by thirst. The heat was borderline equatorial; it asserted a heavy downward pressure. Dogs and humans looked under duress here, flattened and exhausted and flayed. When I removed my hat, the sun had made the top of my head sting in a vivid, concentrated way — it was like having a freshly baked nail driven into my skull.
The houses there were mostly single-story brick boxes, and there were many small construction sites that could easily have been confused with ruins; in Egypt it was often difficult to tell whether the half-formed houses one was always seeing were going up or coming down. There were few women on the streets of Abu Simbel and no vegetation surrounding the town. It was the driest, most barren place I had ever seen. A handful of houses had been painted a pretty Ca-rib-be-an pink and orange, and on the main street there were a few restaurants that had the impromptu air of concession stands at a country fair: aluminum structures with sizzling griddles, conical logs of compressed beef sweating and rotating in front of an electric broiler, and sudden violent eruptions of greasy smoke billowing up under their torn awnings. A string of tiny shops sold tin pots and rubber buckets, Bic pens, potato chips, and cigarettes, and at the edge of the town sat a stone building with a sign on it that said, in lettering that resembled the hastily clipped and pasted characters of a ransom note, “Sanitry, inteyraTion, hoSpitaL, at, abu Simble toreST , Cety.”
And of course in Abu Simbel there were the usual trinket stalls down by the temples of Abu Simbel, the only place tourists ever went in this town. The trinket sellers here were more rapacious and hard bargaining than they were in other parts of Egypt because there was so little business — few tourists stayed overnight in Abu Simbel, as there was only one thing to see and few hotels. The hawkers were bitter and cunning. Above all, they were immensely bored. It would be difficult to say which made them more aggressive, their boredom or their poverty. Every one of them sold exactly the same meticulously arrayed collection of artless trinkets as the man next to him, and there were something like a dozen stalls in all. Living in Abu Simbel during the best of times must have been trying, but when tourism was at a low point it was no doubt an existence of borderline starvation. I was careful not to touch a single trinket in Abu Simbel that I did not intend to buy, for to finger a piece of merchandise in that town was to encourage an unstoppable geyser of salesmanly blandishments, reckless urgings (Make enjoy the eye, my lady! I would stay with you for all eternity!), and a surge of hope that would be cruelly dashed the moment you returned the piece to its slot within the glittering rank of junk. Then the proprietor, with a sickly grin and a gelatinous gob of spit on the ground, would register his contempt for the stinginess of the Western infidel.
At this place I bought seven tiny glasses for approximately three dollars — the original price I was quoted was forty-five dollars — and the man I bought them from was so overjoyed at this sale that he offered me a bite of the melted ice cream he was eating. When I mentioned to the market manager that the men here seemed angry, he flashed his metal teeth at me and adjusted his headdress and said cheerfully, “Yes, because they are very poor and have many children.” Like a number of men in Aswan and Abu Simbel, the manager had Bosnian blue eyes, kinky flame-red hair, and a wash of orange freckles across his nose.
Abu Simbel was such a strange and terrible town that I was compelled to stay overnight there in the Nefertari Hotel, a few hundred yards from the temples of Abu Simbel. The hotel was a dusty, single-story structure with many empty rooms, each with its own door leading to the outside, like the rooms of a motel. The place smelled of plaster, and every wall in the hotel seemed to have a fire extinguisher hanging on it like a technological talisman against the incendiary force of Abu Simbel’s sun. Just above the banks of Lake Nasser was the hotel’s tiny swimming pool. (Apparently no one ever swam in the lake, for the crocodiles in it were said to be nineteen feet long and the water was an awe-inspiring pus-green color.) The green matting around the pool was faded and curling at the corners, and the poolside cabana, which had “Merry Christmas” written in its window, was a wreck — all twisted metal, and broken glass, and water stains on the ceiling, and splinters of wood, as though a flood or a tornado or a frat party had passed through it.
The hotel was empty, but for me and four men who appeared at the table beside mine for dinner — three Egyptians and one Belgian. I gleaned from the technical nature of their conversation (conducted in English for the sake of the Belgian) that they were engineers working for UNESCO or some other international engine of progress. I had seen Egyptian men like this on trains all over Egypt, middle-class officials in Western dress with cell phones and a self-important, superior air. They were often plump and distracted and made an ostentatious show of reading their portable pocket-sized editions of the Koran, which reading consisted of a lot of hectic flipping of the pages, liberally interspersed with minute inspections of their fingernails and watches, and extended periods of gazing out the window while the book lay open and ignored on their well-pressed thighs.
