Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff
By Rosemary Mahoney
Little, Brown, 273 pages, $23.99
On American Rosemary Mahoney’s first trip to Egypt, her idea about rowing down the Nile River was met with frank disbelief from Egyptians:
“Impossible! You are a woman! The river is big! Not mentioning any crocodile! And dangerous ships! And the fisherman who can become crazy seeing a woman alone!”
But Mahoney, an experienced rower whose spirit is akin to a respectful bulldog’s, refused to abandon the dream. Chugging down the Nile in a luxurious cruise ship, looking at “an ox, palm trees, sandy banks, mirror-still coves, water jugs on women’s heads, pink sails in an archaeological distance” only makes her more determined not merely “to see the Nile River but to sit in the middle of it in my own boat, alone.”
“Down the Nile,” informative and witty, evenhanded and dramatic, is an emphatic antidote to the kind of travel memoir that seems to assume the most compelling thing about any place is that a writer (often an American writer) has arrived to observe it. The author of four earlier books of non-fiction, Mahoney has first-rate writing, reporting and research skills. One of the book’s pleasures is that it draws on historical accounts of travel on the Nile provided by Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale, among others. Those accounts illuminate not only the Nile but an earlier century’s view of Egypt and Egyptians.
Mahoney’s skill is more than matched by her desire to see places, things and people, including herself, clearly. She knows, for example, that she has no desire to die, even peacefully, but is “drawn to doing physically difficult and sometimes even dangerous things. I cannot deny that I like to find myself in sticky situations, with the feeling that I’ve really gone and done it this time, that I’m finally sunk, that there’s no turning back and possibly no tomorrow.”
In her view, though, the Nile, a “consistent, stately river,” that flowed up from the South with prevailing winds from the North, is a river she can navigate, even with its peculiarities — if she can only get her hands on a simple fisherman’s boat. The biggest obstacles, she concludes, are not “political, natural or criminal, but cultural,” attitudes about what women can/should do, mixed at times with a good-intentioned desire to protect her from herself, and some old-fashioned, somewhat generalized lust. In response, Mahoney settles on a “slightly Fabian approach, to move slowly, evade questions, and tell no one exactly what it was that I wanted to do.”
Still, she might not have pulled her 120-mile trek off without an extraordinary young man, Amr Khaled, a serious and sweet boatman she meets while sitting on a pier in the dark in Aswan. She has talked to 15 or 20 men that day about boats and doesn’t expect the stranger approaching her to be any different. But like Mahoney, he’s out of step, even in his own country. In a way that happens with no other man on the journey, Amr becomes her ally, without the sexual or economic overlay that colors virtually every other encounter. He enriches the memoir, just as he does Mahoney’s journey.
There are still complications every step of the way, but ultimately she is exactly where she wants to be, alone with the river, the stunning heat, the crocodiles (at birth, they’re about the size of the mother’s nostril) and the occasional man, who may or may not be more dangerous. She proceeds in a “constant combination of fear and exultation,” often with the feeling while rowing that she is “sitting alone in a sparsely furnished room. The flat blue sky was the ceiling, the light brown river the floor, the omnipresent glare and the two narrow panels of green on either side the walls.”
“Down the Nile” is full of moments by turns unexpected and poignant, and always, there’s that undulating, amazing river.
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Lynna Williams, an essayist and short-story writer, teaches at Emory University.
