The Black Nile

Chapter TEN
The Wednesday ferry to Aswan carried me and three hundred other passengers north over the submerged minarets of Old Halfa. We’d boarded like cattle, driven over a steel gangplank and crammed in a bickering line through the ship’s double doors. The second-class passengers crowded into the open seating belowdeck to stake out plots among the rows of plastic chairs in the low-ceilinged chamber, dragging their children and baggage down the aisles. I walked up a flight of stairs to find my first-class stateroom, a clean enough private nook with a bunk bed and a roaring air conditioner that filled the cabin with a wet Shetland chill. Two life vests hung from a coat rack in case the twenty-hour journey turned desperate.
The ferry, maybe thirty yards long, its sides dotted with orange lifeboats, made for an uninspiring little ship but it was the Queen Mary compared with the boat Schon and I had rowed to Lake Kyoga or the barge Alexandre and I had hopped to Malakal. There was even a snack bar belowdeck that sold fried fish, chicken and ful. One flight up from the private rooms, the main deck was a bright daytime promenade where the few foreigners mixed easily with the steerage class, cooing at the babies and sharing cigarettes with their parents. I met a vacationing French bureaucrat who had come to Wadi Halfa via Djibouti, Ethiopia and the railroad from Atbara. Graying and trim, he was stunned by the recent election of Nicolas Sarkozy to the presidency. “Ségolène, I worked with under Mitterrand,” he said. “She is nothing. She deserves to lose. But this man, this little man—this is not a president.” He sat in the shade of the pilothouse chatting with a Sudanese Nubian communist who was returning to his home in Cairo after visiting family in Khartoum. “It was me who broke the lock on Kobar prison when Nimeiri fell,” he said. Among the political prisoners he claimed to have freed was Hassan al-Turabi, the man behind the National Islamic Front’s military coup in 1989 and its subsequent reign of terror. “It is my greatest regret.” While he had second thoughts about cutting loose the country’s leading Islamist, the communist retained the confident myopia that afflicted so many northerners when it came to the civil war. He refused to believe the south would ever secede from Sudan. To the contrary, he said, “Just watch. In twenty years, the south will be entirely Muslim. Now they are free to choose, and they will choose correctly.”
At night the promenade became a village; families emerged from the sultry passenger hold to jockey and menace one another for a breezy patch of deck on which to sleep. I was dozing in my spot by a hanging orange lifeboat, having forsaken my room for a view of the moon-licked waters, when a mustached man in a brown robe and turban wordlessly prodded me awake with his stevedore hands to make way for three doughy peasant women. They together would bed down where I alone had been sprawled. I picked my way through the sleeping bodies and crawling infants toward the aft staircase to find it clogged with men and boys. They filled the stairs and the small rear gangway, dozens and dozens packed together in a rough circle around a skinny blind boy, maybe eight or nine, and an older man who carried a wide and shallow drum. They sang in call and response, the boy standing erect, eyes closed, his right hand in the air, his left clutching the drummer’s jallabiya, shouting out short religious verses in a piping and insistent voice that were answered by the assembly with long droning choruses. Teenage boys joined in from the upper deck. Some hung from the rail, their legs hooked around the painted bars so they might bring their faces closer and lend their voices to the Saharan wind.
Camera in hand, I apologized my way down the steps, cursing the near-total darkness, and made a right onto the port side walkway, past a row of rectangular portholes. The last of these was open, bleeding light, and I poked my head in to find a man bent over a microscope on a stained white countertop. Dressed in the same garb as the grizzled fathers corralling their families belowdeck, he was in fact a medical technician checking the blood of sick passengers for malaria. He and a physician were assigned to the ship by the Egyptian health ministry. Egypt, while home to untold mosquitoes, was malaria-free, and the government meant to keep it that way. Any passenger with a fever was tested on board, and if the results were positive, treatment began on the lake with follow-up in Aswan. I was impressed. Foreigners who spend any amount of time in Egypt return home with florid tales of colossal misgovernance—the ferry that went down in the Red Sea hours before authorities managed to mount a rescue party, the shortages of drinking water in five of the country’s twenty-six provinces, the contaminated blood bags distributed to public hospitals. But some things did in fact work, and here was one. Egypt had all but beaten malaria, something that couldn’t be said for its wealthier and more dynamic peers like India and Malaysia.
I returned to the icy cabin and met my roommate. He was a saidi, a traditional southern Egyptian farmer, dressed in an earth-colored jallabiya and white turban, with a heavy wool scarf around his shoulders and neck (an accessory worn no matter what the temperature). He sat on the bottom bunk carving a tomato with a knife whose blade had been ground into a crescent by untold sharpenings, the slices to be eaten with pieces of onion and Sudanese bread that rested on his lap inside a plastic shopping bag. I said hello and he nodded and we didn’t speak again. I climbed into my bunk, wrapped my shoulders in a thick blanket and willed myself to sleep with the lights on. It was a false sleep, and I woke a few hours later as the ferry stopped and was met by another boat. We were boarded. I slipped my feet into sandals and crept out to see what was happening. A group of men were shaking hands outside the ferry’s café. Their manners were easy and informal, but their uniforms didn’t match. Then I got it. The Sudanese officials were leaving the ferry; Egyptians were taking their place. We had reached the 22nd parallel, the Egyptian border. Sudan was over. Lake Nubia was now Lake Nasser.
While the Aswan High Dam could trace its lineage to decades of British, German and Egyptian engineers and their evolving and competing plans for control of the Nile, this modern wonder had but one true father, and he was neither an engineer nor a colonial overlord. Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser was a soldier, and he set his heart on building the dam, among the biggest in the world, within two months of seizing power in 1952. Never mind Egypt’s empty treasury, its meager technical resources and a deep national malaise. (“The creative impulse was absent from Egypt” when Nasser and the other Free Officers staged their bloodless coup, the British author Tom Little wrote.) In the three-mile-long High Dam, Nasser found an act of creation to rival the pyramids, one that would tame the mighty Nile and free Egypt from its millennia-old dependence on the river’s annual flood. The dam was as critical as any military strategy or secret arms deal. Millions of Egyptians were on the verge of being born, and they would need ground to till and food to eat.
