Our book today is The Other Nile, a slim, somewhat fey travelogue written in 1986 by Charlie Pye-Smith about his travels down the Nile through Egypt, the Sudan, and Ethiopia. The book is evocative as all travel-writing should be; the author is forever describing things that are being overtaken by other things – his book is full of little and big disappearances, including some brought about by nature:

There is nothing in the annals of European weather that quite prepares you for the khamasin (which means fifty, the number of days the storm is supposed to blow each spring). The sun appeared briefly at dawn – I was smoking a cigarette on our balcony at the Balmoral – but by eight o’clock it had been swallowed up by clouds of dust that rolled over Cairo from the deserts to the south. I ate breakfast and went to sit on the east bank of Zamalek, from where I watched the city on the other side of the river fade into the storm.

Pye-Smith has been writing about conservation issues as long as he’s been describing alien flora and fauna, and although The Other Nile is thickly populated with human characters from all levels of the societies he visits, in some of the most striking moments they’re reduced to incidental agents of contrast, and the natural world is front and center:

It was a lovely walk west from the palace towards Omdurman. Buzzards and kites flapped over the river and pied kingfishers dived from the hull of an upturned boat which rose like a hippo’s back from the murky water. In the trees beside the Grand Hotel ibis were copulating, and uniformed waiters were serving lemon juices to early-morning risers on the terrace.

But the thing that struck me the most about The Other Nile this time around (God only knows what happened to my original paperback of the book from thirty years ago, but I recently found another at my beloved Brattle Bookshop and spent a very enjoyable hour re-reading it) is the way Pye-Smith’s more settled sensibilities have overtaken the raw-adventure roughing it of his earlier days. Time and again in the book, we find him singing hymns of praise to comfort and order – then, and especially now, a slightly rebellious thing for a travel-writer to do:

I spent six days drunk with the loveliness, the lushness of Aswan. Rarely have I felt such happiness as I experienced here – partly a reaction to leaving Sudan; but more an inner celebration of beauty. I saw the pigeon-seller squirting gruel from his mouth into those of his birds; I listened to the shoe-shiners addressing one another as Ya Rayeez! – ‘Oh! Mr President'; I spent hours sitting in cafes and watching egrets circling over the palm-covered islands. I saw everything as though for the first time. I was dazed, almost feverish. Even the simplest and most commonplace sight transfixed me, as the rudest object will transfix an autistic child: a man frying spiced liver; a woman suckling a baby; a policeman directing traffic. And the wonderful indulgence of solitude. For the first time for over a month I had a room of my own. No refugees. No arrests. No quiet despair.

A quiet, clean room of one’s own with a water-basin on the table and a bribable policeman within earshot. These kinds of things can be precious after a month in the country.