Excerpt of Down the Nile by Rosemary Mahoney
(Page 2 of 9)
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And yet, having spent a total of three and a half months in
Egypt on three separate visits, I could not deny that, although I
always wore long trousers and long-sleeved shirts and conducted
myself as decorously and seriously and modestly as my
reasons for coming here would allow, I had never visited any
country in which sex had so often arisen as a topic of conversation;
had never witnessed more bald nudity (including not one
but two men openly masturbating on city streets, dozens of
bare breasts proffered at the howling mouths of infants, men
and children freely relieving themselves wherever the need
struck them); had never received so many offhand proposals of
marriage and professions of love from mustachioed strangers,
more swaggering requests for a dance or a kiss, more offers of
romantic dinners; had never been the target of more wolf whistles
and catcalls and distinctly salacious whispers emanating
from behind dusty clumps of shrubbery. Nowhere else in the
world had a smiling stranger approached me and a friend on a
busy street and said, "I want fuck you," with the idle geniality
one might extend in saying, "Looks like rain."
On the hotel television a mounted Dixie soldier rattled his
musket at a handsome slave and jeered, "Git workin', boy! This
ain't no holiday."
The three Egyptians stared at the screen in slack-jawed wonder.
Their bulky turbans were silvery in the electric blue twilight.
I saw that it would be futile to try to get to the bottom of
what the hotel manager was telling me about the president's
visit to Luxor and went out the front door into the stunning
Egyptian sunlight.
I HAD COME to Egypt to take a row down the Nile. My plan,
inspired by a love of rowing, was to buy a small Egyptian rowboat
and row myself along the 120-mile stretch of river between
the cities of Aswan and Qena. This was a trip I'd been
considering for more than two years, since my first visit to
Egypt when I caught a glimpse of the Nile in Cairo and realized
in a moment of deep disorientation that it flowed northward.
At 4,163 miles from its southernmost source - a spring in a
tiny village in Burundi - to its debouchment in the Mediterranean
Sea, the Nile was the longest river in the world. It rubbed
against ten nations. Some 250 million people depended on it
for their survival. It had fostered whole cultures and inspired
immense social and scientific concepts: astronomy, height measurement, square measurement, mathematics, law and equity,
money, civic order, and police. And it flowed north, which
truly surprised me. That it surprised me was equally surprising.
For years I had known about the many explorers - John
Hanning Speke, Richard Burton, David Livingstone, and all
the rest - who had headed south into deepest Africa searching
for the Nile's beginning. For years I had known that the Nile
flowed into the Mediterranean Sea on the north coast of Africa
and not out of it. The only explanation I can offer for my astonishment
at the sight of the Nile flowing northward is a simple
touch of obtuse provincialism: I had never seen a river flowing
northward and therefore must not have believed in my heart
that it was truly possible. (I was later comforted to learn that
Pharaoh Thutmose I, who had spent years ruling life along the
Nile, was exactly as obtuse and provincial as I. When he traveled
to Mesopotamia in the sixteenth century BC and saw the
south-flowing Euphrates River, he was stunned, describing it
in his notes as "a river that flows the wrong way, so that boats
go northward when they sail upstream." Similarly, he dismissed
the entire Persian Gulf with the epithet, "the sea of the
river that flows the wrong way.")
The north-flowing Nile that I saw in Cairo was wide and coffee
colored and dumpy, with piles of trash spilling down its
eastern bank with the distinct look of having been recently unloaded
from a municipal truck. Some of the trash was on fire,
sending into the air slender strings of fishy-smelling yellow
smoke. This urban strip of river - crowded with powerboats,
ferries, tour boats, private yachts; spanned by four or five great
bridges; and lined with skyscrapers and luxury hotels - was
nearly the very end of the great Nile River. It was understandable
then that it looked worn out, congested, and a bit abused.
For all its fame and legend, it looked no more or less majestic
than the Ohio River creeping through Pittsburgh.
Copyright © 2007 by Rosemary Mahoney
