118. DOWN the NILE

Rosemary Mahoney 2007

I read this book while cruising down the Nile, a five day adventure in between our land exploration of Cairo. This memoir was as vivid and mesmerizing as the river before me. It is an amazing travel book born from the author's love of rowing and her fascination for the Nile. It renders a captivating account of her quest to row a boat, an American female alone, 120 miles down the Nile from Aswan to Qena, two years after her initial visit as an ordinary tourist. It also provides a historical glimpse of the old Egypt through excerpts from Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert's own travel memoirs, as well as a general view of today's modern Egypt.

'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.'(Opening line)

'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 lays 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.'(9)

'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!'(11)

'My search for a boat began in Aswan, the southern-most Egyptian city, the starting point of my rowing trip, and technically the beginning of the Egyptian Nile. I wanted a simple fisherman's rowboat, long and narrow, with room enough to lie down in at night.'(21)

"Egyptians in Aswan sometimes try to be felucca captain to get money, but they has not enough experiences and sometimes is not clever. They don't watching the wind." He waved his arm at the steep dunes on the west bank. "Wind can be changing and changing all the time. Sometime it can come"- he snapped his fingers- "very fast from the desert, and is full of sand and if you don't seeing it, it can put the boat over in three seconds."(86)

'Not Nubian, not Muslim, not Egyptian- these facts conspired to disqualify me entirely from the female category. What mattered for a Muslim woman could never really matter for me. In Egypt, a Western woman would never truly be a woman, nor did she quite approach the status of a man; instead, her identity was like that of a pleasant but irrelevant animal, like say, a peahem or a manatee.'(114)

'The sight of an ancient Egyptian monument from a distance is always at first slightly surreal, like a mirage or a photographic image that has strayed out of a book and superimposed itself on real life. On seeing it, you feel at first a little flustered and confused and think not so much of the object itself but of the reproductions you've seen of it and of the thoughts and emotions those reproductions once inspired in your imagination, then gradually you grasp that what you're looking at is real, an object before you that you can walk up to and touch. When Napoleon's soldiers, who had never seen a photograph of any kind, rounded a bend and caught sight of the Temple of Karnak for the first time, they were so moved by the marvelous sight that they burst into spontaneous applause.'(131)

'Across the span of a hundred and fifty years, only one thing has truly remained the same: moonlight still makes the Egyptian sand look like snow.'(159)

'Whenever you were on the Nile, whatever you saw along the banks, the ever-present ridge of the desert loomed beyond the greenery, walling the floodplain on either side, a long chain of hills both east and west, often with pale chutes of sand spilling down them, blown in from the desert beyond.'(161)

'Abu Simbel's night sky was a metropolis of its own, an enormous velvety parabola embracing the earth. Venus shown long on the water in a way that mimicked the moon, and the Big Dipper sat very low on the horizon. The whole place was a deeply swirling mass of stars. I felt short of breath and utterly insignificant looking at its hugeness and depth. This was a night sky you didn't have to raise your eyes to.'(173)

'I rowed with a little bit of fear and a great deal of joy. I was alone, finally, with no one to protect me. I wanted to sing for happiness- a rare, raw, immediate sort of happiness that was directly related to my physical stimulation, to my surroundings, to independence, and to solitude... That was always the best part of rowing- the repetition, the simplicity of the physical task, the slowly and constantly shifting surrounding that inspired free thought. My happiness was a feeling of physical lightness, of weightlessness, like drifting on air.'(218)

'The water, or some small part of it at least, that was passing beneath my boat had traveled slightly downhill for approximately one hundred and fifty days from its source near the equator. It had traveled more than four thousand miles and had been running its modern-day course for over twenty-five thousand years. How many eyes had looked at the same water I was looking at? How many people had drunk from this water, rowed on it, or drowned in it?'(226)

'Anything, really, was possible if you cared enough and had the right tools. I have always resented imposed constraints, hated all the things people said one should and should not do. A woman shouldn't... A man couldn't... People were always conjuring up a wall and telling you to stay on your side of it. More often than not, the wall was false, a cliche, an inherited and unexamined stock response to the world.'(239)
______________________________________

First Back Bay paperback edition, September 2008
268 pages
Book owned
______________________________________

Personal Note: Thanks to all the thoughtful bloggers who bade me good wishes. Although the trip was amazing, I am so glad to be back home! Here are two of my favorite pictures of the River Nile.

An incredible sunset taken aboard a felucca

A glorious morning view from our hotel balcony