In the autumn of 1849, Gustave Flaubert and a friend, Maxime Du Camp, made a wonderful trip to Egypt. At twenty-eight, Flaubert was a handsome, tall, high-spirited, neurotic young man with an ardent yearning for the exotic enchantments of the Orient. It may have been flight from his adored but incredibly dominating mother that in part impelled this journey, or perhaps it was disappointment over his first serious literary effort, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. More understandably, he had a serious and informed taste for antiquity and an irrepressible love of prostitutes, and in Egypt he knew he would find both in abundance. In any case, Flaubert, who was unknown as a writer (Madame Bovary would not appear until seven years later and bring him instantaneous fame), was even then indefatigably recording his impressions of the world, and his travel notes and letters from that nine-month odyssey along the Nile remarkably foreshadow the powers of observation and the acute sensibility that brought his masterpiece into being. By turns beautiful, rapturous, bawdy, hideous, and brutal, his record is also from time to time quite funny. Not only because of the contrasts it presents between the Egypt of now and then but because of the similarities, it comprises a fascinating and instructive document, delicious reading in itself but required reading—let me assign it as a text: Flaubert in Egypt, translated and edited by Francis Steegmuller, Academy Chicago Limited Edition, 1979—for all present-day voyagers along the Nile.
It can accurately be said that there is almost no place on earth that any longer is safe from tourism. When cruises to the Galápagos Islands are within reach of middle-class vacationers, and jumbo jets from New Zealand fly past the ice mountains of Antarctica for panoramic sightseeing trips (and tragically crash, as one plane did not long ago), we have truly begun to inhabit the “global village.” Not only is the Nile no exception, it was beginning to be overrun by tourists even in Flaubert's time, when the exigencies of transportation were complicated to a degree that people accustomed to modern luxury travel can only reflect upon with discomfort. In the Egypt of the mid-nineteenth century, the invaders were already on the scene, inflicting their characteristic wounds. Their ubiquitous spoor—the inescapable graffiti—caused Flaubert some of his deepest moments of depression. “In the temples we read travelers’ names; they strike us as petty and futile. We never write ours; there are some that must have taken three days to carve, so deeply are they cut in the stone. There are some that you keep meeting everywhere—sublime persistence of stupidity.” At the Pyramid of Khepren his despair deepens. Under the name of Belzoni, the great archaeologist, he discovers “no less large, that of M. Just de Chasseloup-Laubat. One is irritated by the number of imbeciles’ names written everywhere: on the top of the Great Pyramid there is a certain Buffard, 79 rue Saint-Martin, wallpaper manufacturer, in black letters; an English fan of Jenny Lind's has written her name; there is also a pear, representing Louis-Philippe.”
Tourism is, in general, a human activity that is neither desirable nor undesirable, merely existing in relationship with some landscape or other because people in their incessant curiosity will travel and observe and explore. Under certain circumstances, however, and usually after the passing of a long period of time, tourism becomes absolutely essential to the life of a place, becomes symbiotic, indeed so organically linked as to resemble the teeming bacterial flora that inhabits the human alimentary tract and that contributes to the body's very survival. Over the past one hundred and fifty years or so, Egypt has developed just such a relationship with its legions of visitors. The tourists who pour in season after season, year after year, comprise a critical factor in Egypt's economy; remove tourism, and the country would suffer a catastrophic blow. What makes the present situation so ironic, and so gloomy to contemplate, is that the very tourism that supplies Egypt with an essential part of its sustenance is threatening to destroy the body of the host. Aggravating as they were to Flaubert, and are to the modern visitor, the composers of graffiti are a minor annoyance compared to the larger menace. Both the proliferation of people—in multinational droves becoming more uncontrollable each year—and the sheer physical damage caused by so many millions of shoes stirring up so many tons of abrasive dust, by countless lungs exhaling huge volumes of corrosive carbon dioxide into the fragile environment of the tombs, have brought on a situation of real crisis. Expert observers believe that only immediate and drastic measures will enable Egypt to save the Nile and its treasures for future generations.
