Of the Germans, the sextet of older, occasionally exuberant blondes, like the reunion of a chorus line, interested me most, because they were traveling with a Levantine doctor. We were on the upper deck one day, having a drink, and he said to me, ‘My field is reconstructive surgery.’ I turned to the women who were talking and sunning themselves, in that odd heliotropic posture of sunbathers, canted against the sun, grimacing and just perceptibly turning.
I was struck by their similarity — the sharp noses, the smooth cheeks, the tight eyes, the bright brittle hair — and I realized that he was traveling with his patients, all of whom were so pretty he, not they, deserved the compliment. This peculiar revelation seemed to me a great subject for a story: say, a young man’s involvement with a much older woman who looks thirty, traveling with her plastic surgeon. To calm myself with the illusion that I was working, I began writing this story. This is my only story. Now that I am sixty I can tell it … As the days and weeks passed, the story became by turns melancholic, comic, reminiscing, and consolingly erotic.
Inevitably, on the Philae, there was one of those helpfully nosy couples who asked all the questions the rest of us did not dare to ask for fear of revealing our ignorance. ‘How in heck did they manage to move those things?’ and ‘Is that fronic?’ were two of their questions. The wife interrogated the women, her husband badgered the men for information.
‘Do you work?’ the bullying wife asked the shyest-seeming woman, one of the petite and pretty honeymooners.
‘I’m a prison officer,’ the new bride said.
‘That must be so difficult!’ was the predictable rejoinder.
When the honeymooner said, ‘Oh, no. We have some wonderful inmates’ all conversation ceased.
The nosy woman’s husband, an irritating old philistine, who looked like Piltdown man in a golf cap, kept saying to me, ‘I guess I’ll have to read one of your books now.’
I begged him not to, in a friendly way. One thing I had learned about traveling with lots of other people was that it was usually a good idea to hold my tongue. The talkers were self-advertisers, people to avoid, along with the networkers, the salesmen and the evangelists; the quieter ones were often worth knowing, but in any case I regarded the whole boatload as one of the sights of Egypt, like the fat stone hippos and the mummified cats and the pesky curio-sellers. I guessed that after Egypt I would not see many more tourists.
None of us knew much about Egyptology, we were hazy on dates, ‘My history’s real shaky,’ was as common a remark as ‘How in heck did they manage to move those things?’
For me this was a picnic, and I suspected my last picnic before plunging deeper in Africa. This was comfortable undemanding travel among mostly companionable people, and if it was true that we didn’t know much about Egyptian history, neither did the Egyptians. It would have been very tedious if some pedantic historian had been on the cruise, correcting impressions and setting us straight. I preferred listening to the improvisations:
‘They must have used those for climbing up the wall.’
‘I imagine they took baths in that thing.’
‘Those ruts were probably made by chariots, or wagon wheels of some kind.’
‘Looks like a kind of duck.’
‘That’s definitely fronic.’
Some countries are just perfect for tourists. Italy is. So are Mexico and Spain. Turkey, too. Egypt, of course. Pretty big. Not too dirty. Nice food. Courteous people. Sunshine. Lots of masterpieces. Ruins all over the place. Names that ring a bell. Long vague history. The guide says, ‘Papyrus’ or ‘Hieroglyphic’ or ‘Tutankhamen,’ or ‘one of the Ptolemies,’ and you say, ‘Yup.’
But what you remember most is the friendly waiter, or the goofball with the mobile phone on the camel, or the old man pissing against the ancient wall, the look of a tray of glossy pomegranates in the market, the sacks of spices, the yellow cow ruminating in the temple, or just the colors, for the colors of Egypt are gorgeous. Edward Lear wrote in his diary on the Nile, ‘Egypt is at least a land to learn color in.’
What was I doing? Making progress, I felt. Proceeding from the shore of the Mediterranean, via the Pillars of Hercules, by degrees, deeper into Africa. Travel is transition, and at its best it is a journey from home, a setting forth. I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease with which a person could be transported so swiftly from the familiar to the strange, the moon-shot whereby the New York office worker, say, is insinuated overnight into the middle of Africa to gape at gorillas. That was just a way of feeling foreign. The other way, going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and my passport, was the best way of being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back.
Close shot: me rowing hard, sweating like a galley slave. The camera draws back, revealing that I am on a rowing machine. A wider shot: I am in an exercise room; wider stilclass="underline" I am on a boat, the Philae, near a window. The camera rises from me rowing on my machine and focuses out the window, finding a man at his oars on a rowboat on the Nile, rowing in the same rhythm.
We came to Luxor, Thebes, the Valley of the Kings, the dream of Egyptologists and fidgety tourists, for even if you know nothing you can still gape at the beauties and listen to recited facts, that the sun is born in the morning as a beetle — the scarab; becomes the god Re at noon, and reigns until night falls, becoming the god Atun. How you can read the Profession of Sinlessness — the Negative Confession, the pharaohs listing all their good deeds on the wall of the tomb. Sun imagery blazed everywhere in the form of solar boats, sun disks on the heads of compound gods, orbs over doorways. The Egyptians saw such power in the sun they called themselves ‘cattle of Re.’
But I most remember the graffiti, the vandalism, the names of ancients chiseled into the tomb walls, and that of the French army, the English nineteenth-century travelers, the crazed Copts, the defacements of the iconoclast Akhnaton who decided to be a monotheist.
And the gravel crunching sandals of the old German professor in the tomb of Amenkopshef, as he approached the glass case and leaned over, saying, ‘See the shy-eld.’
A clutch of little bones and a crushed skull.
‘Is a moomy.’
Indeed it was a mummified foetus.
I remember the tomb of Nefertary, the Nubian wife of Rameses III, not for the many years and many millions in its restoration, nor the svelte Nefertary in her see-through gown and tattooed arms (a wide-open eye on each arm), playing a board game, and the jet blacks, bright colors, storks, beetles, cobras, greens, reds, yellows.
What I remember is that tickets were scarce and the visit was limited to ten minutes and that among all these scenes in the depths of the tomb, the attendant approached me, whispering, ‘You must go now! No, okay, stay three minutes more,’ and putting his hand out for baksheesh.
At Karnak, great city and temple complex, nothing on earth like it, all those columns, I remember mainly the images of honey bees — Nesrut Bity — (King Bee) — symbol of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt — painted high on a roof truss and how the bee thoraxes and legs were defaced. Flaubert said that Karnak looked like ‘a house where giants live, a place where they used to serve up men roasted whole, à la brochette, on gold plates, like larks.’
At the 3000-year-old Mortuary Temple of Medinet Habu, commemorating the victories of Rameses III, I watched a group of Spanish tourists do a double take, first shock, then fascination passing one wall, as they discerned the depiction of hands and penises being cut off captives — the tourists peering at the great stack of dicks carved into the temple wall.