Those were not just names carried by signs on small boats, floating restaurants and vessels sailing on the waters of the Nile in Cairo, but to me they represented moving signs of Nile tales about Cairo s visitors, transit travellers and residents, as they were moments written on the crest of the waves. The names were not the only things carried by the signs, but these carried brief inspiring phrases as well. The stylish restaurants adhered to foreign names, reflecting marked class divisions, even on the surface of the Nile which has taken in all meanings and their significance.

If you are able to reduce Egypt to a city, you may choose Cairo, being aware, however, that there are other cities bearing different hallmarks. Nevertheless, the capital alone distils Egypt as the sky distils rain gathered from countless clouds after crossing wide borders. If you choose Cairo as a place which reflects Egypt, nobody will argue, as Egypt s journey would not have been possible but for the River Nile. Its civilization grew only on its banks, and life started and continued only with the flow of its waves which quenched the thirst of both land and man. Egypt is the gift of the Nile ..Yes and Cairo is its daughter.

Egypt s capital throughout its successive civilizations spread from south to north, not far from its banks. When Caliph Umar urged his commander Amr Ibn Al-Ass not to let any water separate him from the Muslims he chose the location of Al-Fustat, which then represented the narrowest and easiest crossing between its banks, at a time when water crossing was a major barrier. But Al-Fustat, being a military town, was only possible to protect by the Nile from one side, as it was protected by the hill from the other side.

Cairo, the largest desert city, is 414 square metres in area, let alone its current extensions. In the middle of the desert it looks like a sea of sand struggling against many forces and is affected by more currents. Cairo is like the desert whose caravans combined the distant and near countries of the Middle East.

Since the dawn of history, visitors and tourists have been flooding into the city s location. Assuming an Arabic name though, its location had attracted considerable attention long before the Arabs spread out from their peninsula. At the location where the Nile is wide enough embrace the land of the Delta.

Which takes the shape of a paper fan, the Pharaohs established their capital, Memphis. The Sakkara step pyramid, the oldest stone building in the world, is still overlooking the Memphis tombs which can be seen with the naked eye from atop high-rise buildings in Cairo, unless shrouded by pollution. The Pharaohs built their main tombs on the Giza Plateau, which is only 40 minutes by Bus 8 from the centre of Cairo, Tahrir Square, as reported by Desmond Stewart in his book Cairo Forty Years Ago . In a painting by the French artist Nestore Lahotte (1878) in his book Panorama of Egypt and Nubia we see how the4 Nile was playing at a stone s throw from the Pyramids, and on it travel the boats of the sun and people. The goods carried by the travellers to Cairo or its location were not only for trade but they carried religious ideas as well, which the Nile carried from north to south, and from south to north alike.

Layer upon layer, like onion layers, as the popular saying in Egypt goes the lover s onion is a lamb , each layer representing a different cultural layer depending on the colour and thickness of its texture. In AD 1384 the Italian merchant Leonardo Friscobaldi wrote that Cairo s streets were more crowded than Florence s. The population was less than half a million, almost double the population of Paris, the largest European city in the fourteenth century, and five times as much as that of Constantinople. Max Rodenbeck said in his book Cairo, the Victorious City that Cairo in the Middle Ages was like New York today.

Since that golden age, Cairo has known the grandeur of Mameluke architecture, which represented the crown jewel of Islamic architecture in Egypt: tall, impressive minerals, stone domes, fine marble and coloured stone mihrab inscriptions and wooden Quranic verses ... ... ... Marks of the past carried by almost 200 antiquities in Cairo, including mosques, palaces, public fountains, hospitals and museums built over seven centuries ago, but most of which are still being used for the same purpose, including Sultan Hassan Mosque, which for its splendour and magnificent architecture -in addition to its huge costs-was described as the pyramid of Islamic architecture and the crown jewel of Mameluke architecture. It was not only a mosque but a school for teaching the four sects and a hospital. More famous as the pyramids may be, the Mameluke archtecture in Cairo will be more majestic if properly attended to. That was before Cairo, Egypt and the Arab countries fell behind the Ottoman iron curtain, and Vasco da Gama s discovery of the Cape of Good Hope route (1498) and the discovery of America six years earlier, when Columbus set foot on the New World, which made Europe chart is navigational maps and changed Cairo s demography and diminished the importance of its Nile as far as its transit traders were concerned.

