[Statue of Horus, Valley of the Kings – Egypt – January 2003]
It’s amazing what memories can be conjured up by a photo. When I look through my images of Egpyt, vivid visions of mystery descend and I’m filled with a longing to return to this marvelous and mysterious country. Peeking back through old images today I’m reminded of a winter cruise on a tiny sail boat on the Nile…
The others were already cuddled up and sleeping – stretched out in pairs along the curved white-washed wooden slats of the traditional Egyptian sail boat. Our small boat, also called a felucca, was headed north from Aswan in southern Egypt to the Temple of the Crocodile on a two day-ish (depending on the breeze) Nile cruise. Peeking out from under the felucca’s canvas cover, I watched Jamal (our Nubian boatman and chef) move gracefully through the moonlight putting out the remains of our campfire with sand. I heard the sound of snapping cotton and imagined him dusting the sand from his long robe. He stood for a while, majestic and tall, gazing out at the Nile.
I had expected him to come directly back to the boat and was surprised to see him turn instead and begin to use a branch to dig a trench into the beach. Sparks from the now buried campfire flew up to spin about the bottom hem of his robes. He bent down to retrieve something from a basket. In the shadowy starlight it took a moment for me to recognize the eggplants he had earlier proudly told me were from his second wife’s garden. I smiled to my self remembering the conversation. Even with broken English and hand gestures, Jamal’s gift for storytelling and exaggeration shown through. A naturally flirtatious man, in the twelve hours I’d known him he had quoted (with twinkling eyes) various figures to me regarding how many wives he had (everything from two to five) all while puffing out his chest. When I called him out on it (pointing back up the Nile and using my fingers to illustrate the disparity) he winked at me and laughed. He turned and said something to Captain Ramadan and even this stoic, quiet man laughed loudly and rolled his eyes. I blushed and laughed too – not caring if I were the reason for the joke. Fun with language barriers.
He walked outside of my range of vision but I could still hear the splashing watery sounds he made as he rinsed the dusty eggplants in the Nile. He walked back to the trench and carefully buried the eggplants so that only their stems were showing. Reminded of childhood vacations spent burying my father in the Florida sand, I stifled a laugh, but then the laughter that so quickly bubbled up inside me was replaced by quiet awe. I was overwhelmed by the moment. Here I was a simple girl from the suburbs of the American Midwest locked in an intimate, magical moment watching a tall, strong Egyptian man in billowy white robes plant eggplants in the sand under the moonlight. My soul soared out and rushed upward to dance with the palm trees in the starlight.
Eventually, I replaced the cover, wrapped myself in my shawl, and curled up tight to combat the coming cold. My eyes had only been closed for a moment when the gentle rocking of the sail boat signaled Jamal’s return. I watched as he stretched out and unfolded a beautiful creamy-colored homespun woven blanket.
Too cold to sleep, I awoke the next morning well before dawn. I got up and crept towards the opening in the cover while making a mental note to add “nights of absolute freezing cold” to the list of things I’d recently learned about the desert. Very quietly and carefully, I snuck off of our felucca and wandered up the embankment to where the palm trees lined the sand dunes.
[Banks of the Nile just North of Aswan, Egypt – January 2003]
Seen from above, these trees would appear to be narrow verdant green ribbon framing the blue banks of the Nile – beyond these trees there was only sand. Improper planning and subsequent lack of proper blanket aside, I loved the desert. It had presence and personality. Like everything in Egypt, it was incomprehensibly old and full of mystery and drama; extraordinarily greedy and hot through the day – forbidding, clear and cold in the night. I remembered my trip of a few nights before, when my friends and I had ridden in an armored van as a part of a small caravan of pilgrims headed for Abu Simbel. Sometime around 4 AM the truck stopped and I came awake to find all the men exiting for a smoke break. “It’s like one giant ashtray,” said an unknown Australian from a few rows back. My friends were still sleeping. I thought about closing my eyes again too, but curiosity got the better of me. I got off and walked a few steps out into the desert. I slowly spun around, taking it all in. “This must be what it’s like to be out on the open sea with no land in sight,” I imagined. With the vans temporarily turned off and the headlights out, there was no man-made light anywhere, in any distance that my eyes could see. I looked up. I’m not sure how long I stood there staring, but time stopped as the stars overhead almost brought me to my knees.
So many stars.
The Milky Way.
The Southern Cross.
Good Lord – it’s the Southern Cross.
So many stars.
Such a large universe.
Such a beautiful and vast universe.
Thank you God.
Thank you.
So beautiful.
So many stars shining down on me.
A tap on my shoulder brought me back from the potent spell the stars had cast on me. Still a bit stunned, I slowly walked back to the waiting van.
I thought about those stars as I walked up the sand dunes in the early light of dawn. I couldn’t get those stars out of my mind. Dazzling was a word my heart kept saying. Dazzling. I’d brought my camera with me on the escape from the boat and I spent time taking photos in the soft morning light. Then I walked a bit further and found a palm tree, one in a row of palm trees on the very edge of the desert. I sat down and leaned against it. In the distance, a group of Egyptian men walked off into the open desert with heavily laden camels.
A while later I heard the sound of someone running up the hill and turned to face a very nervous and very serious looking Jamal. He looked off after the caravan and scanned the area of desert around us. He was searching for threats where a moment ago I had only seen tranquility. Finally he sighed and looked down at me. His brown eyes reprimanded and his smirk said asked the question “what am I to do with you?” I shrugged and smiled and looked out again at the beautiful desert before me.
“I can’t get enough of this,” I said, gesturing wide with my hands. Though I knew he couldn’t understand me, I continued: “Not the stars, not the Nile, not the desert…I can’t get enough.”
I looked up again at Jamal and wished with all my heart that I could speak Arabic. I was fighting back tears when he stepped closer and took my small, soft, pale hand into his own large, callused, brown one. I stared for a moment at the decades of lines the sun had drawn on his hand. He understood after all. We turned together to look out at the desert and stood there hand-and-hand, shoulder-to-shoulder. For a long while it was just the two of us alone at the edge of the world.
Eventually, we returned to the shore and I sat by the river’s bank to wait for my companions to wake. Cold again, I dug my feet into the still warm sand near the mysteriously buried vegetables and watched as Jamal and Captian Ramadan hoisted the sails and readied the boat. Later that morning, I watched Jamal harvest the now blistery, blackened eggplants and tuck them back into the basket. Once we were again underway, he used them to make the most fantastic baba ghanoush.
—
Sigh. That’s the thing about Egypt – you solve one mystery (like the buried eggplant) and you’re confronted with more. There will always be more to discover there…more to bewilder and amaze. I swear I can hear Egypt whispering my name on the wind.