Issue No. 595
Culture
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18 - 24 July 2002 Issue No. 595 Culture |
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Sticks and stones
There is the way the crow flies and then there is another way, the way that people who do not have wings go and it is, generally, somewhat longer. Quite why crows, of all birds, seem to know exactly where they are going and go straight there, without diversion, no one has ever bothered to explain, even though among my circle of acquaintance I can count at least one ornithologist. Yet crows have the kind of reputation that it is impossible to shake off: apparently they never think oh, there's a nice tree, just down there on the left, I'll go and perch on that and find a worm to eat. They never see an interesting looking building emerging from the morning mists and think, now what's that, maybe it's worth a peek. No, they just get on with going straight where they are going, and having got there do whatever crows do, and then go somewhere else by the shortest of all possible routes. Which means that on the whole they probably miss a lot.
For the wingless traveller, particularly the wingless traveller dependent on public transport, the most direct route is often not an option. It certainly wasn't on the cards the bright and breezy day I set out for Rashid, sometimes known as Rosetta, a town which, somewhat unfairly, is most celebrated for a stone now housed in the British Museum. These days, though, Rashid is receiving some unaccustomed, if deserved, attention, having been placed on one of the itineraries of that oddly-named project, the Museum Without Frontiers, an initiative that, as all the promotional literature it has produced repeats, is intended to display architectural monuments in situ -- i.e. outside the confines of the museum. The leaflets do not elucidate on how you could fit, say, Sultan Hassan into a museum in the first place, and merrily skip over how major architectural monuments can be viewed anywhere other than in situ, but such is the way of promotional literature. You have to rubberise a major portion of your perceptual grid when reading otherwise there is the constant danger of becoming very annoyed by the sheer illogicality of it all.
But back to Rashid. The journey involved a train from Cairo to Alexandria and then an overnight stay. The following morning was filled with discussions on how best to proceed. At the railway station a train was recommended, though not a direct train, not a train that would satisfy a self-respecting crow. At the hotel a microbus was the preferred option, and since the departure point of the latter was just a few hundred yards down the Corniche from the hotel it was on a microbus that the second leg of the journey was made.
There is a new road between Alexandria and Rashid, not quite finished but open to the public. It cuts through acres and acres of palm groves, underplanted with rice, with neither sight nor sound of habitation. It is an eerily impressive landscape: for kilometre after kilometre rows of regularly planted trees emerge from a flat, virulently green sea of mid summer rice shoots. It is repetitive, mesmeric, and it takes some time to realise what is strange about it. There are no bill-boards by the road. There is no advertising anywhere. There are no rest-houses or stopping points or heaps of uncollected rubbish such places generate. There aren't any houses. This is rural countryside as countryside is always imagined -- pristine, clean, uncluttered by detritus -- and that it should come as a surprise, that it should take so long before you register what is different about it, is something of a tragedy. It will not remain so for long. Within a year it will be as messy as any other highway. Travel it while you can.
Arrival in Rashid is announced by the smell of burning: the palm trees are suddenly charred and then you are at the bus station. It is an unpaved square, desultory, dust-laden, fly-blown. But do not lose heart. It is the perfect introduction to a fabulously two-dimensional townscape.
If Rashid seems somehow familiar it is because it has been encountered before, in any number of art house movies from the mid- 1970s to the mid-1980s. If permits to film in Egypt were easier to procure, had location scouts been doing their jobs properly, it would have been host to any number of directors, from Wim Wenders on. As it is, they had to make do with paler imitations, though not so pale as to be unrecognisable. But make no mistake -- this is the real thing.
Plough on towards the river, down the fish market street, picking your way through stalls piled high with fish so fresh they are still wriggling and the entrails of the already purchased liberally strewn across the ground. The town squats, without much ceremony, along the western bank of its particular branch of the Nile. There are two tarmacadam roads, one of which has just petered out in the square, the second of which will be encountered once you reach the river. Between the two the pedestrian is forced to navigate a route through winding, narrow alleyways that involves passing many of the 18th century Ottoman houses that are one of the features of the place. The bulk of these houses were purchased by the government in 1952 though they are only now being restored. And they are as two- dimensional as the rest of the town, picture postcard images somehow stranded in a municipality where rubbish collection is not high on the agenda. It is all wonderfully incongruous.
Despite the efforts of Museum Without Frontiers there are few visitors here and fewer places to stay. There is not a franchise in sight: fast food, faster than its more conventional counterpart and much, much better, comprises freshly grilled sardines. Dinner at the town's one restaurant -- or the only restaurant I found -- involves sitting on the bank of the river in a curtained off space and eating yet more fish. Recreation facilities are restricted to the hiring of bicycles, the criss-crossing of the river in ferries, or playing back-gammon in cafés. Unless you are in a particularly bad-mood, for all of the above are likely to turn into quite social pursuits, there is no need to bring along a book.
And then there is the journey back. A microbus to Damanhour, through a landscape just as pristine as that through which one approached and that, if anything, is even more easily identifiable as countryside. Much of the Delta, from the main roads at least, resembles the backyard mess of the neighbours from hell. Not here, though. This is countryside that does not allow for even the possibility of cultural clash. Landscape traditions are odd things, and this screams for watercolours. Another incongruity. Another case of an improbable prettiness.
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