To Run Across the Sea (9 page)

Egyptians tackle all their problems with ingenuity and resource. I saw a Volkswagen crushed absolutely flat used to plug a hole in the wall of a department store. Larger wrecks had been expanded by the use of hardboard, and taken over by homeless families. When fatal crashes happened, the bodies were sometimes, if space allowed, pushed under the car, reverently covered with flowering branches, and left for the arrival of the police—which might be long delayed.

Those who wish to escape the bustle and the clamour of the capital are recommended by an official guidebook to make a move, as soon as they have seen all the sights, to Helwan, 18 miles away on the banks of the Nile, described in
Tourist Information Egypt
as ‘this city of sunshine, health and beauty … always noted for its marvellous dry climate, and for its mineral waters … one of the famous health resorts of the world’.

A leading article in the
Egyptian Gazette
dated 11 February 1981, brought the record up to date: ‘Unauthorised property development is continuing unabated in Helwan. The value of government land appropriated by private property speculators there is estimated at £500,000. With impunity they bring in the bulldozers, level down whatever lies in their way, and arrange their bricks and mortar with such panache that unless you know, you would never guess that the whole operation was a flagrant breach of the law. With alacrity the more brazen among them put up fences and signs warning trespassers, and then sell off further tracts of land to a second generation of speculators.

‘One individual who seized the hill situated by the continuation of Riyadh Street built an attractive villa at the top and planted an attractive garden. Water and electricity were laid on, rubble and rubbish were discreetly dumped on the other side of the hill. He then started selling off the rest of this well situated piece of land. He is now abroad, but assures everyone that he is now rich enough to buy and bribe his way through any legal proceedings that may be put in his path.’

The writer then went on to speak of the pall of smoke lying over the town, discharged by the string of factories that had been built along the river. I went there and was reminded of my experience of the eruption of Vesuvius back in the forties. People who had come to Helwan for the sake of their health were groping their way about with handkerchiefs held over their mouths, leaving their footprints in the grey fallout that covered the promenade and extinguished the flowers in the celebrated gardens. The view of the Nile might have been through a dirty curtain. The remedy, said the
Gazette
, was to compel factories to pay their corporation tax ‘and to fit chimneys on the equipment which is polluting a district once famous for its balmy perfumes of jasmine, date and guava trees’. It seemed to doubt that much would be done about it.

Upmarket package tour operators switch their attention to Egypt in winter. The news was of all the hotels in Luxor and Aswan chock-a-block, of the Valley of the Kings glutted with multitudes, of fashion models being photographed on the knee of every god at Karnak, of
Son-et-Lumière
and of belly-dancing, barbecues and even sangria at Abu Simbel.

Minya, accepted as the capital of Middle Egypt, where there are antiquities enough to be visited, is no longer in fashion, and I went there, staying at the old Savoy. The hotel is full of sepia photographs and nostalgia, and possesses a new dining-room ceiling pierced with 830 illuminated holes, representing stars, which has so far not quite succeeded in drumming up new business. There was pigeon in saffron rice on the lunch menu, followed by a majestic sweet called ‘eat it and thank God’, but the peace of the surroundings was disturbed by an upper-class Egyptian woman who grumbled loudly at the absence of a buffet. A waiter quietened her with a mish-mash of the negatives pervading a language which insistently tempers deprivation with hope.
Ma’aindish
(I have none),
ma-fish
(It’s off),
khallas
(finished),
bukra inshallah
(tomorrow, God willing).

No town by the water in the good old days was conceivable without its half-mile of promenade, and Minya had this to offer, although the parapet dividing it from the river was now used to dry washing, many of the garments on display being colourful in the extreme, some extraordinary. Across the water a vast cemetery extended for miles, with thousands of tombs, some dating back 4,000 years. I arrived at the moment when the males of a funeral party were about to embark for the further shore. Local custom excludes women from the final scene of the human drama, and they were left to screech and tear at their garments.

