| Fashion News Rhode Island |
Alone on the eternal Nile
Her plan to row solo down the Nile was met with disbelief. Rosemary Mahoney describes the freedom and fears she encountered on her
great river adventure
Rosemary Mahoney
The Observer, Sunday December 16 2007
The Nile near Aswan is wide and slow. Photograph: Tibor Bognár/Corbis
Last summer, online literary magazine bookslut.com, invited me to respond to their standard author questionnaire. One question was:
'Have you ever written a sex scene?' I answered that in five books of non-fiction I had not had occasion to write sex scenes - unless one
would consider, 'the peddler's hand landed roughly on my breast'. But I did tell them that in my latest book, Down the Nile; Alone in a
Fisherman's Skiff, there happens to be a tremendous amount of talk about sex.
Down the Nile is an account of a trip I made to Egypt with the intention of buying a boat and rowing alone some 125 miles from Aswan
to Qena in the Upper Nile Valley. I grew up in New England at the edge of the Atlantic and have for many years been an avid rower. I've
rowed in various places, including the Ganges in India, the River Shannon in Ireland, and the Sea of Galilee.
Most often, though, I've rowed on Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. This bay is big, subject to tidal fluctuations, violent weather, large
waves, sharp-toothed dogfish and toxic waste, and is peppered with enormous shipping tankers and careering speedboats. I cannot
imagine a more hazardous arena for the devoted daily rower.
The Egyptian Nile, though it does have its own particular hazards, is subject to none of what I find in Rhode Island. Since the Aswan
High Dam was built in 1973, the Nile has become something of a grand canal. It is wide, flat, slow and so calm it verges on the geriatric.
It is no longer subject to floods and has no dangerous rapids or foul weather to speak of. The rural Nile is also surpassingly beautiful.
The canvases of Scottish painter David Roberts, executed in Egypt in the 1840s, are still a surprisingly accurate representation of the
modern Nile.
Over two years I investigated the stretch of the Nile I hoped to row and researched the long tradition of foreign travellers in Egypt.
Hadrian and Herodotus travelled on the Nile. Plato did, too. As did Julius Caesar and Cleopatra. So, they say, did Helen of Troy. Also
Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
After Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the publication of his team of experts' vast Description de L'Egypte, European and US
visitors began flocking to Egypt to investigate the mysterious wonders of the Nile Valley. Edward Lear, Lord Byron, William Makepeace
Thackeray and Percy Bysshe Shelley all travelled on the Nile in the first half of the 19th century. Florence Nightingale and Gustave
Flaubert set off up it during the same week in 1849. In the 1850s three men in kayaks successfully travelled the entire length of the
Nile from Burundi to Alexandria. The more I learned, the more I thought: if all those nice people could do it, why can't I?
Here's why: it has never been the custom for foreigners to operate their own boats on the Nile. In fact, the Egyptian government actively
discourages such high jinks. Tourists in Egypt usually travel on cruise boats or, less often, hire a captain to carry them on a felucca, a
traditional wooden sailing boat. In the three months I spent in Egypt I never saw foreigners on the Nile unaccompanied by an Egyptian
captain, and never once saw a woman piloting a boat. The fact that I was a Western woman hoping to go it alone would, I knew, pose a
problem. When, tentatively, I proposed my idea to various Egyptians they usually reacted with alarm. They said it would be impossible,
for I was a woman and surely not physically strong enough. And what if something happened? What if I tipped over? What if I met wild
animals or bad men? (Aside from scorpions, snakes and hyenas, there are no wild animals left in Egypt to speak of, and as for 'bad men'
- that is a possibility everywhere in the world, and perhaps nowhere more likely than in my own country. In contrast to the US, the rate
of personal crime in Egypt is very low.)
More than dangerous, though, my idea to row down the Nile struck Egyptians as stupid and pointless. Why on earth, they asked with
true bafflement, would I want to row my own boat when I could pay a man a paltry sum to do it for me? Americans generally associate
boats with leisure. Vastly less prosperous, Egyptians associate them with nothing but labour. Rowing a boat is something a fisherman is
forced to do to make a living; how could such an activity bring me - a woman no less - pleasure? I was also told that I would need police
permission, which would certainly not be forthcoming, and anyway would cost me a serious amount in fees and/or bribes, and that if by
some miracle I did get permission, the authorities would insist on sending a police officer with me for protection.
