The River That Flows the Wrong Way

ON THE DAY that I hoped to buy a rowboat in Luxor, Egypt, I was awakened, as I had been every morning in Luxor, by a Koranic antiphony drifting from the Islamic boys’ school next door to my hotel. With all the zeal of a Baptist preacher’s, a young boy’s amplified voice shrieked repeatedly in Arabic, “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his witness!” and a shrill chorus of his schoolmates howled the words back at him. I got out of bed and went to thewindow — at 7:00 a.m. the glass was already warm as an infant’sforehead — and discovered that during the night many colorful cloth banners had been strung above the corniche, Luxor’s Nilefront boulevard. Inhand-fashioned Arabic characters, the banners read, “Welcome Mister President of the Government, Muhammad Hosni Mubarak, the Leader of Our Victorious and Progressive Destiny.” Scores of teenage Egyptian soldiers in black uniforms, woolen berets, and white plastic spats lined the avenue in theninety-eight-degree heat, more or less at attention, rifles at their sides, evidently awaiting the president’s arrival. Profiting from a police barricade, the usually hectic street was, for once, mercifully quiet. Across the glittering ribbon of the Nile, the Temple of Hatshepsut and the Valley of the Kings lay blanketed in the pink morning light.

I dressed and went downstairs to the lobby, where the hotel manager and two of his employees sat shoulder to shoulder on a couch before a flickering television. All three men wore white turbans and gray gallabiyas, the traditional Egyptian gown, and, in one of the more baffling manifestations of traditional Egyptian fashion, heavy woolen scarves wound around their necks, as if against an arctic wind. No matter the time of day, the lobby of this hotel was always exceptionally dark, and through the gloom the three men looked like consumptives recuperating in a sanatorium. They were watching an American film in which jeering, sweaty-faced Confederate soldiers were busy abusing a group of morose black slaves.

With an apology for interrupting their entertainment, I asked the hotel manager why President Mubarak was coming to Luxor that day. Without looking away from the television the manager replied, “To open new hospital and sex tomb.”

I studied his long brown nose, his luxurious black mustache. Surely I had misheard him. “Sorry,” I said, “to open a what?”

“Hospital and sex tomb,” he said dully, scratching his chin.

The hospital sounded likely enough, but the idea of a “sex” anything being publicly celebrated by the Egyptian president was preposterous. In this Islamic nation, sex, strictly forbidden outside marriage, was not a subject for public discourse or civic celebration. Human flesh, particularly women’s, was to be concealed, and though in Egypt the assumption of the veil at puberty was officially a matter of individual choice, many Egyptian women wore the hijab, the veil that fully concealed the head and neck, and a surprising number wore the more forbidding niqab, a drape that covered mouth, nose, forehead, sometimes even eyes. Chaste Egyptian women were reluctant to have their photograph taken, because multiplying and displaying their image in this way was considered unseemly. Before my first trip to Egypt, I had been counseled to keep my arms and legs covered, not to wear shorts, and never to touch a man in any way except to shake hands. I had been endlessly informed by people who had experience in the matter that purity, chastity, and piety were Egypt’s prevailing sentiments, and that foreign women who came to Egypt and dressed in a provocative way (there are, in fact, many who do) would be considered promiscuous, unprincipled, fair game for harassment and disrespect.

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.

My romantic impression of the Nile had been informed by the paintings of David Roberts, the nineteenth-century Scottish artist who depicted the Egyptian Nile as a lagoonish idyll of soft-sanded banks, mirror-still coves, stands of tasseled reeds, oxen lazily grazing in the shade of slender date palms, barefoot women balancing water jugs on their heads, and sails flushed pink by a tropical sun setting enormously in the distance, which distance was always punctuated by either a colossus, an obelisk, a minaret, or a pyramid. Roberts had depicted the Nile that way because that was the way the Nile looked when he saw it in 1838.