As if this were not enough, there is the matter of the dam—the High Dam at Aswan. Built in the 1960s by the Russians at the behest of Gamal Abdel Nasser, then Egypt's president, this vast edifice—now the second-largest rock-filled dam in the world—was intended to usher in the nation's new economic millennium; by the trapping of billions of tons of Nile water in a prodigious reservoir named Lake Nasser, the river would be subjugated, while judicious control and manipulation of the water would bring cheap electrical energy to the entire Nile Valley, along with the potential for millions of newly irrigated acres of fertile land. That much of this has already been accomplished seems indisputable, but, it is becoming increasingly clear, the cost may eventually cancel out the benefits. Many observers believe that the negative effects wrought upon the river by the dam will prove in the long run to be, quite simply, disastrous. I was to learn in detail about these consequences and to view at first hand some of the harbingers of the Nile's change for the worse (I had been on the river once before, in 1967) during a recent February trip down the waterway from Aswan to Cairo, when I was from time to time made uneasily aware that I, too, along with my companions on the voyage, had become yet another manifestation of the tourist pestilence. But even so, it was possible to take some comfort from the fact that the auspices under which we traveled were both dignified and felicitous. Our host on the trip, and a good friend of each of the dozen or so Americans and Europeans whom he had invited aboard the M.S. Abu Simbel, was Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, son of the late Aga Khan and until recently the High Commissioner for Refugees of the United Nations. Married to an Egyptian and profoundly involved in Egypt, its culture, and its history, the prince has a house in Cairo; even more significantly, it was in large measure due to his efforts through UNESCO that the majestic colossi and temples of Abu Simbel and Philae were rescued from the encroaching waters created by the High Dam. Thus, plainly, although we were traveling in privacy and style (the comfort of a boat of one's own is something one need not apologize for), the prince's intimate connection with the Nile and his concern for its heritage and its future allowed his guests a unique perspective—without overly solemnizing what still remains, despite the foregoing auguries, one of the most mysteriously ravishing and moving journeys it is possible to make on the face of the earth.
“Handsome heads, ugly feet” is Flaubert's comment upon the Colossi of Abu Simbel, those gargantuan figures that stand guard on the shores of the Upper Nile, six hundred miles from Cairo; in 1850 the four statues were still partially buried under the sand. Flaubert's companion, Du Camp, made the first known photographs of these sandstone figures of Rameses II, after a boat trip from Cairo that lasted nearly two months. Our own trip from Cairo to Abu Simbel (which we visit before boarding our vessel in Aswan) takes a bare two hours by Egypt Air Boeing 737. In these upper reaches of the waterway, the Nile itself, of course, has become obliterated below the vast and murky expanse of Lake Nasser, which spills out across the desert in a desolate pool nearly the size of Delaware. Interspersed with jagged rock promontories and devoid of vegetation at its edges save for a rare patch of the palest green, like lichen, the lake from the air has an evil, unearthly look, resembling the kind of lake astronauts might encounter beneath the mantle of Saturn or Venus. We land on the recently built airstrip, step out into desert air, which at noon is briskly chill, and are thankful that it is winter. In the depths of summer it has sometimes become so hot that planes have been unable to land; the tarmac melts, turned to the consistency of black glue. A brief overland trip by bus brings us to the site.
Rescued from the flood and, by a marvel of engineering, hoisted above it nearly two hundred feet, the Abu Simbel colossi are appallingly big, exceeding all preconceived notions (derived from photographs, even Du Camp's flat, primitive ones) of their bigness; they are simply immense. And awe-inspiring, without a doubt. That these great effigies might have been allowed to sink without trace beneath the waters of Nasser's lake is unthinkable. But despite the sense of awe that they elicit—monuments to human ingenuity, human toil—they do not, for me at least, inspire that ineffable thrill of pleasure that one experiences in the presence of great heroic art. This could be partly due to that “pitiless rigidity” of which Flaubert complained in regard to Egyptian sculpture; or it might be because the colossi, with their enigmatic smiles that so often seem to possess the faintest shadow of a smirk, are simply intimidating, vainglorious, invoking the idea not of true grandeur but of pelf, influence, power. Also, to reproduce one's self four times in figures sixty-six feet high would seem to be a redundancy. The playwright Arthur Miller, one of the Abu Simbel’s voyagers, sits in the chill afternoon light regarding these grandiose duplications (a cast on a recently fractured ankle renders Miller less mobile than the rest of us). “Think of the poor people in those days,” he muses, “who dared to come down the river to invade Egypt from the south. One look at this display and they'd be ready to run back home.” One agrees. They are paradigms of a universal motif: human domination. They would not look out of place adorning the façade of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Even so, they may be more perishable than one might imagine. Farida Galassi, the eloquent French-born Egyptologist who is our guide and who has lived in Egypt for most of her seventy-four years, speaks dispiritedly of the future of the colossi, remarking that she and some of her colleagues feel that the elevation of the statues to higher ground is not only a mere reprieve but a move that in itself contains the seeds of doom. The reason for this is that the old site offered shelter to these vulnerable sandstone figures, while the new location provides exposure to frequent sandstorms, which could prove to be completely destructive in no more than an eyewink in Egyptian time—seventy-five to a hundred years. Thus the High Dam, in a perverse and unpredicted way, may claim Abu Simbel as a victim after all.