I have always been drawn to adventure, to the physically difficult, to what others might consider harebrained or foolhardy. I once
walked the 150 miles from Winchester to Canterbury, mostly along the North Downs Way, camping out in graveyards. People thought I
was bit crackers, but consider it this way: if you were a 'bad man' and you came upon a tent in a creepy graveyard in the middle of a
moonless night, would you be brave enough to find out what was inside? I suspect not. I never slept so well as I did one night in a
beautiful old graveyard in Hollingbourne, Kent.
In the end, having thoroughly weighed the hazards and warnings, I made up my mind to find a boat and set off without permission. I
began my search for a boat in Aswan, Egypt's southernmost city, and quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my trip would not
be political, natural, or criminal, but cultural. Finding someone who would sell me a rowing boat proved more difficult than the trip
itself.
Each time I came upon a boat that I thought would suit, I asked its owner, usually a fisherman, if he would be willing to sell it to me.
Not comprehending my wish to row down the Nile alone, the fishermen just scratched their heads and said either, 'You're a woman -
you don't know how to row,' or 'I will row for you and you can pay me,' or 'Why do you want to do this silly thing when we could go
dancing together instead?' Or they asked for ridiculously large sums of money for their small, ageing boats. Or they looked at me as
though I was unstable and said just plain, 'No, Madame.'
I spent two weeks searching for a boat, all the while navigating the shopkeepers and felucca captains who famously haunt tourists for
custom. I had countless conversations with Egyptian men, conversations that strangely but inevitably made their way around to sex,
virginity and marriage.
In Egypt, as in most Islamic nations, sex is not a topic for idle discourse, yet with astonishing regularity I found myself conversing at
length about the topic with Egyptian men, conversations usually more philosophical than lewd, conversations these men confessed they
would never dream of conducting with an Egyptian woman. I can only attribute this to the nebulous position of non-Muslim women.
Being neither Egyptian nor a follower of Islam I was, in a sense, disqualified from the female category. In the view of many of the
Egyptian men I met, what mattered for a Muslim woman could never really matter for me.
While in Egypt I always dressed modestly, arms and legs thoroughly covered, and conducted myself as decorously as possible. Though
plenty of men followed me down the street, no Egyptian man ever attempted to touch me in an inappropriate fashion.
There are, however, many Western women who travel in Egypt wearing shorts and low-cut tops, who wander the decks of cruise ships
wearing bikinis. That is the custom in the West, and no great crime. But more than one Egyptian man told me the 'scandalous' way
these women expose their flesh clearly indicates that they are promiscuous, unworthy, and that they (the men) would try their best to
have sex with them.
I listened to a lot of Egyptian men - all friendly, many intelligent, some tiresome, most respectful, and one who became a dear friend -
talking about their lives. Some of these conversations revealed a surprising degree of loneliness, frustration and desire for freedoms we
in the West enjoy as a matter of course. The number of Egyptians, women and men, who said, 'You are foreign. You are free. I wish I
could be like you,' was striking. Equally striking was the number who told me, 'My greatest dream is to see New York.'
When, after weeks of cajoling and machination, and a great deal of luck, I finally found myself rowing down the Nile in an Egyptian
fishing skiff of my own I was surprised and delighted. In order to avoid unwanted attention I disguised my identity as best I could. I
didn't fear being stopped by the police so much as the clamorous friendliness of Egyptians who, if they realised what I was doing, would
offer a crippling degree of help.
I wanted to be left alone. I dressed in a white cotton shirt and trousers, vaguely like what an Egyptian fisherman would wear, wrapped a
white linen shirt around my head like a turban, tucked my hair up beneath it, and stayed in the middle of the river as far from the
banks as possible. Preposterous as this disguise may seem, it worked. I was so unexpected that few people noticed I was a white woman
gliding down the Nile alone.
I had seen the Nile several times from the deck of a cruise ship, which to me was like seeing it from behind a glass wall - everything as
distant as an ancient artefact in a museum. Now, sitting alone on this silvery avenue of water with nothing between me and it but an
eighth of an inch of hammered steel, I felt how alive it was. The river was supple and comfortable beneath me, like a down mattress. In
areas forbidden to foreigners I passed through open farmland - fields divided by irrigation canals and mounds of black earth, shady
banana groves and vegetable patches of brilliant green. The cabbagey leaves of the banana trees glinted like glass in the searing
sunlight.
Skinny, bare-chested, turbaned farmers worked the earth beyond the shore, bending and hoeing, hauling and pulling, and now and
then forcing their oxen into the water to cool them off. Dogs wandered into the river and sat down up to their necks in it, blinking
grimly in the terrible heat. (The April heat was so intense at midday I felt I could feel it on my tongue and in my ears.) Fishermen laid
nets and then banged oil drums to frighten the fish into them. In some places I saw farmers lifting water onto their fields with a shaduf,
a contraption thousands of years old in design.