On that first trip to Egypt, in 1996, I boarded a cruise ship in Luxor, steamed southward up the river, and found on the second day out that, without my having registered the gradual change, we had somewhere along the way shed Luxor’s modern urban shabbiness and glided into the precincts of a David Roberts canvas. From the luxurious deck of the ship, it struck me one eve-ning that I was looking at an ox, palm trees, sandy banks, mirror-still coves, water jugs on women’s heads, pink sails in an archaeological distance. I saw flamingos and storks, soft colors, an explosive sunset, obelisks and minarets, and now and then a ruined pharaonic temple. I saw no skyscraper and only several buildings that could be truly termed modern. But for a few power lines threading in and out of the tops of palm trees, an occasional plastic water bottle bobbing on the current, a motorized water pump, and a handful of water jugs made not of clay but of aluminum, there was little in the rural Nile landscape to suggest that nearly two hundred years had passed since David Roberts visited Egypt. Beyond Egypt’s cities, the Nile was much as I had always envisioned it — a rare instance of a fantastical preconception matched by reality.

I was charmed. With a score of middle-aged Spaniards sunbathing on the large deck behind me, I leaned against the ship’s railing and watched, entranced, as the Nile slipped by. The wide river and its green banks looked old and placid, inscrutable and inviting, and yet it was all as distant and inaccessible to me as it had always been. Unable to leave the ship, with its planned itinerary and guided tours, I realized I might as well be watching this wonder from behind a glass wall. What I wanted, really, was not just to see the Nile River but to sit in the middle of it in my own boat, alone.

I BEGAN ROWING some ten years ago when I lived on a small island in Maine. Forced to ferry myself over the water, I found that I enjoyed the task. Rowing was a peaceful, meditative activity, and the constant movement — the inherent mobility — of the water was enthralling. Land was stationary and always belonged to somebody. Water, on the other hand, was free. It moved and shifted and traveled. It was volatile, and when aroused it could be unforgiving. I found it frightening and a little bit thrilling to think that the water that throws itself against the coast of Kennebunkport in July might feasibly be the same particular water that laps at the crab-covered rocks in Bombay Harbor the following March. And it pleased me to realize that I could sit in a small boat and propel myself across all this hugely moving water with an engine no more powerful than my own two arms. One day I told the woman who owned the island I lived on that I planned to row across Penobscot Bay to another island two or three miles away. She protested, said it was impossible, made me promise her I wouldn’t try. I promised, then did it anyway, and having successfully done it, I wanted to do more, to go farther, to row elsewhere. I rowed wherever I had a chance — in Boston Harbor and Central Park and a lake in southern France. I rowed on the Charles River in a carbuncled dinghy, while the elegant fours and eights speared by like airborne swans. I rowed on the Aegean Sea and on a pond in Oregon.

These days I live at the edge of Narragansett Bay. I row here too — up the Seekonk River one day, down to Occupessatuxet Point the next. Often I row my boat into the middle of the bay, ship my oars, and sit back to see where the tide and the current will take me. I do this, I know, not because it’s peaceful but because there’s an edge to it — it can be peaceful, yes, but it is never truly relaxing. I do it because there’s an element of surrender in the exercise, an active acknowledgment of how breathtakingly tiny and helpless I am in the greater scheme of things, a condition that I spend the rest of my day ignoring, denying, scorning, or forgetting. It is frightening yet also liberating to admit a force far larger than our own.

I SHOULD SAY, before you get the wrong idea, that I have no desire to die. I do not want to die even if it be peacefully in my sleep in my own bed. Less do I want to drown to death or burn to death or choke to death or crash to death or have any body part of mine maimed or disfigured or messed with in any way (and especially not by a crocodile, more about which later). I am, in fact, a woman who can be driven witless with discomfort and frustration by the merest splinter, wart, cold sore, sty, hangnail, or personal insult. I am not afraid to die; I simply do not want to. Nevertheless, I am also a person who is drawn to doing physically difficult and sometimes even dangerous things. I cannot deny that I like to find myself in sticky situations, with the feeling that I’ve really gone and done it this time, that I’m finally sunk, that there’s no turning back and possibly no tomorrow. As regards my aversion to death, I think this impulse makes sense. Death — or dread of it really — has always seemed to me to be the subtext, if not the downright text, of all physical adventure. It’s a calling forth of the despised thing in an effort to stare it down, a test of how far life can push itself into death’s territory without getting burned, and ultimately an effort to become inured to the inevitable prospect. Contrary to what we might expect, acceptance of our limitations and of all that lies beyond our control assuages the anxieties that arise from the misplaced responsibility we habitually and rather grandiosely depute to ourselves.

