Love On The Nile

Fatima Bhutto cruises down the legendary river and explores Egypt’s unique history.

- Fatima Bhutto

For years, I yearned to travel to Egypt so that I could retrace the itinerary of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (minus, one hopes, the death), sailing from Aswan to Luxor. But more importantly, I wanted to see my childhood best friend, Nora. We grew up in Damascus, but, displaced by the war, she lives in Cairo now, and I hadn’t seen her in years. Come and visit, Nora had said to me for years. And last spring, armed with the 19thcentury travel memoirs of the French novelist Gustave Flaubert—because Death on the Nile is a truly unreadable book—and eyes blinded by the past, I finally do.

I have two nights in Cairo and even though my time is brief, it feels as though I have been here before. On my first evening, at Hayda, a Lebanese restaurant along the banks of the Nile, I see Nora for the first time in eight years. We’ve been friends since the first grade, and although, since we last met, she’s gotten married and had two children, I see no trace of time on her. I see her just as she was, just as I left her. We sit outside, the bright lights of the city obscuring the dark river before us, and eat Arabic mezze, gossiping and reminiscing. We don’t talk about Damascus.

Later, as we sit in the car, Nora and her husband ask me what I want to see in Cairo. Tahrir Square, I say. They drive me there, at 2am, and we circle the roundabout where, for so many, the Arab Spring came to life. Tomorrow, on Friday, the square that birthed the Egyptian Revolution will be filled with protestors again. But tonight, it is lit up and empty.