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A Sentimental Journey Across Egypt, Libya,
Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Italy XII
Day Nine
(continued from ish 218 during which we're ferried across the river of the dead.)
We awoke on day nine to the sounds of insects buzzing in the field, quietly, almost as if they didn't wish to disturb us. Dew sprung off the mosquito nets as people stretched and yawned awake in the cool dawn light, the waves already lapping the sides of the feluccas away from the shore, our industrious crewmen shoving us afloat again as soon as the sun broke over the horizon. It was a beautiful start to a day on which you could fold up your mosquito net, throw an admiring glance the non-Egyptian sailor girl's way, pitch a pillow up against the side of the deck, lay back and read in the hot Egyptian sun.
Unfortunately, those proceedings were slightly hampered as we all took down our mosquito nets so the guys could get the sails and other related sailing things up and in a position to make the boat move.
One of the members of the tour had been killed in the night by a scorpion attack.
Actually, just kidding. What we did was just what the day was a beautiful start for: we tore down the mosquito nets, threw an admiring glance or two, pitched a pillow up, grabbed a book, and sat back to read in the early morning sun. Shortly after sitting back to read we sat quickly forward again to reach into the bag and grab the sun tan lotion and slather it all over ourselves. I made suggestive eye movements towards the non-Egyptian sailor girl, who was sitting back and enjoying a book of her own, and attempted to make myself look extraordinarily proficient at slathering myself with sun tan lotion, just in case she herself needed services of that sort. After a few minutes of the slurpy sort of noises an abundant amount of lotion makes slapping over pasty white skin, I leant back, casting one last glance towards the non-Egyptian sailor girl that I hoped conveyed some sort of sense of immense satisfaction that I was now impervious to the sun's potentially harmful rays, shimmied against the deck of the boat to a comfortable seating position again and almost lost my book overboard when it slipped and squirted through the copious amount of lotion I'd not managed to spread on some surface or another and looked set to leap headlong into the Nile before I managed to squash it between my body and the side of the boat. Being rather slippery, there were seconds which seemed like, well, really long seconds, like the ones you used to count out when you were a kid and wanted the seconds to last longer. Like when, say, you had an ice cream, and only were allowed to be able to hang on to it for five seconds before passing it on to a sibling (the horror, if you came from a decent sized Irish Catholic family, as you were never seeing that ice cream again...) or friend, and you had to count out the seconds yourself, as you'd not discovered the miracle of stopwatches and watches with second hands and/or counters full-stop, which ruined all the fun, really, and no one ever got nearly as much ice cream as they wanted. Anyway, there were seconds where it seemed like the Nile might gain a rather ungainly new species of slippery and very very rare dolphin.
As it was, I didn't fall over, nor did the book, so we never got to hear the Arabic equivalent of "Man overboard!"
We sailed on, into the sun and the stuff further up the Nile.
We visited Edfu today, pulling up at the dock and getting our hardy sea legs a stretch on dry and extremely sandy land again, just in case we'd forgotten we were in Egypt.
There's a temple at Edfu, split in half, half of it dedicated to Horus, the other half dedicated to a crocodile god. On the crocodile half they had two or three mummified crocodiles, which were surely just some group of boys' idea of fun, much the way finding detailed descriptions of how to melt slugs with salt will be some time in the very far future. Actually, I wasn't quite sure where that thought was taking me. I was standing there in the middle of an Egyptian temple, thinking about slugs and salt. Perhaps I was just a little bit dehydrated.
Before it dawned on us how accustomed we'd gotten in such a short time to not walking on ground that didn't move and gambol and such we were back on the boat, sailing away. This time I took it a little easier on the sun tan lotion and contented myself staring at the corner of the book jacket I could see peeking out of my bag.
disclaimer:
This after a bank holiday wedding and far far too much driving.
Sheffield is quite far, ye know?
But I've a beautiful dance partner.
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