Facing backwards in my boat, I naturally had a view of a landscape I was leaving behind. I saw boys carrying hoes on their shoulders and
girls carrying cornstalks. I saw remarkably few women. The river was the men's domain but for the washing of pots and clothing, which
the women attended to, crouching in the sandy shallows in long black robes and veils, scrubbing furiously, chins between their knees.
Though men and boys swam regularly in the river, in all my time in Egypt I only once saw a woman swimming. Occasionally I saw
women walking slowly along the banks with clay jugs on their heads, but I saw many more birds than women: egrets, kingfishers, black
and white hoopoes, green bee-eaters, rafts of pelicans, and flamingoes with beaks the shape and colour of steamed lobster claws.
I saw temples and ruins and, nearing Naqada, crosses on the spires of Coptic churches contrasting bravely, even defiantly, with the
infinitely more numerous minarets. There were villages with houses painted yellow and blue, brown sheep, large men jouncing along
on the backs of tiny donkeys and, now and then, white camels lying on the riverbanks emitting their strange and haunting moans. And
always, beyond the cultivable strips of land on either side of the river, were the caramel-coloured hills and rust-coloured cliffs,
reminders of the huge expanses of inhospitable desert that lie beyond the Nile Valley.
Passing larger towns I saw factory smokestacks sending billows of smoke into the sky, but aside from the occasional sign of modernity -
a plastic water bottle, power lines threading in and out of the palms, a motorised water pump - what I saw were the scenes of ancient
Egyptian life depicted over and over again on the walls of ruined temples.
At night I tucked my boat amid the reeds and slept in it to avoid scorpions and adders on the bank. The night sky in Egypt is a swirling
mass of stars so bright and numerous the sky seems to tremble with the ice-blue weight of them. At night dogs yipped, donkeys
screeched, herons gargled and muttered and, just before dawn, the call to prayer would begin in nearby villages, a soft lowing sound
that emanated from many directions. When the sun rose, the river steamed gently with its warmth, soft yellow twists of vapour lifting
off its surface.
My days were peaceful: I was alone, the landscape changed little, I spoke to no one and (aside from an occasional canny child who,
realising my face was decidedly not Egyptian, waved and hooted 'Haloo!') no one spoke to me. I perturbed nothing and no one. I was so
inconspicuous I began to feel almost invisible, like a spy - outwardly one thing, inwardly another.
My trip was mercifully uneventful until the last night when, in the glare of a full moon, a fisherman in his boat discovered me asleep in
my boat with my hair uncovered. Suddenly deeply frightened, I gathered myself up and rowed off down the river. The man followed. I
had no idea what he wanted, but with those dire warning of 'bad men' echoing in my head, I convinced myself that he was intent on
raping and killing me, and I decided that I would have to use the knife I had brought and kill him first. It was the first time in my life I
have ever had such a murderous impulse, such a heartfelt and frenzied determination to do another person harm. I was fully prepared
to stab him or club him with my oar or drown him. It was a revolting, deeply lonely feeling, one I hope never to experience again.
When, finally, I stopped and asked the man what he wanted, he said, 'Three dollars, please.' He wanted a little baksheesh of the sort I
had been dispensing all over Egypt. I had given Egyptian children more than that in one sweep, had spent more on a cup of coffee. The
poverty-stricken fisherman wanted a mere three dollars, and yet in defensiveness and fear and ignorance, I had resolved with a
positively brutal fury that I would have to end his life. Of this event I wrote in Down the Nile: 'I felt ashamed. That fear and violence
had sprung from my imagination, from suspicion, from misunderstanding, from the lonely foreign setting and the absence of the sun.'
I gave the fisherman six dollars, which I drew from a wad of nearly 200 that was fully visible to him. He could easily have reached out
and taken it all. He didn't. He took the six I gave him and the shower of gratitude he poured on me was chastening. I had in that
moment a glimpse of what his life must be like. I had, also, a glimpse of what I am like. Exposure to the unfamiliar and the alien, if
approached with openness of mind, is one of the richest ways of understanding what it means to be human, what it means for all of us to
be human.
Cut and paste above the rest
James Cockington
December 19, 2007
Advertisement
These fabulous phonies may have once been dismissed as cheap imitations but not any more. During the past 15 years demand for
vintage costume jewellery has boomed, along with the prices being paid. Pioneering collectors talk about picking up bags of the stuff
from antique shops for $50. That is a fast fading memory. Exceptional items now fetch as much as $1000.