That was the secret of the High Dam in those early days of revolution and socialist Arabism. Though it was publicly portrayed as the cure to all of Egypt’s present and future ills, Nasser and his peers knew the stunning achievement would be, in its most vital incarnation, just a stopgap. Yes, it would one day provide cheap electricity to power new industries. Yes, it would allow Egypt’s farmers to plant three crops a year instead of two. But in 1952, Nasser and his advisers were above all in a race against Egypt’s breakneck birthrate. The billion-dollar High Dam ($6.5 billion in today’s money) would provide just enough arable land to keep Egypt from starvation until new development came on line. And it worked, but not without cost.
Beneath the ferry lay more than 150 billion cubic meters of fresh water. When prolonged drought hit East Africa during the 1980s, the dam and the lake saved Egypt from thirst that devastated Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya. In the 1990s, when heavy Indian Ocean monsoons sent massive flows barreling down from Ethiopia, the dam held back the crushing water, preventing floods that would have been calamitous in an earlier era.
The trade-offs for this security were environmental, financial and psychic. Surrounded by desert and pounded by the cloudless North African sun, Lake Nasser loses about ten billion cubic meters of water each year to evaporation, enough fresh drinking water for twenty million Egyptians. The dam prevents the volcanic silt nutrients of the Ethiopian highlands from reaching Egyptian soil, so while farmers can now plant three crops a year, they and their government must now shell out cash for chemical fertilizers that damage the soil and bring lower yields. This miracle silt, some five billion cubic meters of it (visualize, if you can, two thousand great pyramids of Cheops), sits at the bottom of the lake. In 2004 researchers floated the idea of mining the lake bottom for the life-giving muck, using electric slurry pumps and floating pipelines to vacuum the lakebed clean. Should such a plan come to pass, the farmers of Egypt and Sudan will presumably be handed the privilege of paying to obtain what the Nile used to give them for free.
The human cost of the dam was also great. While the international community donated $87 million ($620 million today) to salvage the antiquities of Nubia, including moving the grand temples of Abu Simbel out of the water’s reach and crating the entire eight-hundred-ton temple of Dendur off to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, less than a third as much was spent to resettle Sudan’s Nubians, an effort that left them hundreds of miles from the Nile’s banks, on land claimed by nomadic tribes of herdsmen, and where large extended families were expected to live happily in cramped “modern” houses. It was no wonder that Midhat seethed and Mohammed Wardi spoke of armed insurrection. I was curious to see how the Nubian Museum in Aswan, built with funds from the United Nations, portrayed the inundation of Nubia.
The scientific, archaeological and ethnographic literature examining the impact of the High Dam runs for miles. What is missing is a psychic record of what happens to a people when you literally change their calendar. For five thousand years Egypt marked its seasons by the Nile flood. And then, quite suddenly, it didn’t. (Though some farmers still use three calendars—Islamic, Christian and pharaonic.) Wouldn’t that kind of disruption produce some measurable or observable cultural dissonance, a civilizational jet lag?


In the morning I slid down from my bunk, wet my face in the crowded common washroom and stepped outside into a wall of daylight. Vertigo hit me and I pressed myself against the bulkhead, sure that I would topple over the rail into a blinding sea. The turbulence passed as my eyes adjusted and my lenses darkened. Schon would have loved fishing off the side, I thought, though the absence of beer might have driven him mad.
I prowled the ferry with my Nikon shooting the children as they scamped and posed for the stranger’s camera. There was one family that had caught my eye the night before. They were Arabs, with a man, two women, a boy and a beautiful little girl maybe eight years old. She had bright bronze skin, amber eyes and long, messy hair that hung to her shoulder blades in two ragged braids. She smiled easily, a happy girl, and leaned amiably against a luggage-scuffed wall belowdeck, her dress flickering with rows of golden polka dots.
There was another, older girl who clung to the shadows while I took her young companion’s photo. She was with the family but clearly not of it. She was a black African, maybe eleven or twelve, at ease with the little girl and her people and wary of others, including me. In time she joined us. She was long and thin, her short frizzy hair brushed in a forward swoop in the front and with a pert flip in the back. She wore a pretty calf-length red dress with two white ruffles that ran down from her shoulders and met at her waist. But there was something off about this girl: Why was she traveling with this family? Was she a friend, a servant, a slave? That question was pushed aside by a more immediate dissonance. Physically, something wasn’t right, and as she turned away from my attention to speak with the smaller girl it finally registered: She had only one ear. The whole of her external right ear, what doctors call the pinna, was gone. Still, when I asked to take her photograph she posed in the stairwell with pride, looking directly into the camera, lit by little more than her own energy. I shot a hopelessly dark frame of her there, and asked her name. She replied in a shy mumble, and I asked again. She mumbled again, though it sounded like she had said “Mariam.” I wanted to tell her that was my sister’s name, Miriam, but to be sure I asked her again and as she answered without volume I automatically, instinctively cupped a hand to my ear. At this she bolted like a doe back to the passenger hold, where she crouched by a wall and glared through the doorway. My heart sank to the muddy bottom of Lake Nasser.
In the early afternoon we approached the elegant three-mile curve of the High Dam and the ferry turned east toward the Aswan port. The passengers were ordered to line up and present themselves to officials waiting inside the ship’s café. All three hundred of us, once so happy on deck, were packed and stacked, dank cheek by sweaty jowl, with luggage and dependents, in the narrow halls and gangways and on the stairs while the name of each was checked against a list of known terrorists and insulters of the president. Foreigners had their passports inspected and stamped; those of the Egyptian and Sudanese passengers were held until every last potential dissident had been screened. One by one a family’s name would be called, and the father would have to claw his way through and over the others to collect his papers.
There was a heat in Aswan that equaled the deserts of northern Sudan and the jungles of Equatoria. The sun peeled back my clothes and then my skin and seemed to braise what muscle lay underneath. It provoked a keen sense of entitlement. I was now back in some version of civilization. The Aswan port had been a real port, unlike the dockside pile that had seen the ferry off from Wadi Halfa. The train to town had been a real train, made in France. I was, for the first time in my journey, in a tourist town, where alcohol was served, with dozens of clean budget hotels to choose from, but in the heat I felt I deserved more.
