Strange, indeed, are the ways of fate and the tricks it can play upon us. One day, more than forty years ago, while making an Inuit film in the Canadian Eastern Arctic, just beneath the Arctic Circle, on a day too wild for us to continue our filming, I found an old tattered magazine and began reading about the Mountains of the Moon in faraway Africa—a strange vision to behold amid the frozen sea and glaciers of Pangnirtung fiord.

Returning to Montreal I trudged through deep snow to the local library, intent on finding out more about these strange mountains of the moon, "on the equator, but capped with snow, . . . clasping around their silent peaks the frozen vapors of distant oceans"
(Fountains of the Sun, 1968).

One morning, I was unexpectedly asked, "Would you like to work in Egypt for a year?" The request was from the Egyptian Minister of Culture, asking for someone from the National Film Board of Canada to come and work with his people. In the midst of reading about the Nile's endless shore, about the people and the staggering temples of Nubia and Egypt, for once, without hesitation, I confidently said, "Yes I'll go."

So it was, in 1963 that, armed with at least a little knowledge of Egypt, I came to Cairo for one year, and stayed for forty. What is it that makes us long to visit distant lands? Perhaps, at heart, we are still nomads setting out on journeys that can never be imagined beforehand.

Many years have passed since I set off from Montreal, which goes to show that most of life's dreams are not carefully plotted: they just happen and we must be ready, and recognize them when they appear. I went to fulfill my dream, and thinking first of the Arctic climbed the rock-strewn slopes of the Mountains of the Moon in central Africa, seeking the snows that give birth to the Nile, the White and the Blue.

In the years that followed I continued to work on different aspects of Egypt, in published texts and photographs, some of which are gathered here in this book. Always traveling with my trusted Leica and the best lenses Ernest-of-Wetzlar could provide, I was to spend a large part of my life ranging up and down the Nile with my camera, over the domes of Cairo, unique in the Islamic world; searching in the Street of the Tentmakers, and in the hidden galleries inside the walls of Saladin's twelfth-century 'fortress on the mountain'; seeking the fragrance of the gods in the jasmine gardens of the Nile Delta; imbibing the sweet nectar of Egypt's red tea (karkadeeh); and searching with the Bedouin of the Western Desert for the elusive desert truffle (from which evolved my special potage for Crème de Truffe du Désert, always tasting better in French); soaring high above the flooding Nile with the Egyptian Air Force; listening to the gently weeping saqia wheels of Egypt now mostly silenced, while recording on film with my Egyptian film crew the very last Nile flood of all to come to Egypt, after thousands of years of Nile floods, from the time the deluge began in the mountains of Ethiopia, until it "spread into every corner of Egypt, depositing the rich seed of the god Osiris" ( Fountains of the Sun, 1968).

Echoes of some of these stories of the past forty years are gathered here in this book. None of them, I hasten to add, are earth-shattering. Rather they are close-up details, one might say, of chosen stories, for only the camera has the power to select details, "decisive moments" as Henri Cartier Bresson called them, moments chosen almost intuitively by the cameraman.

Some of the subjects I chose to photograph and write about were requested on order. For others, I am grateful to Aramco World magazine for letting me make my own choices. Some of the photographs in this collection are accompanied by extracts from Fountains of the Sun, my Nile film, which I completed in 1968; others are accompanied by extracts from my published stories. In all these photographic and film ventures I have enjoyed a close rapport with colleagues in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and with Aramco World (later renamed Saudi Aramco World) in Houston, Texas; with Dr. Tharwat Okasha, who first brought me to Egypt in 1963; and with Abdulla Jumah, now president of the oil giant Saudi Aramco, who brought me to Dhahran in 1975, and who once attended the American University in Cairo. You could say that it has been a happy family affair, chatting back and forth over the years with Ismail in Dhahran, Bob and Dick in Houston, and Fouad and Madame Salwa in the Press Office in Cairo, about so many things known and unknown.

Some of my photographs stem from my film projects, and the films in turn date from when I was just eight years old, when I made a Christmas wish for a small magic lantern. That was the beginning. So you see how important it is to have these wishes in the first place—the wish to come to Egypt, the wish for a magic lantern. From my earliest years I was always one for magic, the childish magic of boyhood. In the ensuing years, this childish magic evolved, via the magic lantern, into the magic of the cinema and of the camera or, to put it in more adult terms, the urge to surprise everyone—which is what magic is all about. Was it Jean Cocteau, poet and filmmaker, who once admonished his students to "surprise me"? This, I believe, is what a photograph should do, in either small or large measure.

For the most part my surprises have been small ones, but sometimes they could be too much for some people. What was meant to be a surprise, admittedly, turned out to be too disturbing for one Saudi man, who complained that he became giddy watching one of my films. To which I said, "You are meant to get giddy. I don't mind if you fall off your chair, provided you don't hurt yourself." Perhaps I should have used a printed caption, as in the days of the silent cinema, saying, "Fasten your seat-belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride." I have always believed in presenting things from my point of view. You should always stick to your guns, and keep on shooting, or, don't shoot at all, if that is how you feel.

Forty years is a long time. Several generations of Egyptians have come and gone since some of these photographs were taken. Some of them have taken on a new meaning because they are of things that have since vanished, providing us with historical glimpses of the past in the present. I am always fascinated when I watch a new generation of Egyptians standing for several minutes on end, peering deeply into my picture of the last Nile flood surrounding the colossi of Memnon. That "decisive moment" was one I photographed early one morning, when I was gingerly finding my step along a narrow ridge of soft earth, just a few inches wide and a few inches above the level of the rising Nile floodwater.

Mind you, the last forty years have not always been easy. There have been days, even years, of utter frustration, working against a background of war and international upheaval, enmeshed in fruitless bureaucratic bungling, waiting for 'permission' for this and 'permission' for that. Sometimes, the permissions never came, in which case I just went ahead and did the work anyway. In hindsight that was just as well, as I think you will see. For who can discern the mind of a photographer, apt to change at the drop of a hat, depending on what he or she feels like at any given "decisive moment"? But usually, with everyone's blessing, things turned out well in the end—for I was helped through thick and thin by Muhammad and Ahmad, Mamdouh, Hassan, Said and Abdel Hamid, Ghoneim, Mustafa, Emmanual, Noel and Tarek, Dory and Hussein, Jan, Nagwa, and Nesrine, Laila, bless her, Magdi, Abdallah and Noura, Fouad and Madame Salwa. As someone once said, "It has all been very character forming."

Yes, to have come to Cairo in 1963, and stayed for forty years has been a unique experience.
Can it be forty? I sometimes wonder.
And after forty years in Egypt, who am I?
New Zealander, Canadian, or Egyptian?

John Feeney
Cairo, January 2005