Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Between Shores
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
The Nile, the world’s longest river, is bounded by the world’s two longest shorelines. The Nile’s lush banks, port to starboard, are never out of sight.
The sightseeing ship AmaDahlia, departing from Luxor with me on board, casts off, easing into the river’s majestic, meandering waters. The ship becomes as much a part of life on the Nile as Egyptian workers transporting stone blocks to build a queen’s tomb or the humblest subsistence farmer drawing water for his crops.
For most of its length the Nile flows with a spiritual silence, a prayerful peace. Motorboats muffle their motors. Pumping stations irrigate nearby fields in silent mode. Grazing animals talk quietly among themselves.
I slip into a revery about nothing, about everything. About life, about death.
In the far distance, rolling hills and steep bluffs are the color of butter brickle. At the water’s edge, verdant greenery—a micro ecosystem. Ramshackle jetties, luxury condos, rickety row boats, cinder block houses without doors. Farmers till fields or burn off stubble, sending a faint, smoky fragrance across the ship’s bow.
Minarets peek up and over the tree line. The Islamic call to prayer hangs in the air.
Alabaster white egrets accent the greens and tans of the flora. A teenager escorts two matched cows, brown with white rumps, to the water’s edge for an afternoon drink.
In a marshy spot on one side of the Nile, a black water buffalo shares tender grasses and appetizing stalks of reeds with a pair of white horses. The trio looks as happy as I am.
Boys, maybe ten years old, float by on inner tubes lashed together. In the middle of the river, they are soaking up a day of freedom. Little kids as carefree as ducklings are wading, splashing, laughing in the shallows.
A donkey brays on the far shore. Donkeys are much used in Egypt. They work as pack animals, plough fields, carry crops to market, lug household goods, transport families, thresh grain. Low-emission, fossil-free utility vehicles.
In the early morning, as the rising sun kisses the Nile, two fishermen in a rowboat trawl for the morning’s catch. One rows while the other casts a small net off the stern.
I am falling in love with the Nile. The river has a calming, life-affirming quality.
Egypt can be tedious and tiring. Ubiquitous flies, pushy vendors, undrinkable tap water. Smothering, suffocating, sweaty, searing heat. The persistent reminder that human happiness is stolen by human poverty.
The Nile conjures up the fragility of my existence. Literally inches beyond its fertile waters lie the bleak, barren Saharan and Libyan deserts. They are what a drought looks like—a beautiful hellscape. As if the god Osiris is warning me about global warming.
In ancient times, before entering the afterlife, the newly dead were interrogated with a life-defining question, “Have you cared for the Nile?” In today’s jargon, were you a good steward of the Earth? A lightness in my chest, a euphoria, envelops me when I realize that climate science deniers will spend their eternities eternally cursed.
The carcass of dead cow—its stomach half-eaten, half-rotting—floats by.
