The most idyllic stretch of the Nile that I saw, an Egyptian pastoral as serene as any watercolor, lay between Edfu and Esna. Afterwards, when I thought about Egypt I always saw it as it appeared to me that hot afternoon from the deck of the Philae. Fifty miles of farms and plowed fields, mud houses and domed mausoleums on hilltops; fishermen in rowboats, in the stream of the river, and donkeys and camels on the banks, loping among the palms. The only sounds were the gurgle of the boat’s bow wave, the whine of locusts, and the flop and splash of the fishermen’s oars. The sky was cloudless and blue, the land baked the color of biscuits and with the same rough, dry texture, as though these low hills and riverbanks had just come out of the oven. The green was deep and well watered, the river was a mirror of all of this — the sky, the banks, the boats, the animals, a brimming reflection of everything, near and far, an ambitious aquarelle that took in the whole visible peaceful landscape.
Esna had always been a stopping-off place, even when the temple lay buried, ‘to its chin,’ as one Victorian traveler wrote. The ruination had not made it less popular. The advantage of a mostly buried temple like this was that a visitor had a close-up view of the upper parts of the massive pillars: the great sculpted capitals and the interior ceiling showing papyrus leaves and ferns, grasshoppers, the symbolic garden easily visible, with zodiac signs, the enormous scorpion and the ram-headed god, Khnum, to whom the temple is dedicated.
The young sensualist Flaubert — he was only twenty-seven — went to Esna in search of a celebrated courtesan, Kuchuk Hanem, ‘Little Princess’, and her famous dance, the ‘Dance of the Bee.’ Esna at that time was the most vicious town in Egypt, filled with prostitutes who by law had been rounded up and rusticated there from Cairo. Flaubert found Kuchuk Hanem, she danced naked for him, among blindfolded musicians.
The Dance of the Bee has been described as ‘essentially a frenzied comic routine in which the dancer, attacked by the bee, has to take all her clothes off.’ But in the word bee there is also a distinct allusion, for it is an Arabic euphemism for the clitoris. Flaubert slept with the dancer and minutely recorded in his travel notes the particularities of each copulation, the temperature of her body parts, his own performance (‘I felt like a tiger’) and even the bedbugs in her bed, which he loved (‘I want a touch of bitterness in everything’). In every sense of the word, he anatomized his Egyptian experience and he became an informal guide and role model to me.
At Esna, Flaubert made two memorable entries in his diary. At the temple, while an Arab is measuring the length of one of the exposed columns for him, he notes, ‘a yellow cow, on the left, poked her head inside …’
Without that yellow cow we see nothing; with it, the scene is vivid and complete. And leaving Kuchuk’s room after the sexual encounter he writes, ‘How flattering it would be to one’s pride if at the moment of leaving you were sure that you left a memory behind, that she would think of you more than of the others who had been there, that you would remain in her heart!’
But that is a lament, with the foreknowledge that he will be quickly forgotten, for later he concedes that, even as he is ‘weaving an aesthetic around her,’ the courtesan — well, whore — cannot possibly be thinking of him. He concludes: ‘Traveling makes one modest — you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.’
After the Philae docked, I went ashore and walked through the little town to the enormous and now fully exposed temple that lay in a great square pit, as though quarried from the earth. The painted signs of the zodiac were beautiful, the columns massive and intact. It is a late, Roman era temple, but the Egyptian style is that of a thousand years earlier, the worst damage is the façade, bullet-pocked by French soldiers who took pot-shots at it in the 1840s, plinking away at the magnificent edifice for the sheer hell of it.
A bazaar clustered around it, narrow lanes, screeching traders, children and animals crowding around.
I went back to the Philae. I finished Flaubert, I started Heart of Darkness, which I was to read twelve more times before I got to Cape Town. Lolling on the upper deck I realized that the Philae was not the Roi des Belges, but rather one of those ships — very few, in my experience — that I wished would just keep sailing on, with me on board, bearing me onward to Khartoum, and southward through the Sudd; into Uganda and the big lakes, pioneering a water route down to the Zambezi.
‘Just yourself this evening, sir?’ Ibrahim, the waiter, asked each night at dinner.
I smiled: Yes, just me and Joseph Conrad.
‘Going to Cairo afterwards, sir?’
‘Yes, to get a visa. Then I am heading south. To Nubia. The Sudan. Ethiopia. And beyond, I hope.’
‘Alone, sir?’
‘Inshallah.’
‘Business or pleasure, sir?’
‘Both. Neither.’
‘Very good, sir. An adventure for you, sir.’
Ibrahim was the soul of courtesy. They all were, really, full of compliments. It is well known that the staff on cruise ships are helpful and friendly because they are hustling for tips. They smile and banter so that you will reward them. I smile; you give me money.
Tipping confounds me because it is not a reward but a travel tax, one of the many, one of the more insulting. No one is spared. It does not matter that you are paying thousands to stay in the presidential suite in the best hoteclass="underline" the uniformed man seeing you to the elevator, inquiring about your trip, giving you a weather report, and carrying your bags to the suite expects money for this unasked-for attention. Out front, the doorman, gasconading in gold braid, wants a tip for snatching open a cab door, the bartender wants a proportion of your bill, so does the waiter, and chambermaids sometimes leave unambiguous messages, with an accompanying envelope, demanding cash. It is bad enough that people expect something extra for just doing their jobs; it is an even more dismal thought that every smile has a price.
Still, on the Philae, the waiters had a cheerful, even celebratory way of working, as though they were acting in an Egyptian comedy; and in such a country, where a schoolteacher earned $50 a month, they probably needed tips just to get by.
Although I was alone at my table, I was one of a hundred passengers — mainly those plump rich amphibious-looking people for whom travel is an expensive kind of laziness, spent in the company of other idle people to whom they relate details of their previous trips. ‘This reminds me of parts of Brazil,’ and ‘Now that, that could be Malta.’ They were American, British, German, with a scattering of South Americans, and of course the gloomy Indians with the boisterous child. The Americans on board could be divided into young friends traveling happily together, contentious aged couples traveling alone, and honeymooners, three pairs, everyone’s favorites.
I resisted mocking them because they were generally harmless and most were committed to geniality, but except for one friendly pair of honeymooners who insisted that I dine with them from time to time, I always ate alone. As for the others, trying to recall them, I only see them eating — feeding-time was always closely observed on shipboard, and they were at their most animated then. The table of older German blonde women, exquisitely dressed; the four German men who were always so curt with the waiter — and one was actually named Kurt; the young American couples, distressed by the news of the failing stock market; the hard-faced woman and her bosomy husband, each seemingly midway through a sex-change; the Indian couple and their bored bratty child.