Aswan

Aswan is about as far up the river as you can go and still be in Egypt. It’s the site of the Low and the High Dam. The British built the Low Dam around 1905 while the High Dam was built in the mid fifties. This later era was a time of turmoil as an independent Egypt took on its own personality – the personality of Gamal Abdul Nasser. It was an anti imperialist period and the new governments were given wide birth and free rein over their affairs. Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. The British, the French, and the Israelis made a counter attack. Eisenhower moved one or more carriers into striking distance of the conflict and told the three countries to back off. Great Britain was stunned by their being called down by their ally. The French went home to grumble over freedom fries. And the Israelis scurried out of the Sinai to make other plans for other times.
Next up Nasser decided that he would make the desert bloom, a popular American/Israeli concept. This would be done by building a great dam on the upper Nile creating the largest man-made lake in the world. The problem was that Nasser’s appetite for agricultural improvement was more than he could pay for. France and Britain were in no mood to foot the bill. The U.S. was the world’s leader in foreign aid but between lobbies in America and Nasser’s independent nature, the U.S. demurred. The U.S.S.R. did not. They sent specialist and equipment and money into Egypt and the project began. There was much Cold War anxious rhetoric within America. The Communist were getting a foot hold in North Africa and the Middle East, the story went. But when the dam was build, the Russians were asked to go home. How this went down with folks in Moscow, perhaps I’ll find out in time to come. But first on the Aswan itinerary was to see the “high dam.”
We boarded a small bus and drove off across the Low Dam, which was more of a causeway than anything else. I supposed that water from the Low Dam had irrigated some cotton crops but modern Egypt needed a higher dam and for that, we had to drive on.
Three Australian sat behind me on the bus. We didn’t know it then but we’d be spending the better part of a week together. They were all young and from Melbourne and knew as much about the Outback as they did about the craters on the Moon. They were all over six feet tall and weighed better than 250 pounds. It made me think that the milk bars may have been more effective than I’d remembered. As we road along, I pointed out an outcrop of rock(s) imbedded in the sand near the road and remarked at how similar that patch of ground was to the first horizontal views we got of the Martian landscape. I had looked long and hard at those three dimensional pictures and they were a good match for the desert at this spot. These young men quickly came up with the scenario that NASA had faked the Martian desert by making photos in Egypt as has been charged that NASA staged the lunar expeditions out of Hollywood. We all laughed but what I seriously wondered about was the similarity between the Mars’s chemical composition and Earth’s. And as is supposed, there was water action on Mars. We weren’t all that far from the Nile.
The High Dam is over a hundred meters high, I believe the lady said. It has more finished rock work and towers and other decorative details than does the dam at Lake Brady but it’s no Grand Coulee and is nothing like the Hoover Dam. But it does the job, which is to back up many square miles of fresh water for power and agricultural use. I wish I’d asked, but I don’t think that the lake will be exploited for recreational use, at least not yet. There were no plastic bags in the water above the dam. From the other side, the wind came ripping up from below the dam and I asked about if anyone had thought of wind generated power. The lady said that the wind was unusual and normally the top of the dam was still and hot. The weather in April in Egypt to date is a pleasant shirt sleeve affair. My friends in Alaska email me a different story.
Next on the itinerary was a small temple complex within sight of the dam. It took a open boat trip out to an island and the lady gave us a quick description of the place and we were turned loose to wander. I’d hoped that temples and tombs would bring alive some of the Egyptology I’d never bothered to learn but the lesson to be learned is, “Hit the books!” So as the sun sank slowly into the west, I hurried back to the hotel to get to bed early. Tomorrow we would board the bus at 4 A.M for Abu Simbel!
And stumbling onto the bus into the dark I found in the words of C.W. McCall, “We got a convoy!” Just exactly why we needed a convoy, I’m not sure. Abu Simbel was one of those wonders connected with the flooding caused by the high dam. Many temples were drown but it was decided that this complex of two temples built by Rameses II was too important to allow to soak for the next thousand years or so. The archaeologist cut it apart and carried it to higher ground. It could be that the temple was the only reason to build a road into this region and since there are no service stations, garages, or hotels, that the government would accompany a convoy per day, guaranteeing that nobody gets stranded alone on the highway. But why a 4 o’clock start? Well there might be two convoys, one in the AM and the other post meridian. The Egyptian tourist industry is like a factory which frets about its efficiency more than it does its product, the experience. And while nobody expects to be shot, it could be that the threat of terrorism may well figure into it. But is the reasoning that no killer would bother getting up at three in the morning to go shoot somebody? But by dawn’s early light, I’d discovered that unless you are a desert lover, you’d missed nothing. The place still looked like Mars.
One thing that made me feel at home on the drive out was that they drove on both sides of the road as Indian drivers would. Things were different here though. One is that there were no hills and not much in the way of curves; the other was nobody was coming in the other way. We had entered the Big Empty.