Our eponymous vessel awaits at dockside in Aswan. The son of a shipbuilder, I look over the M.S. Abu Simbel with thoughtful attention and am utterly pleased. Relatively small by Nile standards—one hundred and twenty feet long—she and her sister vessel, the Aswan, were built in 1979, the first metal boats to be constructed in Egypt. With a catamaran bottom, she is able to negotiate the shallows. She has nice clean lines, with no furbelows or waste space; yet there are ample cabins with efficient plumbing and abundant hot water (essential after each day's desert dust), a comfortable dining saloon with bar, and, perhaps most attractive of all, an open upper deck of fine proportions, allowing visual access to what for many travelers is a Nile voyage's greatest glory: the incomparable river itself and the timeless tableaux of its shores. Flaubert and Du Camp navigated the Nile by cange, a small sailboat also supplied with oarsmen. “Our two sails, their angles intersecting,” Flaubert wrote, “swelled to their entire width, and the cange skimmed along, heeling, its keel cutting the water….Standing on the poop that forms the roof of our cabin, the mate held the tiller, smoking his black wood chibouk.” Flaubert and his friend traveled with a crew of twelve, a fairly high ratio for two passengers; our baker's dozen requires twenty in the crew, likewise a high ratio when one considers that none are oarsmen. A passage by sail and oar would surely have its own enchantments, and such a trip can still be managed for one or two adventurers; but this form of cruising has virtually disappeared from the river. We are enfolded, rather, in soothing decadence. The food is excellent, often superb. Fully air-conditioned, our vessel travels downstream at an almost vibrationless eight knots, powered by twin one-hundred-and-fifty-horsepower Caterpillar engines. But if our motors are modern, our helm is nearly as ancient as the river itself. There is not a single navigational aid on the Nile—not a buoy, not a marker or a beacon—and our helmsmen steer by sight, most often discerning the bars and shoals in this generally shallow river by the characteristic rippling effect on the surface (sometimes completely undetectable to the casual eye) and proceeding boldly at night as long as moonlight permits. They are incredibly gifted navigators but, alas, not perfect; once in a great while, the boat scrapes bottom.
We remain in Aswan for a day or two. The city, situated above the rapids of the river and its clumps of vivid green islands, is a beautiful one, even though its runaway growth (from fifty thousand to almost a million in twenty years) is a measure in itself of Egypt's huge population explosion. Just as the city dominates the river, the city is dominated by the High Dam. Dams, with their attendant benefits and mischief, are not new to Aswan. Around the turn of the century, the British built a dam that, though lower than the new Russian model, was considered a prodigy among dams in its day, allowing the cultivation of vast tracts of land in middle Egypt. It also caused the submergence, for most of the year, of the nearby Temple of Philae, a grand edifice of the Ptolemaic period dedicated to the goddess Isis. Sixty years later the High Dam threatened inundation of Philae forever. But thanks to the similar, almost superhuman efforts that saved Abu Simbel, Philae was rescued, lifted up stone by stone with astonishing precision and deposited in perfect rebirth of itself on a nearby island. Thus was effected over the High Dam a major cultural triumph. It is a pity that such triumphs are few, for it is becoming clear that the harm inflicted by the new dam is enormous. Just one unforeseen case in point may be demonstrated by a crucial difference between the old dam and the new. Whatever its drawbacks, the British structure, with its elaborate chain of sluiceways, did permit an unquestionably major function: it allowed most of the huge tonnage of silt to pass through. By contrast, the High Dam is badly flawed in this respect: so much silt has backed up in Lake Nasser that it has become an obstruction, making necessary a diversionary channel to deposit this life-giving soil in, of all places, the desert.
