Gently drifting along

Egypt

John Lucas

Daily Telegraph 25/5/93

Who was now cursing whom, I wondered, gazing down at the gilded coffin of the young king, Tutankhamun? Since Howard Carter excavated the tomb in the '20s, humidity from the breath and sweat of generations of visitors had fed the mould that was now affecting the wall paintings here. Thus do tourists unwittingly destroy what they have come to admire.

The tomb had been officially closed for two years for restoration, and it was sheer good luck that brought us here at the start of a two-month respite to tourists to mark the 70th anniversary of the Carter exploit.

It was particularly rewarding for me, for my last stay in Egypt had been so brief: a few days in the Canal Zone en route for Palestine with the British Army in 1947 when Farouk was on the throne. Sightseeing would have to wait. It waited till now, 46 years on......

After flying out to Cairo from London, we had bused out to the Pyramids and Sphinx in Giza, then flown on down to Aswan, where our cruise ship, the Nikle Monarch, was moored.

For those who chose to pay the extra charge, though, there was the impressive sight of the huge temples of Rameses 11 and Nefererti. They had been saved in the 1960s by ingenious international feats of engineering that involved their being carved up and raised above the waters behind the Aswan High Dam.

At Aswan we slipped our moorings under a genial December sun and began nosing downriver, stopping the while at historic sites: Komombo, Edfu, Esna, Luxor, Karnak.

We were pampered by the gentle shipboard regime, the result of faultless organisation, largely due to the cruise director, Christine Ellis. The food, locally supplied, was admirable; luggage appeared and reappeared safely and to order with magical certainty. No-one was obliged to join expeditions, though in eagerness to learn, almost everyone did so - even rising at 6.30 or 7am to avoid missing yet another antiquity.

There were calm, lazy days, as we glided between the narrow strips of the Nile valley - more fertile thanks to the great dam. We passed villages bristling with dense thickets of sugar cane, men and donkeys powering primitive irrigation systems, and hopeful fishermen on the river itself. Here was the old, alternative Egypt, another world from Cairo's cavalry charges of impatient cars, honking through tangles of underpasses and flyovers.

Only the sight of rifle-carrying police, vigilant among the villagers, reminded us of recent attacks on tourists by Islamic fundamentalists. Perhaps these incidents were isolated, but then reports were discomforting.

There was plenty to feed the hunger for knowledge. Swan Hellenic's own excellent, informative Nile cruise handbook was augmented by the ship's library, and the expertise of our lecturer, Dr Robert Anderson.

Anderson, an Egyptologist who had taken part in UNESCO's Nubia Rescue campaign, in Quasr Ibrim in 1978, was with us throughout, lecturing and always on hand to answer questions. So were the two Egyptian guides, founts of knowledge both.

On shore excursions, Anderson would nod and smile to some of the over-eager traders clustering round selling alabaster cats, stone gods and Arab headdresses. He had known some of them since their youth, he told me, adding a wry comment that they always ignored his advice that less badgering - at least with the British - would increase their sales.

The Aswan dam has contributed hugely to Egypt's prosperity. But there are debit factors, one of them apparent at Karnak, where mighty colonnades and obelisks had survived for aeons under a cloudless sky: I noticed Anderson peering closely - and worriedly - at a damaged wall from which a strip of hieroglyphs had flaked off.

The cause was simply rising damp. Thanks to the Nile's raised level, water-borne salts had seeped through and risen by capillary action into the ancient wall. At Esna too, sinister damp patches have been appearing. The need for remedial measures was becoming urgent, Anderson said.

Strolling among the temples, the royal-watchers among us tried to identify the Pharaohs and queens in attitudes of supplication to the host of the gods and goddesses portrayed on the wall reliefs. The hieroglyphs had been fashioned with great skill, mostly glorifying the dead monarchs' virtues and victories in battle (defeats passing unacknowledged).

Some of us made a little headway with understanding the hieroglyphs, and in the ship's library I even saw one swot borrowing a book on their grammar. Ye gods and goddesses!

One morning, sunning on deck, I wrote my name in hieroglyphics, then checked it out with Dr Anderson. " That seems all right," he said, "but I think you need to put in a quail chick there."

Like the Greeks, ancient Egypt had deities for all occasions. Everything was capable of the simplest explanation. The rising and setting of the sun? Easy. On one ceiling, Nut (pronounced Noot, goddess of the heavens, arched her arms, trunk, and legs across the skies, swallowing the sun at dusk and giving birth to it again at dawn.

The Nile Monarch turned for home at Nag Hamadi, humming peacefully back to Luxor. There we took off for Cairo for a night's stay and a tour of the Egyptian Museum before returning to London.

This wondrously crowned what was for many of us a journey of a lifetime. The Tutankhamun galleries were all paved with gold: here were the statues of the young king which had guarded the entrance to the burial chamber, as well as the throne - described by Carter himself as "the most beautiful thing that has yet been found in Egypt".

Rivalling them here was the mask that once adorned Tutankhamun's mummy in the Valley of the Kings: and the four golden shrines, like small garages, one inside the other, which contained the sarocophagus.

To sustain Tutankharmun in the next were placed bread, wine, vegetables, fruit, and barley and melon seeds, still capable of germination. Homely trivia that spoke with remarkable eloquence across a great chasm of 3,000 years.