The Nile here, and in all the other towns forgotten by winter visitors, was the river of the Victorian painter in watercolours. There was nothing in the scene that would not have been witnessed 100 years ago; girls in garnet velvet robes carrying watercress on their heads, the low horizon of palms scythed by sharp, white felucca sails, a buffalo with a heron picking at its ear, fishing boats painted with holy tombs, trees of wisdom and crescent moons, a child playing on pan-pipes to advertise the huge eel he had for sale, curling like a python from his wrist. For those who crave peace it was here.

The pyramids start at El Faiyum. Few of these southern pyramids are visited by tourists, although they are remarkable enough, in particular the steep, white fortress shape of El Maidum. El Faiyum uses an ancient system to raise its water from the Nile and the town is full of the unearthly sound of water-wheels grinding on their wooden bearings, resembling only the underwater song of whales. The oasis contains a shallow lake, 25 miles in length, which entices wading birds to leave the safety of the river, and here they fall to cohorts of Italian sportsmen in ambush.

A party of thirty Romans—most of them fantastically uniformed for the sport—had just come in for their midday meal at the Panorama Hotel when I was there. The morning had been a good one. The Italians, having brought provisions including spaghetti, cheese and even spring onions from Rome, did not eat the birds they shot, but sold them to an Egyptian dealer, who killed any that were still alive before thrusting them into a sack. One of the sportsmen told me he had shot about 100
anitre
that morning, but his ducks turned out to be sandpipers, avocets, phalaropes and ruffs—many of them of great rarity by our standards. He had bagged quite a few small birds such as wagtails, too, but these the dealer discarded contemptuously, flinging them into the water. The total bag for the morning weighed 70 kilos, totalling possibly 1,000 birds, and the group expected to shoot as many again when they went out in the early evening. It was the best place they knew of its kind anywhere in the world, but they thought it was too much to expect things to go on much longer like this. Three or four years, at most.

North of Cairo the Nile divides into two channels, one reaching the sea at Rashid, near Alexandria, and the other at Damietta, about 40 miles from Port Said. From these two main courses spreads the vast fan of the Delta, the greatest vegetable garden on earth, which is in its way a secret place, hardly visited by anyone without business there, ignored by the tourist.

The Delta is beautiful in all its parts. A soft light, sharpened with a little sand, billows over the fields and haloes the peasants at work with their buffaloes. The canals breed their own mists, and there are naked boys everywhere stalking moorhens with their nets, and delving for catfish in the mud. Ninety per cent of these children suffer from bilharzia.

For much of the estimated 40 million years of its life, the Nile has been depositing silt in the Delta. This jet-black, crumbling, crystalline, almost vivacious substance bears no resemblance whatever to the grudging soil tilled by the English gardener. It grows all the familiar vegetables in sizes that are so monstrous that a good Delta cabbage has to be picked up in both arms, and one can see a man bent under the burden of an enormous cauliflower carried on his shoulders. Methods of cultivation remain primitive in the extreme, but they are totally effective given a bottomless reservoir of cheap labour. I covered 500 miles of Delta roads without seeing a plough in action. The earth was being chopped and patterned everywhere, by peasants using the adze, which, say the landlords, is ‘kinder on the soil’. Water is shifted daily by the thousand million gallons, from river to canal and canal to ditch, but there are 100 waterwheels turned by a donkey for every pump. These are supplemented by gangs of freelances who scamper from property to property shouldering the device known as the Archimedean screw, used to move small quantities of water. The severe time and motion principles of antiquity prevail here. No one in the Delta falls asleep, Mexican-style, with his hat over his face.

Arrangements are feudal, even by comparison with, say, some of the less-developed rural areas of Latin America. Outside Damanhur, near Alexandria, a gang of men were waist-deep in stinking water, cleaning the sludge from a canal with their hands. They were working at great speed, urged on by two overseers on the bank above, and when one of the men began to show signs of fatigue, and began a blubbering protest, an overseer picked up a large stone, threw it, and hit him in the chest. The man began to scream, came charging up the bank, and grabbed up an adze in a threatening manner, but was soon overpowered. For his insubordination he was told that a quarter would be deducted from his day’s wage, the equivalent of £1.60. ‘If you want to eat, you must work,’ the overseer said. He was quite happy to discuss this incident, and labour relations in general, with an utter stranger. Unemployment was very high, he said, and his firm were able to pick and choose when it came to employing labour. They would only use men prepared to drive themselves hard. When asked why dredging equipment was not used, he said the high cost of fuel made it uneconomic. For the price of a gallon of petrol a man would do more than the machine.