The Old Cataract beckoned. Presidents, prime ministers and proconsuls had all stayed at the Old Cataract. Churchill, of course. A wasting Fran?ois Mitterrand, just a week from death, jetted in for a final look at the Nile and the sunrise over the black boulders and pharaonic ruins of Elephantine Island. I extracted a credit card from a hidden cache in my rucksack, stepped over a metal barricade and walked up the long driveway for two nights of luxury.
But the Old Cataract’s high-thread-count sheets, enigmatic views (even the bathroom had a balcony), liveried room service and, by God, wine list, were not enough to cushion the shock of Egypt. If I had been asked to describe the northern Sudanese in one word, I would have said “cool.” Strangers, even friendly ones, carried with them a formality, a seriousness that I found appealing. I never once in northern Sudan heard one adult raise his voice to another. On my first walk through Aswan I encountered a bellowing match between two taxi drivers competing for the same half-naked German fare, and the equally perplexing sight of one man slapping another’s face during an argument outside an electronics shop. As curious as this open-air aggression—which surely would have led to someone’s death in the Sudan—was the sense that the participants didn’t really mean it. The slapped man continued his argument without slapping his opponent back, much less breaking his jaw.
In Sudan, which sees few foreign visitors, my shambolic presence was met with indifference in both cities and villages. In Aswan I was persistently tailed by taxi drivers, felucca captains, child beggars and touts offering “smoke-hash-boy-girl.” Some were charming, with well-worn raps—odes to “Beel Clington,” curses for “Geeeorg Boosh, no good”—but the spiels got old and the offers kept coming. I walked uphill, deeper into Aswan and away from the river until they lost interest. Here the city was more like a dense collection of villages. Brick buildings sat atop one another like blocks in a crumbly grayscale version of Tetris. A group of women in black abayas squatted against a wall selling vegetables; they ignored me. A cluster of men smoking and drinking tea nodded politely. This was more like it. I was nobody again.
Still, attractions beckoned. The Nubian Museum’s collection of artifacts included a full equine suit of armor and life-size recreations of traditional Nubian homes, but Egypt’s historical discomfort with this tiny minority had leached into some of the displays. The Nubian conquerors who established ancient Egypt’s 25th Dynasty were described as fighting “under rulers of Egyptian origin.” Heaven forbid a darker race might conquer the motherland without some Egyptian DNA to explain it. A photo exhibit on the salvage of Nubian and pharaonic antiquities before the raising of the High Dam made no mention at all of the dam’s impact on the Nubian people themselves. It was as if they had mysteriously disappeared from the Nile Valley, leaving behind only these temples and tombs.


I hired a felucca, a tall-masted wooden Egyptian sailboat, to tour the waters off Aswan and visit Elephantine Island. There I descended into the island’s ancient stone Nilometers—beautiful ancestors of the cement markers Schon and I had seen after our first day on the White Nile—and admired its piles of ruins and bones left by various pharaohs, Greeks, Romans and Christians.
Sailing off Elephantine, we took in the smaller Nile islands and the rapids south of the city, with giant black stones coated in the rind of thousands of years of flowing volcanic silt. Their burnished swoops and hollows lent each a distinctly organic, gnome-like appearance among the rusted steel towers that rose from the water every thirty yards. These were guideposts driven into the riverbed to help boat traffic in the days before the High Dam lowered the water level and left the boulders permanently exposed. Weaving through these, my felucca captain, Fony Badien, brought me to an island in the Nile that had been in his family’s possession for generations. A hundred yards long and maybe thirty yards at its widest, the island was an unintended gift from Nasser. The property had been a seasonal destination in the days before the dam went up, submerged during the Nile flood and visible during its low period. Fony kept a cool mud house on his side of the island and dreamed of one day opening an inn there. His older brother farmed the other half, the island having soaked in Ethiopian silt for a thousand years or more, and spent his afternoons smoking from a water pipe under a straw-roofed hut. From there, on the island’s southern tip, Fony pointed out a cluster of houses set above the water on the river’s western bank. A large-boned white woman in capri pants was stepping out of a battered skiff with the help of a turbaned boatman. She walked casually up to the house as the boatman pushed the boat out and rowed away.
“She lives there?” I asked.
“She is from Europe,” Fony said. “A bunch of those ladies, from England or Germany, they live here part of the year with Nubian husbands. They get the younger man here, not like in England. That’s like their own village.”
Fony’s felucca offered a chance to regain the river and travel by water for the first time since Moses Malueth’s barge dropped me in Malakal those many months before. Fony said it would take five days and three hundred dollars to reach Luxor, a hundred miles to the north. “You will see the Nile, the desert, some temples. I will cook and we will sleep in my felucca,” he said in his lilting, high-pitched voice.
“Who else is on the river?” I asked.
“It is only tourists,” he said. “Feluccas with the tourists. Regular people don’t sail the Nile. Some fishermen will go here and there, but they don’t actually go to places. They fish nearby and then come home.” I had started my Nile journey to learn about an almost hidden world—the developing and dynamic communities on the African Nile. Here in Egypt, the river had been trammeled by five thousand years’ worth of writers, explorers and sybarites; their observations filled the libraries and travel blogs. I decided to avoid the wordy wake of Gustave Flaubert, Florence Nightingale and William Golding and headed north in a second-class rail car.
With my departure from Aswan I left Nubia behind. Ahead lay the treasures of Luxor, the hardscrabble towns of Upper Egypt and Cairo itself. Almost everywhere along this route a glorious past lay just below the surface of the present. Take the village of Qurta, located just south of Edfu. It was near here that in 1962 Canadian researchers found, etched into the overgrown sandstone cliffs, a riot of artwork depicting bulls and other animals. The engravings bore an uncanny resemblance to etchings inside the caves of Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain. Could it be, the Canadians diffidently suggested, that these Egyptian works were just as old—and therefore just as significant to the story of human development—as the Paleolithic treasures in Europe? The scientific community’s answer was a scornful no. Art was born in Europe, and that was that. It was more than forty years before another team of archaeologists visited the area and found even more bull engravings, and, in the ruins of Paleolithic encampments, the horns of those same bulls, now extinct. Egypt was producing art well before the pharaohs. The reliefs and carvings showed care and attention to detail—the wrinkles on the neck and mouth of a hippopotamus, the slight lilt to the head of a bull as it appears to walk across a sandstone cliff fifty feet above the Nile. As the new archaeologists showed, Egypt’s oldest known artworks were fifteen thousand years old—no less significant than those in Lascaux and Altamira.
