Egypt 2007

Egypt 2007

Six days in Egypt have left me completely stunned, exhausted yet ironically exhilarated, and this blog is a meager attempt to describe what thousands have written so thoroughly about for centuries. Oct. 30th found SAS at the entrance to the Suez Canal, and at a lecture the previous day we were told that the ship would anchor with a convoy near Port Suez. We lined up at about 6 am and waited for about an hour to enter the canal along with a whole string of container ships. On the port side were many small villages and guards posted; on the starboard, the Sahara and occasionally the tanks/guns left from the six day war in 1967. Poor Egyptians got routed. Seeing land was a relief after spending eleven days at sea including an unnerving passage through the Gulf of Aden where we expected pirates to board….not such an unusual occurrence, I am told.

The Suez seemed a whole trip all by itself. Started in the 6th Century BCE, the canal claimed the lives of 120,000 workers before the project was abandoned after an oracle predicted that only Egypt’s foes would benefit from it. Those were the good old days when decision making was easier and folks believed in oracles. The Persian emperor, Darius, completed the first canal in the region linking the Red Sea and the Great Bitter Lake, and then later the Mediterranean. The rest is a rather long story beginning with a design by Ferdinand de Lesseps and ending with completed construction in 1988. The Suez crisis in 1956 and then the 1967 war disrupted traffic for awhile and the canal was closed to shipping until 1975. I remember it being a periodic conversation piece in the early seventies when I was living in Lebanon as ships had to go around Africa to get to the Mediterranean from the east. Israelis on one side and Egyptians on the other until Israel withdrew from the Sinai. The port of Alexandria was a sight to behold when we finally finished our passage.

We left the ship at around 10:30 Oct. 31st morning (after an entire day of sea Olympics that was a hoot) and headed for the Pyramids Pre-port lecture had us convinced that since Egypt is a Muslim country we should dress modestly, i.e., no slacks…wrong. I had on a long skirt, shirt and jacket and it was hotter than hell. First notice was a camel ride, and didn’t I look fetching climbing over the hump and trying to get comfortable when my young camel erupted without warning. Arms flailed as I had no way to hold on or balance myself…miraculously I held on with my legs, and made everyone laugh. The scene at the Pyramids is very commercial, and as I remembered the well behaved and coifed camels from Morocco last year, I felt some pity for the Egyptian beasts. The camel drivers, however, were great fun, and when I sputtered my few words in Arabic (the nice ones!), they called me mama and we were off and running…literally. “You smile, mama. I want make you happy.”

The pyramidal structures are on a plateau overlooking all of Cairo, and our guide gave us a brief lecture on what to expect once they were in view. But nothing can really prepare one for the size and dimensions of those critters. (Two big, one medium, one small and three tiny.) They stand out like cosmic chess pieces on a board of sand waiting to be moved around as the sun casts different shadows during the day. Their orientation in the desert is no accident. The wonder for me was seeing the whole environment where they stand, the relationship to the desert, to the city, and the sky, and feeling miniscule. There are actually tombs within and I can’t imagine a better send-off. My imagination had Lawrence riding across the desert to meet Saud (white horse, black horse, yin and yang) Bedouin tents and camel caravans. Instead, the images left at the end of the day are of circus hawkers trying to foist post cards, beads, wood carvings of camels, et al on the tourists who come just to see the famous Pyramids….one of Egypt’s most famous shrines. The men are galloping around on mostly old camels and horses trying to impress all the young tourist fillies, offering them 250 camels (pretty good price) for a marriage, buses of many colors, and general confusion. By this time, I’m cool; the afternoon was great fun.

A short trot down the hill and the big man/lion sits surveying Cairo at a lower level.
I am truly in love with the Sphynx who sits arrogantly eying ignorant tourists like me who try various tricks of photography to make him look silly. He is really big! And he has a long tail that curls around down in back of him. Moreover, pollution and the bullet holes in his face from Turkish target practice have not robbed him of his inner spirit…that of the desert and a few thousand years of crazy human history. In the evening there was a sound and light show in front of the Sphynx, and I was carried away with stories about the pharaohs, Romans, Turks…Sphynx stays and men die. Overture from Aida and I’m jelly in the hands of sound and light producers. The air was temperate, sky dark blue, and desert was absorbing the great tales of kings and warriors. I was falling head over heels in love with Egypt. (I’m a pushover for drama and historical romance.)

Up at 2:30 the next morning to wend our way to the airport and the trip to Luxor. The view of the Nile from the plane was spectacular, a green serpent twisting and turning in a caramel colored desert. We visited three of the Royal tombs amongst which the famous tomb of the young king Tut-Ankh-Amun can be found. The tombs are in the middle of bloody nowhere, and the greatest miracle is how they were ever discovered in the Valley of the Kings…especially by the robbers who pretty much wiped out the treasures from all the Ramses structures. The hieraglyphics and paintings in those tombs have lasted for thousands of years, and one can still see the beautiful indigoes and cinnamons covering the walls. I spend a good deal of my time looking at the paintings on the ceilings and picking myself up from the floor after tripping on small stairs. I have to pinch myself to think I was inches away from masterpieces of history.

Next a visit to Queen Hatshepsut’s temple, the only woman ever to be considered a pharoah. There’s a long story to that one according to our Egyptologist guide, Bachat, something about her having a fake beard and a few centuries of destruction when her predecessors tried to wipe her images from all the temples in Egypt. What a woman had to do to get a little power back in the day! On to the Colossi of Memnon (statues of Amenophis III), standing like true giants in a field of corn, overlooking a small stand of coca cola bottles, sun hats and embroidered shirts. But I should not mock their majesty…. still god-like figures among us mere mortals.