When we arrived along with two parking lots of busses and minivans, I told the guide that I was going to the W.C. (the Egyptian word for restroom.) And then I asked, “You’ll be here?” He nodded. When I got out of the restroom, the minibus had disappeared. Furthermore, I had forgotten to note anything that would identify the minibus. I spotted an Australian couple from our bus and we lined up to pay the entrance fee not covered in the tour package. We were in two separate lines but by the time I’d made change and had my ticket, they were gone. I walked out onto a path leading round a great birm, that I would find, formed the back of the temples…in other words the man-made hill against which the temples were built. Nobody on the path that I knew, just a thousand strangers all of whom where with their tour guides. Around the hill, I saw the temples awash in milling people. Somewhere there was a tour missing one perturbed member. Then I found the Aussie again. He had just heard an explanation of the temple complex and was going inside. I had been inside, not so much looking at the pharaohs and gods but attempting to find my lost tour. An English speaking guide that had delivered the talk was now speaking Spanish and while I understood a bit, his Arabic delivery afterwards didn’t help me at all. Then he turned to me and asked me if I had any questions. “If not, I’m going over there beneath that tree.” He walked off through a crowd and after I got tired of trying to locate the Australians, I went to the tree. It was the right tree. There might be another for a couple of hundred miles. What was missing was the English speaking guide. That was the fourth slip in a little over an hour. You will now understand that I never entertained the idea of becoming a sleuth. It took me another hour, maybe longer, to find the bus. By the way the three Australian men from the High Dam tour of the day before but who were on another tour, helped me find my bus. And again the convoy formed and we roared over the empty (except for the convoy) highway and back to Aswan.
Here’s what I got out of the talk. The larger of the two temples is fronted by four colossi of Rameses the Great. That’s Number Two to his friends. Each statue was a little older than the other showing the pharaoh at four stages in his life. The man ruled, I believe, longer than any other pharaoh and so it is appropriate that there be a likeness which would be familiar to the different generations who he may have outlived. That’s it. My recommendation is buy the book with lots of pictures, read in English, and pass up the road race across a landscape where the only landmarks are the stars and they move. The guide in the bus was upset that no one gave him a tip.
I boarded a felucca that afternoon for a two day trip toward Luxor. A felucca has essentially a cat boat hull (mast set well forward and has a retractable centerboard) with a lateen sail, a triangular sail with a long yard spreading the cloth. It looks like a Sunfish on steroids. After the chase through the desert, I was ready for something more sedentary. There were about ten passengers and too many sailors captained by a skipper who should have been doing something else than entertaining himself by showing what a smart man he was. There always seems to be more “sailors” or any other kind of employees than are needed. I don’t think that anybody gets paid but maybe this is the way to keep busy in a country that has an awful unemployment problem.
A fresh wind blew up river but our centerboard and cat-sized rudder held into the downriver current. We moved out smartly, heeling sharply enough that I had to change my sitting position on each tack.
There was a nice lady, who traveled alone and who spoke English, Italian, and Albanian (her native language) who talked with a beautiful Italian woman who spoke good English. The pretty lady had an American husband/boyfriend who was a researcher in brain studies. I asked him questions about sleep. He said, contrary to what I had believed that rest actually comes between the dreams. He said that no one knows just why we sleep but he pointed out that many creatures seem to need it and that we spend a third of our lives in that semi-conscious state. I had asked him an appropriate question because as we bedded down that night, I kept him and the Albanian lady awake with my snoring. I must remember to not sleep communally. Hearing people snore is restful to me. It’s not so with others.
We tied up for pit stops and for the night but the next morning our “talented” skipper got in our face again with a discussion as to whether we should have coffee or tea. The Albanian lady had asked for coffee and instead of delivering the coffee, he made fun of her for disturbing him while he made tea. Egypt has a way to go before they catch up with the ease of managing tourist as you might encounter in Hawaii. A damn long way to go and this guy was the retard. The woman decided to leave the tour. She had had enough of him. As it turned out, about half the people had signed up for only one night on the boat and all that were left were the Australians and me. Boarding and stepping off the boat was tricky. The gangplank was narrow and wiggled a little in the Nile’s mud. The young men gave me a steadying hand when they could. They had helped me find the bus the day before. Somebody still considered others. They would do other favors as time went on. And furthermore, they slept soundly. My snoring didn’t bother them in the least.
So off we went with fewer passengers and with only two sailors. Captain Loudmouth had business ashore. We had our cook who was fifty but who looked as old as the Sphinx and a kid of thirteen…and that’s all we needed. The boy sailed the ship, the old man cooked and made sure we had plenty of tea, and Australians and I told stories (ah, the deck ran red with kangaroo blood) and even the wind had calmed a little and you could sit or lie for hours without changing your position. Sailing and dog driving are the two quietest ways of moving over the Earth’s surface. If you try to picture us that day, paint it quiet. At one point in the afternoon I got to thinking about tip time. What I would give would most likely be kept by the captain so I passed the boy and the old man a five pound each. This amounts to about a dollar and I wondered if they’d think it too little. But out of the corner of my eye, I caught the two of them grinning at each other.
The Nile is perhaps three quarter of a mile wide and with little wind and just the two who made up the crew and the four of us passengers, I never spent a more peaceful day. From time to time “steamers” came thrashing by filled with the more elegant trade and as I thought it over, I knew that I would probably never drift the Nile in a felucca again but I wondered how much better having a private stateroom on a tour ship would be. Probably more professional but that’s an assumption.
We were joined by the captain and crew that evening which was a downer. He was still complaining about the Albanian lady. At least she did make an impression on an otherwise thick skull. It was a relief to be off to Luxor the next day.
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