December 30: On the Ra I. Sailing to Aswan. Elephantine Island by felucca. Aswan -- the High Dam. The Unfinished Obelisk. The Temple of Philae.

The last night on the river brings us to Aswan, last town before the High Dam.

After breakfast we head out with Emad in search of a felucca. This is a small boat with a triangular sail held by mast and boom, the boom not attached to the mast as in our sailboats but free to float about, held in place by ropes and chains. Feluccas were the workhorses of the river in the past, but now they are confined to Aswan, condemned exclusively to the tourist trade. Emad conducts his mysterious and always slightly furtive negotiations and we have a felucca, headed out into the channel. To my surprise the wind is strong out on the water, and we move along at a good clip. At Aswan began (is that exactly the right word?) the First Cataract -- not a single little waterfall, as I had imagined, but a jumble of rocks and islands that stretched out for kilometers and barred navigation farther upriver in the same vessels without portage. The river spreads out here, shouldering aside the desert -- which responds by hugging the shore -- to make space for islands and the boulders that block and disrupt the flow. One island here was given to Lord Kitchener, he of Khartoum fame, as a reward for his service to the British Empire (service that reputedly included seriously contemplating the reuse of the Madhi's skull as a drinking cup or inkstand). We skim around the islands, admiring the botanical garden the good Lord started and which is still maintained today. The sky is cloudless and flawless, the sun warm and happy. Aga Khan lived out his last years in a house on the east bank at Aswan; Omar Sharif is said to favor Aswan above all other cities. Ellen and Edie plan their imminent retirement to Aswan, with pretty boys and sunny days. Aswan marks the real end of ancient Egypt -- the pharaohs sometimes projected power into, or even controlled, the country to the south, but at Aswan you can feel that you are in a zone of transition -- something else lies to the south, something more mysterious, less known. The High Dam and Lake Nasser have ruined this feeling, for they have rendered the Cataract irrelevant and have transformed the physiognomy of the region beyond, just as Lake Powell has destroyed the very different mysteries of the Colorado River north of the Grand Canyon. Now you can sail Lake Nasser like you can sail Lake Powell, oblivious to the history sunk beneath your keel.

The mighty crew of our felucca -- Mohammed and an assistant -- bring us round to Elephantine island, the largest island in the Cataract. Here has been uncovered centuries and centuries of human occupation, from the Neolithic to the end of antiquity. The British who did some of the early digging there erected a great colonial dig house, complete with huge wrap-around veranda; you can imagine sitting there, late in the day, sipping tea as you watch the sun go down behind the western hills. The house now houses one of the two local museums (the other, recently constructed by the Germans, meets all modern standards for display but lacks even a sliver of the charm of this one). The displays make no concessions -- tiny labels, often essentially devoid of information, dark rooms, dust on the cases. There's nothing spectacular here, but I am charmed and delighted -- I love these little provincial museums, no pretensions, just the objects they have, and always among them some treasure you have never seen or heard of. Here it was (for me, anyway) a little fragment of a Coptic plate decorated with an amazingly self-confident fish -- with a line coming out of its mouth. Alison sketched it.

I've always like border regions. I share this fascination with my good friend Julia, separated from me now these many years by the North Atlantic but still often on my mind. These zones where you go from something to something else, where there is a confusion of languages and cultures and peoples, where the frisson of conflict hovers always in the air, where the central authority is very far away and so feels all the more urgently the need to project its authority -- the Syrian marches of the Roman empire, the limites of North Africa, the wild borderlands of the Sonoran Desert, these places exercise on me a fascination I cannot explain, but feel powerfully, elementally. So is Aswan. You can see it in the very physiognomy of the people -- many more who are darker, kinkier-haired, than you see in central Egypt, a visual reminder that you are now closer to Africa than you will be again on this trip. Many of these folks are themselves, or the children of, Nubians displaced from their villages and resettled in Aswan as the waters of Lake Nasser dissolved the mud brick of their houses and erased the boundary-markers of their fields.

