SAILING ON THE NILE AND EGYPTIAN GOULASH OF ITS HISTORY

 

SAILING ON THE NILE AND EGYPTIAN GOULASH OF ITS HISTORY 

After endless screening of bags, boots, belts and what not, we managed to board the Egypt air flight from Cairo to Luxor. The airline provides a no-frills service on this an hour plus flight.
Hassan Ali, son of Mohammed Ali, or so he boasted in jest, who was   our local coordinator, met us at the arrival lounge. After briefing us, he handed us over to our local guide, Ahmed. 
A serious looking character, well past his fifties, Ahmed's  wrinkled face showed the results of time and strain of walking across the sand and rubbles of the valley and caves and attempts to do justice to 8000 years of history. A certain resignation was reflected in the way he viewed his job. It was past 3 pm by the time we checked into our hotel.

Our hotel, an impressively laid out place, German owned with all the usual trapping and located on the banks of the river Nile. The German fetish for near faultless offerings was not that apparent, even in this 5-star facility. Be as it may, rest of the experience was good.  Formalities done; we had settled down in our rooms.
The Nile captured my attention soon enough.
Egypt was the gift of the Nile so to speak.  An unending source of sustenance, it played a crucial role in the development of Egyptian civilization. Because the river overflowed its banks annually and deposited new layers of silt, the surrounding land was very fertile. I stared at the Nile from the hotel, stood there and absorbed all that history.
I decided to take a walk along the embankment build around the hotel. The waters of the Nile were just a few feet away. The flowing waters seems to tell the tales of yesteryears, of civilization itself. Soon it was twilight and it cast an enchanting yellow and orange hue onto the blue waters. I watched mesmerised as the sun set. In the same manner and hue as it had set 8000 years back, and witnessed by, maybe, a beautiful queen named Nefertiti. Lost in the splendour of the Nile and its history, I was suddenly woken up by the sound of a sail boat moored nearby. Ali the boatman offered to ferry me on his boat. As the Nile flowed, she seems to invite me to come along and the sail boat seemed to be the way to do that. I promised the Nile I would.

The next day was mostly spent visiting the valley of the Kings and the Queens and the Museum. Much of that later.

Later on returning to the hotel I managed to persuade my friends to board the sail boat an hour before sunset and take that ride on the Nile, keeping my promise.  Ali and his elder brother Nabi got the sail to unfurl and set the boat adrift. The wind and the flowing waters took us away.  With the Nile and the wind guiding us along, we took our vantage points on the boat., Nabi made us comfortable with cups of tea. The cold breeze ensured that the tea was welcomed with delight.
Quite moments. I was soon emersed in the full embrace of nature, with the soothing sound of the waves dancing on the Nile then caressing our boat and the wind working on the sails.
In my own tranquil depths I watched the sky, the few stars and the clouds reflected by this ancient river. Did I hear the waters whisper to me that the sky and stars and the river are eternal while I am only a passing soul but, in that instant, we merge as one with nature!

Nabi lived on the banks of the river with his family. His earnings are all from the boat. His kid brother Ali, lived on the boat. Ali, silent and absorbed in watching and managing the sails, seemed to be another eternal element in nature's design. He and Nabi were muscular, tall, and young. The Nile was their life. contemporary souls forming another page in the Nile’s history.
 While I was, as usual, lost reminiscing   about  the ancient world and its players, I soon realised that something was amiss. My friends too looked tense. Nabi and Ali were busy re-directing the sails. It looked like the wind changed direction and was taking us off course.   Nabi was pitched now on top of the sail, with the wind pounding on him while he deftly, with one hand, was untying the line that downs the sail from the mast. Ali was realigning the rudder. Meanwhile scenes of being capsized or being held to ransom were being narrated by my brave friends!  Both the children of the Nile, with determination and skill, utilising every ounce of their strength, were managing to bring the boat back under control. I saw in them images of muscular Egyptian men hauling and placing huge sandstone or granite boulders, one over another, and daring to challenge nature. The excitement finally ended as our boat was laid ashore by Ali.  A series of hugs and thank you later we walked back to the hotel, with the Nile still lingering on my mind. I watched as Ali went about settling down to another lovely night on the Nile. Would I have traded my life with his? Left that to be answered in my dreams.

The description of the experience of seeing and absorbing the mighty Pyramid of Gaza, the several tombs and wall engraving on caves that housed them, the elaborate ritual of facilitating the passage of the dead to the after world by mummifying them, the grandeur of the Pharaohs, the promised magic of the Egyptian herbs-based medicines and perfumes, are best left to be experienced by those who love history. An attempt here is to look at Egyptian history from Ahmed’s heart.

His love of history and pride of Egyptian past burst forth occasionally as he took pains to draw on the paved walk-ways a perspective of the burial sites and the Gods who guarded them. He managed a level of English, spoken with a distinct Mediterranean accent but somewhat distorted by some verbal disability. Patience was not his forte and that almost disturbed us. In spite that   we did get a glimpse of the grandeur of the carvings and heliographic scripts on the walls.  
One marvelled at the beauty of the heliography and the stupendous effort to document history using that script. Egyptian civilisation, one of the oldest, thus offered us, beings of the 21^st  century, credible evidence of life and culture over 7 to 8000 years ago( 5000 BC).
 Ahmed while describing life of people in the region during the Old ( 2000 TO 2600 BC and middle ( 2000 to 1800BC) kingdom, established   Egypt and its agricultural connection with Nile.  He pointed out how  the  Egyptians cultivated and traded wheat, flax, papyrus, and other crops around the Nile. Paper that does not get damaged and has lasted well over 7000 years was made from Papyrus

Ahmed’s dramatization with gestures and frequent questions for emphasis, mesmerised and transported me back thousands of years, made me visualise an image of an ancient setting where the Pharaohs and their subjects set about the task of continuing to build   one of the oldest of civilizations. The performance of various rituals on the Nile, considered to be a causeway from life to death and the afterlife.  Enlightening us, as Ahmed added, how the east (of the city) was thought of as a place of birth and growth, and the west was considered the place of death, as the god Ra, the Sun, underwent birth, death, and resurrection each day.

As the day wore along, his impatient warning about our limited itinerary, sadly met with disdain and consequent realisation that we would miss the Tomb of Nefertiti and manage that of Nefatari only. These two were two different royal women of ancient Egypt,  fact we were not sensitive to while deciding the itinerary.

Nefertiti was, arguably, one of the most famous Egyptian queens– (1300 BC) right alongside Cleopatra. On the other hand, Nefatari was the reigning queen and Wife alongside her husband Akhenaten. Being the principal wife meant that you were a step above the rest of the wives and concubines.  Ahmed did not take us to Nefertiti’s tomb saying, truly, that it was not part of our itinerary. We did visit Nefertiti place later though. But it seems that like the unreconciled history of who she was and what was her status (She is shown accompanying the king and depicted of higher status in some depictions) Ahmed too may have felt uncomfortable demystifying Nefertiti’s status. In his eyes or as per His- Story Nefatari was the official queen.

A large dose of history seen through burial sites, tombs and mummies is not an ideal sojourn for some. But some do manage to look at these and play out the lives, culture and mysteries of the men and women of those times.  However, the Nile and the Red Sea (at Hurghada ) provides a soothing antidote making the whole experience memorable.