“Can you believe we are here?”

As if conjured from my imaginings, a writing opportunity emerged. My assignment was to sail up the Nile on a dahabiya, a glamorous wooden boat, affixed with bright white-and-red-striped sails. I would board just south of Luxor and four days later, arrive in Aswan, where my son would meet me at the Old Cataract Hotel, which I booked for four nights.

Strangely, I was not certain what to expect of the grown man that was flying to join me in Aswan. It was difficult to fathom the person he was now, inhabiting a life that was far removed from his bucolic childhood: from travel basketball, county fairs, summer cookouts and catching frogs. I wondered if and how he might have changed. I also wondered if and how my maternal love would take a different shape when we were reunited, or if it would fall quickly into its comfortable, even ordinary groove. Above all, I wondered where and how my journey would tilt: what our reunion would reveal about us both.

Egypt and Sudan share a north-south border, but most of all they share the 4,132-mile-long Nile River, which begins at Lake Victoria in Tanzania and empties east of Alexandria into the Mediterranean Sea. In Khartoum, the White Nile converges with the Blue Nile, and my son frequented cafes that flanked the shore. Aswan was almost a midpoint between my starting point and his home.

In Esna, just south of Luxor, after a tour through the remarkable Greco-Roman temple, I boarded the Agatha. There was a palpable thrum of history as we set sail. The river had witnessed millennia of wars and conquest, had transported pharaohs, Julius Caesar, Herodotus, Queen Nefertiti, and the blocks of limestone that built the Pyramids of Giza. The Nile’s mythical power was thick, and it filled the air like incense in a cathedral. Once on board, I pondered whether I should be so solipsistic as to think the Nile was the agent of my own personal milestone, too, but I silently offered thanks to her anyway for carrying me to see my boy.

These new, high-tech, and brilliantly stylish dahabiyas were constructed to replicate those from the Victorian age of Egyptian travel (which were themselves replicas of the golden barges of the pharaonic times). Smart set voyagers from Gustav Flaubert to Florence Nightingale (the two sailed, coincidentally, on the same vessel in 1849 and both wrote books about their journey) were lured by growing knowledge of the great civilization that had flourished along the Nile, and the artifacts that archaeologists were excavating and studying at the time. The modern steamship that ferried Agatha Christie through the watery heart of Egypt in 1933 eventually supplanted the dahabiyas.

The voyage was tranquil, almost hypnotic. Even on the water, Egypt was enduring a stifling, airless heatwave. There were only twelve passengers on the Agatha (that can hold up to 26), and though we were all friendly, I was the only solo traveler and kept—by default and by choice—largely to myself. After all, I was on assignment, and focused on fine-tuning my observations, taking notes, and gathering strands from which I would craft a narrative.

With unhurried meditative time out on the water, I sometimes experienced a lashing of fear that my son would have to cancel for some work-related reason, and with each day that passed, the notion was unrelenting. For a while, there was barely a whiff of a breeze, so we were pulled towards Aswan by a tugboat. “There will be wind, insh’allah,” said Yusuf, one of the onboard staff.

The vast, airy deck was lined with cushions covered in striped Egyptian cotton fabric, arranged in seating areas. The crew offered coffee, sugary dates, mint tea, sticky Fig Newton-like biscuits, honey cookies, fresh green lemonade, and guava nectar. I tasted them all—grainy dates that melted like candy, hot tea that blossomed earthy and fresh on my tongue. I read a page or two of a book, but the mesmerizing landscape, my anticipation, and the heat spun me almost into a trance. Snowy egrets, the ancient Egyptian symbol of purity and grace, moved in all-white blurs on the shoreline, where water buffalo waded, bleating an oddly comforting tune.

As we sailed, the riverbanks passed in leafy wash of neon green, punctuated by towering sprays of date palms. At many points, the Nile was narrow enough to spy golden clumps of ripening mangoes through the slick leaves, and brick-red pomegranates hanging in their trees. The faint breeze carried their scent, and that of bitter oranges that the Agatha’s chef plucked on shore and made into marmalade.

Each day, I plunged into the fresh-smelling, silty, but surprisingly clear Nile, and hitched a ride on the brisk current as if I were a strip of driftwood. These dips in the magical, cool water had the effect of mending the wires of my brain that were fraying from the heat. When I showered in my air-conditioned room, and lay down on the smooth white sheets, the sensation was one of fortitude, as if naps in the shade of a linen curtain and bracing swims in the Nile were strengthening me for my reunion.

At each stop our vessel made port, we wandered off with our guide Ashraf, who steered us into temples, through hillside tombs. First the stunningly unscathed complex at El Kab; the massive monument to the falcon god Horus at Edfu; Gebel Silsileh, with its sandstone cliffs holding darkened shrines; and finally, Kom Ombo and its fascinating museum dedicated to the crocodile (the once-revered reptiles were eradicated when the Aswan High Dam was built under then-president Gamel Abdel Nasser in the 1960’s.) In site after site, our guide revealed the stories inscribed on the walls, untangling for us the sophisticated language of hieroglyphs.