The revival in interest really took off in the 1990s, when women started glamming up again. Costume jewellery was back in fashion
along with the more elegant examples of vintage clothing.
These days the designs from the 1920s to the 1950s are the most desirable, although costume jewellery dates back to the Greek and
Roman eras. By the Middle Ages men of note sold their family jewels to finance their war expeditions and replaced them with cheap
"paste" replicas. Eventually, the phonies became status symbols in reverse. Queen Victoria proudly wore jewels made from polished
river stones.
By the 1920s costume jewellery was so chic that even established jewellers such as Cartier sold them along with the more expensive
variety. The top designers often used costume jewels to test out their new range in the market. Despite being fakes, a lot of costume
jewellery was not exactly cheap at the time, except when compared with the genuine article.
As interest in collecting costume jewellery grows, some of the specialist designers and brands are becoming almost as well known as
the Cartiers of this world.
One who sells by name alone is Kenneth Jay Lane, a former artist for Vogue New York who went solo in the 1960s and is still
designing. He tends to recycle his designs, which are often "inspired" by classic art deco styles.
Experts can identify Lane's early designs by the series of back stamps he used, each one marking a period in his long career. He used
his KJL logo for the first 10 years and this period is the most sought-after today.
Others in demand include Coro Jewellery, the company begun by Emanuel Cohn and Carl Rosenberger in Providence, Rhode Island in
the early 1900s. Coro folded in 1979 but the earliest examples of the company's work are among the most collectable.
Perhaps the most important style among today's collectors is what is known as Hollywood Deco, copies of classic art deco designs done
just from before World War II until the late '50s. These were often worn by movie stars, who helped popularise costume jewellery
throughout the world. The emphasis was on glamour and sophistication. Spectacular examples, such as the suite featured on this page,
can now fetch about $1500.
At the other end of the scale, some of the cheapest examples were made in Czechoslovakia, where the manufacture of costume
jewellery, often featuring Bohemia crystal, was a folk art. Brooches depicting animals and insects (even spiders and crabs) were
common. Many of these came to Australia on the coats of European immigrants and these are now gaining in popularity.
Examples of these that could have been picked up for a few dollars 20 years ago are now valued at $200 to $400.
There was also a once-thriving Australian industry.
Simpson, thought to have been on Sydney's North Shore, is perhaps the most important of several boutique manufacturers. Its most
famous design is a copy of the Waratah Brooch presented to Queen Elizabeth II when she first visited Australia in 1952. It was a
best-seller at the time.
Other local manufacturers of note include Jewelcrest of Adelaide, Arkansas, Aurora and Christine Lynch. These were widely available
at the time through jeweller's chains such as Prouds. Most are clearly identified by the manufacturer's name on the back plate and can
often be found in their original box. The box increases the value of an item to a collector.
The final period of interest to many collectors is the 1980s when costume jewellery no longer pretended to imitate the real thing. A
prime example is the fake jewelled crucifix Madonna wore during her "Like A Virgin" period. This style is in demand again and bling
from this period can fetch as much as $450, especially if there's something like a YSL logo on the back.
Major sales of costume jewellery are a rare event in Australia. Alex Renwick's collection of about 110 pieces (see My Collection) is
featured at a selling exhibition at Shapiro Galleries, 162 Queen Street, Woollahra, until Saturday. This is believed to be one of the
most impressive collections in Australia.
My collection
A valuer and auctioneer, Alex Renwick finds his passion for jewellery somewhat at odds with his love for the manly sport of rugby
union. As a student he was a promising front-row forward but his sporting career ended when a scrum collapsed and he was somewhere
at the bottom. With a shoulder dislocated, he decided to stick with antiques.
"Ever since I was a little kid I was obsessed by jewellery," he says, largely because his father was a collector who took him to auctions
when he was in his baby basket.
"I've been seriously collecting now for 20 years and I sometimes wear jewellery myself. For a formal function I like to 'kilt up' and stick
on something suitable."
He first noticed a resurgence of interest in costume jewellery when he returned from England in 1994. He began to seek rare examples.
They were pretty easy to find back then but are exceptionally hard to find today.
"Millions of pieces were produced," Renwick says. "The trick is to decipher the Woolworths variety from the designer brands." After
20 years, he has decided to sell his entire collection, a total of 110 items. The earliest piece is an 1880 tiara, the latest an example of
Madonna-style bling.
All pieces were bought here through a network of industry colleagues and local spotters.