That the Americans, largely because of the politics of John Foster Dulles in the 1950s, were prevented from being the builders of the High Dam is perhaps just as well. Certainly, among other things, Americans are now spared the blame for that appalling monument to Egyptian-Russian friendship, which stands two hundred and fifty feet high at the dam site. Dazzlingly white and constructed in the shape of what may crudely be described as four symmetrically arranged winglike pylons rising toward heaven, the monument achieves an effect just the opposite of upward aspiration, resembling nothing so much as the exposed fins of a colossal concrete artillery shell that has embedded itself in the earth. As we ascend to the top in an elevator, Prince Nicholas Romanoff, a collateral descendant of the czar who can at other times speak with deep affection of things Russian, comments glumly on the traditional failure of Russian architecture, interestingly theorizing that as architects, Russians have been so uninspired because the country has always lacked in quantity that requisite material: stone. In any case, although the view from the top of the structure is spectacular—offering a bright blue vista of the waters of Lake Nasser; the surrounding desert; and also the dam itself, stretching an amazing two miles across the crest of the site—one is scarcely heartened by what one hears now about the dam's further pernicious effects on the river, to which it was supposed to bring an unmixed shower of blessings.
The greater part of the water of the Nile comes from heavy rainfall in Ethiopia. Because of seasonal vagaries, the volume of Nile water is produced with irregularity, but for thousands of years, life along the river has been governed by the annual flooding, whether little or great or just enough. Too much water in this flood and there is risk of a destructive inundation; too little water and the fields grow dry for want of irrigation. This is an oversimplified description of the hydrology of the Nile, about which there have been written many scientific volumes and about which, too, much remains a mystery. The High Dam, aside from its hydroelectric capabilities, was built to put an end to the unpredictable nature of the annual flood and, in effect, to stabilize the flow of water from Aswan to the sea. Probably the most serious consequence of such stabilization is this: while, indeed, the damage that comes from uncontrolled flooding has been eliminated, there has resulted a situation in which the great deposits of silt, so necessary to agriculture, have also been eliminated. Thus the land has suddenly and for the first time become seriously dependent on artificial fertilizer, which is extremely expensive and something few Egyptian farmers can afford. Also, at the mouth of the Nile, fish in the Mediterranean used to feed on organisms conveyed by the silt, but now that the silt is gone, fish and fisheries have been decimated. It is an ecological nightmare. The long-range effects are incalculable—and cannot be good.
Another unforeseen result of the dam is one that demonstrates in a rather weird way man's ability to alter the very normality of certain natural phenomena. It of course almost never rains in the desert, and the green richness of Egypt comes about entirely because of the Nile. But through the formation of Lake Nasser's mammoth reservoir, one of the largest of its kind anywhere, there has been created around it a microclimate in which large-scale condensation and precipitation occur from time to time, and rain falls, reportedly often in torrents. Many villages in the Upper Nile region, made of mud brick and totally unprepared for such freakish downpours, have suffered severe damage because of the High Dam. In other times, people were at least forewarned about occasional inundations.
A few miles north of the dam, at the Temple of Philae, I remember Flaubert's reflection: “The Egyptian temples bore me profoundly.” This is not entirely true, for it is belied by his vigorous descriptions at other moments in his journal; often his reactions to these antique glories are deeply appreciative and recorded with excitement. Yet there is something genuine in his boredom, and his friend Du Camp wrote: “The temples seemed to him always alike….At Philae he settled himself comfortably in the cool shade of one of the halls of the great Temple of Isis to read Gerfaut, by Charles de Bernard.” Visiting Philae myself and recalling this passage, I do not quite feel disposed to sit down and read, but I can begin somehow to partake in Flaubert's dissatisfaction (or is it merely impatience?) with these places, wondrous as they are and as essential as one feels it is that they be seen and visited and strenuously preserved. There are moments of melting and exquisite beauty in Egyptian art—the friezes, the statuary, the gods and goddesses—but for me the glory lies less in the art itself than in a resonance of time and history. This is felt (or, paradoxically, almost heard) in the architecture; for, as Flaubert wrote, “everything in Egypt seems made for architecture—the planes of the fields, the vegetation, the human anatomy, the horizon lines.” And here Flaubert begins to reveal what it is about the Nile that most deeply moves him and engages his passionate attention: the people and the landscape of unparalleled enchantment. I am afraid that it is a feeling that I share. Witness, for instance, his dutiful description of the Temple of Esna: “This temple is 33m. 70 long and 16m. 89 wide, the circumference of the columns is 5m. 37. There are 24 columns….An Arab climbed onto the capital of a column to drop the metric tape. A yellow cow, on the left, poked her head inside.” Plainly, it is the cow that interests Flaubert, not the temple. It is much the same with me.