When I spoke to the waiter in my stumbling Arabic, the three swarthy Egyptians lifted their mustaches from their soup bowls and stared at me. The smooth-faced, sandy-haired Belgian looked wan and tiny and somewhat apprehensive next to his three manly colleagues. I ate vegetable gruel and a salad of lettuce, cucumber, tomato, and crunchy olives from Siwa Oasis and listened to the four men talking about marriage. I couldn’t help listening, for the Egyptians spoke very loudly and were sitting a mere arm’s length away from me.
The oldest and fattest of the Egyptian men said, “It is good to be apart from your wife for some time each month. Marriage works better that way.”
The Belgian sipped daintily at his soup and said with uxorious sincerity, “Yes, because she can do what she wants while you are gone.” The Egyptian, stricken with disbelief and disdain, reared back in his chair. “No!” he roared. “Because you can do what you want while you are gone. You are free. You don’t get tired of her.”
The startled Belgian, realizing too late the tenor of the company he was in, attempted to cover his mistake and match this Arabic machismo by lowering his soupspoon and stuttering, “Oh, yes. Right, right. That’s true of course.” And then he cleared his throat and searched for some dismissive thing to say about women. “Women are at their best before you get married,” he said unconvincingly, and he followed the statement with a theatrical snort, an indication that he was entirely with his colleagues. Relieved, the three Egyptian men said “Ha-ha-ha” hollowly and wiped their mustaches and picked their teeth and went back to staring at me.
The next day in Abu Simbel I met a smart, skinny Egyptian tour guide who had studied comparative religions for several years in southern Virginia but had finally returned to Egypt because, he explained, he loved his wife too much. “My Egyptian friends couldn’t understand that,” he said, leaning against a tree skinnier than he was. “They thought I was stupid to give up my opportunity in America for a woman.”
He told me that one day in Virginia he was sitting in a café with an American friend drinking orange juice and discussing women. The American asked him if he had ever considered marrying an American woman. The Egyptian said he would consider it but only if he loved the woman. In fact, he would be willing to marry a Christian or a Jew or any other brand of woman that he loved. The only woman he could not marry, even if he loved her, was a woman who was not a virgin. The American asked why a woman’s virginity was so important. The Egyptian said, “Put your finger in your glass of juice.” The American did as he was told. The Egyptian ordered him then to drink the juice. The American drank. The Egyptian said, “Now, if I put my finger in your glass of juice, would you still drink it?” The American said that he would not.
“My point is clear.”
I asked the guide if he would kill his sister if she lost her virginity.
Without a pause, as though this was a reasonable and even a common question, he said, “I, for myself, would not kill my sister. But I would put her out of the house and disown her because she had shamed the family name.”
The guide went on to tell me that some Egyptian men didn’t want to go to America to avail themselves of the opportunities there because they feared they would see women in states of undress and would not be able to control themselves. “And then God would be angry with them,” he said. “They believe so much in God.”
When I suggested — gingerly, my voice humming with hesitation and tender hypothesis — that perhaps Egyptian men didn’t respect women, the guide stuck his fingers down the open throat of his shirt and fished up a silver locket on a chain. In the locket were tiny photographs of his veiled mother and wife. “Here,” he said proudly, “is the proof how much I respect women.”
“They’re your relatives,” I said.
“I have no pictures here of my father!”
He explained why Egyptian men are allowed to have more than one wife: if a man’s wife doesn’t get pregnant, and he wants children, he can take another wife. I wondered if the same applied in reverse, would a woman be allowed to take another husband for the same reason.
“Of course not!” he said.
I had walked alone along the edge of Lake Nasser, which struck me as a seriously unnatural body of water. Neon green, it looked poisonous. It looked like a desert flooded with antifreeze. I stood on the shore, stared at the water in wonder, and had the feeling that if I fell into it my flesh would dissolve instantly from my bones. The heat was wounding; I had to narrow my eyes to slits to protect them from it. As I walked along the edge of the lake, I saw, every so often, a tiny patch of green, a withered clump of bushes, or a feeble stripe of grass. I saw lizards and clouds of sand fleas on the beaches, dragonflies and tiny anthills, all of which suggested that only the most minuscule life forms could thrive in these harsh conditions.
Abu Simbel and Lake Nasser were at their best when the rabid sun was gone, and then it struck me as one of the best places in the world. I sat alone in the dark by the pool and listened to crickets and the rhythmic purring of frogs. I stared at the sky for an hour. Far from any city, far from anything at all, a town so small that its artificial light had no effect on the atmosphere, Abu Simbel’s night sky was a metropolis of its own, an enormous velvety parabola embracing the earth. Venus shone long on the water in a way that mimicked the moon, and the Big Dipper sat very low on the horizon. The whole place was a deeply swirling mass of stars. I felt short of breath and utterly insignificant looking at its hugeness and depth. This was a night sky you didn’t have to raise your eyes to. It began below the horizon and was always right in front of you, wherever you turned. When I looked at it, the vortex of stars seemed to be lifting me off the ground, and I had to look down at my feet now and then to see that they were firmly planted. And then, looking down, I half expected to see stars there too. It was a sky so masterly and dizzying, I imagined myself having to crawl back to my hotel room on my hands and knees to keep from being bowled over by it and, more, by the endlessness that lay beyond it. This sky could make you feel comically small; you might as well crawl like the ant that you were.