Our next stop was Esna. Known today as a minor stopover for tourists en route to see the Ptolemaic temple at Edfu, Esna bore a much darker distinction in the late nineteenth century. Unknown to the visitors who flocked Esna’s tourist market, it was here that young African boys captured during tribal warfare and sold into slavery were brought for castration. The Coptic Christian priests of Esna had cornered the market in minting eunuchs, and over the years they mutilated thousands of black-skinned boys from Sudan and Ethiopia, most of them between seven and nine years old. “Their profession is held in contempt by even the vilest Egyptians,” a European visitor wrote, “but they are protected by the government, to whom they pay an annual tax.” Those boys who survived the operation—victims were immersed up to their chests in Nile silt to heal—were sent to Cairo for sale into the harems of Egypt, Turkey and Syria, where each would one day guard another man’s concubines. I kept out of Esna and slept the rest of the way to Luxor as the train sliced through a rambling landscape of cement-block houses, irrigation ditches and palm trees.
In Luxor the dead lived very well. It would be impossible to quantify the volume of time, imagination, sweat and reverence the Egyptians of yore put into honoring their royal departed, and I found their obsession irresistible. The site of the ancient city of Thebes, Luxor boasted what might be the world’s biggest-ever religious complex: the 247-acre ruins of the temple of Karnak. Across the river lay the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens and the rest of the west bank necropolis. It was on the west bank, at the temple of Hatshepsut—the queen who ruled Egypt in the guise of a man—that fifty-eight foreign tourists and four Egyptians were slain by Islamist militants in 1997. The attack set off a no-holds-barred war between the state and its insurgents. It’s estimated that twenty-five hundred people were killed by radical gunmen, while more than ten thousand suspected Islamists were sent to prison without trial. Most were tortured as a matter of bureaucratic course. By the end of the nineties the Gamaa Islamiya—the Islamic Group—had declared a cease-fire with the government, and a second group, Al Jihad, had gone underground. Al Jihad’s leader, a doctor named Ayman al-Zawahiri, fled to Afghanistan, where he joined Osama bin Laden to declare the International Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders, better known as Al Qaeda.
The grisly history of Egypt’s Islamist insurgency was all but forgotten in Luxor, where the city fathers were more concerned with emulating the Luxor casino in Las Vegas than in predicting another militant attack. I crossed to the west bank and let the ancient world blow my mind for most of the 105-degree day before returning to the pedestrian present. A half mile from the temple of Hatshepsut, a barren earthen plain ran down from the sandstone Theban hills, its surface marked by the shells of a few crumbled mud-brick houses. Their walls were painted an incongruously gay aquamarine, the landscape broken by dozens of sloping trapezoidal holes. This had, until a few months before, been Gurna, a collection of hamlets created and later undone by archaeology. People had always lived among the pharaonic west bank ruins, but the population began to swell with Bedouins after the arrival of foreign treasure hunters in the early nineteenth century. They had found foreigners willing to pay good money for garbage—the old bones and carvings that littered and sprang from the ground. Tombs were scattered among the hills of Gurna, and the Bedouin shrewdly built their homes atop them.
In time the archaeological community and the Egyptian government came to view the settlement as a menace to the underground treasures, the hunger of Western collectors and museums for their contents notwithstanding. In 1948 the government decided the people of Gurna would have to be moved. The acclaimed architect Hassan Fathy, author of Architecture for the Poor, planned a holistic model community to replace the larcenous village. The homes of New Gurna would be made in the cool Nubian style of inexpensive local materials, with a mosque, a souk, an outdoor amphitheater and a school, but the effort wasted away and old Gurna persevered. In 1998, the government tried to clear Gurna again, this time by force, and several people were killed defending their ancestral village. Nine years later, the state returned, offering the sweetener of new “modern” homes for those who left, coupled with the threat of prison for those who didn’t. They cleared and then leveled most of the houses. Gurna’s thirty-two hundred families were moved to a new village a mile away, a new New Gurna, with cookie-cutter stucco houses—the opposite of Hassan Fathy’s vision—that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a suburb of Tucson or San Diego.
I stepped out of my taxi to shoot Gurna’s remains and was interrupted by two young girls carrying water to a village farther down the road who invited me to take their photograph. I knew this would be followed by a demand for money, so I skipped that step and gave them each an Egyptian pound. They complained like angry birds—this was the off-season, and tips were scarce—before moving on. A man passed in a donkey cart and he too called out for me to take a picture. I turned away without answering and he brayed nothing good and carried on toward the river.
At an empty souvenir shop nearby, Mohammed Abdel Naeim sat in a wicker chair and denounced the government’s dirty business. “If it was done professionally it would have been good,” he said. “But they rushed everybody and they did the wrong thing. They spoke to the rich people. They spoke to the sheikh. But they don’t know how the poor people live. And the poor weren’t consulted.” Abdel Naeim wore a smooth light green jallabiya. His nails were neatly trimmed and he wore a $3,000 Tag Heuer wristwatch, or at least a good knockoff of one. It had been a long time since this son of Gurna had pulled a mummy from the earth, assuming he ever had. Behind him a silent army of ibises, sphinxes, tomb cats, Nefertitis and King Tuts crafted from plaster, alabaster and wood lined the shelved walls from floor to ceiling.
“First of all, the new houses are bad,” he said. “They’re just bad. The foundations are bad. The columns are bad. You have no chance of building another level. The concrete is bad. You need six pieces of rebar in each column to build up and these have only four.” In crowded Egypt, where land was scarce and families tight, every house was built with the expectation that a second and third floor would one day spring from the first. It helps to give the cities and towns their peculiar unfinished look—most houses have bare concrete columns sprouting from their roofs, the columns crowned by rusty spines of steel rebar, waiting for the day the money comes through to build again. It wasn’t hard to imagine that the contractor responsible for building these had pocketed the savings on steel.
“Another thing,” Abdel Naeim said. “A lot of people have animals. The yards at these new places are three by six meters. Some are three by ten. You need at least 175 square meters to graze a cow. But this new place isn’t really a village. It’s a complex—so you can’t let animals out. Now, I have four sons. For my sons to get married, each needs a flat. Some families got more houses than they have sons. We got one house for everyone. My old house was mud brick, four rooms and a basement. It was a fantastic house—warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Now it’s gone. Millions and millions of tourists come to Luxor, thousands come to the west bank every day. What have they done to help us? Nothing.”
