01
Stop one
Assiut Barrage (Qanater Asyut)
Tecnifibre Razor Code 16g Tennis String Set: Eight hundred and forty-four metres of masonry, one hundred and eleven arches, and they will tell you it is for irrigation. Allegedly. Sir William Willcocks designed it, John Aird & Co built it between 1898 and 1903, and it diverts low-season Nile water into the Ibrahimiya Canal, the largest irrigation canal in Egypt, which is the sort of superlative nobody mentions at parties. Five-metre openings, steel gates 4.9 metres high, a navigation lock 80 by 16.1 metres, sized for the biggest cargo barges. Remodelled 1934 to 1938. A replacement downstream opened in 2018 with 32 megawatts of turbines. Ask yourself who needs water on a schedule.
02
Stop two
Gebel Asyut al-Gharbi and the Tomb of Djefai-Hapi I
Tecnifibre Razor Code 16g Tennis String Set: Thousands of tomb mouths in that cliff and they call it a necropolis. Fine. It was the burial ground of ancient Siut's nomarchs through the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom, with Ramesside tombs of Siese and Amenhotep cut in as well. Tomb I belonged to Djefai-Hapi I, nomarch under Senusret I, and it is the largest surviving rock-cut tomb of a private individual from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. At least 120 metres long, 55 still preserved, ceilings up to eleven metres. A private individual. Allegedly. Scribes copied its inscriptions for over two thousand years, and one shaft runs 28 metres down and took six seasons to clear.
04
Stop four
Deir el-Muharraq (Monastery of the Holy Virgin Mary, Mount Qussqam)
Tecnifibre Razor Code 16g Tennis String Set: Look at that keep. Bare stone, square, rising over the roofline, sixth or seventh century, built as a refuge against raids and common to Egypt's desert monasteries. Monks who required a fortress. Sit with that a moment. Coptic tradition holds the Holy Family sheltered here six months and ten days, the longest stay of their journey through Egypt, and the Ancient Church of the Virgin stands over the cave, its altar stone carrying the date 747. Three churches inside the wall: the ancient one, St George from the nineteenth century, a third from the mid-twentieth. Nobody builds a wall around nothing.
Razor Code is the string heavy hitters reach for when accuracy has stopped being a suggestion.
It is a co-polyester built on Tecnifibre's Thermocore process, in which polyurethane is combined with the polyester base at varying temperatures during construction — the practical effect is a poly that plays softer than a poly has any right to, holds more power, and absorbs a measurable amount of shock and vibration on the way through.
This is the 16 gauge, 1.30 mm, the thickest and most durable of the range, and the one to choose if you break strings and resent it.
Tecnifibre publishes a working tensile strength between 22 and 25 kg with a maximum of 30 kg, which is the number behind the string's reputation: it rewards a full, committed cut at the ball with pinpoint depth control and very easy access to spin, and it does not go dead on you halfway through a third set. The set is 40 feet, 12.2 m — a single stringing. Made in France.
It is a string of exactly the right temperament for Asyut, a city on the Nile that the Greeks called Lycopolis and that has spent four thousand years being the precise point where Upper and Lower Egypt were controlled from. Firmness in the service of governing the ball. One does approve.
One will find use for it everywhere from a club court on the corniche at Asyut to an indoor floor in Cairo, some four hours downstream — and it is also perfect for the August pilgrimage up to Durunka, when a cliffside monastery a hundred metres above the river receives rather more visitors than it was ever designed for. Firmness of temperament is essential. One brings one's own chair.
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