It is easy to feel a little bit jealous of Rosemary Mahoney, who seems to exist only for herself. The almost 40-year-old author and scholar’s decision to travel to Egypt to row a fisherman’s skiff down the Nile River all on her own seems exhilarating and enchanting, a whimsical fantasy filled with the promise of an almost childlike abandon, one most of us would never have the gumption to entertain.
Mahoney seems to emerge almost mystically for us out of a pristine bubble. She tells us almost nothing about her life or loves or heartache. She remains unmarked, and strangely pure, and it is sometimes difficult to ascertain what she might be searching for. What is evident throughout her captivating narrative is that we are in the presence of a ferociously independent and restless spirit, someone who cherishes nature and history and travel and adventure, and who bristles at the restrictions placed on women all around the globe.
When Mahoney traveled to Egypt a few years back, she fell in love with it, but was frustrated at the limitations imposed upon her by traveling with a tourist group under the close supervision of the Egyptian authorities. Once home again in Rhode Island, where she would spend hours rowing on Narragansett Bay, she began to think about going back, this time alone.
Mahoney began to research the diaries and journals and private letters of luminaries who had journeyed to Egypt during the last two centuries after it was finally opened to foreign travelers, after almost 1,000 years of closed-off Arab rule. Her book is littered with fascinating digressions of many of them: Napoleon’s famous trek in 1798; Florence Nightingale; Gustave Flaubert; Winston Churchill. Nightingale became mesmerized by the ancient beauty of the temples lining the banks of the Nile. Flaubert was spellbound by the seductiveness of the women whose exquisite beauty he describes at great length.
All of the tourists seemed to find something in Egypt that liberated them, cleared their minds and allowed them to think about the possibilities of their own reinvention.
But Mahoney remains coy about her most private yearnings. We do learn about her love of solitude, her penchant for rowing and her distaste for the peculiar combination of vulgarity and repression she finds among many of the Egyptian men. We can sense her exasperation with the silliness and complacency of many of the women she meets as well, who Mahoney seems to view as pathetic lost children who are unaware they are being punished.
Mahoney is a strange and somewhat awkward traveler. As she attempts to surmount the legal, cultural and bureaucratic red tape involved in securing her own row boat in order to travel down the Nile, she is continually thwarted. Women in Egypt don’t do anything alone, and Mahoney has an uphill battle that is sometimes made more difficult by her own xenophobia.
Mahoney finds a like-minded soul, an Egyptian man who is willing to help her get her boat and sneak her past the authorities. Finally free and secure in her skiff on the Nile, she joyously recounts, “Down the middle of the river I rowed, feeling that I was not floating but flying. No one shouted at me because there was no one there to see me. The river was delightfully empty. This was not like any other body of water I had rowed on. I half expected the water to speak or a naked arm to reach up out of the water to grab my oar.”
But the reader can’t help but wonder if the breathless euphoria of her solitude and self-mastery and her glorification of it will really be enough to sustain her. Perhaps some of her answers still can be found on dry land.
Elaine Margolin is a freelance book reviewer and essayist in Hewlett, N.Y.
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NONFICTION
Down
the Nile
Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff
By Rosemary Mahoney
$23.99