“From what I’ve read,” I said, “the village was supported by tomb robbing. How long was that going to last?”
“Ya ragul!” he said. Come on! “You can’t tell me there’s a man riding a donkey and he’s eating bread and salt and okra and he has all this money. Money shows. Look: In the future, when we set foot here it will be as strangers. It will all be tourists and businessmen. Don’t be surprised if you see a tall hotel where Gurna used to be.”
The new New Gurna had the plastic look of a planned community. Stuccoed houses of maroon and beige sat end to end; their wooden-shuttered windows opened onto wide and empty paved streets, with a streetlight on every short block. Skinny saplings rose from the curb every forty feet. At first it looked like a Potemkin village; there was no one to be seen, no sign of life. But it was hot—why would there be? I walked down the middle of the street like a sunstroked gunfighter until I found Umar Khalifa sitting in the meager shade of his front porch. He rose slowly to my greeting and offered me a chair. It was a difficult move to the new village, he said. “I told them I would leave when I was dead.” That was three months ago. Now, he said, “My wife and I like it here.” New blooms of bougainvillea were climbing a homemade trellis, and Khalifa’s five-year-old granddaughter came outside to watch us speak and to play with a hose that had been left running in the dirt under the vines. For some, a little running water could go a long way. Khalifa was old and retired, and maybe a little wired. He and his wife, Afaf, had received a three-bedroom house even though their children were all grown and gone. Afaf even ran a little snack and soda stand nearby. I walked deeper into the settlement and found a few other villagers who said they were adjusting nicely to the indoor plumbing and plentiful electricity of their new homes, but they clammed up when a car appeared and parked about twenty yards away. A lone driver got out and watched our meeting without approaching. “We hass to go now,” the taxi driver said. “He is bolise.”
Bolise were indeed everywhere in Egypt. Young men in black woolen uniforms lounged outside the tourist sites pretending to screen visitors for explosives and guns. They manned the big intersections, breathing exhaust and sipping tea. They were like moss, gathering in shady alcoves outside the important hotels and buildings, many dragging Kalashnikovs that one suspected had never actually been fired. In the alley behind my hotel I saw one police officer fooling with a little boy; they were playing tug-of-war with the officer’s rifle. But this wasn’t the kind of police that watched my foray into New Gurna. The uniformed police existed as a watery balm for tourist fears of terrorism. The plainclothes cops existed to protect Egypt from all critics, foreign and domestic. No threat was too small. That’s why they tortured bloggers.
That evening I crossed again to the Nile’s west bank for dinner with a friend of a friend who’d lived among the villagers for twenty years. A Coptic Christian doctor, he’d dropped out of the career race as a young man, choosing village life in Upper Egypt to the prestige and pressures that awaited his classmates in the hospitals of Cairo and Alexandria. He was sharp-featured, balding and thin, with a face like that of the French action hero Jean Reno. He drove me to a nearly empty outdoor restaurant that sat under gnarled shade trees, and waited for me to draw him out of his reticence and turn the duty of this social call into an actual conversation. He was both an outsider and a local, and I felt he might have a unique perspective on this strange city of the dead. I babbled uncomfortably for a half hour, and said at last, “I just don’t understand how this place works. Even with millions of visitors, the entire city can’t be employed by tourism. So how do people live?”
He nodded and drummed his long fingers against his forehead. “The work is farming and construction,” he said. “But many of the farmers are not good farmers. They are Bedouins, they don’t have the habit yet, it’s too few generations. So they plant poorly. The building work is always around, because there is always need for new houses, because of population increase. The people have to eat, so there are shops for food and candies. There is more of that now than ever, more snacks and less nutrition.”
I asked if he saw the effects of this new diet in his practice.
“Definitely. Malnutrition is a real problem. Their children eat as much Twinkie cake as they do bread. They take tea for breakfast, only tea. I tell them, you must have bread, some egg, something more than tea. The morning tea blocks the stomach from absorbing iron for the rest of the day. So there is malnutrition and anemia also. And the wrapped cakes are so cheap that people think they’re as good as bread.”
I asked him how the villagers interacted with the tourists—how did they view these legions of foreign visitors? “There is nothing beside the exchange of money,” he said. “Sometimes a local man will marry a foreign woman—never the other way around—but it doesn’t last. It cannot last here, in this environment. She will grow bored. Or she will get him a visa and they will live in England or Germany. If they resolve to live here, the relationship lasts only until they have a child, and if they have a daughter it is a guarantee they will leave.”
“She’ll take the girl before the family can circumcise her?” I asked. Genital mutilation—“purification”—of girls, while less common than in the past, was still pervasive among both Muslim and Coptic Christian families, thanks in part to a belief that the *oris, if left attached, will grow into a penislike appendage, leaving the woman unfeminine and indifferent to men.
“No,” the doctor said. “The family won’t touch the girl that way, they will respect the mother’s opposition. It is mental excision they are fleeing. Because the girl will become like the other girls in the family and she will be cut out of her future. But even if they have a boy, the child will need a school, and the regular schools are horrible and the good private schools are expensive. By the time the child is school age they are back in Europe, or the mother leaves and takes the child with her.”
“I saw a village in Aswan that my felucca captain said was built entirely by old European women who had married local men.”
He flung his head back and brought it forward in a truncated nod. “You see that man over there?” The man in question looked to be in his late twenties, dressed in slacks and a rayon shirt, relaxing over bottles of 7-Up with his abayaed wife and three small children. “He has another wife besides this one. He is married to a foreigner, a Dutch. It’s disgusting.”
“Disgusting? Really? What’s wrong with having a foreign wife? I mean, it’s legal, isn’t it?”
He thrummed his forehead again, exasperated. “This is not that kind of marriage, a love marriage. These women like he has married are old. And fat. And ugly. No one will touch them in their own country, so they come here and they get a young husband. She gives him money to build a house, and she sends money from Holland, and then she comes for a few weeks in the winter and he has to be with her. Several of my patients do this. They cry when they talk about it. They come and ask me for drugs. The only way they can perform is to get drunk. It is an old practice here that a man will sometimes put dust from one of the temples in his tea, to help with performance, but even the pharaohs’ dust can’t help these ones. Only liquor.”
