An Athenian Diary

 

32

 

On the Road with Kids, Part 3

 

The Athenian Diary Goes to Egypt

 

December 28-29, 2003

 

 

 

 

December 28: On the Ra I. 

 

A day of nothing. We sail down the Nile, slowly past an endless succession of houses, fields, irrigation stations, palm trees. The desert approaches and retreats. Between al-Ma'allah and Isna cultivated land on the east bank almost vanishes as a line of yellow desert cliffs march within a couple hundred meters of the water. For a while desert encroaches on the west too, and we are squeezed in between hands of sandstone. Boys swim in the Nile, apparently immune to the many critters inhabiting those blue waters, which have driven us to "Baraka" (Arabic for "He has blessed"), water coming from a "deep source well."

 

All along the Nile, electric pumps suck water out of the river for irrigation; you can tell which are on by the racket they make. Houses in mud brick nestle right up against the banks; groves of palms sway meters from the water. All this must be subsequent to the completion of the dams upriver, for before the Low and the High Dams, these stretches of land would have been subject to the annual inundation, and the mud brick would have melted away.

 

We dock at Isna. "Dock" glamorizes the facts -- we tie up right onto the bank of the Nile, by ropes tossed over the side to workers on the shore, who hammer great spikes, also tossed from the boat, 1.5 meters long into the ground and loop the lines around them. The docking isn't even finished when a swarm of rowboats besiege us -- it's the attack of the river merchants. In each boat a rower and a salesman, the latter with a powerful arm and persuasive voice. The voice, of course, to get the passengers to look at, then buy, his wares (tablecloths, shawls, etc.), the arm for his unusual sales technique -- if you are interested in an item, he stuffs it into a plastic bag and heaves it up to the sun deck of the ship. You negotiate, and when you've settled on a price, he loads another bag (for heft only) and heaves it up; you stuff your money inside and drop it onto his little boat. Edie and Ellen engaged in heavy negotiations and ended up each with a lovely tablecloth.

 

We seem at first to be the only Americans on the Ra I. There is a very large French tour group; one afternoon I help two women get into their room, whose lock they could not get to budge. We exchange a few words of French (mine riddled with errors) and a smile or two. The great benefit of our companions (who otherwise keep entirely to themselves), so Edie speculates, is the food -- it's great. Every night has a theme, but the main point is that it's always fresh, well-cooked, perfectly safe, and varied. Even the kids always manage to find something to eat.

 

December 29: On the Ra I. Sailing to Edfu/Idfu. Edfu Temple. Sailing to Kom Ombo. The Kom Ombo Temple.

 

We passed through the lock at Isna in the middle of the night, while everyone but Edie slept soundly; she woke up, and looked out, but reported only a shimmer of lights on the water; too tired to dress and go topside, she crawled back into bed, and no one actually saw the Ra I slip through the lock.

 

Our next stop was Edfu. There are three chief attractions at Edfu: the extraordinary temple of Horus (but aren't we beginning to feel that everything in Egypt is extraordinary?), the horse-drawn carriages that bear you to the temple, and the shopping opportunities. We availed ourselves of all three.

 

The temple of Horus at Edfu is a Ptolemaic structure -- begun by the third king to beat that name in 236 BCE, and finished with the end of the reign of the Ptolemies, as Kleopatra VII laying dying in the arms of her asp. Covered for centuries with sand up to its armpits, it retained its roof of massive stone blocks. Its treasures have naturally been looted -- the boat in which Horus traveled now resides in the Louvre -- but its majesty can't be stolen. And Horus still guards the entrance to the inner sanctuary. The most impressive feature of the whole for me, though, is the thorough-going Egyptianness of the thing: the Ptolemies are depicted as pharaohs and the structure and plan replicate those of any temple 1500 years older. This isn't (I don't think) to be attributed (as it sometimes is) to some timeless Egyptian conservatism, but to the sanctity that deep, deep time brings, to a sense that the Egyptians know how to worship the gods -- and that, fundamentally, the Ptolemies had to govern the country, and that meant accommodation with (and to) the expectations of the population. The Ptolemies had to present themselves as their subjects expected them to -- an understanding that began already, as we have seen, with Alexander the Great.

 

We did indeed take the horse-drawn carriages to the temple from the ship -- in fact it's essentially obligatory for the tourist. 

 

And then there was the shopping. The main attraction here is the galibbiya. This is the shift-like garment that the majority of Egyptian men wear outside Cairo (and lots wear inside Cairo, too). A simple long shirt that reaches about to the ankles. The Egyptians wear them in pale colors, browns and grays; for us tourists the shops at Edfu offer a dizzying variety of colors and fashions, with decorative embroidery and optional undershirts. The kids are openly enthusiastic -- Alison and Emma buy simple bright white ones; Caroline, who has seen on the ship exactly the one she wants, shops with an unsatisfiable eye (eventually Edie will find the right one, green and decorated with images of the ancient gods, for the one on the ship is alas the wrong size). I had no intention of buying one at first but let myself be talked into a fancy green one with gold-colored trim, full of dignity befitting a professor (or so I tell myself). The total damage cannot be more than $40, and Emma (we learn later) wears hers at home almost every day after school and in the evenings, an Egyptian vision in suburban Chicago.

 

After Edfu the boat heads upriver again, to Kom Ombo. I watch the banks from the sundeck of the Ra I. Just south of Edfu the east bank almost vanishes, as the hills and desert, whitish yellow brown lumps of earth, shoulder up against the river, leaving passage only for the railroad and the highway. Atop a low rise Edie spots a mass of mud brick ruins -- houses with arches, fortification walls. What are they? The map offers not a clue, silence of toponyms. Centuries, millennia, cover the possibilities. Sometimes the desert retreats in favor of a massive grove of date palms or bananas. Canal heads pop into the river at intervals. Low flat islands fill the center of the river, almost all cultivated with date palms and the occasional farmer and his donkey. One unusually abandoned to wild flora just south of Edfu seems to have become the domain of a single yellow dog that lounges by the shore, eyeing our passing boat. This stretch of river is idyllic -- quiet, washed in a brilliant sunshine under an endlessly blue sky.

 

Kom Ombo features a temple dedicated to Sobet, the crocodile god (the irony is that, with the construction of the High Dam, the crocodile has disappeared from the river in Egypt; Sobet was the god at Karanis too, where he entertained Roman tourists -- see below), and his brother Horus (not the famous Horus but another one), divided fair and square between them by the goddess of justice Ma'at after a dispute. The sanctuaries stand side-by-side but separated by a wall (with a secret passage underneath to allow the priests to imitate the voice of the gods while moving unseen between the two halves) -- and so what else is new? Like many well-preserved Egyptian temples, the Ptolemies started it (around 180 BCE) and it was finished under the Roman emperors (about 217 CE). It has many of the features that mark Greco-Roman work against earlier Egyptian -- Corinthian column capitals, very large cartouches, figures with exaggerated toenails and similar details and diaphanous clothing, women depicted with large breasts and cinched waists. There's a great Nilometer here too -- two deep tanks with stairs spiraling down into the deeper, for the measurement of the flood.

 

 

 

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