Along the Nile, beyond history

While the world's longest river laps a landscape where nature, myth and memory are one, we gaze in fascination at the life that animates its banks, today as it did three thousand years ago

They sleep locked in a shrine at the Crocodile Museum next to the Kom Ombo temple, behind glass that would shatter instantly if from death suddenly rebelled. For the millennia could do nothing against their woody, sharp scales, their mighty bodies brown as logs beached in the sun. And even the sharp eyes appear no less alive than they did when these reptiles were not yet dead, three thousand two hundred years ago, before the Egyptians mummified them and laid them in the necropolis of this site originally consecrated to Sobek, the crocodile god, the ruler of the flood, the one who from his own sweat makes the Nile flow from its sources to the Mediterranean.

And one must always remember this while cruising aboard a traditional boat or dahabeya: a cruise on the world's longest river is not a shortcut (albeit a gentle one) to touch without traffic the magnificence of temples and necropolis, from Luxor and Karnak to File and the unforgettable Abu Simbel, the temple of Ramses II built on a rise in Lake Nasser, where crocodiles still haunt the waters and wreak havoc on perch, and only certain Nubian families dare to catch them and keep them in their homes, as pets and auspicious amulets.

Sailing on the Nile is to forget history or rather, to blend it into nature, poetry, religion and myth. To spend hours at the bow watching life dancing on the water, and to imagine where the mountain ranges that of the Nile form the valley start and end. Wondering why that blue color is so much maritime and so little river, plied by the barges and small boats of the tilapia fishermen, always and only two aboard, one paddling and the other casting nets, one beating the water with a wood to build a trap of bubbles around the fish, and the other finally lifting the spoils.

The magic is not just getting lost in this centuries-old order. But to make the hieroglyphics and wall paintings seen during the stops, Cleopatra VII and the Book of the Living, the Book of the Dead and the Book of Doors, come alive in the mind like cartoons. And so, resuming navigation at sunset after visiting the Valley of the Kings, the sky suddenly begins to tell another story.

And it's nice to play at thinking that the world you see is the same world a peasant or a scribe saw, as the empyrean is made in the image and likeness of the vault frescoed in the tomb of Ramses VI, that starry sky over which is stretched the goddess Nut depicted as she gives birth to the sun at dawn and swallows it up at sunset. And then - I saw it painted on a wall in the tomb of Seti I - the sun disk itself is no longer a star but a living thing, generated by the sacred scarab that gives it form with its front legs and with its hind legs pushes it up, until Horus puts his falcon mask on its face and closes the circle of day and night.