The Egyptians seem to have known this too. From at least the Middle Kingdom there was a fortification at Elephantine Island. During the Persian period the garrison troops included a contingent of Jews, who built a temple there (ruins still visible) and left behind a trove of documents that record their lives in this distant outpost of a massive empire. (The Persian empire remains extraordinarily unfamiliar to even many well-educated Westerners who carry at least a sketch of Roman imperial history in their heads. Not only did the Persian empire rival the Roman in extent and duration, it also provides a model of religious toleration -- the Jews welcomed the Persian conquest of Jerusalem, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they enjoyed considerable religious freedom under the Persians -- a feature too of course of the Romans; we have as always in many areas of cultural and civil life a great deal left to learn, and are for all our televisions and the end of slavery, not always more advanced than our ancestors of a very long time ago.)

The path to the excavations leads through a charming little garden of palms and rhododendrons. The excavations themselves, without guide book or labels, do not reveal readily their secrets; but their significance and function reveal themselves plainly enough in their location -- the south end of the island, looking down toward that borderland. And, of course, they collected taxes here, too.

When the High Dam displaced the Nubian population south of Aswan, the Egyptian state provided some people with land in compensation on Elephantine island -- and so now there's a Nubian village here which, as with so many other things in this post-modern world of ours, exists in part to display itself, for pay, to tourists. The village sits below the site of the ruins; a small stream runs through the middle of it, clogged with waste. A woman in black from head to foot, washing clothes by a well, rewards me with an open smile for my "good day" in Arabic. We are on our way to see a "typical" house. The owner is expecting us. (Emad has arranged all this in his usual efficient and behind-the-scenes way.) Emad tells Ellen he regards himself as middle-class, hoping to see his children become doctors or teachers or tour guides. (The last is a very high-status job in Egypt.) The house consists of two stories, in painted mud brick. The ground floor is divided among a reception room, living room, kitchen, and bedroom. (Ellen wryly notes the cell phone plugged into the wall.) In the hall they keep baby crocodiles; the kids hold them. What, I wonder as I take the pictures, do they do with these charming creatures when they grow up? Upstairs is the roof, delightful sleeping quarters most of the year, roofed in thatch on sloping bamboo poles, equipped with low tables and pillows on which to still while you lean against the wall and sip coffee or Fanta. (There are cases stacked in the kitchen.) Other tourists (French) await us there, as well as a display of crafts for sale -- necklaces and other jewelry, carvings, and hundreds of absolutely exquisite baskets colorfully designed with patterns in low relief -- soothing to gaze upon. I regret now not buying some!

What are we to think of this kind of tourism? On the one hand, it left me vaguely uncomfortable. The motivation behind it is slightly pornographic -- see the natives in their native habitats wearing their native costumes as they perform their native rituals! On the other hand, the fees we pay go no doubt to underwrite the education of the homeowner's children who will go on to be those doctors and tour guides of the next generation. And, because tourists are willing to pay money for the house with its traditional furnishings and the crocs and the baskets, the owner has a reason to keep in touch with this "traditional" way of life -- however much it may be refracted by the tourism it feeds. But because the whole transaction has been commodified, so too has the "genuineness" (if every such a thing really existed) been compromised -- so what is left of that which attracted the tourist in the first place? Of course, all these reflections apply with equal justice (more or less) to almost any form of tourism. And the experience still exists, for me and for them -- one simply needs to figure out what it means. . . .

Aswan boasts quarries of some of the best granites in Egypt. They are still in use today; from the archaeological site I watched quarry workers not 100 meters away cutting stone. Exploited from deep antiquity, they supplied the stone for many of the great monuments of ancient Egypt. In one of the quarries -- which is located right in the middle of town -- lies one of the great almost-monuments of ancient Egypt, the Unfinished Obelisk. This behemoth is 40 meters long (that's about 130 feet!). It was abandoned in the quarry because it cracked as it was being extracted. Had it been finished, it would have been the largest known obelisk.