Cairo needed centuries to regain its importance, either through expeditions to discover the sources of the Nile or military expeditions which recognized the secret of its timeless location.

History repeats itself, and as Alexander had done it 2000 years before, Napoleon Bonaparte followed him cherishing a more ambitious dream: I saw myself as a preacher exploring Asia riding on an elephant, wearing a turban, carrying a new holy book, which I will rewrite myself to meet my needs . Between AD 1798 and 1801 Cairo and Arab cities to the north and neighbouring cities in Egypt and Palestine witnessed an expedition which failed militarily but achieved one success, namely the writing of Description d Egypte by a (French) multidisciplinary team of 154 scientists, painters, anthropologists and physicians. This 24-volume encyclopedia reviewed the country s memory and rediscovered it to the world at the same time, and even paved the way for the British to maintain their presence for a century to come and to end the collision of Egypt s rulers from the Mohammed Ali dynasty with them with the rise to power for the first time of the Egyptian military in 1952.

Around a century prior to that revolutionary history, Egypt, with a population of 600,000 was a haven for Europeans and Americans fleeing from the fog and cold of their towns, and cotton merchants and craftsmen who sought the comfort of a rich, cosmopolitan city where grocers were Greeks, mechanics Italians, watchmakers Austrians, pharmacists British, hoteliers Swiss and merchants Jews. The night was for dancing in Clubs, the day for horse race gambling and the afternoon for having a meal on the bank of the Nile. That was Cairo of Khedive Ismail who aspired to make his capital a copy of European capitals and to rebuild it as Haussmann did in Paris. The Khedive built his new city to the west of the old one to be closer to the Nile and diverted the course of the Nile to run through the city center. His choice of Ali Mubarak, a French-educated man, as Minister of Public Works, might have been meant to be a link in the chain of Cairo s modernization. But Ismail s reliance on the proceeds of the sale of cotton during the cotton and cotton market boom, which is similar to the oil boom today, was short- lived. Egypt was burdened with debts which were heavier than the sky which was lit up by the stars of Verdi s Opera, guests to the inaugural ceremony of the Suez Canal, and Azbakiya Park s lovers.

That situation continued until the British occupied Egypt to secure settlement of the debts due to them.

The Nile Corniche

When you come to Egypt by plane from east or west and look through the window when the captain announces that Cairo is in sight, you will see nothing but desert on the right or left of the Nile, but when you come from the north it is a different story, as the green Delta prepares you to receive the great river and the capital which crosses it. I hold my camera closer to the window and take many shots of Cairo and its Nile, where two islands lie in its heart, the one marked by the Cairo Tower, the Opera and Museum of Egyptian Contemporary Art, and the other Rawdah Island, at the tail-end of which the Nilometre is located. Rawdah and Gazeera s green disappears gradually and is cut by ugly cement high-rise towers which devour millions of pounds from the people who want to live by the Nile, but to their dismay, discover that it is all but hidden and they need to put a mirror in its sky to be able to see it or just hang its pictures on the wall. Except for the hotels and lucky towers close to the Nile, almost nobody in Cairo can see it.

You will ask yourself: who goes to the Nile earliest? Fishermen, walkers, travellers or elegant restaurant- goers ? As a matter of fact contact between the Nile and the people of the unsleeping city continues round the clock. As mosque-goers at dawn praise and glorify Allah, they take over from the unsleeping, noise never abates for the duration of the day. The Nile sees what goes around it, and is seen by all. But what s the relationship between the silent giant and screaming little beings inflicted sometimes by tension and feebleness, and by misery and greed other times.

When you step off the pavement on the Nile Corniche from a point in front of the TV complex on your way to Kasr El Nile Bridge and before you are confronted with the morning noise, you can hear the rustle of thin camphor trees or enjoy the morning breeze, until the sun shines, under an acacia tree listening to birds exchanging words of love on a sycamore tree avoiding the summer heat.

