The fare painted on the boat

Two small boats carry people across the Nile near Qena.

On the first, the fare is painted on a board by the step. It was there yesterday and it will be there tomorrow. It is the same for a farmer with a sack, a student with a bag and a stranger with a camera.

On the second, the fare is whatever the boatman says when you step off. Ask why it is more than last time and there is always a reason. It is late. You have luggage. It is the holiday. The wind is against him. Each reason sounds plausible on its own, and each one shifts the moment you question it, because none of them was ever the reason. They were found after the price.

Both boats get passengers. Only one becomes part of people's lives. The schoolteacher who crosses every morning, the woman who sells vegetables on the far bank, the family that visits on Fridays: they plan around the first boat. They can count their money before they leave the house. They know what will happen before they arrive.

That is what a rule is. It exists before you meet it, and it holds after you have gone. You can explain it to a child. An explanation invented afterwards is something else, a justification borrowing the clothes of a rule.

The test comes on the feast day, when the bank is crowded and the man with the painted board could charge double and nobody would stop him. If he keeps the fare that day, the board meant something. If he does not, it was only paint.

Principles are cheap on quiet mornings. They are worth something only on the days when keeping them costs you.