Summer reads

"Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff"
By Rosemary Mahoney
Little, Brown, $23.99

It's possible to get bitten by the travel bug simply by reading, and "Down the Nile" will leave you with a desperate yearning that has only one known treatment: a plane ticket to a far-off locale. Rosemary Mahoney documents her journey down the Nile in a rinky-dink rowboat -- all by her lonesome. It's the kind of trip most sane people would prefer to experience vicariously, without the real-life fear of man-eating crocodiles, killer heat and hostile locals uncomfortable with the idea of a woman driving a car, let alone navigating a boat down the Nile.

With vivid and unusual language, Mahoney paints the Egyptian landscape as it passes on either shoreline: "Two camels slumped along across an open plain, gliding and bobbing like sea horses straining forward underwater ... Smoke from sugar factories lifted gauzily into the sky ... the pretty sandstone temple ... with its columns and porticoes, stood gold against the hard blue of the afternoon sky." But her voice is also dedicatedly unromantic -- she describes one stretch of the river as congested with littered power boats and ferries, the water "coffee colored and dumpy, with piles of trash spilling down the eastern bank with the distant look of having been recently unloaded from a municipal truck."

The same can be said about her unflinchingly honest observations of local culture, which give the book its backbone. She has repeated, surreal confrontations with Egyptian men convinced that: Hillary Clinton is an example of a good wife; women simply do not enjoy sex; and the virtue of a pious Muslim woman is worth more than that of a Western woman. Then there are the local women, one of whom tells Mahoney plainly: "I wish I could be free like you."

The actual time spent alone, meditatively working her way along the Nile in the blistering heat -- a white T-shirt wrapped turban-style around her head -- is poetic but ephemeral. The real story is in Mahoney's struggle to get there -- to find even just one local man willing to sell a woman a boat. In this way, the memoir embodies that travel cliché: It's about the journey, not the destination.

--Tracy Clark-Flory

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