He was Benito Cruciani, from Macerata in Italy, and had come here to Aswan by way of the Sudan, where he had stayed for nine years until he became ill and was invalided out.
‘I was in Darfur,’ he said — a remote district in the western Sudan. ‘The Africans used to throw stones at me. But when I said, “I am not American, I am Italian,” they stopped.’
He was a Comboni father, the order named for Daniel Comboni, whose motto ‘Africa or death’ was prophetic, for in the event he achieved both simultaneously, dying in the Sudan in 1881. Father Comboni’s plan was ‘Save Africa through Africa,’ which seemed a gnomic way of expressing a missionary intention. In fact, such priests made few converts, taught by example and were watched closely by the Islamic Brotherhood, less robust than in Cairo but robust all the same. That is to say, unbelievers were now and then made an example of by being murdered.
‘Your name, Cruciani, sounds like “cross” in Italian,’ I said.
Yes, he said, it was a deliberate construction, Cruciani was a Florentine family associated with the Crusades, and six centuries later he was still a crusader (crociato), promoting Christ in an intolerant Islamic fastness.
‘I want to go to the Sudan. I’m still waiting for my visa. Any advice for me?’
‘You are alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘We say, “Mountain and sea — never travel alone.” ’
‘A proverb?’
‘Not so much a proverb as a rule you should obey.’
‘I don’t have much choice.’
‘So my advice is — pray,’ Father Cruciani said. He then beckoned, Italian fashion, dog-paddling with one hand. ‘Come.’
He stepped inside the church and just as I entered I heard a great booming muezzin’s voice calling the faithful to pray, ‘Allahu akhbar!’ As this reverberated in the crypt, Father Cruciani showed me the under-altar effigy of St Teresa, the saint’s life-sized figure in a glass coffin. While we were looking at it four youths in blue and white school uniforms crept towards it and stuffed some notes through a slot in the coffin.
‘So they will pass their exams,’ Father Cruciani said and made a satirical face.
Outside I said, ‘No one is very upbeat about the Sudan.’
He said, ‘Wonderful people. Terrible government. The African story.’
In a little corner of the rescued and reconstructed Temple of Isis at Philae, in the river south of Aswan, was a bull in stone, the image of the god Hapi — or Apis — surrounded by protective snakes. Apis was the sacred bull of Memphis, associated with the river and so with fertility, and worshiped as the god of the Nile. Nearby was the image of Osiris, god of the earth, in his candle-pin headgear, personification of the Nile, the flooding of the river symbolizing his rebirth; his features were smashed, and so were those of Horus, its falcon face obliterated by fanatic Early Christians. There was lots of Napoleonic graffiti on the walls. The Nile cruise past Egyptian ruins is an experience of obliterations and graffiti. Over 150 years ago, the young Gustave Flaubert lamented these very things in a letter to his mother. ‘In the temples we read travelers’ names; they strike us as petty and futile. We never write ours; there are some that must have taken three days to carve, so deeply are they cut in the stone. There are some that you keep meeting everywhere — sublime persistence of stupidity.’
The human faces were scratched away, the gods’ images were chipped off, the walls have been stripped and chiseled into. But though the experience of the ruins is the experience of millennia of vandalism the proof of the strength and glory of the ruins is that they are still beautiful, even cracked and defaced and scribbled on.
The tall pink granite obelisks that you see in London and Paris and Central Park originated at the ancient quarry outside Aswan where work in stoppage shows the famous Unfinished Obelisk. This stone pillar, eighty feet long, distinctly geometric and symmetrical, being chopped from the granite ledge, lies partly hewn, being gaped at and trodden upon by bewildered admirers.
‘It was all by hand!’
‘Maybe they just got sick of working on it.’
‘How in heck did they manage to lift these things?’
An Egyptologist was saying, ‘So Osiris was killed by his evil brother Seth and cut into fourteen pieces. One of them was eaten by a fish, and Isis used it to revive Osiris and give birth to Horus. Which one, do you think?’
His leer suggested the obvious answer but speaking for the group one passenger asked, ‘Any crocs in the river here?’
The answer was no, none here, none even downstream at Crocodilo-polis — though one had been kept and worshiped at the temple there, as the cat — image of the goddess of joy and love — had been worshiped in the temple at Bast. The big crocs these days lazed on the banks of the White Nile, in the swampy Sudd in the southern Sudan and even farther upriver at the source of the Nile, Lake Albert and Lake Victoria. The crocs here had been long since made into handbags and belts.
We visited the High Dam and Lake Nasser, we waited until our flight was canceled to Abu Simbel, 200 miles south at the border of the Sudan and the head of the lake.
The pleasantest aspect of the river cruise was the combination of gourmandizing and sightseeing, gliding with the current and stopping every now and then at a resurrected ruin. And I liked the ruins most for the way they were overrun by the rackety bazaar, not just curio-sellers but browsing donkeys among the pillars, and goats in the roadway; hawkers’ stalls in the foreground and Ptolemaic colors on the sheltered upper parts of the temples, still bright after thousands of years. Kom-Ombo, where the Philae stopped the first day, was an example of these features — the bazaar, the ruins, the chewing animals, the loud music, the double shrine of Horus and the croc god represented by mummified crocs inside the temple. Kom-Ombo was not just temples but a small town and its name, meaning ‘Pile of Gold,’ was both flattery and mockery, and the temples looked more appropriate as part of the life of the town rather than fenced-off museum pieces. They did not gain dignity in being reconstructed; they looked false and approximated.
The town itself with its Nubian name was ancient.
‘Who lived here way back?’
‘Many bibble.’
The walls of the temple at Kom-Ombo were Egyptology in pictures, history and culture. As a reminder of the wisdom and skill of the Egyptians, one wall depicted medical instruments: pliers, forceps, knives, hooks, suction devices, the paraphernalia for carrying out serious surgery, possibly more surgery than was being carried out in the present-day Kom-Ombo General Hospital. Childbirth was illustrated in one hieroglyph. I sketched a picture of the Eye of Horus, which in a simplified form became the symbol (Rx) for a prescription. Elsewhere on the temple walls were representations of the natural world, vultures, ducks, bulls and hawks, and farther on, warriors, and a whole pantheon of the Egyptians’ enemies, including an unmistakable Negroid head and torso, a fierce warrior with the heavy-lidded gaze of the Nubian. It was wonderful to see such black assertive faces glaring from the walls of these ancient temples, like DNA in bas-relief, proof of the power and persistence of the African.
We floated onward in the Philae, nibbling delicacies, sipping fine wines, leering at the honeymooners on board, dodging the boisterous little Indian boy. We got to Edfu. ‘The temple of Edfu serves as a latrine for the entire village,’ Flaubert noted in his diary in 1850. But it was disinterred and tidied up and is said to be the best preserved temple in Egypt.