Returning home from my first visit to Egypt, I took my boat out on Narragansett Bay and imagined myself gliding alone down the Nile among the flamingos, reeds, and palm trees. For months I imagined this. On winter days, when the Rhode Island sky was gray and cold, I pulled myself across the bay and conjured what I had seen along the Nile. I fantasized about returning to Egypt, finding a boat, and heading off down the river on my own. On that first trip to Egypt, whenever I mentioned my Nile rowing idea to Egyptian people they had all said with real disbelief, Impossible! You are a woman! The river is big! Not mentioning any crocodile! And dangerous ships! And the fisherman who can become crazy seeing a woman alone! Egyptians generally thought the plan was idiotic, pointless, and dangerous, and seemed to find it inconceivable that anyone at all would want to row a boat on the Nile for no pressing or practical or, above all, lucrative reason, let alone a foreign woman, and especially when you could make the same trip lounging on a comfortable tour boat with your feet up and a drink in your hand. But sitting in Narragansett Bay, I earnestly wondered why such a trip should be impossible. The Nile was a consistent, stately river that flowed up the continent from the south while the prevailing winds came out of the north, a rare phenomenon that for centuries had allowed easy passage in both directions. Why should its location in Egypt make this river any more forbidding, inaccessible, or unrowable than any other?

A year passed, and my fantasy failed to fade. I found myself spending afternoons in my local library, pawing through books about Egypt and the Nile, studying photographs, gathering information about the river and about others who had traveled on it. Millions of people — including thousands of foreigners — had traveled on the Nile, among them the obvious centuries of Egyptian fishermen, farmers, and pharaonic slaves who daily went up and down the river as a matter of survival. Hadrian went up the Nile. Herodotus did it too. Plato did it. So did Helen of Troy. Julius Caesar and Cleopatra went up the Nile. So, reportedly, did Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Napoleon and his ill-fated soldiers did it in 1798, and along with them went Dominique-Vivant Denon and twenty-one mathematicians, three astronomers, seventeen civil engineers, thirteen naturalists and mining engineers, thirteen geographers, three gunpowder and saltpeter experts, four architects, eight draftsmen, ten mechanical draftsmen, one sculptor, fifteen interpreters, ten writers, and twenty-two printers, all sent to record and analyze every possible fact about Egypt, its monuments, its culture, and its people. The result of their efforts was the Description de L’Egypte, published between 1809 and 1828, an enormous nineteen-volume summary of the country, complete with highly detailed measurements, etchings, and drawings. The international publicity and huge number of maps the Description brought with it eventually inspired the world’s curious to flock to Egypt in droves. (Thanks to Napoleon’s expedition, by 1820 Egypt was the best-mapped country in the world.) The country that had been lost to the rest of the world by a thousand years of Arab rule, which had essentially barred foreign travelers from the Nile Valley, quickly became the favorite destination of explorers, scientists, tourists, and notables alike. When Victor Hugo wrote in his preface to Les Orientales in 1829, “We are all much more concerned with the Orient than ever before,” the statement was directly due to Napoleon’s fact-gathering expedition and the long-locked door it had opened. Edward Lane, Edward Lear, Lord Byron, William Makepeace Thackeray, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Cullen Bryant all went to Egypt in the first half of the nineteenth century. Florence Nightingale went in 1849. So did Gustave Flaubert. Herman Melville went, as well as kings and queens of numerous nations, the Prince of Wales, Émile Zola, Winston Churchill, and William Golding. In the 1950s, three men in kayaks, John Goddard, Jean Laporte, and Andre Davy, together paddled nearly the full length of the Nile, from the Kagera River to Alexandria, and in 2004, a team of explorers led by Pasquale Scatturo rafted the length of the Blue Nile from its source in Ethiopia to the Mediterranean Sea.

