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  He splashed his wealth about with abandon and commissioned the French engineer, de Lesseps, to build the Suez Canal (more or less along the route of older canals between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea).

  This new, far deeper canal was engineered by wetting the sand before excavating it, a new, more speedy technique, but cholera and other diseases caused a serious death toll in the workforce, who eventually completed the project despite the hostile climate of the eastern deserts. But it took them ten long years to do so.

  ‘From our point of view,’ the attaché told me, pointing at a large map of Egypt on the wall, ‘the new canal cut the journey to India and the Far East by half compared with the existing Cape of Good Hope route. So, as the world’s greatest sea-trading nation dependent on our coal-burning steamships as well as the troopships needed to defend the Empire, the canal was of huge benefit.’

  The main threat to Britain at the time was the French efforts to dislodge our interests in the Near East and East Africa. Since a Frenchman had built the canal with French money, they now had a huge stake in Egyptian politics.

  Khedive Ismail, immensely proud of his new canal, now declared Africa to be an island and that (despite the fact that he owned many slaves) he planned to annex the Upper Nile countries and suppress the slave trade there. He hired the British explorer Samuel Baker to command his Egyptian-Sudanese forces in order to achieve this.

  After many twists and turns and battles involving the British, the Egyptians and the Sudanese, Egypt came under British rule in 1882, and the British bought all rights to the canal from the Khedive when he went bankrupt. They did, however, grant Egypt full independence under the Khedive’s successors in 1922, whereupon the country was ruled by hereditary monarchs for thirty years.

  In 1952 King Farouk was thrown out in a revolution masterminded by the so-called Free Officers of the Egyptian Army, who were committed to freeing both Egypt and Sudan from British domination.

  The coup leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, became President of the new republic, with Anwar Sadat as Vice President. Nasser courted the Soviet Union as his close ally against the Western powers.

  ‘The last real low point of our relations with Nasser’s Egypt,’ the attaché added, ‘was, of course, the Suez crisis in 1956 when we and the French invaded, seized the canal and achieved a speedy victory over Nasser, only to be hounded out of the country with our tail between our legs following intense pressure from our supposed allies, the Americans and the UN. It’s a funny old world! So you can see why we had to forbid you to come here at this volatile time of the ongoing war with our Israeli neighbours.’

  Nonetheless, the ambassador and the military attaché took the extremely bold step of allowing us, despite three of our number being serving members of HM Forces, to head south, trusting to luck and in the knowledge that every other British citizen had been turned back and that we just might be imprisoned and used as a ‘ransom’ to persuade the UK not to sell tanks to the Israelis.

  We spent our last night in Cairo at the home of a friend in the Nile-side suburb of Zamalek. I didn’t sleep much due to the voices of many thousands of local Muslims with their lilting chant praising the Creator who gave them the Nile and, therefore, life. The tomcats and bullfrogs of Zamalek did their best to compete, adding to the overall din.

  The road to Cairo headed due south into the midday sun. Three of us were crammed into the cabins of each hard-top Land Rover. The air conditioner of the ancient ex-AA vehicle had long since ceased to work and the heat quickly grew uncomfortable.

  The natural reaction to take off our shirts was resisted due to local rules against baring any part of your trunk when driving.

  Each village we came to was crowded, for we had by bad luck chosen an important feast day, Bairan al Adfah, on which to set out. The main road seemed to serve villagers as the marketplace for hawkers and vendors with their mules, carts and baskets of goods. Stray camels with supercilious expressions licked our headlights for some reason, and once the strange nature of our hovercraft was noted by children, the shriek went up, rapidly passed from mouth to mouth, of ‘Tayyara Abyad’ (White Aeroplane). This was weird since neither Baker nor Burton had wings (or wheels), but our convoy was soon surrounded, front and rear, by a throng of all ages, although mostly children. We could only move forward at a snail’s pace in the suffocating heat, and often not at all. Nick, never patient, muttered an ongoing string of curses, including untranslatably rude Arabic ones that he must have picked up when trying to sell his razor blades in Bahrain.