I wish to board the Abu Simbel and leave Aswan on an upbeat note, wanting to feel at ease with this majestic river, but it is very hard. I think of the “sociological” concerns I would like to touch upon but cannot. By Egyptian standards Aswan is as clean as, say, Toronto, yet its backstreets smell of filth, of urine and corruption. Much of Egypt smells like this. I cannot hesitate even a second to ponder the squalor and poverty of Egypt; it would require the passion, the commitment, of an entire book. Meanwhile, my concern is with the dam and its twin goblin, tourism. Realizing the possible absurdity of my obsession with the latter when I am but a particle of the tourist mass, I find that what I see still bothers me sorely. Above Cairo, Flaubert's Nile was virtually empty, its mode of navigation primitive; certainly the river did not lack a few travelers, but when Flaubert writes about them they take on the quality of being unannounced, rare, a little strange. (“A cange carrying a party of Englishmen comes sailing furiously down the river, spinning in the wind.”) Berthed near us at quayside are two enormous boats of the Sheraton hotel chain. Ungainly, totally utilitarian, they are painted in garish blue, white, and gold colors and are capable of accommodating one hundred and seventy-five persons.
These barges, together with their two sister vessels, are typical of the bloated floating hotels that have replaced the much smaller, humanly scaled paddle-wheelers that cruised the river as recently as 1975; those were stylish old boats, really, with the charm of Mark Twain's Mississippi. They carried a reasonable number of passengers. Unsurprisingly, the Sheraton monsters have been made possible by the High Dam, since the fluctuating depth of the water in the old days prevented vessels of such bulk and displacement. At temple sites they disgorge tourists in nearly unmanageable hordes. Also, besides carrying far too many people, these boats are of such size and power that their wake has begun to contribute to the erosion of riverbanks already eroded badly enough. In the gentle dusk they possess a truly wounding unsightliness. And I cannot decide who has produced the greatest eyesore here in lovely Aswan—Sheraton or, once again, the Russians, who during the building of the High Dam erected a hotel that unpardonably interrupts the serene, low skyline like some grandiose airport control tower. (There have been, since the departure of the Russians, serious thoughts about blowing up this structure, but like the dam, it is built for such permanence as to make the cost of demolition prohibitive.)
But during the days that follow on the Abu Simbel, almost all anxieties concerning the Nile's future are absorbed in contemplation of the river itself. When one is removed from the population centers like Aswan—and there are few of these—it seems impossible that anything could seriously encroach upon this timelessness. In benign hypnosis I sit on deck for hour after hour, quite simply smitten with love for this watercourse, which presents itself to the gaze in many of its aspects exactly as it did five thousand years ago. “Like the ocean,” Flaubert wrote, “this river sends our thoughts back almost incalculable distances.” Beyond the fertile green, unspooling endlessly on either bank, is the desert, at times glimpsed indistinctly, at other times heaving itself up in harsh incandescent cliffs and escarpments, yet always present, dramatizing the fragility but also the nearly miraculous continuousness of the river and its cycles of death and resurrection. Sometimes life teems, as at the edge of a village where men and women, children, dogs, donkeys, goats, camels, all seem arrested for an instant in a hundred different attitudes; a donkey brays, children shout and whistle at us, and the recorded voice of a muezzin from a spindly minaret follows us in a receding monotone.
At other times life is sparse, intermittent: a solitary buffalo grazing at the end of an interminable grassy promontory, seemingly stranded light-years from anything, as in outer space. A human figure on a camel, likewise appearing far from any habitation, robes flapping in the wind, staring at us until we pass out of sight. Undulant expanses of sugarcane, furiously green; groves of date palms; more cane in endless luxuriant growth; then suddenly: a desolate and vast sandbar, taking us many minutes to pass, that could be an unmarked strand at the uttermost ends of the earth—one could rot or starve there and one's bones never be found. Now in an instant, a fabulous green peninsula with dense undergrowth, feathery Mosaic bulrushes, a flock of ducks scooting along the shore. We pass by a felucca, drifting, its sail down. One robed figure kneels in prayer; the other figure, with an oar, keeps the bow pointed toward Mecca. Then soon, as we move around a gentle bend, history evaporates before the eye, and there is an appalling apparition: a sugar refinery belching smoke. But infernal smoke! Black smoke such as I cannot recall having seen since childhood in the 1930s, during a trip past the terrible mills and coke ovens of western Pennsylvania. There are no smoke pollution controls along the valley—another bad sign for the beleaguered Nile.