It has never been the custom, however, for foreign visitors to operate their own craft on the Egyptian Nile, and in modern times the government actively discourages such journeys. Tourists opt instead for the cruise ship or, less often, hire an Egyptian sailor to captain a felucca, the traditional lateen-rigged sailboat ubiquitous in Egypt. In my first four weeks in Egypt, I had neither seen nor heard of any foreigners on the river unaccompanied by an Egyptian captain or of a single woman, Egyptian or otherwise, operating a boat on the river. Still, I saw no truly persuasive reason that the trip I had in mind should not be possible for me. Narragansett Bay was a body of water complicated by altering tides, sometimes large waves, sudden violent weather, scores of international shipping tankers powered by propellers the size of houses, and speedboats occasionally operated by reckless drunken drivers. In Egypt, though the Nile did indeed have its own peculiar set of hazards, there would be none of that. The Egyptian Nile was hardly a wilderness: more than fifty-five million people lived alongside it; there were no ferocious animals left there to speak of; and I knew that a desperate traveler armed with a little bit of money could find her way off the river, one way or another, at any time.

The more I learned about the Nile, the less forbidding it seemed. I had so often imagined rowing on the Nile that doing so had begun to feel less like a fantasy and more like a memory that only wanted its corresponding action rightfully exercised.

Two years after my first visit, I returned to Egypt, determined to find a boat and make my trip on the Nile. In an effort to acquaint myself with the stretch of the river that I was interested in rowing, I once again spent four days on the deck of a cruise ship, traveling — this time from Luxor to Aswan — with a pair of binoculars pressed to my face, examining every island and shoal, observing the currents, trying to gauge the swiftness of the river’s flow, watching fishermen at sunrise laying their nets. When rowing upriver, the fishermen hugged the shore, where the current was less intense and occasionally even eddied in reverse. Their boats sat low in the water, were flat bottomed, were made of steel, were on average twelve to fourteen feet long and three feet wide, and were roughly the shape of a Turkish slipper, narrowed at both ends but slightly higher and finer at the bow. As oars they used long, coarse, bladeless planks that resembled nothing so much as clapboards ripped from the face of a derelict house. They used not the U-shaped metal oarlocks I was accustomed to, but vertical pegs of wood or steel to which the immense oars were lashed with a length of prickly twine. The current never appeared swift enough to vex or deter these fishermen. They maneuvered their boats with breathtaking precision and finesse, making sudden one-hundred-eighty-degree turns with a simultaneous and contrariwise two-wristed snap. From Aswan to Cairo, the Nile bed falls little more than five inches per mile, which means the river offers a relatively slow, peaceful ride. In my observation, the current was swift but never roiling; there were no rapids to speak of other than those tossed up by the boulders of the first cataract above Aswan; and while there were shallows treacherous enough to stop a misguided cruise ship, none was shallow enough to prevent a small, light, flat-bottomed boat from smoothly proceeding. As for the dangerous ships Egyptians had warned of, there were no ships on the Nile that I could see, other than the plodding, festively lit cruise boats equipped with swimming pools and dance floors and packed with vacationing Europeans. (The size of these cruise ships was trifling compared to the hulking tankers I regularly marveled at on Narragansett Bay.) There was never a threat of rain. There was the possibility of a khamaseen, a hot southeasterly wind that whips dust out of the Sahara and renders the air a stinging, opaque mass,* but this was April and just in advance of the season for that. There was a large lock at Esna that looked complex and possibly like trouble for a small boat, and a few bridges that did not. As for crocodiles, there were, the captain of my cruise ship had dismissively confirmed with a dry laugh, no crocodiles whatsoever in the Nile below the High Dam.