  Most of the crowd were good-natured but a few kicked our vehicles, especially when we tried to edge forward at faster than walking speed. Once out of the first village, Al Aiyat, we tried to go at a reasonable pace in between camels and other obstacles, but deep potholes threatened our delicate trailer suspension.

  Four hours later than planned we came to El Wasta, and the first of the dreaded police roadblocks manned by an officer in a smart uniform, which must have been stiflingly hot. Behind him were a number of angry-looking goons in plain clothes.

  They spread out to check our loads and to remove all the documents I could produce. We all smiled lovingly at the goons, who glowered back.

  ‘You,’ the policeman enquired, ‘are the helicopter trade party from England going to the foot of Africa?’ We all nodded in unison.

  Peter’s diary: After a further change of escort we arrived at El Minya where the chief of police, town head and local minister of Tourism met us and wished us well. It transpired that we were the first “tourist” vehicles for ten years.

  The police chief told us, ‘I have only today received orders to let you go south and to give you an escort out of my El Minya governorate and down to the Beni Suef zone. You must be careful. These are bad times. I send all other people back to Cairo.’

  A couple of old vans with flashing blue lights and klaxon horns, manned by more sullen goons, appeared and we followed them with great relief down the river road. Village crowds, so impeding before, now melted away at the first sign of our escort’s flashing lights.

  At Beni Suef the local governor gave us coffee in a baking-hot office under a huge picture of a grinning Nasser.

  At El Minya we met two gloomy Scottish archaeologists who had come to study the Nileometer of Elephant Island, an ancient stairway used centuries ago to measure annual flow rates. The police had ordered them to leave the area at once and go back to Cairo without delay.

  They were a mine of information about the history of the Nile. Long before the invasion of the Arabs, the locals had established a Nile way of life which Islam hardly changed. The desert herdsmen who first settled by the river fetched water in shoulder bags, but as their vegetable plots grew in size, they needed more water and, around 2000 BC, they invented the shaduf, a contraption consisting of wooden poles that swivel from upright posts. Each pole has a large bucket on one end and a balancing weight on the other. The upright post of each pole is six feet further up the bank than its predecessor and it scoops water into and out of a series of pools dug into the bank at each level.

  Centuries later the sakiyeh (water wheel) driven by oxen or camels made things even more efficient and allowed local farmers greater productivity.

  In the nineteenth-century struggle between British troops and Islamic forces based far upriver, army generals such as Gordon and Kitchener powered their fuel-hungry Nile paddle steamers by breaking up sakiyehs for firewood in a land where wood was, and still is, as rare as gold dust.

  The dejected-looking Scotsmen sadly drove north, and we followed our goons on towards El Minya, passing through intermittent roadblocks. Mike drooled at the various panoramas and exotic scenes he would have liked to stop and photograph, but we feared this would annoy our escort, the key to our progress through an otherwise forbidden land. So sly snapshots through the window were all that Mike could capture.

  We came to El Minya by dusk and slept in the yard of a local school with a police detachment to whom our goons
delivered us, receiving a signature from the station commander to record our safe delivery into his Governorate.

  In the morning a police captain said that, if we left our vehicles with his men, we could hire a taxi to see the local sights while waiting for the escort that would take us further south. Mike and Anthony, happy as sandboys, loaded their cameras. El Minya taxis turned out to be Victorian-era hansom carriages with polished brass lanterns harnessed to noble-looking black Arab horses.

  At the taxi rank on a shelving Nile beach, cabbies were lovingly washing their horses down with handfuls of sand as they stood knee-deep in the fast flowing river.

  ‘You like English speak guide? Pay extra?’ We did, and another Mohammed appeared from nowhere whose accent was that of Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther. He was well versed in Nile lore and, over coffee after a fascinating tour in three cabs, he gave us a rambling talk.