Two dams block the flow of the Nile south of Aswan. The first, more northerly, is called the Low Dam. Constructed originally in the 1880s and twice raised, it stretches across a low valley within the run of the first Cataract. The modern road runs across the top from Aswan on the east bank to the west bank, where you access the High Dam. It impounds a small lake and affords a great view of the Cataract (unfortunately impossible for me to photograph).

A few kilometers further south stands the High Dam,begun in 1960 and finished in 1971. I had always imagined that "high" meant "high," like Hoover Dam -- a massive horseshoe of concrete crammed inside a steep-walled gorge against the endless flow of the water behind. In fact, the High Dam is just a rock-fill dam -- just a mass of dirt and rocks piled up across the river valley, perhaps 100 meters high (maybe more), a monument not to technological achievement but to the simple back-breaking work of carrying uncountable loads of fill and dumping them in place. After US-Egyptian relations broke down under Nasser in the 1950s, the Egyptian government turned to the Soviets for the money and help to build it -- so that in the High Dam traditions of massive Egyptian public works (pyramids, temples, the whole irrigation system) meet Soviet ideology. The dam is, of course, an ecological disaster; aside from the 32 ancient temples that sulk under the surface of Lake Nasser (at 500 km², the largest artificial lake in the world -- 150 of those km² lie in the Sudan), the calm blue waters hide an increasing burden of silt, the "gift of the Nile" being stored up against an unhappy future. The ecology of Egypt north of the dam has changed; without that silt, chemical fertilizers have become a standard part of the armory of the Egyptian farmer and salinization, the bane of all desert irrigation, has started to take its toll on Egypt. Like Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona, the High Dam will be presenting severe problems in the next decade or two. One cannot but wonder whether ultimately all these great structures, monuments to control of nature designed only for the day, not, like the pyramids or Thucydides' History, for all time, will have to be taken down.

The Egyptians haven't yet gotten the idea of industrial tourism, either. The Stalinist-style kiosk, the only shopping opportunity at the Dam, sells only soda and snacks -- not even postcards! Edie and Ellen -- raised in the Folta family tradition of industrial tourism (which, when you think about it, is really perfectly consonant with the Soviet world view) -- faced bitter disappointment, unable to send their sister and mother "Greetings from the High Dam at Aswan, Egypt" with cheesy drawings of happy workers on the High Dam. Because it's just rock-fill you can't go inside (as you used to be able at Hoover Dam before fear of terror closed that off), and you can't go farther than the kiosk along the top because it's "forbidden." Much here to learn.

The Temple of Philae stood originally on an island submerged by the rising of the Nile south of the low dam. Taken apart and reconstructed stone by stone, it stands now on a nearby but higher island. The site is magical, quiet, refreshing, soothing. You get there by boat across the lake, which is dark with dissolved iron. At the docks by the island it is madness -- the boats crash up against one another, the captains shouting, as the passengers scramble from boat to boat to reach the docks, themselves crammed end to end with a mass of tourists. It is the same in the temple itself -- endless crushing crowds. Philae could be the poster child for mass tourism gone completely awry -- I felt here more than anywhere the impossibility of really coming to understand where I was and what I was seeing, because I could spend no more than a second contemplating anything before the crowds pushed me on. And this is a great pity, because for many reasons Philae is the most interesting (to me) of the temples we saw.

Once again, Philae is Ptolemaic -- begun under Ptolemy II and finished, with admirable celerity, under Ptolemy III. The temple is dedicated to Isis, whose extraordinary figure adorns the outer walls of the inner towers, facing the courtyard. She stands naked, gesturing, crowned by the moon and crescent that symbolize her. She's not a native goddess -- her worship began among the Greeks in the fifth century BCE and became extremely popular in the Hellenistic period. Her presence here, at the boundaries of Egypt, displays at once the power of the Ptolemies and the protection of the goddess. Like the fort on Elephantine island, the temple at Philae speaks confidently about the authority of the new dynasty in language the locals had been able to parse for thousands of years -- because, of course, despite the new elements in the iconography, the design of the temple and the layout of its decorations resonate with practices sanctified by centuries and centuries of Egyptian belief.

