The Winter Vault Read online

  Since the band of naturally fertile, silt-rich soil along the riverbank was only a few metres wide, for thousands of years Nubians have worked their eskalays. The eskalay, Avery had told Jean, holding his lamp close to an illustration in his journal that lay open beside him on their bed on the river, is the great machine of the desert. Its motor is a yoke of bulls. Countless generations of cattle have plodded tight circles in the sand to draw the river, waterbowl by waterbowl, into fields of chickpea and barley.

  Farming land was so limited that shares were passed down, single feddans divided and subdivided through generations so many times that, when compensation was to be allocated because of the dam, exasperated clerks found themselves dealing with shares as small as half a square metre. The divisions were so minute and the deeds of ownership so complicated – every single official landowner having died many centuries before – that any hope of straightforward compensation was abandoned. Instead, the Nubian way had to be respected – co-ownership in a communal economy.

  In Nubia, families distribute the fruit of the palm among themselves, with shared responsibility for the care of the tree. Cows are the property of a collective of four, each owning a leg, and these shares can be sold and traded. An animal can be rented. The one who feeds and shelters the cow has a right to its milk and calves. Each owner has to provide food and shelter when the animal works his eskalay. Division but not divisiveness, for that would literally kill the enterprise.

  Before the building of the High Dam at Aswan in the 1960s, a small dam was constructed, and its height was raised twice – ten, then twenty years later, the villages of lower Nubia, the fertile islands, and the date forests were drowned. Each time, the villagers moved to higher ground to rebuild. And so began the labour migration of Nubian men to Cairo, Khartoum, London. The women, with their long, loosely woven black gargaras trailing the sand, erasing their footprints, took over the harvesting and marketing of the crops. They pollinated the date palms, cared for their family's property, and tended the livestock. Men returned from the city to be married, to attend funerals, to claim their share of the harvest. And some returned in 1964 to join their families when, with hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cement and steel, and millions of rivets, a lake was built in the desert. Nubia in its entirety – one hundred and twenty thousand villagers, their homes, land, and meticulously tended ancient groves, and many hundreds of archaeological sites – vanished. Even a river can drown; vanished too, under the waters of Lake Nasser, was the Nubians' river, their Nile, which had flowed through every ritual of their daily life, had guided their philosophical thought, and had blessed the birth of every Nubian child for more than five thousand years.

  In the weeks before the forced emigration, men who returned from labour exile walked through their villages to homes they had not seen in twenty, forty, fifty years. A woman, suddenly young and then just as suddenly old again, looked at the face of a husband barely seen since she was a girl, and children, now middle-aged, looked upon fathers for the first time. For more than three hundred kilometres, the river absorbed such cries and silences, the shock not of death but of life, as men, living ghosts, returned to look upon their birthplace for the last time.

  The workers at Abu Simbel fell into small colonies: the Italian stonecutters – the marmisti – who could smell faults in the stone at twenty paces; the Egyptian and European engineers; the cooks and technicians; the Egyptian and Nubian labourers; and all the spouses and children. Avery walked through the site and saw a hundred problems and a hundred singular solutions. He saw the clever adaptations made by workers who could not wait three months for replacement parts to arrive from Europe. It gave him a deep pleasure, his father's pleasure, to notice the wire and spring borrowed from another machine, transplanted with the fraternity of an organ donor.

  When Avery first saw the Bucyrus machines squatting in the desert at Abu Simbel – the pumps, refrigerators, and generators – it was almost an ache he felt, for these were the machines his father had loved best. William Escher had put great stock in Ruston-Bucyrus reliability – in their famous excavators and in their machines for compressing, ventilating, pumping, winching, heating, freezing, illuminating … He'd had a boy's love of heavy machinery and favoured Bucyrus above all because of their machines born of the Second World War: midget submarines, flameproof locomotives, mine sweepers, landing craft, patrol boats, the Mathilda 400 and Cavalier 220 tanks, the 600 Bren Gun Carriers, and the tunnelling machine commissioned by Winston Churchill and constructed to his personal specifications, a box with a six-foot steel plough in front and a conveyor system in back, designed to dig trenches at the rate of three miles an hour.

  – 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. Everywher
e 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.

  In the evenings, those first months in Egypt, Avery and Jean often sat together in the hills above the camp, looking out upon what was as yet, to Jean, a scene of indecipherable activity. She felt that if the desert were plunged into darkness, all human presence would also instantly dis appear, as if the incessant motion of the camp was activated by the generators themselves, the men in their service and not the other way around.

  There had been many schemes proposed for rescuing the temples at Abu Simbel from the r
ising waters of the Aswan High Dam. It was understood, especially in the reality of post-war demolishment, that Abu Simbel must be saved.

  The French had suggested building another dam, of rock and sand, to protect the temples from the reservoir that would form around them, but such a structure would require constant pumping and there would always be a danger of seepage. The Italians recommended the temples be extracted from the cliff and lifted in their entirety on gargantuan jacks capable of hoisting three hundred thousand tonnes. The Americans had advised floating the temples on two rafts, to higher ground. The British and the Poles thought it best to leave the temples where they were and construct a vast underwater viewing room around them, made of concrete and fitted with elevators.

  At last, with no time left to prevaricate, the dismantling of Abu Simbel, block by block, and its re-erection sixty metres higher, had been chosen as the “solution of despair.” It was believed that every block in three would crumble.

  An international campaign was launched. Across the globe, children burgled their piggy banks and schools collected bags of loose change to save Abu Simbel and the other monuments of Nubia. When envelopes were torn open at the desks of UNESCO, coins from every country jangled to the floor. A woman in Bordeaux abstained from dinner for a year in the hope that her grandchildren might someday see the rescued temples, a man sold his stamp collection, students donated their earnings from paper routes, dog-washing, and snow-shovelling. Universities organized expeditions and sent hundreds of archaeologists, engineers, and photographers into the desert.

  When Jean and Avery arrived at Abu Simbel in March 1964 for the vibrograph testing, which would determine more discriminately the fragility of the stone and the methods of cutting, the first task was already underway: the building of the immense cofferdam and its elaborate drainage system – 380,000 cubic metres of rock and sand, and a wall of 2,800 metric tonnes of steel sheeting – to keep Ramses' feet dry. Diversion tunnels and deep clefts lowered the water table, so the river would not probe its way into the soft sandstone of the temples. The cofferdam was conceived and constructed quickly, just in time. In November, Avery watched the water tempting the lip of the barrier. It was easy to imagine the colossi melting, toe by toe, the water slowly dissolving each muscular calf and thigh, and the Pharaoh's impassive courage as the Nile, his Nile, took him to her.