The Winter Vault (3 page)

– When my father worked for Sir Halcrow and Co., Avery told Jean, the company was building the great Scottish dams. And during the war they were consulted for the “bouncing bomb” missions, and tunnelled under London for the post office, and extended Whitehall for Churchill. My father was sent to North Wales to assess the Manod slate quarry to ensure it was sound enough to shelter paintings from the National Gallery. That's where he'd learned the sizes of Welsh slate: wide and narrow ladies, duchesses and small duchesses, empresses, marchionesses, and broad countesses. He loved the names of things: joists, trusses, sole plates, studs, footing, bearers, lintels, and spars.

– They could be plant names, said Jean. The flowering lintel, the spar nettle, the black-eyed joist …

– My father's first job, when he was fifteen, said Avery, was at Lamson Pneumatic Tubes. Ever since I can remember, we shared an affection for pneumatic tubes: ingenious, practical, inexplicably humorous. We loved the idea of an elegant, handwritten note, perhaps a love letter, stuffed into a cylinder and then shot through a tube of compressed air at thirty-five miles an hour or sucked up by a vacuum at the other end like liquid through a straw. My father believed this was the most unjustly neglected technology of the century, and we were continually thinking up new uses for pneumatic tube systems – it was a game he started with me in his letters during the war and we never stopped playing it. He drew maps of London criss-crossed with hundreds of miles of underground pneumatics – little trains of capsule-cars for public transportation; groceries delivered direct from shops to private residences, swooshed right into the kitchen icebox; flowers shot directly from the florist into the vase on one's piano; delivery of medicines to hospitals and convalescent homes; pneumatic school buses, pneumatic amusement rides, pneumatically operated brass bands …

My father was a splendid draughtsman, Avery continued. I have never known anyone who could draw machinery as he did. He pushed aside his plate at the supper table and I'd watch him sketch inner workings with fine clear lines. Suddenly the paper came alive and each part took its place in a moving, working mechanism.

It was over a draughtsman's drawing that my parents met. My mother was sitting across from him on a train. He had a drawing tablet open across his bony knees and she praised his work. Avery sat up in their bed below deck, very straight, and jostled against Jean as if they were in a railway compartment. ‘… Thank you,’ said my father, ‘though I must tell you, it's not the human circulatory system, it's a high-pressure vacuum engine. Though perhaps,’ he added politely, ‘it seems like a heart when viewed upside down.’ He turned the drawing around and looked. ‘Yes, I see,’ he said. ‘And now so do I,’ said my mother. ‘It's beautiful,’ she added. ‘Yes,’ said my father, ‘a well-designed engine is a thing of exceptional beauty.’ My mother reports that he then examined her more closely, searched her face. ‘Well, yes,’ said my mother, ‘but what I mean is the drawing itself, the pressures and flow of the pencil.’ ‘Ah,’ said my father, blushing. ‘Thank you.’

– Wait! said Jean, to whom one of the great, unexpected pleasures of her marriage was this free speech before sleep. Did your father really blush?

– Oh, yes, said Avery. My father was a mechanism for blushing.

The palm tree, Jean discovered, bears two fruits – not only dates, but also shade. Everywhere in Nubia they are tended, but in Argin and Dibeira, in Ashkeit and Degheim, the date palms grow so thick along the banks of the river that the Nile disappears. The shade there is green and the wind makes a fan of the entire tree. Even the south wind gathers there to cool itself among the leaves of the crown.

The Bartamouda palm gives the sweetest fruit, pouches bursting with brown liqueur, plump flesh with a tiny stone, which the tongue finds like a woman's jewel as the sweetness fills one's mouth. Gondeila dates, by far the largest but less sweet, just right for syrup. The Barakawi, barely sweet at all and therefore somehow more satisfying to eat by the handful. And the Gaw, thin flesh barely covering its bulbous stone, perfectly adequate for vinegar and
araki
gin.

More than half the palm trees in the Wadi Halfa district were Gaw, immense
huras
, ancient groves growing around a single mother, reproducing for generations. At pollination time, the Nubians climbed, the graceful trunk between their legs, and cut the male flower in the bud. Then the buds were ground to powder and small amounts were wrapped in a twist of paper. As each female flower opened, the climber would again ascend, his cap brimming with paper twists of pollen that would be broken over the open flowers. Any flowers left unpollinated grew a tiny date, a little fish,
sis
, and were fed to the animals.

When Jean and Avery first arrived in Egypt, the dates were still green, but soon the fruit drooped in heavy yellow-and-crimson clusters. By August the crop had grown dark and wrinkled with ripeness and then grew darker still. When at last the fruit was shrivelling on the branch, it was quickly harvested, its sweetness reaching its deepest concentration. Men climbed, swung their scythes, and the bunches fell to the ground, where women and children gathered the fruit in sacks and baskets. Bunch after bunch rained down, sackful after sackful was carried back to the village and spread out to dry.

