From Aswan, on the Nile

Well, Praise the Lord, Bush! Another connection! Again, a bit hard to find, since the hotel’s access was for some reason disconntected when I first tried last night. But then I got some help from Fadel’s son, Islam, who is accompanying us, so here I am again, a little before six, sitting on the terrace outside our room at the Old Cataract Hotel. A truly beautiful spot, unlike any I have ever seen in my life before. Very African, someone said last night. A little green oasis corner of the river, swarming with boats and people. Even this early, the place is alive with the sound of birds and cicadas. A sense of intense life, surrounded closely by the barrenness of the desert. The thoughts that follow may seem a little disjointed, since some of them were jotted down along the way. Again, you’ll probably find scads of typos. Have no time to edit. Here goes:

Notes from the air, Cairo to Aswan. Sand, sand, sand. Nothing but sand, as far as you can see. An arrid, barren landscape.

Because Egypt Air is a monopoly, Fadel tells us, they schedule flights according to their own whim. To get our party to Aswan by regular commercial flight, he said, would have meant splitting the party in two (not enough bookable seats on a single flight) and leaving at four and five in the morning. His solution: charter a plane. So here we are in our own Boeing 737, traversing the desert.

A propos of nothing in particular: our friend Todd White observed—and I, too, had noticed this—how many men are on hand to work at jobs that seem to require far fewer. With the result that many of them seem to be just standing around, waiting for something to do. I noticed this at our hotel: a huge staff, far more than you’d see at a comparable American hotel, all ready to jump and help at a moment’s notice. Same thing at the airport, as Todd noticed. Even the security men lining the highway on the way out to the airport (there were more of them, I noticed, along the runway as we took off—posted in little shelters a couple of hundred yards away.) And the riot cops yesterday. So many of them. So many men, and apparently so little work. Fadel mentioned a figure of 20-25% unemployment.

Our way is quite different, Bush. We’re all business, all efficiency. We pay well, by comparison, but we employ as few as possible and expect a maximum of work. The result is more wealth but less happiness. We’re all about success and getting ahead. When it gets to be about subsistence and survivial people seem more able to be in the moment, and value other things in life. Themselves, each other, family, clan. I recalled how shocked the Dalai Lama proclaimed himself to be, on first encountering the unhappiness, and the desperate need for psychotherapy in the affluent Western world.

Back to the landscape: more of the same. Sand. And then suddenly a great swath of dark green fertility as we cross the Nile. And soon again, more sand.

We arrived in Aswan without incident, and set off in a bus that led us past the old dam, engineered by the British in the early 20th century (and a distant glimpse of the new one, which is supposed to have caused the flooding of many ancient archeological sights.) Then embarked on a boat that ferried acoss the dam to the Philae Island, where they moved the Philae Temple in the 1980s. Fadel brought on a whole team of Nubian musicians, who sang and strummed their haunting music as we made the crossing. A nice touch—and time for a tribute to Fadel, whose knowledge of the people, the history, and the terriotry makes our journey so much richer at each stop along the way. (Ellie spotted an ibis, pointed it out. A thrill!)

The temple, then: no matter how many pictures you may see of the archeological sites of Egypt, the first glimpse of a temple in real life comes as an awesome delight. I found it simply overwhelming: the scale, the grandeur, the incredible detail of the relief work and the hieroglyphs is unbelievable. This particular temple is devoted to Isis, we learned, the mother of Horus, the sun god, and one of the inner chambers is devoted to the story of his birth.

Fadel gave us an excellent run-down of the history of the place and the mythological stories that it celebrates. But my purpose here is not to try to give a potted version of either Egyptian history of Egyptian mythology—about both of which my ignorance is vast. Just to recall the experience, standing there in the heat of the Egyptian sun, gazing up at these marvels engraved in monumental slabs of sandstone, and to be awed by the human spirit—not to mention the skill and the labor—that made them possible.

On the boat back, Fadel introduced us to his Nubian friends, who were now anxious to sell their wares, producing from nowehre a whole inventory of beads, necklaces, scarves, beaded headwear. Their families, Fadel explained, depended very much on the small income they could glean from sales to tourists. The jetty, when we reached it, was now crowded with small stalls, and seemingly hundreds of needy Nubians. I succumbed to a nicely carved black cat and snake, and probably paid too much for it. Our friends Todd and Linda got one for much less. But it was smaller.

Heading on toward our hotel, we made a stop at a granite quarry to see where much of the stone for the temples—even those further north—was quarried to be ferried downriver. (Two men at the entrance, one handing out tickets, the other, standing right beside him, tearing off the stubs!) The quarry was an impreesive sight in itself, with its jagged granite boulders left since the early times. But the notable piece was an unfinished obelisk, which apparently would have weighed some 12,000 tons. A gargantuan piece of stone, its shape was already carved out in the rock, but only at the sides: the undercutting work, to release it from the quarry, had been abandoned because of a flaw discovered late in its creation. We were fortune to have been the first to be escorted to another section of the site, where most of the undercutting work had been done on another massive obelisk, also still not yet completed.

On the way out, more sales. The salesmen are persistent, always ready to bargain. It’s clearly a way of life here. Along with baksheeh. Everyone is ready for, expecting a handout. For photographs. For offering a hand up a steep step, for small acts of service. It’s simply expected. Fadel counsels, wisely, not to be irritated by it. As for the salesmen, tuning out is better than allowing yourself to be hassled by them. “You’re here to have a happy time,” he told us. “Not to get mad.” But it is different, Bush, from our way. It comes with beautiful smiles and infinite politeness, but it is about subsistence.

We arrived at the Old Cataract to find one of those grand old Victorian-style hotels—something, I suspect, like Raffles in Singapore or the Peninsula in Hong Kong. High ceilings, lots of exotic decoration, slightly over-the-top, slightly decadent grandeur. Took a rest and emerged, at dinner time, on the terrace, to find this incredible view of the river bend at dusk. And took a boat, again, to dinner—a Nubian restaurant high above the water, long tables, exotic decoration… And settled down to a Nubian feast of spicy casseroles, before returning to our hotel from drinks under the starlight on the terrace before bed time.