That evening I felt strongly the urge to get off the boat. The Ra I is really nice, but I am beginning to feel too isolated from the world around. I want a little more direct contact with people, a little less mediation. I decide to take a walk. Ellen, who seems to feel a bit of the same, or perhaps even more just a need to exercise the body a bit, comes with me. We stroll south on the corniche, past a kiosk or two, then turn a corner away from the river. The night is warm and embracing, like a sweater, or a lover; it smells of the water of the Nile. No one accosts us except a couple of black market money changers, who recognize the impoverished when they see them and leave us alone. We come up to a massive church we had noticed on the drive to the dam, and decide on impulse to go in. It takes a bit of effort to find the entrance (turns out its upstairs) but when we do, we find ourselves in a huge open space filled with folding chairs with the lovely design of a phoenix on the seats, facing a simple altar with a deep red velvet curtain. A young man comes up to us. He insists, in excellent English, that he wants no money to share with us what he know about the church. It is new, begun just seven years ago, and unfinished -- painting the images on the dome (we look up to see the stark white plaster a hundred feet above our heads) will want another seven years. It is dedicated to St. Michael, while also honoring St. Mark, who is believed to have brought Christianity to Egypt; the rite, of course, is Coptic. It will serve, or is already serving, the 15,000 Christian families living between here and Edfu. It stands shoulder to shoulder with an equally impressive mosque. Emad, who visited it also with a friend (he's a Christian) told us, with a clear hint of sadness, that he thought the numbers were few. But the magnificence of the building and the prominence of its location bespeak a confidence in the Egyptian Christian community. People are putting money and time into it, and it's not being built for tourist display. We thank our guide --who really, truly, didn't want money, a refreshing rarity -- light a couple of candles, and pass back into the night. Ellen remarks how comfortable she feels in a church. We talk a bit about the damage religion has done to the world.

Farther on, we come to another sight that had caught our attention from the felucca -- the Old Cataract Hotel. This luxury hotel was one of King Farouk's palaces, now a shrine to wealthy tourism. (Omar Sharif stays here.) Two bribes cancel out the sign on the gate announcing that all tickets for tours have been sold out; my suspicions were aroused anyway by the fact that the sign seemed to be permanently bolted to the bars. The grounds are a dignified garden of palms and tropical trees and bushes, with paths in brick, seats, pools. We peeked inside the windows with their elaborately carved wooden grilles. Sumptuous furnishings, archways tying the rooms together decorated with soft wide red stripes. The late Ottoman influence is redolent, the luxury of empire and many women at your command. It is not hard to see why, aside from his dependence on the British, King Farouk was not well liked. . . .

Aswan, as Ellen remarks, is a happening town. Unlike Luxor, you sense here that tourism is not the most important matter on people's minds. (Of course in Luxor there's also the sugar cane crop.) On the drive out to the dam I noticed in the western desert camouflaged bunkers covered with desert sand but revealing by the shape of their openings -- as Walter Pigeon observes in another context in Forbidden Planet -- the objects they contain: jet fighters. In other words, Aswan clearly has other sources of money than the pockets of people like me. The importance of a liminal position remains today, though now to cover the 280 km to Abu Simbel you must, if you do not fly, join a caravan that gathers early every morning on a particular street in Aswan. Emad tells me the Sudanese border, closed a few years ago when Paul Theroux tried (and failed) to cross it, is open now, thanks to the recent settlement of a border dispute. I had looked longingly south from the lip of the High Dam. Can we go, please?

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