After a while the same pavement will be filled with lupite, kernel and peanuts sellers and their customers who are passers-by or loiterers, as well as those who prepare to get down to the anchorage, where sailing and motor boats are moored and ready to receive lovers, families and schoolchildren who love going by the river bus to the Barrages built by Mohammed Ali the north of Cairo to spend a day there enjoying its meadoms and green spaces until the time of the last bus back whose engines make a noise louder that the dandling of children, the shouting on skippers and the noise of young singers noise. The Barrages are a symbol of the central location of Cairo, because it is situated at the top of the Delta, as if it were a tap, and whoever owns such a tap in a desert country owns the entire country. And it is from here that the Nile branches into arms watering the Delta. Cairo lies exactly under the Delta at a site where the Nile branches into two main tributaries Rasetta and Damietta.

I had to sail on the Nile more than once to prepare for the journey of writing and to make my relationship with its waters not just watching from the outside and so that my lines might not be merely reminiscences of boyhood and youth. With the countless times I got down to the anchorage boat owners got used to seeing me.

I was then faced by a key question from the boat owner on the Nile cruise in Cairo: Motor or sail? Many people prefer motor boats because they are faster and can cross the bridges on the Nile, and the sound -of motors is only eclipsed by youth songs. Those who prefer peace and quiet and would like to talk to one another and want to hear rhythmic Nile water more than rhythmless songs, choose sailing boats, as a homesick return to the pre-machine age, as if the sail meant passion, but the motor was preoccupied with something else. The skipper playing hard on the bars, making a pleasant sound, and the air moving the sail and filling the lungs with air. And as far as the eye can see a girl leans to touch the water with her little palm. Whenever she touches the water I feel cold, as if the Nile passed through her fingers to play with my forearm.

Forty years ago, you could hire a felucca steered by a brown-faced boatman from Upper Egypt for just five shillings (a quarter pound). Today, the cruise costs £E 50 for half an hour. It is not the journey, of the river alone, but the journey of the local currency and its purchasing power as well, and it is the Nile s mirror that can best reflect this.

You may wish to test all the colours which the Nile reflects and changes every hour, even every minute. At midnight, the Nile shines and glitters like steel, as if it were drops of molten metal in the moonlight. At dawn it is a mixture of colours like a peacock tail. A little while after sunrise the Nile water looks like butter. At noon it becomes greenish, and in the afternoon, with the sun sending out its rays in all directions, the water turns golden. When it is time for you to, or all but, drown, its eyes redden, and it closes its eyelids and becomes a mirror or subdued colours in huge hotels and luxurious boats.

On the floating houses and dahabies we lived with the heroes and heroines of the novels of Naguib Mahfouz, who treated the Nile as his favourite part of Cairo and used to walk along it every day before the assassination attempt against him. Today the floating restaurants have become the alternative life for many heroes in novels, films and life multi-storey restaurants presenting the Nile for diners and pleasure seekers. From my seat in the boat, Kasr El Nile Bridge looks like a huge balcony The bridge was built in 1871, but its current shape was completed 65 ago and was built by Doorman Long & Co., the same company which built the famous Sydney Harbour. From this balcony, onlookers can see boats passing under them carrying lovers and pleasure-seekers. Because it connects more than one special place, such as the Opera on the left and the American University on the right, it looks like a pavement with two lions from one side and two from the other side acting as guards. You don t know whether the lions guard the bridge or the passers-by. The bridge s old name Lion Father may explain people s feeling upon seeing the four lions on both sides.

At nightfall the moon tries to rise behind the ugly billboards which all but obscure vision, as if the Nile weren t polluted enough and accepted visual pollution caused by the advertising hoardings which do not preserve the dignity of the Nile or onlookers and became a massive iron wall carrying ridiculous faces advertising everything, but in fact they advertise one thing :Deteriorating public taste which allowed it to encroach on the Nile and make it all but unable to breathe, having blocked the space in front of it.

The Nile Flood and Nilometre

In 1798, Monsieur Luber, a member of the French scientific expedition which accompanied the French army upon its occupation of Egypt, wanted to document the Nile floods recorded from 1150 A. H to 1215 A.H, which Amin Sami Pasha compiled in his almanac of the Nile and added to it from many sources. The Nile flood was deemed inadequate if it measured 18 20 cubits weak if 20 22 cubits, good if over 22.5 cubits, severe if over 24 cubits. Severe floods were no doubt disastrous and so was its drought, however different the degree of severity and drought and their consequences might have been.