In planning my rowing trip, among my greatest worries was unwanted attention from the Egyptian police. In terms of freedom and accessibility, the Nile was a far cry from an American river on which any psychopath could, without hindrance or permission, indulge in any half-baked boating scheme he was capable of devising. I had been told that in order to travel alone on the Nile, I would need police permission, that such permission was not likely to be granted, and that if by some miracle permission was granted, weeks of bureaucratic wrangling would follow; I would have to come up with a considerable amount of money in fees; and that, in the end, if they let me go, the police would insist on sending an officer with me for my protection.

Since the 1997 massacre of fifty-eight tourists at Luxor’s Temple of Hatshepsut (an act of terrorism euphemistically referred to in Egypt as “the accident”) and several other slightly less devastating terrorist attacks perpetrated by the extremist Islamic group Gama’at Islamiyah, the Egyptian government has at times elevated its tourist protection operations to levels worthy of visiting heads of state. A country of sixty-two million people whose chief source of income is tourism cannot afford another “accident.” Groups of foreign visitors who want to venture off the beaten tourist paths must now, in theory at least, be accompanied by a police convoy. Sightseers are often trailed by soldiers toting semiautomatic rifles, their sagging pockets stuffed with bullet cartridges bulky as bricks. More often than not, the soldiers are skinny, vaguely staring pubescents who carry their guns slung over their shoulders like cumbersome schoolbags, wear flip-flops for shoes, and spend a lot of time napping on the job. Security points have cropped up at important tourist sites — a show of outdated metal detectors and young guards rummaging halfheartedly through visitors’ handbags. At other times the security effort seems a mere rumor. “If you go to Fayoum, you’ll have to have soldier in your car with you once you get there.” I went to Fayoum. There was no soldier. At the Temple of Hatshepsut, where tourists had not long before been shot and hacked to death with machetes, I found the primary guard fast asleep in his guard-house, slumped heavily in his chair, mouth hanging open, arms dangling at his sides — so unconscious was he that even when I put my camera eight inches from his face and snapped his picture he never awoke.

The Egyptian efforts at security are designed as much to make tourists feel safe as to actually frighten or deter militant Islamic terrorists intent on damaging the secular, West-tending Egyptian government. Fanatical terrorists could probably not be deterred, but vacationing tourists could be soothed and assured by the sight of Mubarak’s soldiers. As for the river police, I had seen a few police boats at Aswan and Luxor manned by large groups of young men, but nowhere else. If I asked the Egyptian police for permission to row a boat down the Nile, I would undoubtedly have to take them with me and perhaps endure at their hands the very intrusions and harassments they were supposedly there to protect me from. If I didn’t ask, I was on my own. The latter seemed preferable.

As for random crime unrelated to terrorism, the rate of personal crimes against foreigners in Egypt was low because the consequences for perpetrators were dire. But for the violent period of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalist revolution during the 1950s, when anti-European feeling was high, since the days of Napoleon’s invasion and the subsequent rule of Muhammad Ali, the average foreigner in Egypt has generally been accorded civil rights and a moral status superior to that of the native Egyptian. In the early nineteenth century, if a foreign visitor was murdered, every Egyptian within walking distance of the event would, without trial or investigation, be put to death as punishment. If a foreigner complained of having had his money stolen by one Egyptian, some thirty Egyptians would be jailed for a month. In 1849 Florence Nightingale observed, “The police which Mehemet Ali instituted . . . have effectually cleared the country and secured the safety of Europeans. No pains are taken to investigate who is the offender; when an offence occurs, the whole village suffers to save the trouble of inquiring who’s who . . . If you miss a pin now, the whole village is made responsible for it, and the whole village bastinadoed.” And as late as 1872 Amelia Edwards, a British writer who traveled up the Nile, recorded an incident in which a member of her boat party, while hunting for fowl, accidentally grazed the shoulder of a child with his buckshot. Properly incensed, the local villagers grabbed the man’s gun from him, struck him on the back with a stone, and chased him back to his boat. Edwards’s party filed a complaint against the village. In response the governor of Aswan promised that “justice would be done,” arrested fifteen of the villagers, chained them together by their necks, and asked the hunter in what manner he would like the scoundrels punished. The hunter confessed that, not being familiar with Egyptian law, he had no idea what would be fit. The governor replied, “What-ever you want is Egyptian law.” The hunter stated that his aim was simply to “frighten [the villagers] into a due respect for travelers in general.” In turn, the governor assured the hunter that his only wish was to be agreeable to the English and averred that the entire village should have been beaten “had his Excellency [the reckless and obviously not too bright hunter] desired it.”