“And the Egyptian wives? They don’t care?”
“They don’t mind. It is allowed by the religion and by the law, and it gives them a good life.”


Predatory foreign brides were the least of Egypt’s hazards. As I ran by rail through Upper Egypt, the rustic belt of hard villages and bleak towns that separates Luxor from Cairo and the Delta, it was easy to see how a man could marry a stranger and how his true wife would support it. The ever more teeming box-brick towns of Sohag, Assiut, Minya and Beni Sueif gave a sense of generic poverty and unloveliness. But tucked away in the midst of this grim archipelago was a place where the ancient world inhabited the present. I got off the train at Sohag and, with the help of three interlocutors, one of whom I suspected was a police spy, convinced a nervous taxi driver to take me into the countryside. Just before Sohag the Nile runs hard by limestone cliffs riddled with the caves of hermits. A Coptic Christian stronghold, the area is home to some of the world’s oldest monastic communities and is a living link between the pharaonic and Coptic traditions. Despite Egypt’s approximately ten-to-one ratio of Muslims to Copts, the latter do not see themselves as a minority so much as the true community of indigenous Egyptians. The Arab invaders of AD 649 referred to their new conquest as dar el Gibt, “home of the Egyptians,” and many Copts still hold fast to that distinction. When their masses are spoken in the pre-Arab vernacular, Coptic priests are not only speaking the language of Christianity’s earliest days; they are evoking the speech of Ramses and Cleopatra, as surely as the Coptic cross is a descendant of the ankh, the symbol that pagan gods used five thousand years ago to restore life to the mummified worthies of Egypt.
This stretch south of Sohag was one of the rare sections of the Egyptian Nile where the banks were not marred by construction; the river here recalled the Nile I had traveled in Uganda and southern Sudan, one of tall reeds, papyrus and a marvelous absence of garbage. Sohag itself offered nothing to the eye, but its countryside seemed a place apart. Amid the fields and patches of date palms I saw clusters of mud-brick houses with tall castle-like dovecotes, pigeon towers built in an ancient style thought to be the oldest in the world. The mud homes were rambling constructions with new rooms added generation after generation to accommodate the ever-growing Egyptian family. But unlike in Uganda and Sudan, my ranging made people uncomfortable. After a couple hours the driver brought me back to the train station, demanding triple our agreed fee for the risk he’d taken. Foreigners aren’t allowed to move around rural Egypt, though I could never figure out if it was because of banditry, the occasional clashes that took place between rural Muslims and Christians or simply a general fear for the fate of Westerners so far outside their element. I settled up with the driver and waited for the next train. My wife was meeting me in the capital. It had been a long time.


Cairo was a riot. A party. A slum. A traffic jam.
In Africa’s biggest city, the elevated expressways were just another road. Working people and students scaled concrete barriers to stand on the highway and hail taxis and buses. Craft sellers piled their wares on blankets on the side of the slow lane, as low Toyota pickups, their beds packed with cattle or sheep, swerved around them on the way to market. Overhead the billboards advertised Samsung mobile phones and luxury condos in Mecca.
At street level the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries collided with less irony and considerably more iron. In 1991, at the time of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, Cairo had 2.6 million cars on its streets. Sixteen years later, there were seven million. Neither the traffic system nor driver education had kept up. Even with an average automobile speed of just six miles an hour, Cairo boasts the shockingly high rate of fifty-eight thousand road deaths a year. Riding in from the Ramses train station, my taxi missed by a sliver colliding with a gray BMW pushing its way into traffic, a disaster that might have brought the driver a beating in addition to financial ruin. “Tawakilt ala Allah,” the driver said moments later as he punched the gas to fill a five-foot gap between us and the next car. “I put my trust in God.” Cairo’s taxi fleet was a polyglot collection dominated by stately black-and-white Peugeot 504s, with a handful of Fiats and Soviet-era Ladas thrown in. Some still ran on leaded gasoline while a few burned clean compressed natural gas. The traffic police, who direct cars the way stoplights do in other countries, have six times the globally accepted level of lead in their blood, more than any other group in the world save perhaps the men who actually mine the stuff. My driver and his brethren vied for space with an explosion of privately owned cars bound for gated satellite cities in the desert with names like Dreamland and Utopia, overloaded diesel city buses, sardine-packed minivan taxis, swarms of motorcycles and scooters and even the occasional and alarmingly brave bicyclist.
In the affluent island neighborhood of Zamalek where I stayed, the main east-west street was thick each morning with traffic and exhaust as local residents joined the flood of commuters heading into Cairo’s even more crowded precincts for work. July 26 Boulevard had six lanes on the ground and four more on the expressway above. Each morning, I would turn my head after buying the International Herald Tribune and catch sight of a ghost floating through this honking congestion: a pale man, white as pearl, pedaling hard on a heavy black bicycle, one hand on the handlebars, the other steadying a six-foot-long wooden plank resting on his head like a surfboard, a tray piled with flat rounds of Egyptian bread. I saw this deliveryman more than a dozen times, his cheeks and brow spectral with flour, his concentration keen as an astronaut’s, and never once did I see the traffic get the better of him. Not once did he have to stop and somehow recover a fallen piece of bread among the cars.
It was a city of near-miss artists. Drivers could calculate to the millimeter the amount of space that would keep them from collision. On the streets, beefy men fought in slapping matches like the one I’d seen in Aswan, a sight that never ceased to shock, and yet this too I came to see as a calculated avoidance of real violence. In a country with rising inflation and falling subsidies and wages, choking pollution and widespread underemployment, people needed to blow off steam. The powers that be watched the frustration grow and tried where they could to divert it. Eighteen million people were crowded here on the Nile, trapped by thirst and by a government that couldn’t do much with efficiency but break heads. Police and internal security forces outnumbered the army. They filled the streets in black-uniformed phalanxes at the first sign of a mild liberal protest. The rais, President Mubarak, was very old. His son was gearing up to replace him and nobody could really think of an alternative regime that could actually govern the country—not that the country was being governed now. The liberals were crushed like beetles, and, as the only game in town for young comers, the ruling party vacuumed up most of the new political talent. The Western powers simultaneously tsked at and embraced this status quo.
