Christmas Holiday
Plight into Egypt
Philip Hope-Wallace
MY own favourite daypaper would entitle this led to the Mast'. For it concerns Flight into tgYpt. Not of course the one undertaken by the Holy Family which occurred, if my history is rg Some days after Christmas, but an excursion undertaken by three unholy bachelors bent on escaping a London Christmas of Office Partied, distant relatives in orange paper ,hats. charades with total strangers or even '°reigner5. A fugue to Egypt seemed a good did not of evading the so-called 'festive season'. It not so work. A warning to would-be SerGoges. Who were we? Three men in a boat: a lawyer, 41tusic critic and a museum curator: no wives Or children. These were provided by the rest of the Party, however, for it was one of those ekage tours and had attracted our mean gaze .'11,_st because it was about half as cheap again as the next such 'bargain', and promised a lot of archaeological joy. Well, to be truthful, this it `,1(lid produce. I had been in Egypt before and L._ecturing to the troops at that on — would you wlieve it? — such subjects as the exciting new itish theatre as represented by Christopher 'Yard Peter Ustinov (circa 1950) and on music the lads liked the lecture on the castrati, j !call — but I had had little time for the real antiquities. I I must not give the impression that this atter-day excursion was a flop from the tourist of view. I hugely enjoyed much of it. The terrace of the magnificent Old Cataract Hotel ,, i:.Assuan is a dream from a silent film come Theda Bara and Rudolph Valentino are 0111lounging out on wicker chairs in the breeze fel the smooth stone crags overlooking the ktleca sails. The temples, especially old st"roak which dwarfs you as no other p`rocture I can think of except possibly Saint meter's and caused the weights to shift about in rZab°dY as these were in Mrs Woolf's Mrs al-,4"°waY when she looked up at Saint Paul's, to"eed all the splendour of Luxor, the lesser alrilbs rather than the most famous made a yv°st Magnificent voyage to recall and one I airlId gladly repeat especially if I thought we int have such good guides again. etiQut the abiding memory is of a discomfort ,111.11ative and ultimately hideous. I knew of c"iillrse that Egypt could be very cold at srji, strnas time and it was a peculiarly frigid CI for the fortnight spent on an old river boat,' cktIllt at the turn of the century to take chaps ,_"Wri the Thames to Maidenhead, refurbished rd traded to gyppoes no doubt some time muefore the First World War and stripped of si,allY of its amenities such as windows which lavatories which worked. Unlike many of ,s`n_e dentists' daughters who completed' the 04113', I had equipped myself with a number of ckl woollen garments, because I knew that 1132 t only looks like the travel brochure at wx:'e rig noon. Once the sun dips below the ;eau Desert and the Nile turns — what else? ter:4 de Nil, a magical opalescent green — the ature goes Own like a stone into a cisteller .rn. Teeth chatter. I had a cabin, one of the inw_,IIdiIslept in all the clothes I had with me, s en,. a mackintosh, stuffed inside with old Copies of the Egyptian Times and was still too Celdto-sleep. When my teeth were not chattering too loudly I fancied I could hear crocodiles gnawing the woodwork below which separated me from the waters of the royal river, but this no doubt was mere fevered imagination. For of course we all had flu, as well as what you always get, especially on a houseboat on which the toilet facilities have stopped working since the 1914 show. I did not myself undress for ten days. But at least our party did not cheat by lighting bedroom fires or anything of the kind: whereas on the sister ship, making the Nile trip in the opposite direction and largely taken up by non-English frogs, someone lighted oiled rags to get up a bit of heat; the moored ship caught fire and sank into the magic waters, just as a party of French ladies on camels were coming back from a visit to Tutankhamun's tomb and saying, as such dear creatures do between clenched teeth, that it really was insupportably dull and vulgar and not worth the ride, which sentiments gave way to furious cries of "00 est mon manteau, mon passePort, mon sac?" (at the bottom of the Nile by now). Later we saw the unfortunates being loaded back to Cairo in cattle trucks. It humbled us grumblers, maybe warmed our hearts at least. But did we avoid Christmas? Not on your nelly Nile. Come the sweet Holy Day and we were all eating mince pies, dancing with the dentists' daughters, wearing orange paper caps and aching for home sweet home and hot baths. Moral: stay and endure. It comes but once a year.
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