Baksheesh

Cairo is enormous. It’s modern. It’s truly ancient. There are freeways. There are passages so narrow that two people are hard pressed to walk side by side. There are street signs. There are traffic lights. There are pedestrian lights. No one pays the slightest attention to any of them. Where painted lines indicate four lanes of traffic, there is sure to be six, the lines hidden under the gridlock. Bicycles thread between and around the vehicles, pedestrians skip across the streets without a moment’s hesitation, trusting fully in the benevolence of Allah. It’s utter chaos. It’s thrilling to watch. It was exactly like Manila, and like Manila, I would never want to drive there.

Imagine trying to negotiate that chaos in a coach. A bus is not a small thing. Were the bus to wait for an opening, it would never move again, not until Cairo itself had been worn down by the wind and the sand, so opportunity must be made, and that’s what our bus did, it pressed on, punching into the maelstrom of vehicles, inching in and rushing into what gaps presented themselves, regardless who or what else might be trying to occupy that same space, the traffic lights changing from green to red and back to green again before we ever hoped to burst through into the traffic and escape out the other side.
The parking lot of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities was a haven of order by comparison. Cars here, buses there, the busses banished to the edge where they lined up in an orderly fashion, all forty-five degrees to everyone else’s ninety, otherwise they would never have had a prayer of ever escaping ever again.

We were given our entry passes, were shuffled past the concrete sphynx guarding the entry, then passed security, lingering just within until the rest of us had gathered. The foyer was enormous. Two seated Pharaonic sculptures, easily twenty feet high, surveyed the sarcophagi gathered within. Beyond them lay the ages.

We found where everything we’d sought to see had found a home, all the things that hadn’t been stolen by the British, French, Germans and Americans, anyways, and everyone else who’d happened by in the last couple hundred years. There were sarcophagi in abundance, statuary of every conceivable shape and size and detail and skill, from the truly ancient to the merely ancient. Cats, jackals, thrones and burial masks, not to mention clay tablets, and painted friezes.

We shuffled along with all the other curious, eager to see the mummy of the fabled Ramses. I found him under glass. He was old, mummified old, his skin a dried shell of leather, his eyes vacant, empty slits.

I bent down to get a better look, and would have been eye to eye with his deified self were he able to turn that dry, dead head of his, and uttered, “Let my people go,” in my best Charlton Heston voice. The others looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “What?” I asked, “Haven’t you ever seen ‘The Ten Commandments?’” Blank stares faced me. What the hell, I thought, why are you here? Why would anyone come to Egypt to see all this stuff if you had no knowledge of it in the first place, of its history, its importance, its mythos and majesty? Why not just go to a beach, instead?

Finally, we came upon Tutankhamun, struck by the beauty of all that had been piled high in his burial chamber. His burial mask was the most beautiful, the most intricate of them all. There was so much to behold in one object: layered gold, the lapis lazuli, the inlays of coloured glass and gemstones, the white quartz of his eyes, his obsidian pupils. The myriad of stones of all different colours set in his crown and necklace and his garments and beard. It must have taken weeks to construct.

After lunch, we braved the roads again, this time miraculously spilling out onto the ring road with ease. I asked about the buildings I’d been curious about since arriving. There were rows and rows of tall square structures, each of different height, but each the same in that each was sprouting rebar up from their roofs like a porcupine’s back.

They’re houses, I was told. Houses? Yes, houses. Apparently, land was expensive, so were the taxes, but if you built your house on top of your father’s, no extra tax was added, so each son built his house on top of the other, the rebar left exposed and ready for the next tier of relative.

We spilled out of the bus for our next experience, camel rides. None of us had ever been atop a camel before. We were all a little nervous about the prospect, the reputation of the ill-mannered beast having preceded it.

They weren’t that ornery; in fact, they were rather domestic, kneeling when prompted, standing when directed, responsive to reins and heels and American whoas. Never having been on a horse, I found my seat high and not particularly stable, if not unruly. It rolled and teetered with every step, necessitating my having to constantly shift my butt and clamp my legs, but I was getting the hang of it. The key was to relax, to not fight it, but to roll with it.

Midway through, there was a boy, no more than three, up against his low fence with his had extended over it, saying “Baksheesh, baksheesh,” to each of us in turn. Jackie had always said that she wouldn’t give beggar children money, only pencils, having read that their parents would only take the money away from them. She’d also read that pens and pencils were expensive there for the working class, so she always carried a couple boxes of pencils with her. She angled towards the boy, and having fished a pencil out of her box, she handed it to him as she road past. The boy’s eyes lit up. His mouth opened and a shrill scream of joy burst from him. He called out to his mother, the raised pencil held out for her to see.

This emboldened Jackie. When she found herself surrounded by a herd of urchins at the end of our ride, she began to hand her precious pencils out to them, one each. They swarmed her, climbed up her. Panic rose up in her eyes. Our Kiwi host swept in toward her, gently spreading the boys and girls apart until, having reached Jackie, he tore the pencils from her fist and hurled them away, the little wooden sticks fanning out broadly before bouncing across the ground. The children were after them as soon as they were flung, and our host took Jackie by the shoulders and escorted her back into our fold, cooing her back to calmness.

I never once saw Jackie pass out pencils again.