Adrift on the Nile

He came out to the street clearheaded for the first time. He felt as far as could be from the laughter, the reveries and apparitions of the pipe. The road stretched out ahead of him, bordered on both sides by tall trees. The tops of the trees bowed to meet one another, like a frown on the edge of his field of vision. For the first time he saw the houseboats; large and small, they were moored all along a shore made pretty by the variety of the gardens on the bank.

It was extraordinary. Each houseboat had its own personality, color, youth--or old age; its own human faces appearing at the windows. And the most astonishing thing, a date palm laden with yellow dates. He would not have believed that there was a single date palm on the bank. There were a great number of trees of different sizes and shapes and blossoms. He did not know their names, or anything about them.

A caravan of camels passed him. There was a man driving them. He wondered where they had come from, and where they were going. An intimation as strong as certainty stole into his mind: that he was sliding into a depression filled with tension and pain. There was a sign over the door of one of the houseboats: "Furnished Rooms to Let." So here was an empty flat, and a woman as well, not so old or unattractive either, looking in his direction from the upper floor of the houseboat. Think of all the possibilities awaiting a new, bachelor tenant. But how on earth did the sober man get through the day? There was a tree in his way; the huge, sturdy trunk stopped him short. He looked up at the branches spreading out in the breeze, a huge dome, the top lost in the thin, low clouds of the morning. Then he turned once more to the aged trunk, letting his gaze wander down to the splayed gray roots driving deep into the earth beneath the pavement like talons, as if the tree were in a rigid frenzy of defiance and pain. A patch of bark had been eaten away to reveal pale yellow inner wood, hollowed in the shape of a Gothic arch. Directly in front of him, as tall as he was, it invited him to go in. The great life span of that tree--that one alone--would be enough to convince anyone, even those who did not need to be convinced, that plants were beings with no intelligence. He walked on, examining everything around him, wondering amazed whether the color of existence was red or yellow, and whether the bark of a tree was like a dead man's skin--but when did I see the skin of a dead man? Now he was sure that there was something in his way, challenging, resisting, causing pain. He realized suddenly that he had not shaved. And that when he had been smoking he never forgot to shave. And that made matters even more complicated. A voice asked him the time, but he did not bother to answer it, and paid no attention. He continued sluggishly on, catching sight of a morning newspaper seller, and passing him by.

He had not read a newspaper for a long time; he knew nothing of current events except what he picked up from his friends' delirious commentaries that merged into the endless babble of the smoking party. Who were the ministers? What were the policies? How were things going? But who cares! As long as you can walk along a deserted street without a thug attacking you, as long as Amm Abduh brings you the good stuff every evening, as long as there is plenty of milk in the refrigerator, then things must be going well. As for the agonies of sobriety, car accidents, the cryptic conversations of the night, he still did not know who was responsible for those affairs.