Journey Up the Nile沿尼罗河而上.docxVIP

Journey Up the Nile Tombs and temples of ancient Egypt follow the Nile well into Sudan. Driving southward from Cairo into the valley, I entered a landscape that owed little to the present era. For the next 1,800 miles the thin blue ribbon of the Nile, flowing slowly north, unwound over brown soil and green fields, some only a few yards wide, others as broad as an Iowa cornfield. At the edge of the fields, rising in dramatic hills or stretching flat to the horizon, lay the brown barren deserts. I had the illusion that I was driving through one immensely long, narrow farm. The villages and towns were usually perched on the edge, so as not to waste arable soil and because there was a need, before the High Dam tamed the Nile, to live beyond the reach of the annual floods. The road followed the course of the Nile, now passing through the fields, now drawing a black line separating them from the desert. At EI Awamia, just south of Luxor, I watched farmers harvest sugarcane. A village elder, Amin Ibrahim, invited me into his house and gave me a cheerier view of the effects of the Aswan High Dam than I had heard before. “Before the dam we were obsessed with the flood — would it be too high or too low? said Amin. Like all the generations of my family back to the pharaohs, I used to plant my crops and never know if I would harvest. Now there is no fear; we know there will be water, and how much there will be. And we can get three crops a year instead of one. There is electricity in our houses and to run pumps, so we do not have to work the shaduf. We used to go to the house of a rich man to hear the radio. Now, since we grow crops all year, we buy our own radios and even televisions. Judiciously, Amin conceded that there was another, less happy, side to the story:“The land is poorer, because the mud that used to come with the Nile flood has stopped. We must use fertilizers that cost a lot of money. Even so, the crops are less.” He led me through fields near his hous