To float down the Nile, stopping at the temples, sleeping on my ship -- this was my desire and now I am in a stateroom on the Cheops I, a floating hotel rather than a mere boat, looking at the wharf at Aswan and reading Flaubert's journal of a similar voyage he made in 1849. I notice many of the same things. "The barber, dog barking, children crying, a visit ces dames." Well, not the latter. "The ladies" are nowhere in evidence.
But, like him, I go to Philae, an island temple-complex devoted to Isis, and during the 19th century, the ruins thought most romantic. Flaubert found it filled with "a thousand charming details," but was indignant at the religious depredations, the defacing of the ancient deities, the chisel marks of later intolerance. I find it blazing under the hot, late spring sun, Isis nursing Horus, a bas-relief so enormous that the Christian chiselers could not reach that high, a series of immense slanting, roofless chambers holding the sun and making the shadows cold. There are also signs of the earlier tourists: the Temple of Augustus, the Gate of Diocletian, the Kiosk of Trajan.
Everything is so stunningly permanent that it is difficult to realize that this is not quite what Flaubert saw. UNESCO only 25 years ago moved the entire complex, stone by stone, from its original island to one somewhat like it and reconstructed Philae just as it had been. Now it is permanently above the waters of the Nile, which, thanks to the dams, floods no more, and the only yearly influxes the charming Philae must now endure are the high and low tourist seasons.