The richness and splendors of Egypt had overwhelmed me, and I wondered why it had taken me almost six decades to step foot on its storied sands. And I thought, as I often do, that time feels perilously short when emboldened by the energizing movement of travel.
I disembarked in Aswan, and was driven to the Old Cataract, an elegant and stately Victorian-era hotel that forms the backdrop of the filmed version of Christie’s Death on the Nile, which she wrote in one of the hotel’s suites. There, I waited for my son, who was due to arrive in the early afternoon. I could not explain my nerves, but it was strangely similar to the sensation I had the weeks before he was born.

I knew my son, every molecule of him, in the intimate way a mother knows a child. I had raised and nurtured him, cheered him on, stood by for his milestones and cleared the tarmac for him to fly. He was a person my husband and I had created, and at times I shook my head at this ordinary but mind-blowing realization. But that morning in Aswan, I felt I was meeting him for the first time.

“I ran a half marathon in Khartoum, and never went to bed,” he said through his instantly reassuring wide, toothy grin, when he stepped out of the taxi with a backpack and briefcase. For a few seconds, I dipped into a pool of nostalgia as I remembered the day he got braces, and flashed his bound-up teeth, saying, “I can’t wait to get these off.”

At the restaurant on the porch, I ordered him a huge lunch: lamb, chicken, puffy rounds of warm pita bread and hummus, lentils, spinach, and ful—fragrant bean stew. Mothering was never anything I analyzed too deeply, but feeding him was as natural as breathing. As was the desire for him to have clean tee-shirts, socks and underwear, which had filled a duffel bag that I carried from Connecticut.

We attempted to process the unfathomable vista of the river, of Elephantine Island, of the vibrantly hued feluccas that zipped against the current, and of the pockets of white water that sloshed through the cataracts. And mostly of the light that made the Nile a surging stream of molten silver. “Can you believe we are here?” he asked.

I could not, nor that he was with me—two itinerant souls who had that, and much more, in common. Throughout the meal, he held my hand. I nearly swooned from the tenderness. I knew we would lock horns at some point. We were too alike in our tendency toward strong opinions to give in quickly to the other’s point of view. But I also knew our disagreement would be brief, would rapidly resolve itself, and would be probably about communication: could he please call home more often?

Our days would be busy ones, and I ran through the schedule with him. Nour El Nil, the company that owned the Agatha and a fleet of modern dahabiyas, had recommended a guide, who turned out to be excellent, who answered thousands of my son’s questions, even more than his journalist mother asked. We planned excursions to the temples at Philae and Abu Simbel, which was south of Aswan and three and a half hours closer to the Sudanese border. He wanted to go to the medina, and to the Nubian Museum, to study the ancient culture that originated near present-day Khartoum.

As I watched him glide through the restaurant, chatting in Arabic he learned on the streets of Khartoum, I contemplated how well I knew this boy, but how thrilled I was to encounter the man he had become. He was exactly the same person as when he was born: engaged, determined, curious, intuitive, and very, very funny. But as he shook hands with the maître d’ and chatted with the General Manager, a feeling inside of me bloomed into something new.

We were connected by the strongest attachment that exists in the natural world, that of a mother and child. But I had the piercing and gratifying knowledge that he had somehow outgrown me. I told him how proud it made me to encounter the son I had always known, but now with an overlay of complete self-sufficiency.

We had much to catch up on: the latest news about his sister, the recent hurricane that tore through New England and left us without power for a week. He wanted to hear what his grandparents were up to, how my book tour went, what projects his dad was undertaking. But first, he needed to rest. “Just a quick nap,” he said. “I don’t actually remember the last time I slept.”

His cheeks barely landed on the pillow when he fell asleep. In our shared suite (it’s the only thing that made economic sense), my bed was across the room, close to the window. Before me spread the vista of the sun lowering over the river, turning the terrain, the water, and all the riches of southern Egypt, to gold.

“My boy is asleep in this very room,” I said to myself, over and over again, as if the moment existed only in the firmament of my mind, and could manifest only if I repeated it. He lived so far from home.

I crossed the room to feel the warm streams of air from his nostrils, as I did when he was a baby in a crib, when I reassured myself that my son was still breathing. I recognized the momentary flash of panic, the relief, and the swell of potent love.
Nothing had changed, and nothing ever would.

It was clear: he was out for the night. I removed his shoes, and pulled a blanket up to his shoulders. I was excited for our many conversations, but they could wait until morning.

“I’m so tired, Mom,” he whispered. I saw him grin ever so briefly, and I turned out the lights.