There was no shame, no concealment, about such transactions, no desire to avoid publicity. They were the facts of life in the Delta, recognised and accepted, likely to have drawn only a foreigner’s attention and comment. The overseers were not psychopaths but ordinary men doing a regular, respectable, no less well thought-of job than, say, greasing cars. A half-hour later I saw a gang of young children, guarded by a man with a switch, who were engaged in clearing stubble from a field. The man was delighted to stop for a chat. He was benign-looking and genial. We wished each other peace and the mercies of God, shaking hands and touching our hearts. He told me that the youngest of the children was about eight, and they were paid the equivalent of 20p a day, starting work at 7 a.m. ‘I love them all,’ he said, lashing out playfully at a nearby slacker. He prided himself on knowing how to get the best out of children. ‘Encourage them,’ he said. ‘Kid them along, praise them when they do well.’ He held up the switch and shook his head disapprovingly. ‘I really hate to have to tickle their hides.’

The Delta population doubles every few years. Everyone has heard of the Pill, but despite the urgings of President Sadat’s wife it is rejected by the very poor. Children here, just as in the slums of Naples, are a source of income, and as they undercut the price of adult labour they can find employment however short work may be. The driver lost his way in the labyrinth of mean streets of Mahalla el Kubra, and we were instantly adopted and taken into the confidence of an assortment of males sucking at their hookahs outside a café. One of our new friends provided facts and figures. He himself, he said, seemed to spend most of his life out of work, but his two daughters in their late teens had jobs in the brickyards of El Rashid, where they were paid £1 each a day. Three of the younger children, ranging from 5 to 12, did odd jobs in the rope factory. Nothing too strenuous, he said, and it kept them out of mischief, and brought in another 80p. His wife’s contribution raised the family income to a level which at least filled all their stomachs. She did the daily shopping for a rich woman, who was so fat, he said, that she could not stand up, only kneel, and even then she had to be supported.

Fat women in these small Nile-side towns were everywhere to be seen, and a man had just come into sight manoeuvring his enormous wife, like a piece of stately furniture, into a position where she could be propped against a wall across the road and left. He came over and introduced himself in English as a high-pressure welder, producing a sheaf of testimonials given him by companies he had worked for in Britain and West Germany. His wife had been joined by several elephantine friends, dressed like Madonnas of the Florentine school in black biblical robes. They wore patent-leather shoes with gold buckles, and small girls in attendance, squatting as necessary to wipe flecks of mud from their sparkling footwear, completed the feudal picture.

It was a scene without appeal for the welder, on a month’s leave from Hamburg. The hookah, pulled from a neighbouring mouth, was thrust between my teeth, while he plied me with all the questions indispensable to the protocol of such meetings, and exposed the secrets of his own unsatisfactory life in Mahalla. ‘What is your affliction [work], sir? Don’t talk about daughters, but how many sons have you? How is King George? I love Miss England. The ignorant woman over there is my wife. She eats every day one kilo of nuts, and on Friday four pigeons.’

At El Rashid—once Rosetta, where they dug up the famous stone by which ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were deciphered—the mouth of the river was finally reached. Cold Mediterranean rain was spattering on the yellow water and in the muddy streets, but it did nothing to damp down the animation of an intensely oriental setting. Perhaps there is something in the story that the Gypsies passed through Egypt on their way to Europe, for the streets were full of objects, carts, barrows, market-stalls, even the occasional wraith of an American car, painted in exuberant Gypsy style, largely with rambling roses. El Rashid gathered the harvests both of the sea and the land, a bustling, prosperous place where business and pleasure had reached a civilised agreement. A fleet of taxis (half-fare travelling on the luggage rack, a quarter in the boot) brought buyers and sellers from all the villages, and they went about embracing each other and roaring with laughter.