While their cousins in Sudan completed their seventeenth year in power, the Muslim Brothers of Egypt were in a state of perpetual cull, their leaders facing trial before military tribunals even as hundreds of thousands depended on them for social services the government was too incompetent to provide.
This standoff between the authoritarian government and those few bold or organized enough to challenge it was an old one, and that’s what stung about Egypt, the sense of a place trapped in amber—though amber at least acts as a preservative. Egypt felt like some slow-decaying element.


It was all a bit difficult to contemplate, what with the young man wagging his ass in my face.
He was a doughy boy, maybe eighteen, and a half hour of dancing inside the humid confines of the riverboat nightclub had cast a dark vertical band of sweat down the cleft of his cream dress slacks. The young man wore his hair in short oily curls and his tongue on the outside of his mouth. While his bottom shook to a complicated rhythm that would intimidate a Cuban bandleader, the boy’s arms sliced through the air in a fast but simple one-two beat. Nearby a thirty-piece band was playing a rhythm and blues instrumental that sounded thoroughly Egyptian, with its tiny cymbals and fretless lute—and also, with its ripping tenor sax, indistinguishable from the music of James Brown’s backup band, the legendary JB’s.
There were dozens of other boys gyrating among the crowd. They wore matching suits and each moved as if possessed by an especially lascivious djinn. The audience of upper-class Egyptians—necktied fathers, bejeweled and headscarfed mothers, girls in their finery, little boys in little tracksuits—was transfixed; some of the women sported grins of mild embarrassment, others of absolute wickedness. And then the music stopped and the dancers froze and there was a thunder of drums from the ten-man percussion section. A booming chant of “Salaam aleikum” filled the room. Saad El Soghayar had arrived, illuminated by a single spotlight pointed down from the VIP balcony. In contrast with the formal garb of his eighty-odd dancers, drummers and sidemen, Egypt’s most popular shaabi singer sported a yellow T-shirt and tight no-brand blue jeans. He took the stage in punctuated steps, a wireless microphone in his right hand. Short bursts of machine-gun lyrics popped from his mouth as the dancers went wild again.
Shaabi has been described as Egypt’s version of hip-hop. The comparison, while inapt, is the nearest available. It was slum music—low culture infecting high. Played with speed and brevity, its topics were at times naughty and uncomfortably political in a country where the reins of culture had been in the hands of the government since Nasser’s day. It didn’t seek to extol the nation or set an example. It was earthy and fun and consequently banned from the national airwaves. But not even a five-decade national security state could keep a good beat down. Despite its absence from the radio, shaabi was in demand, and so here was Saad performing in front of the swells, who had paid more than the average Egyptian’s monthly salary to see him. It was past three in the morning and this was his sixth show of the night. Five weddings had preceded it.
Across the table from me, facing the stage, sat my host, a lanky man with straight white hair, pale blue eyes and a smile that said he’d seen it all and still enjoyed most of it. I didn’t know Miles Axe Copeland III when I was a boy, but I loved his work: As the founder of IRS Records, Miles had brought the world The Police, R.E.M. and Wall of Voodoo. Miles’s father, a jazz trumpeter from Alabama, had a successful career manipulating, advising and overthrowing Middle Eastern governments as one of America’s legendary spies (and wrote a dictionary of colloquial Syrian Arabic along the way). Now his son was marketing Arabic popular music to the West, and Saad was one of his discoveries. Copeland was back in Egypt looking for new talent and had stopped by to say hello to Saad, who was just now prowling the audience, standing on tables and singing “Al Hantour” (The Carriage).
Hey, you there! Hey you there on the carriage!
Hey you, swaying back and forth!
Whoa! Yeah! How I wish to ride in the carriage
And sway back and forth.
And who wouldn’t? The song contained a few simple metaphors for sex and also lyrics of almost courtly romance (“I’d put her hand on my arm and we would link arms and sway / and we would stop on either side [of the road] and get down to eat grilled sweet potatoes”) and the beat kept on its bum bim! bum-bum-bum-bum bum-bum bim! rhythm of drums and tambourine. Saad shimmied and come-hithered the women with wolf eyes until, quite without warning, he plopped down on my lap, straddling my left thigh, and began to grind his pelvis into my leg with a pole dancer’s enthusiasm. The spotlight followed. When Saad grew bored of embarrassing me, he leapt up, spun around, looked my wife in the eye and gave his right nipple a twist, posed for a photo with Miles and moved on to the next verse and victim.
It was only a matter of time before Saad and his band eroded the audience’s middle-class reserve. Some of the fathers, a few bearing the raised forehead callus that marked Egypt’s Muslim devouts, stood up to dance spastically beside their seated wives. A half dozen little girls took the stage to show off their belly-dance moves. They were cleared off after a few minutes save one, maybe nine years old, dressed in a white terrycloth pantsuit, who seized the spotlight and arched her back so her long black hair might touch the floor, hands held out level with the stage, her child hips moving ta-ta, ta-ta. Miles shook his head. “People in America wouldn’t understand this,” he shouted across the table. “They think the Middle East is nothing but veiled women and angry men. That’s the image they get—violent shrews who don’t have any fun.” We stumbled out of the club after six in the morning, got into a taxi, waited while the driver tipped a police officer with a Cleopatra cigarette for the privilege of idling there and sped into the dawn on nearly empty streets, swerving near the Four Seasons Hotel to pass a donkey cart hauling chickens in wooden cages.


Egypt hadn’t fought an armed conflict since the October War of 1973 but the Delta was still considered a strategic area. I traveled north with a pass from Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. It gave me permission to visit the Delta’s archeological sites, a badly needed cover to explain my presence to police and other snoops in areas off the tourist track. The Delta was Egypt’s agricultural and industrial heartland. Here the Nile split into its eastern and western branches, each feeding a complex network of irrigation canals and waterways. It was here that the silt of the ages had been deposited, creating a fertile 9,600-square-mile triangle between Cairo and the Mediterranean. It was here that the electricity from the High Dam had been put to use irrigating the land and powering the looms. Nasser’s land reforms had turned serfs into small landowners and his factories had created employment for two generations of workers. Now factory towns like Zagazig, Mahalla and Kafr el-Dawwar were in foment. A wave of wildcat strikes was shaking the great state-owned textile mills, where workers were spooked over low wages, high prices and threats of privatization. A populace conditioned to expect everything from the state was now being told to fend for itself, and it was buckling under the strain.
