Postcard from the Nile River, Egypt

[Living Egypt.]

Starting from Luxor and ending in Aswan, we spent a few nights on a traditional sailboat called a dahabiya. I can hardly believe it, but it’s absolutely true: we sailed into upper Egypt on the storied Nile River in the company of kingfishers, herons, and egrets. The Nile is still here, every day, even today.

We gazed up at sun-soaked hieroglyphs on temple walls, in narrow tombs, and on obelisks in Luxor, Esna, Edfu, and Kom Umbu. We saw a stone quarry where people once cut away stone and practiced their polishing, carving, and painting to create all the astonishments we saw. Such an effusion of treasure that it began to run together.

I might be selling myself a little short—I did manage to work out the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms and their dynasties; the kings, queens, and the queens who ruled as kings; which animals represented which gods, and so on. But it’s so much. Thousands upon thousands of years of treasure preserved in the arid heat, in many cases looking much the way it did the day it was carved.

This is what is dumbfounding about Egypt. Were we on the Nile for four days, or 4000 days? Or is it possible we sailed it tomorrow? Because tomorrow will be a sunny day on the Nile, just like every day before it. The cycle of flood/sow/harvest will happen every year. The current will flow to Lower Egypt and the wind will blow to Upper Egypt allowing navigation either way, every day, forever.

I’ve never been anywhere so timeless.

The people who live here show signs of living in 2025, of course; mopeds and pickups, for example, crowd in among the livestock at the animal market. People have cell phones. But the men involved in lively negotiations for cows, sheep, donkeys, and camels are conducting business as their fathers and grandfathers did, and their great-great-great-grandfathers, too. Pick a Kingdom; they might be alive in any of them.

A boy carries a tray of small glasses of hot tea to one of the circles of men in heated debate. Just like his elders he’s dressed in a galabiya, and he leans in, pays attention. All the boys and teenagers do. They hover on the edge of the circles, missing nothing but affecting cool indifference—that electric, poignant stance boys everywhere assume when they are watching men.

Nearby, a boy deftly skins a lamb as his father watches. Red blood soaks into brown earth.

I thought I was coming here to see the legendary dead Egypt: messages in stone from long-gone pharaohs, lost to time then decoded once more. They are marvels. It was humbling to stand before them, bearing witness.

But it turned out to be living Egypt, at the animal market and later at the gorgeous vegetable market, where this country is truly timeless. People have carried on along the Nile for centuries beyond counting and, it appears, for centuries to come.

Egypt lives on.