‘But are the Nubians the genuine pharaonic people, as it is sometimes claimed?’
‘Everyone asks this question, especially Nubians.’
There was more talk, more shouting, everyone smoking and talking at once. ‘The next Arab — Israeli war will be different!’ a man yelled. I crept down to the bar and drank a beer and when I came back they were still shouting and the gathering around Mahfouz had grown to a small crowd. I had lost my seat. Three hours of this and they were still shouting. Mahfouz went through this five nights a week and found it a tonic.
‘He wants to know where you’re going,’ Raymond said, when I made my excuses and began to leave.
‘To Nubia,’ I said.
Mahfouz said something in Arabic and it was translated.
‘Nu bia is “The Gold Place.” Nub means “gold.” ’
Before I took the train to Aswan, and still awaiting a Sudanese visa, I decided to boost my spirits by getting an Ethiopian visa. That would be easy, I was told, because Ethiopia was still at war with its breakaway province of Eritrea, now a sovereign state — but a battle-scarred sovereign state littered with corpses, casualties of war. No one wanted to go to Ethiopia.
Some consulates are so atmospheric — a certain quality of dust and old furnishings and the lingering odors of the national dish. The Ethiopian Consulate in Cairo gave me that impression: faded glory, high ceilings, beat-up sofas, unswept floors, the aromas of fasting food, the fermented smell of injera and spiced beans, the thick nutty fragrance of Abyssinian coffee, a slight stinkiness of old-fashioned men’s suits and stained neckties.
I was received warmly by the balding 34-year-old consul general, Mr Eshete Tilohun. He was small with an impressive head, a big bulging brow that would have suited an extra-terrestrial or a math whizz, and deep-set eyes. He told me that for seventy US dollars I could have a visa that would remain valid for two years.
‘Look!’ he said, a cry of anguish, lifting his eyes from my passport.
A large multicolored map of Ethiopia and the surrounding countries in the Horn of Africa covered part of the far wall of his office.
‘No outlet to the sea!’ he said in a lamenting voice. ‘Eritrea! Djibouti! Somalia! And we are land-locked. That is why we are poor!’
‘What about the war with Eritrea?’
‘Not our fault,’ he said. ‘It is those people. Bring an Eritrean here and you would see the difference in culture. Ha!’
He had rubber stamped my passport but he had not filled in any of the blanks. His pen was poised, but he was still clucking over the map.
‘Djibouti — so small! The soldiers of the Derg wrecked the country. Mengistu gave Djibouti away. The Eritreans made trouble. The Somalis are just bandit people.’
‘But things are quiet now?’
‘Very quiet!’ His eyes bulged when he emphasized a point. I liked his passion. He seemed to care that I wanted to go to Ethiopia. He reflected, ‘Of course the Emperor made his mistakes. The country was backward.’
‘In what way backward?’
‘Feudal,’ he said, and shrugged, and went on, ‘But go to Tana! See churches! Go to Gondar and Tigre. The women have tattooed faces there. They are good Christians — since AD 34 they have been Christians. They have been Jews for longer. Go to the southwest. See the Mursi people. The naked Mursi people. Your name is?’
‘Paul.’
‘Paul, the Mursi are the last naked people in the world.’
I disputed this and told him in detail about nudist camps in such places as the United States and Europe, how the campers might play bare-assed ping-pong, or eat or chitchat or swim, mother naked.
‘No! They go into the street like this?’ Mr Tilohun asked.
‘Just around their camp,’ I said.
‘Like the Mursi.’
‘For them it’s not sex. It’s health.’
‘Exactly like the Mursi! They say, “Why do you wear these clothes?” ’
Mr Tilohun tried to look shocked and indignant but you could see he found the whole idea of public nudity extravagantly funny. ‘One of my friends had his picture taken with a Mursi woman. She had no clothes on at all!’
Mr Tilohun’s eyes glittered at the thought of his decently clothed friend standing next to the naked woman — who, by the way, being a Mursi might not have been wearing a dress but would have worn a saucer-sized plug in her lower lip.
‘The Mursi are real Africans,’ Mr Tilohun said. ‘And there are others. The Oromo. The Galla. The Wolayta.’
‘I can’t wait,’ I said, and meant it.
At one point, speaking of my trip and the road south, Mr Tilohun said, ‘There is only one road going south in Ethiopia. It is the road to Johannesburg. The longest road in Africa. You just keep going.’
The weather had not changed, nor had the weather report. ‘Tomorrow — Dust’ was the forecast, and it occurred as predicted, but more dramatically than before, a high deep dust cloud approaching from the west, looking like a mountain range on the move, gray and dense, overwhelming the city, and at last the sun setting into it, turning into a dull disc. It was in fact a dust storm, with the appearance of fog but the texture of grit, covering everything, the pages of the book I was reading, blurring the windows of Cairo, getting into my teeth.
One last visit to the Sudanese. Mr Qurashi said, ‘Next week, inshallah.’
Ten days earlier, on my arrival in Cairo, inshallah had meant, ‘God willing’ and ‘Soon’ and then ‘Eventually’ and ‘In the fullness of time.’ Later it meant ‘We hope’ and ‘Don’t count on it.’ Now it meant, ‘You wish!’, ‘No way!’ and ‘Not bloody likely!’
3. Up and Down the Nile
The Philae, a river cruiser, lay aslant of the bank, captive in her mooring lines in the winter sunshine at Aswan on the Nile — yes, Heart of Darkness opens something like this. I really did suspect that I might be headed to a dark place and as with all long trips I fantasized that I might die there. Last night’s rain had freshened the air and turned the riverbank to gleaming paste. Fellaheen with fishing poles stood in mud to their knees and other muddy men were calling out, ‘Felucca ride! Felucca ride!’
A young man in a grubby white gown said to me, ‘We go. Nice felucca. We find Nubian banana.’
‘Nubian banana?’
‘Big banana,’ he said, and made an unambiguous gesture near a portion of his grubby gown. ‘You come with me. Big banana.’
He went on flattering himself until I said, ‘Oh, bugger off.’
His sort of importuning was common in the tourist-haunted parts of Egypt where I regularly saw visiting men and visiting women tacking in quaint feluccas at dusk towards the less-frequented parts of the Nile embankment, where unobserved in the shadows of overhanging ferns, they would find the Nubian banana.
I had been told to board the Philae at noon for the scenic trip downriver to Luxor, where the boat stopped and I would continue. I planned to keep going, overland, in Africa, on the longest road trip of my life, over the frontier to Wadi Halfa and Upper Nubia and beyond to Dongola and Khartoum, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and deeper south to Malawi, via Zomba and Limbe, where I had lived so long ago, to see what had happened to Africa while I had been elsewhere.
I had come here from Cairo in a sleeper on the night train. The taxi driver had asked for fifty Egyptian pounds (about $12). I offered him thirty, assuming he would negotiate as all the others had done, but instead he became peevish and indignant and lapsed into a lofty silence, no haggling at all. At the station, which was very crowded with commuters and cars, he became ridiculously attentive, he bowed to me, he insisted on carrying my bag, he parted the crowd, he found the right platform, the Aswan train, even the section of track where the sleeper would stop. So I handed him fifty for the extra attention he had given me. He scrupulously fished in his purse and gave me twenty pounds in change and thanked me in a sneering way. I tried to hand the money back to him. He touched his heart, waving away the tip. Wounded feelings had turned him into a paragon of virtue.