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/12/17/1197740180708.html
Her plan to row solo down the Nile was met with disbelief. Rosemary Mahoney describes the freedom and fears she encountered on her
great river adventure
Rosemary Mahoney
The Observer, Sunday December 16 2007
The Nile near Aswan is wide and slow. Photograph: Tibor Bognár/Corbis
Last summer, online literary magazine bookslut.com, invited me to respond to their standard author questionnaire. One question was:
'Have you ever written a sex scene?' I answered that in five books of non-fiction I had not had occasion to write sex scenes - unless one
would consider, 'the peddler's hand landed roughly on my breast'. But I did tell them that in my latest book, Down the Nile; Alone in a
Fisherman's Skiff, there happens to be a tremendous amount of talk about sex.
Down the Nile is an account of a trip I made to Egypt with the intention of buying a boat and rowing alone some 125 miles from Aswan
to Qena in the Upper Nile Valley. I grew up in New England at the edge of the Atlantic and have for many years been an avid rower. I've
rowed in various places, including the Ganges in India, the River Shannon in Ireland, and the Sea of Galilee.
Most often, though, I've rowed on Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. This bay is big, subject to tidal fluctuations, violent weather, large
waves, sharp-toothed dogfish and toxic waste, and is peppered with enormous shipping tankers and careering speedboats. I cannot
imagine a more hazardous arena for the devoted daily rower.
The Egyptian Nile, though it does have its own particular hazards, is subject to none of what I find in Rhode Island. Since the Aswan
High Dam was built in 1973, the Nile has become something of a grand canal. It is wide, flat, slow and so calm it verges on the geriatric.
It is no longer subject to floods and has no dangerous rapids or foul weather to speak of. The rural Nile is also surpassingly beautiful.
The canvases of Scottish painter David Roberts, executed in Egypt in the 1840s, are still a surprisingly accurate representation of the
modern Nile.
Over two years I investigated the stretch of the Nile I hoped to row and researched the long tradition of foreign travellers in Egypt.
Hadrian and Herodotus travelled on the Nile. Plato did, too. As did Julius Caesar and Cleopatra. So, they say, did Helen of Troy. Also
Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
After Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the publication of his team of experts' vast Description de L'Egypte, European and US
visitors began flocking to Egypt to investigate the mysterious wonders of the Nile Valley. Edward Lear, Lord Byron, William Makepeace
Thackeray and Percy Bysshe Shelley all travelled on the Nile in the first half of the 19th century. Florence Nightingale and Gustave
Flaubert set off up it during the same week in 1849. In the 1850s three men in kayaks successfully travelled the entire length of the
Nile from Burundi to Alexandria. The more I learned, the more I thought: if all those nice people could do it, why can't I?
Here's why: it has never been the custom for foreigners to operate their own boats on the Nile. In fact, the Egyptian government actively
discourages such high jinks. Tourists in Egypt usually travel on cruise boats or, less often, hire a captain to carry them on a felucca, a
traditional wooden sailing boat. In the three months I spent in Egypt I never saw foreigners on the Nile unaccompanied by an Egyptian
captain, and never once saw a woman piloting a boat. The fact that I was a Western woman hoping to go it alone would, I knew, pose a
problem. When, tentatively, I proposed my idea to various Egyptians they usually reacted with alarm. They said it would be impossible,
for I was a woman and surely not physically strong enough. And what if something happened? What if I tipped over? What if I met wild
animals or bad men? (Aside from scorpions, snakes and hyenas, there are no wild animals left in Egypt to speak of, and as for 'bad men'
- that is a possibility everywhere in the world, and perhaps nowhere more likely than in my own country. In contrast to the US, the rate
of personal crime in Egypt is very low.)
More than dangerous, though, my idea to row down the Nile struck Egyptians as stupid and pointless. Why on earth, they asked with
true bafflement, would I want to row my own boat when I could pay a man a paltry sum to do it for me? Americans generally associate
boats with leisure. Vastly less prosperous, Egyptians associate them with nothing but labour. Rowing a boat is something a fisherman is
forced to do to make a living; how could such an activity bring me - a woman no less - pleasure? I was also told that I would need police
permission, which would certainly not be forthcoming, and anyway would cost me a serious amount in fees and/or bribes, and that if by
some miracle I did get permission, the authorities would insist on sending a police officer with me for protection.
I have always been drawn to adventure, to the physically difficult, to what others might consider harebrained or foolhardy. I once
walked the 150 miles from Winchester to Canterbury, mostly along the North Downs Way, camping out in graveyards. People thought I
was bit crackers, but consider it this way: if you were a 'bad man' and you came upon a tent in a creepy graveyard in the middle of a
moonless night, would you be brave enough to find out what was inside? I suspect not. I never slept so well as I did one night in a
beautiful old graveyard in Hollingbourne, Kent.
