Low life
Pharaoh-
Jeffrey Bernard
I never meant to get sucked into a group and it was foolish of me to imagine I wouldn't be when we set sail from Aswan to go downstream to Luxor. Groups hell- bent on 'sightseeing' shuffle along in a slow-moving queue avaricious for anything of antiquity and quick on the draw with a camera. And I wonder how well Kodak do out of the film wasted on the other obsession of the tourist — the views. You really need something a little special other than a Pentax to take pictures of views and local postcards are best. But the group from the boat seemed to think I was an oddball sloping off to find my own views which didn't register with any of them. In a refreshment bar near King Tutankhamun's tomb, where I found a lavatory with as much wonder as Carter experienced in 1922 on opening that tomb, I watched dried-up old Arabs smoking their pipes and drinking coffee over endless games of backgammon. I drank very cold beer and liked it for the first time in years.
When the group came in at last after having seen the tombs of generations of kings they immediately got' into line for Coca-Colas and 7-Ups and they seemed to look disturbed at my drinking beer. After all, wasn't I just about the only person of about 300 on the boat who drank alcohol in the lounge bar? It was the same sort of hostility tempered with curiosity that I felt steaming up the Mississippi from New Orleans to Memphis and cruising around the fjords of Norway between Oslo and the North Cape. On the Nile it occurred to me that if travel broadens the mind then Australians and Americans set out with precious little of it.
But there was a strange atmosphere in both the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens. Perhaps I am romancing or letting my imagination run away with me but the feeling of time and an age going back 4,000 years made me feel as though I was being watched. The desert and the mountains had, after all, soaked up so many people over the years and the old Egyptian preoccupation with death and the dead somehow lingered in those scorched and blistered rocks and sand. Fanciful maybe, but that it is how it was to me. On the way back to the banks of the Nile where a ramshackle ferry waited to take us back to our luxury boat our coach stopped to allow the group to photograph an old pillar and to buy some papyrus. Watching people barter bores me. Trying to do it myself embarrasses me but it seems to be obligatory. They actually like being knock- ed down, these street traders. We had stopped on a muddy lane in the fertile sugar-cane fields that accompany the river from Aswan to Luxor. The camera buffs didn't see the dog lying in a puddle and panting from the heat or the open-doored tin sheds with old women inside seated at tables and emulating the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. A small boy drove a flock of goats with expertise but the Canons and Nikons, aimed at the old pillar, chattered away like castanets.
Back on the boat I witnessed the largest order for Coca-Cola the world has ever known. Into mine I poured some vodka out of my duty-free bottle and was spotted doing so by an Australian teacher in charge of a revolting crocodile — the only one on the Nile — of 26 schoolgirls. She turned to her companion, an overweight PE teacher, and said, 'That isn't allowed. Should we report him?' A combination of heat and impatience with middle-class Australian priggishness prompted me to lean forward and suggest she mind her own f ing business.
I had hoped to meet the lovable Sir Les Patterson or some of the wonderful drunk- en wits who jeer at the English from the Hill at Sydney cricket ground but no such luck. But I did make one little friend on the boat — an American 14-year-old boy called Phillip who is an amalgam of Huck- leberry Finn and Portnoy. He deserves to be laid very soon by a discerning and sympathetic woman. When we dis- embarked at Luxor to fly back, to Cairo my bar bill was £E102. His was £E80. His father was not pleased but being a profes- sor of genetics probably managed to rationalise it. My daughter Isabel's bar bill was £E32 for four days' Coca-Cola which struck me as being fairly revolting. I don't think she liked the holiday much and she is not yet sufficiently streetwise not to be intimidated by waiters, hotel porters and taxi drivers. Anyway, for her, anyone over 21 is geriatric, although she told me she made some 'pen friends' from the group of Australian schoolgirls. It remains to be seen whether anyone can actually write. At least Isabel has learned the wonder of signing bar bills. On our last day we went to see the pyramids and the Sphinx and took pictures of each other standing in front of them. An Arab insisted on taking a picture of me holding on to his camel. Disgusting anim- als. All the while our own personal guide spouted history lessons. All I wanted to know was how Egyptians live today. After all, can they have so much regard for archaeology who kept Egyptian railways running for a ten-year period using no other fuel than mummies? But I shall remember the Nile especially during its brief sunsets. The heat of the day makes the sky white and not blue and when the sun does go down over those angry orange carbuncles of mountains, it is also pale and yellow. Then the colour of the river changes too and it becomes as gunmetal. The distant chanting of calls to prayer are only interrupted by calls for Coca-Cola on the boat. I hope the ghosts of the old kings get angry one day.
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