The foreigner’s word was rarely questioned in Egypt, and the essence of that custom remains even now. One day while walking in Cairo with an American friend, two young boys called out to us, “Give us money!” When we didn’t reply, one of them threw a stone at us. In an offhand way my friend told an Egyptian man what had happened, and immediately the man summoned a police officer who swiftly collared the two boys and, to our dismay, beat them silly with a bamboo stick. Neither man had witnessed the event, neither had questioned whether our story of the thrown stone was true. The foreign tourist, protected by Egypt’s dependency on her cash, enjoys an unwarranted elevated status. In 1849 Flaubert wrote, “It is unbelievable how well we are treated here — it’s as though we were princes, and I’m not joking.” That particular social luxury had altered only slightly in a hundred and fifty years.

The truth was that the biggest obstacle to my trip would not be political, natural, or criminal, but cultural. My attempt merely to purchase a boat would prove nearly more arduous than the trip itself. Had I a boat of my own with me, I would have simply put it in the water and slipped away, taking my chances as they came. But I had no boat, and I knew that finding one in Egypt would involve dealing with a succession of men who would wonder why a female foreigner wanted such a thing, would try very hard to dissuade me from my intentions, and would eventually suggest that instead of rowing down the river I should spend my time in Egypt dancing and dining with them.

The Egyptian temperament — invariably gregarious, humorous, and welcoming — is also spiked with a heavy dose of intrusiveness. Curious and paternalistic toward foreigners, Egyptians watch over their visitors with elaborate concern — a sweetly self-important trait, as though one could not possibly survive without their attentions and advice. On seeing a pen tucked in my shirt pocket a gentleman says with genuine alarm, Madame! Be careful not to lose your pen! As I leave a hotel another says, Oh, lady! Please be sure to close your bag tightly for safety. Without asking if I want him to, a delightfully friendly shop-keep-er with mahogany-hued teeth and one pinkish, weeping eye, takes proprietary hold of my backpack, tamps at his tongue with a greasy crumpled cloth, and rubs dust from the pack with his plentiful saliva, saying, Better this way! When I put my hotel room key under the leg of my breakfast table to keep the rickety thing from wobbling, a waiter hurries over, plucks up the key, and says with regal self-congratulation, You dropped your key, madame. You must be careful! Once more, surreptitiously, I tuck the key beneath the table leg; dramatically he picks it up again. If I stand before a shop window full of wristwatches, within thirty seconds a passerby will put his nose to mine, point to what I am looking at, and inform me with the patronizing indulgence of a kindly professor instructing a barefoot hillbilly, “This is wristwatches, you see.” And it is nearly impossible for a foreigner to proceed down an Egyptian street without having to answer the same dozen investigative questions shot from the mouths of six dozen people within the span of, say, five minutes: What your name? Which your country? You are alone? Married? Children? Where you went today? My God, you shouldn’t go there. What you did last night? Oh, my God, I will tell you something better to do. What you want? No, no, you do not want that. You will want this better thing more. Do not walk that way. There might be a wolf/snake/bad man. Look out, my God, for the traffic.

In Egyptians, this trait seems derived not only from a wish to try out the few English phrases they’ve learned but also from a particular conviction that they know far better than you do what’s good for you. Confronted with foreign tourists, Egyptians become noisy and nosy, bossy and brash, intrusive and terribly friendly.

Not comprehending my wish to row myself down the river alone, well-meaning Egyptian men, I knew, would try to stop me or, alternatively, would offer a crippling degree of help. And so, as I began my search for an Egyptian rowboat, I resolved to take a slightly Fabian approach, to move slowly, evade questions, and tell no one exactly what it was that I wanted to do.