How to Become a Mermaid

Here the Nile is so wide it jars with our landlocked imagination. On a felukka in the river between the banks of Aswan you're entirely unprepared for the width of water. Islands intersperse the oceanscape, like pockets of high land after a postapocalyptic deluge. Historians say the Hyskos travelled up the Nile from Congo and peopled Europe. My girlfriend and I thought we'd do the opposite: float down the Nile, retracing our ancestors' footsteps. But over water there are no footsteps.

Beth and I, land-dwellers from Europe, were captivated by the sunkissed water. Down the Nile we rowed in row-boats, up the Nile we sped in speedboats. In a desert, you appreciate the role of water. Whole families, we saw in Aswan, live by the Nile. Communities of boat people who lived their whole lives afloat, born in river vessels, living, then dying there too, their sustenance the river's delicious freshwater fish. We gorged on some too - even catching our own!

In Aswan, the land is less fun. Aggressive touts, desperate for business after tourism collapsed, ambush you like the packs of lions that once roamed the region when it was a wilderness. Many of them lost their homes in the creation of the Aswan Dam.

The dam's magnitude is magnificent; the only manmade site visible from space, they say, besides China's Great Wall. A hydroelectric project supplying water and power to this ancient nation, Aswan Dam is an emblem of the imposition of modernity on a people poised on the past. Beth spied a crocodile swimming solo in the dam; when it comes to the Nile, no feat of engineering can keep nature out its own kingdom.

The further down the Nile we went, we saw the transition from a Mediterranean world familiar to any visitor to Greece to Africa. The music picks up sub-Saharan percussions. In Aswan these two worlds, these two rhythms, meet.

Once in a diner we thought was 60s-themed (in fact it just hadn't changed in half a century), Beth and I had a row. She stormed out, taking flight on a felukka. Chasing after her, I boarded one too. "Follow that felukka!" I said, like a spy in a period espionage flick.

But arguments belong on land. Reunited on the Nile, we let the serenity of the seas take hold of us. Humans may be terrestrial creatures, but Aswan's romance of the Nile can turn anyone into a mermaid.