As I described the night sky of Abu Simbel for Amr, he lifted his face toward the sky above us and, with the kind of fatalism that believes that everything is better elsewhere, he said, “Abu Simbel much better ’n this.”
We all went to sleep early, and that night, like that day, was long. A seemingly endless parade of cruise ships passed us on their way to Luxor, each one stirring up a new barrage of waves that rocked us in our vulnerable spot and made the mast buck and teeter so that Amr and Wa’il had to jump out of their sleeping bags and — like attendants in an insane asylum — hold the moaning mast in a bear hug to keep it from juddering out of its socket. The mast was thirty feet tall, nearly the circumference of a basketball hoop at its base, and was tightly fitted into its foundation hole with a collection of cedar shims. If it toppled in the night, Amr would be in terrible trouble, not to mention the possibility that we might all be crushed under the weight of that enormous telephone pole.
Sitting up in my sleeping bag, I watched a few ships go by — at night their glowing lights made them seem cozy and noble. There were three hundred cruise ships on the Nile between Luxor and Aswan at any one time — a fleet that in daylight was just a moldy collection of buoyant buildings, bland and in need of paint. The ship I had traveled on with a hundred European tourists was tawdry and tired and had about it a melancholy air of lost luxury and promise. It was equipped with a sunbathing deck, a stagnant swimming pool with a torn one-pound note lying at the bottom of the deep end, a bar, a flashing disco dance floor, and a grinning crew of overfamiliar Egyptian attendants making lame jokes about mummies and tombs and pharaohs.
We left our camp at Silwa early the next morning, and when I reached Silsileh alone, I knew I was there just from the look of the place. I had read about this famous spot in countless books. Gebel Silsileh, the “Mountain of the Chain,” was also known in Arabic as the “Place of Rowing” because it was the narrowest spot on the entire length of the Nile, and, lacking room in which to tack their sailboats comfortably, captains and their crew often had no choice but to row their boats through the defile. Here the river was hemmed in by high cliffs of red sandstone that concealed the famous quarries that had provided the stone for the temples of Karnak and Luxor, Esna and Edfu. In past de-cades, Silsileh had been a popular mooring place, but now tourist ships never stopped here. The cruise boat I had traveled on had passed by it at night.
I found it beautiful and a little bit frightening to see these close walls of cliff dotted with caves and cracks and small tombs rising straight up out of the water, looming above me and my tiny boat, their reflection in the water running red beneath me as I rowed. From the east cliff to the west, the river was said to be only 260 yards wide; passing so close between them was like entering a grand, high-ceilinged ballroom. Geologists have theorized that at some point these cliffs were joined into one stone barrier — the name Silsileh is believed to have come from the Coptic word for “stone wall” — and that, blocked by the wall, the Nile had pooled behind it into a lake. Only with aeons of overflowing had the water eaten through the stone and set its modern course toward Cairo.
I stopped rowing and let myself float, trying to prolong my stay between the two close cliffs. When I came to a safe spot where I could leave the boat on the shore, I climbed out and went up to the rock-cut Speos of Horemheb, with its five little doors, and peered in. The thing, like a stone chicken coop, was approximately three and a half thousand years old. The ground was dusty, reddish, and dry, and the place was empty and smelled of bat dung. The stones were slowly crumbling. I followed a narrow footpath high up the hill to the south and found more tombs. I was the only person here. Because the spot was isolated and so ridden with little tombs and shrines it felt like the oldest spot I had yet been in Egypt. I felt for the first time the thrill — and the mild anxiety — of being alone in a strange and slightly forbidden place. Little tombs and niches and stelae had been cut into the rock of the cliff; they were like abandoned prison cells now. Amelia Edwards had noted in her diary that her guides had pointed out a sort of table rock here, “fantastically quarried in the shape of a gigantic umbrella, to which they pretend some king of old attached one end of a chain with which he barred [the] Nile.” I saw the very rock, still implacably standing and looking more like a half-nibbled mushroom than an umbrella.
At the top of the cliff I looked to the west and saw the enormous desert, a fearsome stretch of cooked earth, of nothing. When I saw Amr’s sail approaching the gorge from the south, I scurried back to my boat and pushed off, not wanting him to know I had gone ashore.
