Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (39 page)

Flaubert is overshadowed in that photo by the two rundown buildings behind him. Perhaps on their roofs there might be storks nesting. The garden looks wintry, a couple of low acacia trees and a taller tree, perhaps some kind of palm, framing the right-hand side of the picture. On an occasion when Flaubert makes Madame Bovary seem the epitome of the deluded romantic fool he has her imagine herself and Rodolphe living happily in a low, flat-roofed house in the shade of a palm tree.

On his way home Flaubert wrote from Constantinople, ‘Why have I a melancholy desire to return to Egypt, to sail back up the Nile and see Kuchuk Hanem? No matter: the night I spent with her is the kind one doesn’t have very often, but I enjoyed it to the full.’ He was still seeing prostitutes. It’s not surprising that du Camp and Flaubert both contracted venereal disease – but not in Egypt, most probably in the Lebanon.

Kuchuk Hanem made such an impact on Flaubert that his account
of their night, in a letter home, was turned by the poet Louis Bouillet into a poem where the courtesan is depicted as ‘sad as a widow’ after the departure of the virile young Flaubert (they’ve done it five times in about thirty-six hours). This poem made Flaubert’s muse-figure and mistress Louise Colet jealous. Flaubert wrote to her, realistically one feels, ‘You and I are thinking of Kuchuk Hanem, but she is certainly not thinking of us. We are weaving an aesthetic around her, whereas this particular very interesting tourist who was vouchsafed the honours of her couch has vanished from her memory completely, like many others.’ In Flaubert’s writing Kuchuk Hanem appears in the dance of Salome, the dance that leads to John the Baptist losing his head.

Twenty years after Flaubert’s visit, his ex-mistress visited Egypt in 1869 for the opening of the Suez Canal. She felt driven to sail up the Nile in search of Kuchuk Hanem. She claimed she met an old and diseased woman of that name. The discarded lover’s last revenge? Later we will follow her on this quest.

For his last novel Flaubert again reverted to Egypt for inspiration. He was still thinking about the owners of the Hôtel du Nil when he thought up Bouvard and Pécuchet, the dim-witted autodidacts in what was intended to be his masterpiece. He never finished it. A few days before his death in 1880 Flaubert wrote to his niece: ‘for the past two weeks I have been gripped by the longing to see a palm tree standing out against a blue sky, and to hear a stork clacking its beak at the top of a minaret’.

I went looking for the Hôtel du Nil in downtown Cairo the other day. In Murray’s 1857 guide the hotel was located across from Ezbekiya Gardens in what is now Goumraya Street. I searched up and down this street, now mainly dedicated to the sale of air compressors and mechanics’ tools, for some sign. But like the second cataract the hotel is long submerged by the workings of modernity. Dodging crazy taxis and surrounded by blaring car horns, I came in the end to the conclusion that the frantic forecourt of the MISR petrol station was the former site of the garden of the Hôtel du Nil.

7
•
A journey down the Nile – 2007

The eye of the guest sees cockroaches giving birth
. Nubian proverb

I thought of Flaubert strolling along the Nile in Cairo and I imagined that the islands midstream, rather than the banks, would be the closest approximation to how things had looked 150 years ago. But the islands are inaccessible except by local ferry. No tourists visit them (I am talking about the islands that have no bridges to the mainland). I decided to do my own cruise through Cairo to see the islands that are inhabited midstream but are unvisited by tourists and have no cars upon them. You might see a solitary motorcycle crisscrossing the fields, more likely a donkey. These islands would have been submerged during the flood; at best they would have been swamps. But since the first dam at Aswan was built over a hundred years ago they have become permanent parts of Cairo. The largest island has both a church and a mosque; it is straddled by the huge Mounib Bridge, but there is no access to the island from the bridge. Instead you must take a small ferry that costs the equivalent of 5p. There are other, smaller islands, all given over to agriculture and a way of life that has disappeared on the mainland.