As previously mentioned, the Nilometre is located on the Rawdah Island, which has been inhabited since the days of the Pharaohs, who had their own Nilometre in the same site. Rawdah was a harbour and a shipyard, and was even described as a Paradise in the Arabian Nights before it fell prey to the huge cement high-rise towers. What was in the past a wide canal separating the island from the Nile bank has now been reduced to a narrow isthmus between the island and the corniche over which is a wooden bridge leading to the Nilometre which was built in AD 861.Quranic verses are engraved on its walls. Upon leaving the Nilometre and a little farther to the left you will find Al Manasterli Palace, built in 1851 on the site which was occupied by the Nilometre mosque. The palace is now used as a centre for arts, especially international concerts. To complete the arts space you wil pass by Om Kolthum Museum. You may hear a distant echo of her voice while singing for the Nile sounding in your ears, or Mohammed Abdul Wahhab s voice praising the brown Nile in the Nahawand rhythm:

The Nile is brown, sweet and smart... ... looks wonderful in gold and marble, playing a flute, praising and glorifying God. It is the lifeblood of our country. May God boost it ! She said she hankered for an hour in a felucca on its water. At a distance from where we were I saw a Pigeon flying to a fro from over the water. I stood up and called the felucca man. Could you please come forward and take us. He answered in an angelic voice: Welcome !

The Nile derives its brownness from the flood which carries alluvium , which is the objective correlative to fertility. The eagerly - awaited Nile flood took place in late August every year when the whole city went out to celebrate it. In our childhood that was known as the Nile Completion feast. In the years when the Nile was feared not to flood, Cairo s streets were filled with crowds of supplicants who went out from the streets on the eastern bank led by the Sultan and clergymen of all faiths to offer up a prayer for rain.

As Al-Maqrizi said: In Shawwal 362 AH (July AD 972) the Fatimid Al Moez Lideen Allah prohibited heralding the Nile flood and ordered people to write in this respect to him or to the Commander Jawhar of Cicily . When the Nilometre measured at least 16 cubits, he allowed the announcement. What a wonderful policy! When there was no or slight flood people worried and refrained from selling their crops awaiting a price increase, and those who had enough money stored the crops, either to charge higher prices or keep foodstuffs for their families, thus causing higher levels of prices.

Another custom was practised on the night of 11 June, namely the Drop Night, which took place in the eleventh Coptic month Baouna , in which it was believed a sacred drop of rain fell at night causing the flood. Most of Cairo s inhabitants, especially those who believed in the Drop Night, spent it on the banks of the Nile, and even some women cut moulds of dough representing a family member each hoping to catch the drop, and when the morning dawned they believed the person whom the piece that caught the drop of rain represented to be long-lived, and through it predicted the volume of the Nile flood, as recorded by Edward William Lean in 1834 in his account of the customs of the Egyptians related to the Nile.

Another custom related to the great river was the Nile herald who used to go out giving the good news of the Nile flood, starting with praising Allah, pronouncing peace and blessings on the Noble Prophet, thanking the government and praying for its safety, bringing the glad tidings to the people. As we know, the Pharaohs believed that the flood resulted from some of Isis tears crying for Osiris. Their rituals included sacrificing a bride who was given away to the loving Nile. Many scholars denied this legend and said it was similar today to a doll in the size of a girl thrown away into it, perhaps after the danger of drought had disappeared.

The Nile has witnessed a number of dams which control the course of its life. In 1902 the Aswan Dam was built and a series of barrages was built later: Assiut (1902), Zefta (1903), Isna (1909), Nag Hamadi (1930). In 1958 a loan agreement was signed between Egypt and the Soviet Union, under which the former borrowed 400 million roubles from the latter to finance the first phase of the High Dam. Work started in 1960 and the project was completed ten years later and was formally inaugurated in January 1971. The dam meant hope for a better life, but, like all major projects, was an environmental disaster, like accumulating alluvium which negatively affected the fertility of the Nile, and inundated many Nubian villages. After Nasser s death, projects to remove alluvium in front of the dam stopped.

