A Pilgrimage to Agatha Christie’s Nile

Jim Klobuchar Revisits the Great River    When Agatha Christie sipped tea on a hotel terrace above the Nile and concocted her fictional schemes of murder most vile nearly a century ago, the character of the river was an inseparable part of the plot.     The Nile was then, and had been for a few hundred eons, the headstrong goddess of Africa’s mighty and mysterious wild nature. The Nile was the keeper of Africa’s and Egypt’s secrets. As a force of nature, flowing unencumbered for thousands of miles, it was free and glorious, haughty and basically unmanageable.     By the time I first saw the Nile in the 1990s, its impetuous surge through the Sahara in Egypt had been curbed by the massive high dam south of Aswan. The goddess river had been industrialized to bring electricity to millions who’d never known it, and harvests of corn and bananas to hundreds of miles of desert that were once lifeless.     But beyond time and change, it is still the Nile, the nurturer of humanity and a wellspring of our art and science. More than any phenomenon of nature I’ve known in my travels, it links the then-and-now of our earth. Its currents, rising in the jungle and sweeping for 4,000 miles and four months through wilderness and desert to the Mediterranean, reach into the deepest antiquity of Africa. And somehow that history, locked for centuries in tombs and hieroglyphs, becomes relevant in the psyche of the stunned western visitor who might have arrived in the desert a few days before with a head cluttered by high tech gobbledygook.     In the times I’ve seen it and felt the river’s history, it has always stopped me in my tracks. The Nile brings to the traveler more than its power to evoke another age. Sometimes, especially at night when it is kindled by starlight, it is simply a thing of loveliness. You can fall into a trance watching it, trying revert yourself into the time of who? Ramses II?     You think: Dynasties ago, the pharaohs invoked the Nile to seal their immortality. You think further: Thousands of years later the engineers poured mountains of dirt and concrete where pharaohs feared to tread, built the largest man-made lake on earth, flooded the lands of the Nubians--and made the Nile a little more manageable.     But in the heart of a roamer, it remains the irresistible river of the ages. Now that I have seen both the culmination of the Nile where it joins the sea, and its source, where it charges fully-grown out of the very soul of Africa at Lake Victoria, it’s a struggle to leave the scene of the Nile when it is at it’s most alluring. At Aswan, the Nile flows silken out of the cataracts and then beneath the garden terrace where Agatha Christie plotted the lively homicidal conspiracies that were left to the redoubtable Hercule Poirot to unravel without fail.     When I travel in Egypt I usually find a couple of hours in Aswan to make a pilgrimage to the Old Cataract Hotel where Agatha did some of her writing and much of the work for "Death on the Nile." The Sofitel chain now operates the Old Cataract, which is probably a gift to the Christie faithful. It could have been reincarnated as one more museum, which Egypt could probably do without. The old hotel’s darkwooded dignity has been scrupulously preserved. So have the courteous whispers with which a greeter from the staff confronts the visitor. The rest of my small and inquisitive group had left for the day to visit the Philae Temple, which had survived the river’s reconfigurations 30 years ago. We’d cruised for three days on the Nile and we’re leaving Aswan for the Pyramids and Cairo the next day. I’d seen the Philae three times and was politely excused by the others.The old gatekeeper at the entrance of the Old Cataract’s botanical gardens was on to me the first time I appeared there ten years ago. He asked if I was guest at the hotel. I didn’t say yes. What I did was to shrug ambiguously. He took this to mean I wasn’t. If you weren’t a guest you probably had to pay to visit. That was going to take the charm out of the whole episode. I looked at the gatekeeper with my best face of the abandoned waif. The gatekeeper smiled benevolently. He welcomed me to the Old Cataract with a gracious bow and in the years afterward we actually became friends. It became a tradition.     But he was no longer there last week and the young man who replaced him held a small packet of vouchers in his hand, explaining that visitors were welcome to the Old Cataract with a minimal $5 purchase in restaurant fare. So much for tradition. But I thought this was a reasonable tradeoff for the loss of my old equity. The lobby’s historic muted gloom and stuffed furnishings were reverently untouched by the new management. I threaded my way through yards of unoccupied armchairs and made my way to the terrace for spiced tea and the Nile. It was absolutely gorgeous.     The little sailboats, the feluccas, bounced and glided in the distance off Elephantine Island and kids splashed after them in their tiny dinghies, rowing with their hands, trying to catch up.But here beneath the hyacinths and palms, the Nile was quieter and elegant; and it was the kind of interlude you wanted to engrave. To international politicians, Egypt is maddening and disappointing; with the right kind of leadership it might be part of the solution in the deadly turmoil of the Middle East. For the historian, what is important about Egypt ended 2,000 years ago. For the social developer, Egypt’s reluctance to explore the rewards of modernity is depressing. But for the visitor open to different faces and different tongues, it’s a lark to walk through the cluttered local shops of Luxor, to banter with the peddlers and to watch with wide eyes as the daily fast of Ramadan ended with the rays of the sun. Place settings for 12 or 24 suddenly appeared in the streets and the all-night feast was on.     On the last night in Cairo Susan and I walked along the Nile for an hour in the gloaming. So here was the eternal river, flowing beside us in the midst of an enormous city of 20 million. The urban chaos had pretty much subsided for the day. We walked past towering western hotels with glass fronts, beneath graceful mosque domes and minarets, only a block removed from shabby apartment buildings. Wealth and poverty were not far apart; east and west were awkwardly paired and the news from Istanbul fresh and ugly. The constant in all of this was the Nile. It’s hard to resist the temptation to impart human attributes to a force of nature. If the Nile had them, it wasn’t revealing much. How many generations of humanity had it witnessed? Was it sympathetic about the mortality of one more, ours? Was it regretful?     Oddly, we heard a voice. It came from the sidewalk, not the river. "My friend," the horseman said. "I have carriage. You tired." "We’re not, we’re talking to the river," I said brightly. "That mean you really tired," he said. We walked 50 yards further, and called back to the horseman. "You right. We tired."     So we rode a horse-drawn carriage through a multimillion dollar tunnel built for high-speed traffic in the middle of Cairo, and waved to a donkey rider who was doing the same thing. Some of the marvels of Egypt are not so ancient.   Cordially   Jim Klobuchar