There were metal detectors at the entrances to most buildings, though they were seldom used and seemed more symbolic than practical. Perhaps they didn’t work? Certainly the electricity supply was unreliable and there seemed to be a labor shortage. The armed men, with assault rifles slung at their sides, meant to reassure the tourists, simply looked sinister and added to the atmosphere of menace. The touts and curio-sellers were persistent, nagging, stalking, tugging sleeves, there was donkey shit everywhere and the sound of car horns and loud music playing at the tape-and-CD stalls, and pestering beggars, lepers, and the usual naggers from restaurants and coffee shops snatching at passersby. The bazaar and its density of hangers-on and hawkers have their nearest analogue in an American shopping mall — just as diverting, as much a time-killer and a recreation. The pedestrian zone, the food court, the wedged together shops of the mall, all have their counterparts in the Egyptian bazaar, which may be dirtier, smellier, and noisier, but is much cheaper and better-humored.
My hotel was on the river, walking distance from the train station. Gull-winged feluccas on the sparkling Nile, hawks overhead, crows, breathable air, a clear sky, and as many as 300 riverboats moored for the Nile cruises to Luxor. But business was poor — there were more boats than there were mooring places or piers, they were piled up and double and triple parked. It was early February, low season, and because tourists confused Israeli and Palestinian violence with much-more-placid Egypt, they were avoiding the Nile cruises.
I had breakfast, bought some amber beads in the bazaar, and did the Al-Ahram (English edition) crossword puzzle in the sunshine, sitting on a bench.
It was then, setting down one answer (it was aa, a Hawaiian word for a certain kind of cindery lava rock) that I was approached by the young man in a grubby white gown, who said to me, ‘We go. Nice felucca. We find Nubian banana.’
There were plenty of takers. Young women, singly or in pairs, being sailed by Egyptians, singly or in pairs, at sundown had to know that they were doing something that no Egyptian woman would do without understanding that they were putting themselves completely into the hands of these young men — these priapic young men.
While watching the feluccas tacking into the darkness into crepuscular copulations, I was approached by a big dark man.
‘I am Nubian,’ he said. ‘Mohammed.’
Another unambiguous flirtation, I was sure.
‘You ever been to Japan?’
‘Yes, I have — several times.’ Thinking: an ambiguous flirtation, then.
‘You like?’
‘Japan? Lots of people. Very expensive. Unlike Aswan — not many people. Very cheap.’
‘I am a tour guide here for ten years for Japanese people,’ he said. ‘I hate Japanese people. What is in their heads? What is inside? They are …’ But he didn’t finish the sentence. He winced, searching for words. ‘I hate to be a guide for them. Something is wrong with Japanese people.’
‘Maybe they are not like you,’ I said, trying to calm him.
‘They are not like me. Not like you. Not like anyone.’
‘You think so.’
‘I know this!’
To a Nubian such as Mohammed the Japanese were weird, mask-faced, backward-looking, strangely attired, oddly aromatic and inexplicable; much as a Nubian might seem to a Japanese. It was not for me to arrange for the twain to meet here in Aswan, but as a matter of fact there were a great number of Nubians here, who had been uprooted and rehoused because of the disruption of the High Dam and the lake that emerged.
Sudan was just at the other side of the lake, and there was a clear link, culturally and racially, with greater Nubia, the coming and going, the language most of all. No one said to me here as people said all the time in Cairo, ‘This isn’t Africa.’ This was Africa, and Aswan was full of relocated Nubians, whose villages had been inundated by Lake Nasser.
At noon that day I boarded the Philae, a lovely river cruiser with a capacity of about 100 passengers, and there were almost that number on this down-the-Nile trip, lots of Germans, some British and Americans, Egyptians, Dutch, and one Indian family, two adults and a small badly-behaved boy, the only child on the boat, who was bored and whiney the whole trip.
Recreational history, what most sightseeing amounts to, the History Channel in 3-D, to justify the enormous gourmet buffets and fabulous dinners and drinks on the upper deck: this was the mission of the Philae contingent. I had been on only two other cruises in my life — the luxury Seabourn Spirit (‘Your caviar will be sent to your suite shortly, sir’) and a Turkish junket in the MV Akdeniz which had delivered me to the coast of Egypt, with 450 courteous Turks, reminiscing about the Ottomans and wishing the Khedive still had the whip hand.
Wealthy people too lazy to read love cruises for the anecdotal history and archeological chitchat that later serve them to one-up their listeners in boasting-bouts after they go home. The Nile cruise passenger is someone in the process of becoming a licensed bore. The apprenticeship is filled with exploratory questions in the realm of Egyptology, much more than just the correct pronunciation of Ptah and Hatshepsut.
‘So the common people weren’t allowed to enter the temple?’ and: ‘Which one is Horus?’ and the recurring question of the tourist on the Nile, ‘How in heck did they manage to lift these things?’
Now and then the queries were detailed: ‘You mean there’s more than one Ptolemy?’ to which the answer was ‘Zayre was feefseen’ — and Ptolemy the math whizz wasn’t one of them.
Or: ‘How many centuries did you say?’ and the answer: ‘Seerty.’
The more meaningless the question the more detailed the interrogation, and the cruise passenger would just nod when the answer was delivered.
A woman on the Philae, for reasons of her own, kept asking the onboard Egyptologist, ‘Is that fronic?’
And the answer was sometimes yes, and sometimes spelled out on the item in question, the two hieroglyphics indicated in the cartouche, Per and Oni, meaning Big House, or Big Structure, or King, Pharaonic.
One night in Aswan I went by felucca to Elephantine Island, while in the distance midstream more feluccas, Egyptians at the tiller, were steering foreign women into the darkness and the quality of light gave the expression ‘being spirited away’ a definite meaning. The island was a gift to Horatio, Lord Kitchener, for mercilessly putting down the rebellion in the Sudan, a massacre known as the Battle of Omdurman, which was belated revenge for the Mahdi’s decapitation of General Gordon. Kitchener turned Elephantine Island into a botanical garden, which he could view from his villa. Some of the palms and plumeria and exotic shrubs still flourish, but what is most remarkable about the island is that from the east bank there is a view of the cliff-side town and the bazaar, and from the west, across a stretch of river, just sand dunes, long monumental sand pistes of smoothness, suggesting depth in the way it lay in wind-swept swathes, scooped and carved, like trackless snow-fields tinted pink and gold at sunset, awaiting skiers.
My felucca sailor dropped me in the dark at the east bank, below the town where, at the limit of the bazaar, I spotted an imam in a white gallabieh standing at the gateway of his mosque. But it was too dark for me to see the outlines of this place of worship. As I walked closer I saw it was not an imam but a priest in a white cassock — what’s the difference? He was standing at the gateway of his church, inhaling the night air. Seeing me, he beckoned with a benign wave of the hand.