Furthermore, lest I become too beguiled by the river's charms, I am sobered by evidence of still another kind of havoc wrought by that hulking barrage at Aswan. This threatens the very existence of the monuments themselves and can be viewed graphically at the Temple of Esna, thirty miles south of Luxor, on the west bank of the river. The harm being done is the result of the titanic volume of water behind the High Dam, the pressure of which has altered and, together with overirrigation, slowly raised the subterranean water table along the valley. In places the water contains a heavy saturation of salts, which, rising to the surface, have begun to attack not only the land but the foundations of many of the temples. Quite corrosive white streaks of this ominous residue can be plainly seen everywhere; but at the ancient Temple of Abydos (which we visit a few days later), the wonderful and mysterious underground structure known as the Oserion (aptly called “an idea in stone”) has become sacrificed not to the salt but, even worse, to the water itself, and much of the great architecture is flooded forever. Thus, like an unshakable and troubling presence, the High Dam adumbrates the future of man, his heritage, and nature up and down the valley. In the gorgeous lush green fields beyond Esna, I glimpse a stunning juxtaposition that tells much about the confusion—the triumph and error, gain and miscalculation—that ensues when man attempts to modify any natural force as prodigious as the Nile: adrift in the air, a web of high-tension wires, humming, gleaming, the very emblem of newly harnessed energy; directly beneath the wires, a sickly and ravaged field not long ago cultivated in thriving vegetables, now overlaid with huge dirty-white oblongs of deadly salt.
But what is the future of the Nile? Do these alarming portents mean that the outlook for the river is inescapably somber? At the moment, one can only speculate. If it is remarkable that human beings in their recklessness and folly have, in the past hundred years or so, nearly destroyed some of their greatest and most beautiful rivers and lakes, it is equally remarkable that those very waterways have proved to be capable of survival, even health, given enough time and given the human determination to reverse the death process. The Thames, the beautiful Willamette in Oregon, and to some extent the Hudson—still in the midst of resuscitation—are just a few examples of this provisional deliverance; and it may be that even the awful felony committed upon the James in Virginia—the wanton dumping of tons of a lethal insecticide into the stream, causing a contamination of marine life that destroyed fishing and the fishing industry for years—will be alleviated by time, with the poisons eventually washed away and the natural equilibrium once again achieved. Pollution along the Nile (including much sewage and trash pollution from tourist boats) is a potential problem; more subtle and dangerous is a form of pollution by disease—and once again the culprit is the High Dam, the sins of which begin to bemuse one by the sheer monotony of their enumeration. This has to do with bilharzia (also known as schistosomiasis), the gravely debilitating, often fatal parasitic disease that is endemic in lower Egypt. Many experts in environmental medicine believe that the disease—caused by microscopic blood flukes that breed in the bodies of snails, then float about in shallow water and penetrate into the bloodstream of mammals, including human beings—was minimized in its extent by the annual flushing action of the great Nile flood, which swept up countless quantities of the snails and their larval guests and removed them from the shallows, where people were most likely to become infected. But the dam changed all this. Now the general stillness of the water means a more prolific generation of snails and parasites, more frequent infestation in the backwaters, and possibly more disease, despite strenuous public-health campaigns.
The Nile is the ancient mother-river of the Western world, and it is impossible to conceive of her failure to survive these present vicissitudes. Although what man has done in the past twenty years may appear inexplicably thoughtless, and vainglorious, too—interrupting that immemorial ebb and flow, shattering a rhythm that existed eons before man himself appeared on these seductive banks—one feels that it does not really spell the end, although much cruel injury has been done. Human beings are both resilient and ingenious in crisis—never more so than when guiltily surveying the harm that they have inflicted themselves—and one can conceive of the unhurried pace of Egyptian time allowing men to forestall more ruin and even perhaps to rectify some (though certainly not all) of the damage that may now seem beyond repair. Finally, there might be controlled hereon the Nile one of the worst of the pollutions of man: the aimless proliferation of his own peripatetic self.
