124 GOURMET TRAVELLER
N
o one knows why it’s called the Nile.
In the beginning it was just called the
river because there was no other, and
it was everything. The gift the Nile
gave the world, wrote Herodotus,
is called Egypt.
There are ways other than the Nile to see Egypt,
but to make even a little bit of sense of it the river is
the place to start. Take a look at Egypt from space: the
Nile flows right through the middle of it, life slashing
through the sterile desert, blooming into the delta
like a lotus at the Mediterranean. Take a look at Egypt
from the water: the blue-green-yellow of the river, the
lush grass of its banks giving way to dense palms that
surrender in turn to the dunes, the sky pink and gold
above the incandescent desert.
Flooding each year, the river brought the water
and silt that gave Egypt not just sustenance, but
wealth and power. Ancient Egypt took its reference
points accordingly; what we now call the south
was Upper Egypt, the place from which the waters
flowed, towards Lower Egypt, where the river met the
Mediterranean. Temples were built on the east side of
the river, where the sun rose, while the western banks,
where it set, were reserved for tombs and monuments
to the afterlife. “We don’t say ‘he died’,” a Cairene
friend tells me, “we say ‘he left for the west’.”
Egypt has a way of broadening one’s metaphysical
education. The physical scale of everything plays a part.
The great religious and royal monuments are builtalong lines so much larger than human that words such
as colossal, epic and, well, monumental, just aren’t up
to the task of describing their mind-bending bigness.
Then there’s the question of that other dimension:
time. The greatest of the pyramids at Giza has
been around longer than Moses, Jesus, Buddha
and Mohammed. It was already very, very old in
antiquity. Cleopatra VII, she of the asses’ milk, asp
and distinctive eyeliner, lived closer to now, to our
day of smartphones and space flight, than she did
to the laying of the pyramid’s foundation.T
o follow the Nile as it flows through Egypt,
Abu Simbel is the place to start. Today its two
temples stand on the banks of Lake Nasser,
the reservoir that was formed when the Nile
was dammed, beginning in 1964. When they were built,
around 1200 BC, they marked the southernmost point
of the empire and were designed to inspire awe. Cut
directly into the rock of two hillsides, they are dedicated
to the gods Amun, Ra and Ptah, but their most striking
feature is four giant statues of Rameses II. He is seated
and smiling faintly in each, but the scale sends a clear
message: this is not an empire to be trifled with.