  There were always, he explained, three types of boat on the Nile: the felucca used for haulage like European river barges and for fishing; dhows, used as taxis and for every task under the sun; and lastly, not including paddle steamers, the cumbersome dahabiyas. These were made from the hardest of woods, the Egyptian sunut tree, and were crewed by Nubians in smart uniforms. Nile tours were in vogue with wealthy Victorian families, habitués of the Orient Express, indulging in floating house parties and romantic honeymoons which often turned sour in the heat, thus providing excellent source material for Agatha Christie’s murder tales.

  Under gently flapping sails these houseboat tubs would schmooze majestically upriver until the breeze died down, whereupon the lower echelons of the crew plus local labour as necessary would harness themselves to long towlines and plod along the hot and dusty banks, their rhythmic chants blending with the on-board murmur of posh gossip.

  Mohammed told us that there were no piranha in his river. ‘Bad for tourists,’ he explained. But there were plenty of ghost-like moonfish who, from time to time, drown sinners who dare to go swimming. They can be seen at certain times streaking through the water with their spiked backs gleaming. They can inflate themselves and produce a fart-like noise, audible from a long distance, when they deflate. Swimmers should also beware of the eel-like Nile malapterurus which can deliver a stunning shock. This creature has legs and lungs and could presumably enjoy time on land if it wished.

  Crocodiles and hippos, Mohammed added, were both common all the way to the Delta and the sea until well after the time of Christ. They were worshipped as gods but hunted by Pharaohs. One King of the Hyksos once ordered that all hippos near to his palace should be killed as their nocturnal roars were ruining his sleep.

  Since Russian engineers had begun the building of the Aswan Dam, the resultant lake, named Lake Nasser of course, had grown wider each year and had formed a barrier down-river into which no crocodile or hippo could venture.

  ‘This,’ said Mohammed, looking genuinely sad, ‘is bad for tourism.’ But he waxed ecstatic about the unbeatable taste of the local Nile perch. ‘In Uganda and up there – ’ he waved to the south – ‘the perch are giants, but their taste . . . N’yurgh!’

  I failed to recognize the expletive, and asked him if it was Arabic.

  ‘No, sir, it is not Arab and I am not Arab. I am Egyptian. Very few Egyptian people are Arab. They come here only maybe one thousand years ago. We are from the people before the Pharaohs.’

  Our cabs took us then to Abu Mengal, eight miles in all of underground burial chambers, including many thousands of coffins containing mummified baboons and ibises, the revered creatures of the pharaonic god Thoth.

  From Minya a new escort, even more sullen than the previous lot, led us south past Assiut, Sohag and Qena. In between towns the land was rich in orange and citrus groves with a multitude of lovingly designed clay cotes with windows and ledges for the doves that fertilized the crops.

  Breeze-waving palm trees bordered fields of cotton and sugar cane. Waterwheels clattered and children splashed merrily in disease-riddled stagnant pools. Several of the little girls who came to stare at us had eyes glazed by trachoma.

  At the village of Samhud our escort stopped and their commander was given a handset by his signaller. There was clearly an emergency for he told me abruptly, ‘You go on.’

  ‘On?’ I was puzzled.

  ‘Yes. Yes.’ He pointed upriver. ‘In Qena more police for you. We busy.’

  So, for the first time we located our road maps. Nick navigated and we took a wrong turning which led us deep up a labyrinthine network of sugar cane lanes. Turning our convoy around was a major exercise, but eventually, and briefly free of any escort, we fetched up in Qena.

  Qena means black country, for it was here that the Pharaohs’ engineers mined the hard black stone found nowhere else. Qena’s clay was also known to be superior, and all Egypt’s waterwheel buckets in pre-metal days were once fashioned here. We had to cross the Nile near Qena by one of two bridges. The Nag Hammadi bridge had recently been demolished by Israeli commandos, and we were met at the other by a new escort. For some reason, this lot actually smiled at us. Peter found this sinister . . . like crocodiles smiling.

  The bridge was floored with wooden planks for lorries down one side and with a railway line on the other. Eight hours after our arrival and with thanks to over forty bridge guards with slung rifles, plus, reluctantly, our escort policemen, we managed to manoeuvre our trailers (which were both too wide and too low-slung for the available width and height of the rails) on to and over the bridge.