In the end, having thoroughly weighed the hazards and warnings, I made up my mind to find a boat and set off without permission. I
began my search for a boat in Aswan, Egypt's southernmost city, and quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my trip would not
be political, natural, or criminal, but cultural. Finding someone who would sell me a rowing boat proved more difficult than the trip
itself.
Each time I came upon a boat that I thought would suit, I asked its owner, usually a fisherman, if he would be willing to sell it to me.
Not comprehending my wish to row down the Nile alone, the fishermen just scratched their heads and said either, 'You're a woman -
you don't know how to row,' or 'I will row for you and you can pay me,' or 'Why do you want to do this silly thing when we could go
dancing together instead?' Or they asked for ridiculously large sums of money for their small, ageing boats. Or they looked at me as
though I was unstable and said just plain, 'No, Madame.'
I spent two weeks searching for a boat, all the while navigating the shopkeepers and felucca captains who famously haunt tourists for
custom. I had countless conversations with Egyptian men, conversations that strangely but inevitably made their way around to sex,
virginity and marriage.
In Egypt, as in most Islamic nations, sex is not a topic for idle discourse, yet with astonishing regularity I found myself conversing at
length about the topic with Egyptian men, conversations usually more philosophical than lewd, conversations these men confessed they
would never dream of conducting with an Egyptian woman. I can only attribute this to the nebulous position of non-Muslim women.
Being neither Egyptian nor a follower of Islam I was, in a sense, disqualified from the female category. In the view of many of the
Egyptian men I met, what mattered for a Muslim woman could never really matter for me.
While in Egypt I always dressed modestly, arms and legs thoroughly covered, and conducted myself as decorously as possible. Though
plenty of men followed me down the street, no Egyptian man ever attempted to touch me in an inappropriate fashion.
There are, however, many Western women who travel in Egypt wearing shorts and low-cut tops, who wander the decks of cruise ships
wearing bikinis. That is the custom in the West, and no great crime. But more than one Egyptian man told me the 'scandalous' way
these women expose their flesh clearly indicates that they are promiscuous, unworthy, and that they (the men) would try their best to
have sex with them.
I listened to a lot of Egyptian men - all friendly, many intelligent, some tiresome, most respectful, and one who became a dear friend -
talking about their lives. Some of these conversations revealed a surprising degree of loneliness, frustration and desire for freedoms we
in the West enjoy as a matter of course. The number of Egyptians, women and men, who said, 'You are foreign. You are free. I wish I
could be like you,' was striking. Equally striking was the number who told me, 'My greatest dream is to see New York.'
When, after weeks of cajoling and machination, and a great deal of luck, I finally found myself rowing down the Nile in an Egyptian
fishing skiff of my own I was surprised and delighted. In order to avoid unwanted attention I disguised my identity as best I could. I
didn't fear being stopped by the police so much as the clamorous friendliness of Egyptians who, if they realised what I was doing, would
offer a crippling degree of help.
I wanted to be left alone. I dressed in a white cotton shirt and trousers, vaguely like what an Egyptian fisherman would wear, wrapped a
white linen shirt around my head like a turban, tucked my hair up beneath it, and stayed in the middle of the river as far from the
banks as possible. Preposterous as this disguise may seem, it worked. I was so unexpected that few people noticed I was a white woman
gliding down the Nile alone.
I had seen the Nile several times from the deck of a cruise ship, which to me was like seeing it from behind a glass wall - everything as
distant as an ancient artefact in a museum. Now, sitting alone on this silvery avenue of water with nothing between me and it but an
eighth of an inch of hammered steel, I felt how alive it was. The river was supple and comfortable beneath me, like a down mattress. In
areas forbidden to foreigners I passed through open farmland - fields divided by irrigation canals and mounds of black earth, shady
banana groves and vegetable patches of brilliant green. The cabbagey leaves of the banana trees glinted like glass in the searing
sunlight.
Skinny, bare-chested, turbaned farmers worked the earth beyond the shore, bending and hoeing, hauling and pulling, and now and
then forcing their oxen into the water to cool them off. Dogs wandered into the river and sat down up to their necks in it, blinking
grimly in the terrible heat. (The April heat was so intense at midday I felt I could feel it on my tongue and in my ears.) Fishermen laid
nets and then banged oil drums to frighten the fish into them. In some places I saw farmers lifting water onto their fields with a shaduf,
a contraption thousands of years old in design.