For transport I needed something inconspicuous, invisible even. Foreigners are not encouraged to take their own boats along the Nile without official protection, or that’s the theory. In any case too much of a presence would result in lots of unwelcome attention. I’d been with a professional photographer in Ezbekiya book market and been warned off by bullying members of state security – I didn’t want that sort of interest on my little cruise.

My Maxime du Camp was my friend D’Arcy Adrian-Vallance, who is usually up for most aquatic larks – we once paddled the fields of Oxfordshire during the worst of the floods – and who reminded me that I had once boasted that a rubber beach raft was the best way to travel on the Nile. The challenge was on. My beach raft, which cost around £20, was about nine feet long with rubber rowlocks and enough room for two – one at each end. I had two tiny oars to row with. D’Arcy was happy to keep watch and cradle our only rations – a water bottle and some biscuits. I was grateful for the water as I had something of a cracking hangover and had arrived with nothing except the boat tied to my car roof. This we inflated at a local garage in Maadi and then with
a £2 tip to the nearest felluca captain we launched from the jetty next to TGI Friday’s. Feluccas ply the River Nile at all the main towns. In Cairo they are limited by the bridges – their masts being too tall to fit under some of them. We would have no such difficulties.

Quickly we were midstream and travelling fast with the current. Throughout its length the Nile is never sluggish – it is a young river still, or feels it, no, that isn’t right, it is a virile river, it knows its own mind. There is nothing sleepy about it.

I was always surprised and was surprised now at how little floating garbage there is in the Nile in Cairo. You’d think by now after all these miles it would be a veritable cloaca. The canals that lead off it are horrible. Those that haven’t been covered over are like fly tips or open sewers. You see lads bathing horses in these canals, riding the horses in up to their withers. No, the Nile is a clean river, cleaner now that there is a sewerage system that takes city waste far out into the desert to be treated. I looked down and saw no fish, though I have seen them in shoals in the sun-heated shallows near the bank. I rowed on, feeling the sun on my dehydrated face but blissfully happy. D’Arcy dangled his fingers in the water as it streamed past, or rather as we streamed along with it, as it was the roughly 3mph current that was taking us towards the centre of Cairo.

We were at the tip of the big island known as Geziret Bahrein when children began shouting and waving to us. You never get that in the city – kids are too blasé there and there are too many foreigners walking around for it to be a novelty. We passed a little beach where women were washing giant aluminium cooking pots, and in a sort of concrete river-lapped pool they were smashing clothes against the water. Boys dived in to swim to us, but in some kind of natural etiquette they kept their distance from our ludicrous little craft, though their faces were beaming – all wet heads and white teeth. We declined all invitations to land and rowed on past an enormous two-masted dhow, a sandal, whose sides were overflowing with freshly cut reeds. It looked like an enormous floating haystack. Special boards, grey and worn-out looking, were fixed to the gunnels to raise the ship’s sides. This meant the reeds reached right up to the bottom of the sails. There was no engine on the craft, perhaps the last working sailboat in Cairo – I would never have thought I’d see such a thing in the twenty-first century. The rudder was especially massive, hewn, it seemed, from timbers a foot thick with a great arching tiller arm like the bough of a tree. Men, half hidden by
the high reeds, called out to us laughing. It seemed we had found the ideal way to travel into Cairo.

Not 300 yards away was the infamous Corniche, the racetrack along the Nile’s bank where it is not uncommon to see a car in a tree – that is, off the ground like some Formula 1 mishap. That’s how dangerous it can get. Ever been undertaken by a car going 100mph while simultaneously being overtaken by one going about 90? I’m not surprised that foreigners decide to hug the slow lane come what may, though it does put you nearer to the trees. And the river. Which is obviously the best place to be. Strangely, we were making good time. The six or so miles from TGI Friday’s in Maadi to the island of Zamalek would take us just under two hours. When the traffic is really bad I’ve done the same journey in an hour and a half. D’Arcy and I talk excitedly about getting a power boat to move in and out of Cairo with ease. But we’ll never do it; drifting with a bit of rowing is way better than blasting and bumping over the waves creating a power ripple that annoys the net-casting fishermen, even though they are so inured to insult they never show it.

