Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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I have just finished reading the latest issue of the Saudi magazine Aramco World, published by the eponymous oil company. The first time I received the magazine a few years ago left me a little puzzled. Why should I receive a magazine published by an oil company? I have nothing to do with the oil industry, nor with Saudi Arabia.

Then I discovered why. Among the articles in this beautifully produced magazine was one on mosques in Cairo by John Feeney. I realised then that he was behind my receipt of the magazine. He was probably sending me a reminder that Egypt will always be in his heart.

In fact Feeney is not the first non-Egyptian who has fallen under Egypt's spell and in whose thoughts my country continued to linger. Alexandria haunted Lawrence Durrell's mind and he produced his Quartet many years after he left Egypt. PH Newby's trilogy of Egypt came out a long time after he gave up his job as lecturer at Cairo University. In fact in 1977 he published his novel Kith, again with Egypt as a background.

I remember when I was cultural attaché in London from 1945 to 1956 that I was approached by Terence Tiller, the head of the BBC Third (Cultural) Programme. Tiller was a well-known poet and for many years taught us poetry in the English Department of Fouad El-Awal (now Cairo) University. He wanted to produce for the BBC a programme on Um Kulthoum. I wrote the scenario and he directed the programme, which met with great success when aired.

Perhaps Constantine Cavafy, the Greek-Alexandrine poet, better expressed how the memory of the country dogged those who lived in it. In his poem "The City" he writes:

The city shall ever follow you

In these same streets you shall wander,

And in the same purlieux you shall roam,

And in the same house you shall grow grey.

There is no ship to take you to other lands, there is no road.

But I should stop wandering and get down to my main subject which is John Feeney and Aramco World. Feeney is a well-known documentary filmmaker, a Canadian citizen whose family is originally, I believe, from New Zealand. In 1967 he came into the office of then Culture Minister Dr Tharwat Okasha with a film he had made of the Nile titled Fountains of the Sun.

It was in 1964 that Feeney with an Egyptian four-man film crew set out from Cairo "to capture on film the very last flood that would come to Egypt". In this last issue of Aramco magazine, Feeney writes about their adventure along 3200 kilometres (2000 miles), starting in Ethiopia. This had never been done before and the cinema scope feature documentary they produced became the only filmed record ever made of this momentous event.

The story of the film reads like an adventure epic. He describes the sultry heat of Aswan where thousands of sweating workers toiled day and night, hurrying to complete six giant tunnels in time to carry the coming flood safely past the then unfinished Aswan High Dam.

The crew moved to Ethiopia, where they experienced "the big rain" and when for three weeks on end they worked in the drenching rain, "diving across mountain plateaus, heading up river further still to the source of the Blue Nile"...which was anything but blue, "plunging from its source in Lake Tana above, down into a deep dark abyss that was the beginning of its great journey to Egypt".

Dr Okasha, myself and members of the Minister's Bureau watched that breathtaking film which ended with these words:

"The waters of the Nile have known Aristotle and Alexander; Anthony, Cleopatra, and great Caesar; Joseph and Moses found beside the river and the Christ child brought into Egypt; Saladin and the Crusades; Arab princes and the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt. All have drunk from the stream, for water is everlasting. Water cannot be created. Water cannot be destroyed. A great river flows from sky to sky, eternally from ocean to ocean."

In fact Feeney drank the waters of the Nile for over 40 years during which he lived in Egypt -- his home away from home. I often visited him in his ground floor flat near mine in Heliopolis. He had a large back garden in which he grew tropical plants as a memento of his Nile adventure. He left Egypt a couple of years back, but judging by this recent article it seems that Egypt is still with him.