In the afternoon (as if three pharaoh haunts were not enough for one day), was a visit to the breathtaking Karnak temple. I’ve seen my share of Greek and Roman temples, but this one staggers the imagination. (We are still in Luxor!) The columns, paintings, carvings….everything was too grand to describe, and difficult to capture the perspective of scenes on photographs, but once again I have in my mind’s eye Karnak’s place in its environment of rocky soil, deep blue sky and lovely palms. When I look at images of the temple in books, I can well picture its place on the earth, and I sincerely hope the pharaohs are somewhere looking down at visitors, and applauding themselves for recruiting thousands to build such awesome structures. We spent the evening at Luxor temple, a little smaller and less grand than Karnak, but nonetheless impressive. Sunset and then spotlights gave the temple an eerie feeling of ghosts lurking behind pillars. What impressed me was a small room in the southern part of the temple that contains evidence of a small Coptic chapel, a place of refuge for the early Christians. Those of us who grew up Roman Catholic often forget about the earliest Christian sects who sweated out their faith in the desert trying to escape persecution. Folks…I’m already one day into the trip and have not yet described food! Not much time to eat.

Another early wake-up call and we were on our way to Aswan by bus. I was delighted to have a bus trip along the Nile because it gave us a chance to see the small villages, lush shrubs, fertile fields, men in dish-dash, and loads of donkeys carrying sugar cane, bananas, fire wood, and much more. Once in Aswan we were ferried over to the Temple of Philae, the romantic and majestic complex of buildings dedicated to Isis. The day was crystal clear, blue sky, and not too many other bodies to get in the way of meandering. Moved from its original island and rebuilt on neighboring Agilika, to save it from the waters of Lake Nasser, the shrine dates from the 4th century BCE. The goddess Isis reigned here, and the temple was the most important pilgrimage center in Egypt. Philae was the last functioning temple of the ancient religion and was not closed until the reign of Justinian in 550 CE. It is a fusion of Egyptian and Greco-Roman architecture, built in harmony with its natural surroundings. Weird to see columns that look Corinthian but have papyrus carved at the very top.

We continued on to Aswan High Dam, an engineering masterpiece built to regulate the flow of the Nile and to counter the unpredictable annual flooding. Back to the hotel for lunch and a cruise on the Nile aboard a felucca….quiet, serene and simply lovely. In the future I can imagine myself saying “When I was sailing on the Nile in a felucca…..” and everyone saying “Yeah, right! She is sooo obnoxious.”
Market at night and I had great fun with the shop keepers who inflate the prices of everything just to have fun bargaining with tourists. The spices were mounded into unusual shapes at each shop: thyme, saffron, indigo, turmeric. Each was a beautiful palette of delicious smells, and it was very frustrating not to grab handfuls and take them home. Hookas abounded but our students are not allowed to bring them aboard…considered drug paraphenalia in the U.S. At any rate at sailing time, the crew collected a whole garbage can of them that they tried to smuggle aboard, and cut all the tubes. They should have given them back to the Egyptians who were looking in from behind the fence.

The piece de resistance on the fourth day was our trip south to Abu Simbel
dedicated to Ra-Harakhte, the sun god; Amun, patron god of Thebesm; Ptah, god of the underworld and, of course, to Ramses himself. Ramses II had four statues built (he and his fellow gods!), and the message to the Egyptians was that he was also a god. The statues in the front of the mountain are gargantuan and just for fun I took a photo of one foot…sans body. It hardly fit on the lens viewer. The temple was precisely oriented so that the sun’s rays reached deep into the mountain to illuminate its sanctuary on Ramses’ birthday and the anniversary of his coronation.
Now that’s a worthy monument to one’s ego!

Tthe monument had to be moved in 1964 from its original site because Lake Nasser created by the Aswan Dam would have swallowed it. The temples were cut into 1041 sandstone blocks weighing up to thirty tons apiece, hauled and then reassembled 210m behind (and 61m above) its original site, a false mountain being constructed to match the former setting. We were told that the project is still being paid for since the cost was approximately $40 million.

The smaller temple, Temple of Hathor, is dedicated to the cow-headed goddess of love and built in honor of Ramses’ favorite wife, Queen Nefertari, supposedly the most beautiful women in Egyptian history…not to be confused with Nefertiti. It is the only temple in Egypt that portrays a woman at its entrance. The sculptures and the frescoes within are legendary, and once again it was a luxury to see them in their original homes.

Our last day was a trip back to Cairo to visit the National Museum and a bit of the city. I don’t know how many people live in Cairo, but it’s too many. The streets are crowded with cars, and traffic keeps everyone at a standstill at most times of day. We passed Mubarak’s house, a few mosques with beautiful mosaics, and then came to the museum building that looks like an old train station. Granted the Egyptians are building a new museum (another one of those biggest in the world structures), but the present one is quite awful. The rooms are dank and dark; the labels on exhibits are on paper that is yellowing.

King Tut’s gold is on display as are many, many mummies, sarcophagi, amulets, statues…the place is teaming with antiquities and millions of tourists. I went off by myself and visited the “small things.” Lots of tiny amulets representing Egyptian mythology. I was surprised to see an old leather copy of the St. John gospel in one of the cases, dating from the 1st century…I wanted to steal it but not spend time in a Cairo jail. Driving past the new library I was impressed with the fact that Egypt is coming fast into the 21st century world of technology. The new library of Alexandria is built over the remains of the old which I believe was destroyed by fire many centuries ago, and built to seat thousands with tons of computers. It is another Egyptian wonder.

How do I love Egypt? Let me count the ways: the gregarious people, sultry climate, memorable architecture, the smell of incense in the markets, horse-drawn carriages, gold cartouches, and the beautiful river without which Egypt and its glorious history would never have happened. Let’s hear it for just plain water; it sustains and, indeed, blesses us.