Shares in date trees were sold, mortgaged, given as wedding gifts and dowries. Not only the fruit but the core of fallen trunks,
golgol
, was eaten. The fruit was sold at market, used for jam and spirits, for cakes, as a special porridge for women in labour. The leaves were woven into rope for the waterwheel, the
sagiya
, for rugs and baskets; they were used as sponges for bathing, as fodder and fuel. Stems were fashioned into brooms. The branches were used for roofs and lintels, for furniture and crates, for coffins and grave markers. And when the train bearing the last inhabitants of Nubia left Wadi Halfa just before the inundation, its engine was decorated with the leaves and branches of the date palms that would soon drown. One could almost have believed a forest had risen from the ground and was making its way across the desert if it weren't for the wailing of the train whistle, a sound unmistakably human.

How much of this earth is flesh?

This is not meant metaphorically. How many humans have been “committed to earth”? From when do we begin to count the dead – from the emergence of
Homo erectus
, or
Homo habilis
, or
Homo sapiens?
From the earliest graves we are certain of, the elaborate grave in Sangir or the resting place of Mungo Man in New South Wales, interred forty thousand years ago? An answer requires anthropologists, paleopathologists, paleontologists, biologists, epidemiologists, geographers … How many were the early populations and when exactly began the generations? Shall we begin to estimate from before the last ice age – though there is very little human record – or shall we begin to estimate with Cro-Magnon man, a period from which we have inherited a wealth of archaeological evidence but of course no statistical data. Or, for the sake of statistical “certainty” alone, shall we begin to count the dead from about two centuries ago, when the first census records were kept?

Posed as a question, the problem is too elusive; perhaps it must remain a statement: how much of this earth is flesh.

For many days the great Pharaoh Ramses' men had journeyed upstream, past the foaming gorge of the Second Cataract where every sailor gives thanks for his passage. Then, in the peace where so few before them had travelled, their sail cutting the sky like the blade of a sundial, suddenly they saw the high cliffs of Abu Simbel that caused them to turn to shore. There they waited until dawn, when, following the angle of sunlight up the steep rock with a line of white paint, they marked the place of incision, the place they would open the stone to make way for the sun.

These men built two temples, the immense temple of Ramses and a smaller temple honouring Neferteri, his wife. They conceived the temple's epic proportions, its painted sanctuaries and hallways of statuary, and the four colossi of the facade, each Ramses weighing more than twelve hundred tonnes and, sitting, hands on his knees, more than twenty metres high. They carved the temple's inner chamber sixty metres into the cliff. In mid-October and in mid-February, they steered the sun to pierce this deepest chamber, illuminating the faces of the gods.

Like Ramses' engineers more than thirty centuries before, President Nasser's engineers drew a white line on the banks of the Nile to mark where his monument, the Aswan High Dam, would be built. Egyptian advisers strongly opposed the project, in favour of canals to link African lakes and a reservoir at Wadi Rajan – already a natural basin. But Nasser would not be dissuaded. In October 1958, after Britain declined to support the dam, in retaliation after the Suez conflict, Nasser signed an agreement with the Soviet Union to provide plans, labour, and machinery.

From the moment the Soviets brought their excavators to the desert at Aswan, the land itself rebelled. The sharp desert granite ripped the Soviet tires to strips, the drillheads and teeth of their diggers were ground down and blunted, the gears of their trucks could not endure the steep slopes, and within a single day in the river, the cotton-lined Soviet tires rotted to scraps. Even the great Ulanshev earth-moving machine – the pride of the Soviet engineers – which could hold six tonnes in its scoop and fill a twenty-five-tonne truck in two minutes, broke down continually, and each time they had to wait for parts to arrive from the Soviet Union; until, at last, defeated by the river that had so long been their ally, the Egyptians ordered Bucyrus machinery and Dunlop tires from Britain.

Every afternoon, a twenty-tonne pimento of dynamite was stuffed into each of twelve boreholes and exploded at 3 p.m. The shudder reverberated for thousands of kilometres. And every dusk, the instant the deplorable sun sank behind the hill, an army of men – eighteen thousand Soviet and thirty-four thousand Egyptian labourers – were loosed upon the site to recommence the cutting of the diversion channel. The banks of the river overflowed with shouting men, pounding machinery, shrieking drills, and excavators tearing into the ground. Only the Nile was mute.

At the ceremony to mark the first diversion of the Nile, Nasser had stood at the edge of the span, the captain of the ship, and beside him Khrushchev, the admiral. At the pressing of a button, the inundation began. Labourers clung to the sheer, man-made cliff, ants climbing aboard an ocean liner, slipping and falling into the river.

The dam would make a gash so deep and long that the land would never recover. The water would pool, a blood blister of a lake. The wound would become infected – bilharzia, malaria – and in the new towns, modern loneliness and decay of every sort. Sooner than anyone would expect, the fish would begin dying of thirst.

Hundreds of thousands of years before Nasser had ordered the building of the High Dam, or before Ramses had commanded his likeness to be sculpted at Abu Simbel, these cliffs on the Nile, in the heart of Nubia, had been considered sacred. On the stone summit high above the river, another likeness had been carved: a single prehistoric human footprint. Lake Nasser would melt away this holy ground.