The government too was buckling. It tried to manage the bigger threats, like the industrial strikes, applying force and sometimes compromise as it felt the situation warranted. But the state’s true face appeared in its reaction to smaller irritants, as when a sixteen-year-old girl at a Delta high school found herself being interrogated by the education ministry after she criticized the American invasion of Iraq in a school essay. What secret organization, the under-secretary of education wanted to know, had told her to write such things? The girl, Alaa Farag Megahed, was told she would have to repeat the entire school year, a sentence that was repealed once news of the scandal broke. “This is a public offence, which is punishable under Law 41 for the year 2000,” a ministry official told Al-Ahram Weekly. “The essay asked students to describe reasons for the environmental problem of desertification—what has this to do with President Bush and the Egyptian regime?”
The Delta itself was sinking under the weight of modern Egypt. The region was one of mud stacked on mud, and each year it sank a little bit. This reduction in elevation had been countered by the annual Nile flood and the silt it left behind, but silt hadn’t reached the Delta since the High Dam went up. Without it—those five billion cubic meters now on the floor of Lake Nasser, the Delta was falling and the sea was invading. Geologists say the Nile Delta has now entered its “destruction phase.”
Still, the only sinkage I could discern was metaphorical. My train north took me past dusty company towns and emerald fields where water buffalo pulled plows. Thick with the human, agricultural and industrial waste of Egypt, the Nile water here was as brown as the water at Lake Victoria was clear. A young Winston Churchill famously imagined a day when the Nile waters would be “equally and amicably divided among the river people, and the Nile itself, flowing for three thousand miles through smiling countries, shall perish gloriously and never reach the sea.” The waters were now divided, not equally, though almost amicably, and the smiles were surely forced. But the last part of Churchill’s prediction has nearly come true. Its flow slowed by the High Dam, its volume bled by miles of canals, the Nile struggles to completion.
I got off at Damietta, a prosperous port city near the mouth of the Nile. It is known for its furniture workshops and as the meeting place, in 1219, of Saint Francis of Assisi and Sultan Malik al-Kamil of Egypt during the Fifth Crusade. It was said that Damietta had no unemployment. Its sixty thousand furniture workshops imported timber from Europe and sent it back in the form of wooden chairs, tables and divans, all hand-carved in a classic nineteenth-century style. Damietta had a clean, seaside feel and its narrow streets and alleys rang with the blows of untold hammers and chisels. The people seemed to move with a relaxed sense of purpose that was missing from the frenzied streets of Cairo. There, a workingman had to carry two or three jobs to scrape by—a government job during the day, a taxi at night and maybe a weekend shift at a cigarette stall. The people of Damietta made things with skilled hands and sold them; they seemed healthier for it.
A few miles north was Ras al Bahr on the Mediterranean coast. With this resort town the sea truly began. It was late afternoon and the big, high-bowed fishing boats were coming back inland for the evening. The water’s surface rhythm was complex, a meeting of river and sea. I stopped to chat with three men walking along the riverside promenade. “It is in the Koran, you know,” one said.
“What is?”
“This place, where the river stops and the sea begins.” He pulled out his Nokia, punched a few keys and the verse came out reedy and, I had to admit, a little magical, through the tiny polyphonic speaker. Sura 25, Verse 53: “And He it is Who hath given independence to the two seas (though they meet); one palatable, sweet, and the other saltish, bitter; and hath set a bar and a forbidding ban between them.” The Mediterranean and the Nile met at Ras al Bahr, the verse implied, but they didn’t mix.
I took a taxi ninety miles across the Mediterranean coastline to Rosetta, where the Nile’s western branch made its exit, and paid a captain to take me there on his fiberglass motor launch, an open-air tourist boat in a town with no tourists. Rosetta, home to some lovely Ottoman-era homes, lacked the bustle of Damietta, but its outskirts hummed with industry. Three layers of economy were visible from the boat. The water was crowded with fish farms. Floating wooden platforms, some of them supporting little shacks with guard dogs, overlooked square netted enclosures that dotted the river for miles. Up and down the shore, fat triple-decker yachts and pleasure boats were being built from the ground up of imported wood for sale to wealthy Gulf Arabs. And just inland, dozens of brick kilns pricked the clear Delta sky with their smoke-stacks. We rode the last of the river to the chopping sea and turned back without fanfare. I had spent more than six months tracing the Nile from the shores of Lake Victoria and had expected to be happier at the end of the line. Down the length of the Nile people lived and even thrived under extraordinary constraints. But Uganda and Sudan were dynamic, changing. There, the future was unwritten and—however unevenly—the horizon was growing. It seemed the opposite held in Egypt: Here, your fate was obvious and you would never be free.
On a railway platform south of Rosetta, waiting for a train connection back to Cairo, a young man in the uniform of the pious—skullcap, high-water pants, a thin but untrimmed beard—approached and tried to share with me the good news of the Prophet and his revelation. He had a cleft palate and innocent eyes and clearly not a dime to his name, and I listened with a courteous false attention as he produced cassette tapes of sermons by preachers he admired. He ran his finger across the words on the cover of one, sounding it out for me: “Ishh-lam. Ishh-lam.” I thanked him and apologized for not speaking better Arabic, and he said that was all right and gave me a stack of tapes to take home with me. I reached into my pocket to give him some money, and he pushed my hand away. “Salaam aleikum,” he said, and left me again to myself.
The train would be coming soon. I walked to the other end of the platform in search of a bottle of water, and saw the young fisher of men in agitated conversation. He was moving his hands quickly, explaining something to two police officers. The train pulled up, and I stepped in and continued to watch through the open doors. One officer was looking through the cassettes in the boy’s plastic shopping bag. The other, sweating under his black beret, looked away, a winding up of the torso, and then turned back to the boy with an extended arm and open palm, connecting hard with the right side of his face. It sounded like a popped balloon. The train gave a lurch and pulled away. I took my seat and was gone.



AUTHOR’S NOTE
The names of some people in chapters 4, 6, 7, 8 and 9 have been changed to preserve their privacy and security.