Toward the end of our trip, stopping to view the Colossi of Memnon at Thebes, I recall a typical Flaubertian animadversion. “The colossi,” he wrote, “are very big, but as far as being impressive is concerned, no….Think of the number of bourgeois stares they have received! Each person has made his little remark and gone his way.” This sour putdown inevitably causes me to think of the hordes of tourists who stream past the colossi on their way to or from the Valley of the Kings. As a fragment of one of these hordes, but momentarily detached, I stand at midday on top of the towering cliff overlooking the enormous Temple of Deir el Bahari, certainly the dominating man-made presence in this valley of temples and tombs. Far below on the desert floor, dozens of buses and vans are disgorging their human cargo. The visitors represent nearly every nationality in the world, and as they proceed up and down the terraces ascending to the colonnade at the temple's upper level, they seem an orderly but overwhelming mass, almost numberless; they remind me of the throngs of Disneyland or, even more claustrophobically, as I go down and move among them, of the mob of which I was a gawking young member at the New York World's Fair in 1939. It is fortunate that they—or I should say, we—have been barred permanently from many of the tombs, for it has been demonstrated that the acid exhalations of our breath combined with our million-footed shuffling in the dust has caused irreparable damage already. But people keep coming in ever increasing legions, and it may be that these very numbers, uncontrolled, will soon prove to be more injurious to Egypt than the High Dam.
This is not an alarmist view—it is based on solid evidence—but even so, the situation might change for the better through a strict and systematic program of regulation. Prince Aga Khan, who has made a study of the tourist crisis, believes that a rigorous policy on the part of the Egyptian government would, in not too long a time, finally restrain this runaway influx of travelers, lessening the attrition at the historic sites and making a trip to the Nile a happier event for everyone, including the Egyptians. The policy would commence not only with the limiting of permits for the building of hotels and boats but with supervision—through expert architectural advice—of the construction of these boats and hotels, so as to avoid such atrocities as the hostelry the Russians put up at Aswan or the oversize Sheraton barges. Hotels and tourist villages would be developed in conformity with local traditions and landscape and, just as importantly, be decentralized. They would be moved away from the already preposterously engorged centers of Luxor and Aswan. Such measures would benefit both the tourist and the less economically prosperous population of the backward areas. The sites themselves would undergo drastic changes and management: rotation of tourist groups according to seasonal timetables in order to avoid overlapping and overcrowding; modernization of access roads; installation of advanced systems of dust and humidity control in the tombs, along with better superintendence and better lighting. These are strenuous measures, but in the opinion of the prince, neither impossible to implement nor economically unfeasible; the vast sums of money that tourists bring to Egypt (and which now seem to benefit Egyptian antiquities in only the most marginal way) should be sufficient to pay for such a program, with much left over. But the need is immediate.
How many trips in the world does one really want to make again? For me, not many. But I could go back to the Nile over and over, as if in mysterious return homeward, or in quest for some ancestral memory that has been only partially and tantalizingly revealed to me—as at that interval when one passes from sleep to waking. On the last evening aboard the Abu Simbel there comes to me a moment when I know the reason why I shall always want to come back to this river. Moored to the riverbank at the edge of a small village, the boat is peaceful, all energies unwound; at dusk, alone, I go up on deck and feel in my bones the chill of the coming night. In the village I see a nondescript street, children, a camel, a minaret. Far back on the river two feluccas rest as if foundered immovably upon a sandbar; the light around them is pearl-gray, aqueous, and they seem to hover so delicately on the river that it is as if they were suspended in some nearly incorporeal substance, like gauze or mist. With their furled sails, they are utterly motionless; they are like the boats on an antique china plate of my childhood. As the light fades from the sky and the stars appear, the village is silhouetted against the faintest pink of the setting sun. I am aware of only two sounds: the clinking of a bell, perhaps on some cow or donkey, and now the voice of a muezzin from the minaret, intoning the Koran's summons in dark and monotonous gutturals. It is then, in a quick flood of recognition, that I feel certain that I have been here before, in some other century. But as the sensation disappears, almost as swiftly as it comes, I ponder whether this instant of déjà vu means anything at all; after all, I am a skeptic about mystical experiences. Nonetheless, the feeling persists, I cannot quite shake it off—nor do I want to. And so I remain there in the dusk, listening to the soft muttering of the muezzin and gazing at the distant feluccas miraculously afloat in the air. And then I wonder how many others—hypnotized like me by this river and the burden of its history, and by the drama of the death along its shores and waters, and eternal rebirth in all—might have known the same epiphany.
[GEO, September 1981.]