  The Qena police dropped us off at night at the apparently unmanned police station of Luxor. Uncertain whether or not we would again need to map-read, we unrolled our main Nile map on the dirt floor of the police compound. It was an impressive sight, for the roll-up map showing the Nile from its Mediterranean estuary to its Lake Victoria source was 18 feet long.

  We discussed our progress to date against the red marks I had previously made on the map, noting vital dates at key points if we were to keep ahead of the sandstorm season in the Nubian Desert and the first rains in South Sudan which would quickly block all further vehicular progress for eight months. We agreed that we were a week behind schedule, but, once out of Egypt, we should be able to catch up.

  A dark shadow fell across the map. Four armed police gazed down at us and their boss reached down for the map. He rolled it up and pointed into the police station, the lights of which he switched on. Other police ransacked our gear.

  Our interrogation was slow and confusing, since it depended entirely on my Omani Arabic and hand-waving by all present.

  In short we were told that we would be arrested, that our radios were like those of the Israelis, and that the hovercraft mission was a clever disguise for our spying activities. Why did our map, which showed all the Nile countries, only have extensive pencil marks and numbers alongside the Egyptian Nile?

  Because, I explained, we made the marks only when we reached the relevant places, since they were our records of progress to date.

  The interrogation was a relaxed affair compared with that which I had undergone three years previously during SAS training in Wales, and it ended with our dismissal, complete with all our papers and equipment, except for our main map which the police annoyingly retained.

  We were told to leave our vehicles in the compound until our new escort arrived the next evening. Meanwhile, we were welcome to tour Luxor. Hiring a guide, we spent the day imbibing quaint stories about Pharaohs, their tombs, their mummies, their murals and their animal gods.

  At sunset our escort duly arrived and led us past the Narrows of Silsileh, where the river was but 85 yards wide at low flood and where Pharaohs once prayed (begged) for a high flood level the following year.

  Such prayers (by Cairo’s modern Pharaohs) are no longer necessary, thanks to the Aswan Dam which, since its completion in 1970, ensures a predictable water level in the Delta and an extra million acres of arable land in Egypt as a whole.

  The dam was impressively huge and was s
oon to become the largest in the world. Arriving at the police headquarters, our equipment was again checked item by item, as were our papers. From unseen police cells we heard intermittent screams, but we were more worried by the news that we could, under no circumstances, drive the 200 miles of desert from Aswan to the Sudan border at Wadi Halfa because all usable tracks had over the previous few months been submerged under the rising river waters. We must travel on board a barge towed by a tramp-steamer which we must meet at the temporary loading ramp at Shellal, twelve miles south of the dam.

  Peter’s diary, 2 March: To the surprise of the many East European technicians and to our great relief we passed through the Aswan rocket base and into Aswan town where we were to load our vehicles onto the ferry. Here we were met with great ceremony due to an extraordinary incident at the Sudanese shipping office in Cairo. Ran had been accused of presenting a forged passport to the supervisor who exclaimed that he knew the real Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes because he was his soldier servant in 1942.

  At Shellal, the good news was that a boat would leave for Wadi Halfa in twenty-four hours, and the bad news was that its barges took passengers and camels but not cars of any size.

  A sizeable wad of piastres and several cartons of Marlboro cigarettes persuaded the ferry’s skipper, whose entire face appeared to consist of a nose embedded in a beard, to load all our machines onto one of his barges ‘if Allah permits’.

  Allah took the form of an ingenious loading procedure devised by Peter, plus the sweating efforts for several hours of a great many Nubians in white robes, five German students and two Californian hippies who thought that hovercraft were ‘dead cool’.

  Baker was the last unit to be force-fed onto the barge and ended up with its hull protruding well over one side of its parent vessel.

  As with many expeditions, cliques form and our group total of six worked well. Nick and Peter, Charles and me, Mike and Anthony, left no ‘outsider’ to feel awkward.