Billmon usually has excellent commentary on world events. He recently attended a conference in Egypt and took some time off for a train trip down the Nile to Luxor. Good travel writing illuminates other cultures. This is beyond good. He has his first two sections up. I will link to the others when he writes them.

All's Well That Ends Well

Every since I was a small boy, and used to spend hours pouring over maps of faraway places and dreaming about the treasures hidden there, one of my dreams has been to take a train down the Nile, into the heart of Africa. Riding first-class to Luxor on the Egyptian national railway isn’t quite the same thing, but it’s close enough, and that’s what I was set to do after I left Sharm el-Sheikh and the World Economic Forum behind. Last Tuesday, however, my dream was almost shattered, probably beyond repair, because of a large red spot on the corner of a $10 bill. It would have been entirely my fault. For once in my life, I forgot the traveler’s golden rule: cash is king. And because I forgot, I arrived at the Cairo train station Tuesday morning with only twenty Egyptian pounds (or about $3) in my pocket – 47 pounds less than the price of a first-class ticket to Luxor. And that almost kept me from going to Luxor at all. I know what you’re thinking: What about that $10 bill with the red spot on the corner. What the hell does that have to do with rail travel in Egypt? I’ll get to that, but first let explain why I ended up in a strange city in the Middle East with virtually no ready cash.

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The Gift of the Nile

In Edwin Abbott's story Flatland, he describes an imaginary two-dimensional world in which the inhabitants can only perceive each other as points and lines on a horizontal plane, either growing or dwindling depending on their shape and motion. It’s a strange tale, but in creating Egypt God did Abbott one better, for in Egypt only one dimension truly matters, and it runs the length of the Nile: up river and down. The Egypt we see on the map – the irregular rectangle with the Sinai hanging off one corner, like a stumpy tail – is a fraud, existing only in some colonial boundary commission’s imagination. The real Egypt is shaped like a sinuous snake, with its fangs clamped firmly into the bottom of the Mediterranean. (Indeed, one of the ancient symbols for upper Egypt, above the delta, was the cobra.) To the west, a string of oases – the snake’s ba, or soul shadow -- follow the parallel line of another ancient valley, which once marked the river’s course to the sea. Beyond that, only sand and wind and the faint sound of scorpions, scuttling across the dunes. Egypt, in other words, is the Nile, and the Nile is Egypt – a 500-mile miracle that exists only because the highland forests of central Africa happen to drain north, through the Sahara, instead of west, into the Congo basin, or east, into the Indian Ocean. It’s hard to imagine a country more completely defined by an accidental quirk of geography – or, as the high priests at Karnak probably would have argued, that represents such a unique gift from the Gods. There is, in short, no place like it on earth.

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