As I approached Edfu in the late afternoon on the third day, a crowd of boys swimming off the Edfu dock tried to climb into my rowboat. I feared they would sink me and shooed them off by swatting at their heads with my cotton hat, which they found terribly funny and which only inspired them to try harder. They laughed and showed their white teeth as they slapped at the water with their skinny arms, their wet black heads glittering in the sunlight. I eluded them and waited on the dock for Amr, Madeleine, and Wa’il, who were still trailing behind me. We had made it here in three days.
Sitting on Amr’s felucca, packing up my possessions, and emptying the rowboat of my water bottles, sandals, and food, I felt both sad and excited. I was happy to have come this far but conscious that having Amr behind me had distracted me. I had spent much of my trip thinking about him, worrying for him, hoping not to displease or alarm him. We had made it here without undue difficulty. There had been no disaster, no robberies or drownings. The mast had not come unhinged, the police never showed up to protest my presence, I had met no crazy fishermen, had not tipped over, and I hadn’t ruined Amr’s rowboat. Now that we were here, Amr seemed very happy. He congratulated me on having rowed all this way and confessed that he was astonished to see how fast I had moved. I didn’t tell him that I had deliberately drifted a good deal of the time to allow him to keep up with me or that I had actually twice rowed back upriver to keep in sight of him.
Before we left Aswan, I had agreed to pay Amr two hundred pounds. Now, moved by gratitude and affection, I gave him three times that — still it seemed too little. Amr was so surprised by the money that he didn’t protest. He stood on the deck of his boat in his white gown, barefoot, the late afternoon sun illuminating his square and prematurely white head, his muddy brown eyes squinting at me. His lower lip quivered beneath his white-flecked mustache, and he clicked his tongue in that way that I knew meant he was speechless. Six hundred pounds — though it was six times what Amr usually made per month — was less than two hundred U.S. dollars. It was nothing; it had been worth it. My time in Egypt was short, and Amr had made it possible for me to begin my rowing trip. He had been unobtrusive, supportive, patient, and generous. He hadn’t ridiculed my desire to row on the river or doubted my ability to do it.
Madeleine and I both gave Wa’il a tip and said good-bye to him, and Amr climbed into a horse carriage with us to accompany us from the dock to the taxi stand. Madeleine and I had agreed that Luxor would be the best place for me to find another boat and continue my trip. We would go there immediately, and I would start my search all over again. Driving to Luxor would mean missing the stretch of river between Edfu and Luxor, which I regretted, but I felt that my chances of finding my own boat here were even slimmer than they’d been in Aswan. And this way I would avoid the lock at Esna, which I was certain the authorities would never allow me to pass through.
I didn’t tell Amr that I planned to continue on the river by myself. He would worry, would tell me all the reasons I shouldn’t do it, and I would do it anyway. It was better not to tell him.
All the horse carriages in Egypt had funereal black bonnets, like the sunshades on old-fashioned baby carriages, and the insides of the cabs were lined with photographs of foreigners who had previously ridden in them. As we rode through the crowded streets of Edfu in this dark little box on wheels, young barefoot boys raced past us on tiny barebacked horses, whipping the horses with palm branches; then they turned and raced back again, shrieking their welcomes at the tops of their tiny voices. Back and forth, back and forth, they accompanied us in this frenzied way, the horses frothing and sweating, their hooves clattering and sliding on the hot pavement.
At the taxi stand, a driver said with the severity of an executioner, “No foreigners can ride to Luxor without bolice convoy!” then, ignoring what he had just said and without any pleading or cajoling from us, he opened the rear door of his car and shouted with the same severity, “Get in! I take you to Luxor. You give me forty bound.”
I hated to say good-bye to Amr. When I told him that I felt lucky to know him, he said, “Luck for me too.” There was no sufficient way to thank him for the help he had given me. I knew that he would endure ribbing and even ridicule when he returned to Aswan, towing the empty rowboat behind him. He wouldn’t care. He was strong. He was also good company, and he was trustworthy. I would miss him. I wanted to hug him, but that was out of the question — such a display of affection between a man and a woman could simply not take place on a public Egyptian street without unpleasant consequences. We shook hands instead, which seemed pale and formal and deeply insufficient. It was unlikely that we would meet again.
As Madeleine and I climbed into the taxi, Amr began picking his way on foot through the throng of people jostling for taxis and carriages or waiting for the local bus. I watched the white head and the rounded shoulders so readily given to shrugging as they disappeared into the crowd, and felt very sad. I thought of Amr’s life in Aswan, the home into which he had welcomed me, the house-bound mother and sister he had to support with his meager income, the new house he dreamed of finishing so that he could leave his claustrophobic village and live in freedom. He was ill suited to the job of felucca captain — not aggressive enough, not coy enough, not eager enough for the money, not enough of a clown or a cad to elbow his way to the front of the crowd of Aswan felucca captains in order to attract the attention of the foreign tourists. He didn’t fit in. Because he didn’t fit in, his life was difficult.