The Gift of the Nile by Chris Vourlias
The marvelous Worldhum website features this article by Chris Vourlias that will definitely whet your appetite for visiting this beautiful country.
Chris’ article is entitled “The Gift Of The Nile – Egypt’s Great River”.
For 5,000 years, the slow, timeless rhythms of Egypt’s great river have enthralled everyone from Mark Antony to Aunt Phyllis. Chris Vourlias takes a felucca trip to see if he, too, can feel the magic.
We’ve been bumping along a rocky road for half an hour. On both sides of us, men hunched beneath the harsh sun work a quilted patchwork of emerald fields. They wipe their soiled hands on their galabiya robes and pause now and then: stretching, blinking at the sky, watching the quizzical Westerners waving and clattering by. A donkey clops past, tugging a cart piled high with sugarcane; a mischievous kid perched on top grins as if he’s riding a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. He flashes a thumbs-up, his bare feet dangling off the side, and gives his luckless mule a few hearty whacks with a stick. It whinnies and tosses its head and bucks its front legs, breaking into a trot as it’s swallowed by the mid-day heat.
Captain Mohamed has promised us the spectacle of the biggest camel market in Egypt, a riot of Arabian bargain-hunting in the dusty no-man’s land north of Aswan. It’s a chance to see something different after two lazy afternoons drifting along the Nile. He’s moored the felucca between two wooden fishing boats and flagged down a passing truck, which belches a few discouraging puffs of exhaust before wheezing down the road.
At the market men in turbans haggle hard; the camels look on, nonplussed and serene in a way that only camels can be. A guide points out the choicest ones: their humps proud, their flanks padded with muscular flesh. We watch a few get loaded onto flat-bed trucks. They wail and moan and hold their ground; a couple of guys take running starts and slam into their haunches. One gruff buyer punches a fine-looking steed in the neck, winding up for roundhouses that could floor a heavyweight. There’s a murmur of approval as the beast finally gives in, its legs roughly taken out from under it. Nearby old men sit Indian-style in the shade, drinking mint tea and lazily swatting away the flies.
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