We drift on past the enormous fountain base midstream beneath the rotating restaurant in the sky attached to the Grand Hyatt. The water piles past the concrete base and we noticed a small maintenance ladder which we grab hold of. In such a small craft the scale of the world seems changed, as if we are Borrowers scurrying around the giants’ world.

Finally we arrive at the cultivated market gardens that stretch along one edge of Zamalek. There are similar gardens all along the Nile. Any patch of earth near a water supply gets turned into a bed growing something. When they burned the police huts down during the 2011 revolution only the gardens next to them were left unscathed. Egyptians are gardeners before anything else – I’ve never seen a garden that isn’t tidy, artistic and good to look at. In Europe, good gardeners tend, on the whole, to be about as imaginative as petrol-station designers. The flower growers are sometimes a tad more creative than the vegetable experts, but not by much. But an Egyptian garden is at its best when it is mainly vegetables. These will be grown in an ordered but pleasing way, with a flower or two thrown in – which we now know contributes to better growth all round. When you see Egyptian gardens, market gardens and vegetable gardens, you understand how they could have built the Pyramids – a stone at a time, each one individually crafted but broadly similar, but not mechanically similar. I think that’s what makes these gardens so pleasing.

We pulled the boat out. Deflated it, put it on the roof of a hailed taxi and drove back to Maadi in half an hour. It was early and the Corniche was empty.

8
•
Kuchuk Hanem’s fame

Trust in God, but tie your camel first
. Arab proverb

Flaubert was in Egypt in 1849–50. So was Florence Nightingale and so, as we have seen, was George William Curtis, American author of
Nile Notes of a Howadji
. Curtis later became editor of
Harper’s Weekly
and, like Flaubert, was more interested in the mysterious orient than in ancient antiquities. He wrote a long description of the dancing girls of Esna, and he, too, succumbed to the delights of Kuchuk Hanem, whom he took to be in her late twenties and calls, wrongly, Kushuk Arnem. For all the brilliance of Flaubert’s description we are left with a woman like the statue of Memnon, her lip curled and carved in stone. Curtis, a worse writer, makes her live: ‘Smiling and pantomime were our talking and one choice Italian word, she knew – buono. Ah! How much was buono that choice evening. Eyes, lips, hair, form, dress, everything that the strangers had or wore, was endlessly buono. Dancing, singing, smoking, coffee, buono, buono, buonissimo! How much work that one word will do!’

With her young associate Xenobi and an aged couple beating drums and playing a one-stringed fiddle, Kuchuk Hanem began to dance. We see immediately the expert bellydancer at work:

Poor Louise Colet hadn’t a chance.

9
•
Colet searches for Kuchuk Hanem

The hyena will enter at the place where a pet dog breaks through the hedge
.
Ethiopian proverb

Louise Colet was ten years older than Flaubert. She died in 1876, four years before he did. It was during the interregnum of their intense eight-year affair, from 1846 to 1854, that Flaubert spent his night with Kuchuk Hanem. After he had reported it all to Louise Colet, the idea, the image, the competition, this woman, this dirty foreigner, she just wouldn’t go away. It ate away at Colet and she should, of course, have let it go. Instead, in 1869, she wangled an invitation – as with her Académie Française prizes, it was said she was expert at getting influential people to intervene on her behalf – from Muhammad Ali’s grandson Ismail Pasha. To celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal, Ismail was sparing no expense: a boat would sail up the Nile, quite the match for one of Cleopatra’s galleys, and on board would be the greatest minds of literary Europe, the celebrities of the day, the aristocrats and the men of wealth and influence. All on one boat which would traverse the Suez Canal and then proceed up the Nile as far as Aswan, stopping, of course, at Esna, the adopted hometown of Kuchuk Hanem. By some quirk of fate, Colet and Hanem were not quite the same age – sixty years old and fifty years old, women who had shared the same man, the inventor of the modern novel, some twenty years earlier. One, a French intellectual, a poet, a salon hostess. The other, a courtesan, a prostitute perhaps, but also a marvellously skilled dancer, a musician and a singer.