However, what is worrisome about the Nile today is not more serious than pollution. There are 80 agricultural discharge points along the Nile from Aswan to the Mediterranean. The wastewater contains organic fertilizers, in addition to 59 artificial discharge points along the course itself carrying heavy metals and toxic and organic substances which are harmful to health. The longest river in the world (6825km), and the only river which discharges into the Mediterranean and flows alone for 2700 km in a long journey across the desert with a force that makes it in no need for a tributary to support it, is thus threatened with enormous human dangers.

I wonder: have we forgotten one of our forefathers addressing the Nile saying: Praise be to you, the Nile, which springs from the earth to feed Egypt. You are the light which comes out of the darkness. When you flood, people offer sacrifices to you and slaughter cattle and organize a big festival. The Nile, according to the Ancient Egyptians "is the one which goes on time or comes back on time, brings food and supplies, and joy and delight. Very loved. The master of water which grows green. People compete in his service. It is respected by the gods. Today s Egyptians have to reread history to restore some of the Nile s dignity..

The Capital of destinies:

We go northwards to the Nile in Cairo. Another traditional custom associated with the Nile survived the ages from the Pharaohs days with typical Egyptian variations: Sham El Nasim Day, which coincides with the first day of the Khamasin, on which many people go out to the Cairene gardens, or their remains around or inside the Nile to eat all they can from salted fish, green onions and coloured eggs. I wonder if there is still room in their hearts for the main objective of going out that day, namely breathing fresh air. I doubt it.

Breathing fresh air and enjoying the sight of water were more available when, at the turn of the twentieth century, the Nile cut through Cairo . a gulf that was the first passage receiving the flood waters from an estuary which later disappeared to move in the direction of Al Mouski Street. That gulf which was overlooked by houses on both sides earned the city the name of Venice of the East. But everything has changed. The gulf disappeared and the street was renamed many times, and its ends are only connected with crowds and car bodies and scrap. Not only have the Nile course and tributaries changed, but they were also encroached on by high-rise blocks which competed in ugliness and infringement of the largest portion of green spaces on the Nile s banks or islands.

Today, more than half of the cars in Egypt travel on the streets of Cairo, and half of Egypt s population spend their day in the capital. Unusually, Egypt is a country whose capital is in control of its destinies. That s why people call Cairo Misr (Egypt), a spontaneous real reduction. The Nile bears witness to all that, a silent witness, unbearably draining away Cairo s land, sea and water.

Rodenbeck used to compare Cairo to New York, but today the comparison is unfair, unless we take the American city s skyscrapers to be similar to Cairo s crowded flyovers and roads, hence restoring its standing as possessor of a chaotic network of cement lines, flyovers and tunnels which are crowded with people, vehicles, trains, motorcycles, horse-drawn carts and other means of transport which never stop on both banks of the calm Nile.

With the writer Khalid Yusuf I went to the Marine Club, which is frequented by its members and others. Among its advantage is its closeness to, even touching, the Nile waters from its long terrace. It is also close to a building which after reconstruction will be Museum of the July Revolution Leaders. Facing the British Embassy on the other side, my friend told me that at early in the July free officer s rule, when Abdul Latif EL-Baghdadi, member of the RCC, was appointed Minister of Municipal and Rural Affairs, and the revolution government was keen to introduce a tangible achievement to ordinary citizens and the middle class, it decided to build a new corniche along the Nile, from Shubra Al-Khaimah to Helwan, so that the Nile might become the property of the people rather than of the palaces which lie on the private beaches. The main building which had to be removed and to reroute the road in front of it was the British Embassy in Cairo, which still occupies the same place. But after the garden overlooking the Nile and its anchorage were lost, El Baghdadi requested the Embassy to vacate a part of the garden and anchorage to build the road for public use. When the embassy procrastinated and thus delayed the project, his patience ran out quickly and he sent his bulldozers to pull down the walls and take over the necessary area to complete the corniche, thereby providing a road between the embassy and the river, a road for the people to go down, a symbolic gesture of the return of the Nile to its people. Dusk is falling, and the Nile has almost but finished telling its tales, voicing its complains from the city which it gave love and affection and donated life and so became the largest urban oasis in the desert, but the city returned its love with some disregard affection with negligence, and life with pollution. However, the Nile is still singing, and we still love it.