Facing backwards in my boat, I naturally had a view of a landscape I was leaving behind. I saw boys carrying hoes on their shoulders and
girls carrying cornstalks. I saw remarkably few women. The river was the men's domain but for the washing of pots and clothing, which
the women attended to, crouching in the sandy shallows in long black robes and veils, scrubbing furiously, chins between their knees.
Though men and boys swam regularly in the river, in all my time in Egypt I only once saw a woman swimming. Occasionally I saw
women walking slowly along the banks with clay jugs on their heads, but I saw many more birds than women: egrets, kingfishers, black
and white hoopoes, green bee-eaters, rafts of pelicans, and flamingoes with beaks the shape and colour of steamed lobster claws.
I saw temples and ruins and, nearing Naqada, crosses on the spires of Coptic churches contrasting bravely, even defiantly, with the
infinitely more numerous minarets. There were villages with houses painted yellow and blue, brown sheep, large men jouncing along
on the backs of tiny donkeys and, now and then, white camels lying on the riverbanks emitting their strange and haunting moans. And
always, beyond the cultivable strips of land on either side of the river, were the caramel-coloured hills and rust-coloured cliffs,
reminders of the huge expanses of inhospitable desert that lie beyond the Nile Valley.
Passing larger towns I saw factory smokestacks sending billows of smoke into the sky, but aside from the occasional sign of modernity -
a plastic water bottle, power lines threading in and out of the palms, a motorised water pump - what I saw were the scenes of ancient
Egyptian life depicted over and over again on the walls of ruined temples.
At night I tucked my boat amid the reeds and slept in it to avoid scorpions and adders on the bank. The night sky in Egypt is a swirling
mass of stars so bright and numerous the sky seems to tremble with the ice-blue weight of them. At night dogs yipped, donkeys
screeched, herons gargled and muttered and, just before dawn, the call to prayer would begin in nearby villages, a soft lowing sound
that emanated from many directions. When the sun rose, the river steamed gently with its warmth, soft yellow twists of vapour lifting
off its surface.
My days were peaceful: I was alone, the landscape changed little, I spoke to no one and (aside from an occasional canny child who,
realising my face was decidedly not Egyptian, waved and hooted 'Haloo!') no one spoke to me. I perturbed nothing and no one. I was so
inconspicuous I began to feel almost invisible, like a spy - outwardly one thing, inwardly another.
My trip was mercifully uneventful until the last night when, in the glare of a full moon, a fisherman in his boat discovered me asleep in
my boat with my hair uncovered. Suddenly deeply frightened, I gathered myself up and rowed off down the river. The man followed. I
had no idea what he wanted, but with those dire warning of 'bad men' echoing in my head, I convinced myself that he was intent on
raping and killing me, and I decided that I would have to use the knife I had brought and kill him first. It was the first time in my life I
have ever had such a murderous impulse, such a heartfelt and frenzied determination to do another person harm. I was fully prepared
to stab him or club him with my oar or drown him. It was a revolting, deeply lonely feeling, one I hope never to experience again.
When, finally, I stopped and asked the man what he wanted, he said, 'Three dollars, please.' He wanted a little baksheesh of the sort I
had been dispensing all over Egypt. I had given Egyptian children more than that in one sweep, had spent more on a cup of coffee. The
poverty-stricken fisherman wanted a mere three dollars, and yet in defensiveness and fear and ignorance, I had resolved with a
positively brutal fury that I would have to end his life. Of this event I wrote in Down the Nile: 'I felt ashamed. That fear and violence
had sprung from my imagination, from suspicion, from misunderstanding, from the lonely foreign setting and the absence of the sun.'
I gave the fisherman six dollars, which I drew from a wad of nearly 200 that was fully visible to him. He could easily have reached out
and taken it all. He didn't. He took the six I gave him and the shower of gratitude he poured on me was chastening. I had in that
moment a glimpse of what his life must be like. I had, also, a glimpse of what I am like. Exposure to the unfamiliar and the alien, if
approached with openness of mind, is one of the richest ways of understanding what it means to be human, what it means for all of us to
be human.
Cut and paste above the rest
James Cockington
December 19, 2007
Advertisement
These fabulous phonies may have once been dismissed as cheap imitations but not any more. During the past 15 years demand for
vintage costume jewellery has boomed, along with the prices being paid. Pioneering collectors talk about picking up bags of the stuff
from antique shops for $50. That is a fast fading memory. Exceptional items now fetch as much as $1000.
The revival in interest really took off in the 1990s, when women started glamming up again. Costume jewellery was back in fashion
along with the more elegant examples of vintage clothing.
These days the designs from the 1920s to the 1950s are the most desirable, although costume jewellery dates back to the Greek and
Roman eras. By the Middle Ages men of note sold their family jewels to finance their war expeditions and replaced them with cheap
"paste" replicas. Eventually, the phonies became status symbols in reverse. Queen Victoria proudly wore jewels made from polished
river stones.
By the 1920s costume jewellery was so chic that even established jewellers such as Cartier sold them along with the more expensive
variety. The top designers often used costume jewels to test out their new range in the market. Despite being fakes, a lot of costume
jewellery was not exactly cheap at the time, except when compared with the genuine article.
As interest in collecting costume jewellery grows, some of the specialist designers and brands are becoming almost as well known as
the Cartiers of this world.
One who sells by name alone is Kenneth Jay Lane, a former artist for Vogue New York who went solo in the 1960s and is still
designing. He tends to recycle his designs, which are often "inspired" by classic art deco styles.
Experts can identify Lane's early designs by the series of back stamps he used, each one marking a period in his long career. He used
his KJL logo for the first 10 years and this period is the most sought-after today.
Others in demand include Coro Jewellery, the company begun by Emanuel Cohn and Carl Rosenberger in Providence, Rhode Island in
the early 1900s. Coro folded in 1979 but the earliest examples of the company's work are among the most collectable.
Perhaps the most important style among today's collectors is what is known as Hollywood Deco, copies of classic art deco designs done
just from before World War II until the late '50s. These were often worn by movie stars, who helped popularise costume jewellery
throughout the world. The emphasis was on glamour and sophistication. Spectacular examples, such as the suite featured on this page,
can now fetch about $1500.
At the other end of the scale, some of the cheapest examples were made in Czechoslovakia, where the manufacture of costume
jewellery, often featuring Bohemia crystal, was a folk art. Brooches depicting animals and insects (even spiders and crabs) were
common. Many of these came to Australia on the coats of European immigrants and these are now gaining in popularity.
Examples of these that could have been picked up for a few dollars 20 years ago are now valued at $200 to $400.
There was also a once-thriving Australian industry.
Simpson, thought to have been on Sydney's North Shore, is perhaps the most important of several boutique manufacturers. Its most
famous design is a copy of the Waratah Brooch presented to Queen Elizabeth II when she first visited Australia in 1952. It was a
best-seller at the time.
Other local manufacturers of note include Jewelcrest of Adelaide, Arkansas, Aurora and Christine Lynch. These were widely available
at the time through jeweller's chains such as Prouds. Most are clearly identified by the manufacturer's name on the back plate and can
often be found in their original box. The box increases the value of an item to a collector.
The final period of interest to many collectors is the 1980s when costume jewellery no longer pretended to imitate the real thing. A
prime example is the fake jewelled crucifix Madonna wore during her "Like A Virgin" period. This style is in demand again and bling
from this period can fetch as much as $450, especially if there's something like a YSL logo on the back.
Major sales of costume jewellery are a rare event in Australia. Alex Renwick's collection of about 110 pieces (see My Collection) is
featured at a selling exhibition at Shapiro Galleries, 162 Queen Street, Woollahra, until Saturday. This is believed to be one of the
most impressive collections in Australia.
My collection
A valuer and auctioneer, Alex Renwick finds his passion for jewellery somewhat at odds with his love for the manly sport of rugby
union. As a student he was a promising front-row forward but his sporting career ended when a scrum collapsed and he was somewhere
at the bottom. With a shoulder dislocated, he decided to stick with antiques.
"Ever since I was a little kid I was obsessed by jewellery," he says, largely because his father was a collector who took him to auctions
when he was in his baby basket.
"I've been seriously collecting now for 20 years and I sometimes wear jewellery myself. For a formal function I like to 'kilt up' and stick
on something suitable."
He first noticed a resurgence of interest in costume jewellery when he returned from England in 1994. He began to seek rare examples.
They were pretty easy to find back then but are exceptionally hard to find today.
"Millions of pieces were produced," Renwick says. "The trick is to decipher the Woolworths variety from the designer brands." After
20 years, he has decided to sell his entire collection, a total of 110 items. The earliest piece is an 1880 tiara, the latest an example of
Madonna-style bling.
All pieces were bought here through a network of industry colleagues and local spotters.
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/12/17/1197740180708.html
| Please Enjoy This Hot Fashion News! |
Fashion News! Fashion News!