There’s Order in Chaos

We’d visited a number of mosques while in Egypt, some were stark and medieval, while others were beautiful beyond compare. None were as beautiful as the Mosque of Mohammad Ali. Perched on the summit of the Citadel, its twin minarets and the silhouette of its central dome surrounded by four small and four semicircular domes, the mosque can be seen from all points of the city. Regardless how impressive its exterior may seem, its interior is stunning to behold.

The interior is forty meters square, an enormous span by any comparison, made larger still by the two levels of domes that rise up into the heavens on four arches, those in turn supported by colossal pillars. There are four semicircular domes around the central dome, all painted and embellished with motifs in relief. The pillars and walls are covered with alabaster up to eleven meters high. Vast conical chandeliers hang deceptively close to the red rugs that overlap one another from wall to wall, the lights suspended on chains anchored in the dome high overhead, with further concentric rings of lights stepping out from them, they too hanging from that high height. The domes are a marvel, emerald and sculptured with an array of rosettes, disks of calligraphy at each of the arches. Words can’t do it justice.

Collecting our shoes, we departed for our final stop, the Khan el-Khalili, the oldest market in the world. Ushered through the domed Bab al-Ghuri gate, the market is as tight and confined as the mosque was open and spacious. From the start, we’re gestured to, the merchants bursting forth, displaying their wares in hand with abandon, their cries overlapping one another, the scent of their incense noisome in its abundance. Chandelier shops blaze with an intensity that the sun lacks, the buildings so close together that they all but shut out its light except at noon when directly overhead. All manner of wares spilled out into the narrow paths, the displays a menagerie of this and that: brass bowls and hand-blown glass, tin and iron works, hookah pipes gleaming and glowing of gold and silver and coloured glass, rivalling the costume jewelry sparkling next to them. Wicker baskets were piled high, defying gravity. Leathers shoes, leather belts, leather bags. Rugs rolled and piled higher than houses. Clay pots. Beads. Necklaces. There were more Egyptian burial masks and statuary than could have stocked all the tombs combined, a lot of it crafted in China. Fallahs lingered over tea. A man walked by bearing a wide try upon his head, its width piled high with loaves of unleavened bread. It was a riot of sight and scent and sound.

I was on a mission. I was seeking that aforementioned mother-of-pearl chessboard, evocative yet transportable statuary, something that screamed at me. I ignored the merchants that did just so, aware that the hard sell was on, and that the wares were overpriced, and painfully aware that my ability to haggle was limited at best, nonexistent at worst. Our Contiki host knew what I was looking for, we’d discussed it a couple times as I browsed what shops we’d already visited, enlisting his and their eyes to help mine, he always remarking, “Not to worry, mate; you can find anything in the Khan el-Khalili.” Everything except a mother-of-pearl chessboard, that is. I saw some lovely stonework examples, but they were far too heavy to carry, too expensive by weight to ship. I saw others of intricate inlays that called out to me, but upon seeing the price, was instantly put off. I tried quartering the price, but the merchants were so put out by my offer I thought I was to be chased from their kiosk. Maybe that was part of the negotiation, because they never did; but even when I increased my offer by half again, they still stood firm on their price.

I decided to take a little break before returning to my horrible haggling, seeking out a tea shop at the edge of a sunlit plaza, finding our host stretched out in a wicker chair, a pot before him.

“Didn’t find your chessboard?” he asked.

“Not yet,” I said, sitting. A tea menu was thrust in front of me as my bum touched the wicker. I ordered a pot of green tea, one recommended by our host.

Before long I had to go to the toilet.

“Can it wait?” our host asked.

“Not really,” I said.

Our host called the owner of the shop over. He said I could use the washroom but it would cost me two Egyptian pounds. I agreed to his terms. Two Egyptian pounds was a trifling amount. The owner made a gesture and our waitress, his daughter, approached and was soon guiding me away from the café. There was no toilet at the café, I was surprised to discover; there ought to have been, to my mind, they were serving fluids, after all. Not to worry, I was told; it was close by. Close by? Within minutes I found myself hopelessly lost within the maze of the market, taking turns that seemed to overlap in twisted circles until she gestured for me to climb an impossibly narrow and steep stair, ending in a concrete platform and plywood door. I entered what I imagined was their apartment, a fairly spacious space that was almost devoid of furniture. What furniture there was had been piled into a corner. Children played on a rug in the center of the room while the adults, all women, wrestled with mounds of white linen, all of it wet, all of it destined for a wringer. There was a huge basin opposite the children and furniture, a green rubber hoses coiled and piled in twists around the basin. My guide explained my presence, I paid the aged matron my two E. pounds, and I was directed to a tiny space in the corner, a plywood privacy construct, where the half-high plywood plank that served as the door tapped the toilet when opened. Thankfully, I only had to pee. Had I to do the other business, I’m not sure I could have managed it.
Did I buy my chessboard? No. I did manage to buy a little sphynx statuette in the market shortly before we were herded back to the bus, nothing more.

And with that, our Nile tour was complete. We were on our own, left to fill what remained of our time in-country as we saw fit. That wasn’t long for some. They had to leave right away. There were heartfelt goodbyes to those I’d never see again and the first of us made their way to the airport, destined for California and a bookmark of memory.

For those of us who were departing the next day, there was supper to be had. We looked at the Mena House menu, declaring it beyond our means, asking the desk about options. He suggested TGI Fridays. I’d never heard of it.

“I love Fridays,” one of the girls said. It’s a chain, she said.

I was hungry, so I agreed.

We caught a cab, spilling out at its entrance by the river, six lanes on traffic in front of it. It was typical roadhouse fare, not good, not bad. The ambiance was typically American, something that thrilled the Americans, if not Derik and Jackie and I. A couple beers later, we didn’t mind, either.

We hailed a cab when done. And waited for the traffic to thin out so that we could be on our way. Suddenly, our driver peeled out and crossed not only the three lanes between us and the direction we were aiming for, but two more lanes once we were through the gap in the meridian and headed back in the right direction. We spun around so fast we were all pressed into the same door, too stunned at the prospect of the expected impact to holler or scream.

“Well,” Jackie said once our heart rates had settled back to normal, “that was almost worth the price of admission.”

We laughed. At that moment, nothing could have been funnier.

Giza

The next day was spend in and around Giza, so we even had the luxury of being able to sleep in. I hadn’t done that for a week, so I took advantage of it and had a laze about the bed for a few minutes, stretching like a cat before rising and showering. I was still the first down, relishing two Turkish coffees before settling in to breakfast. The rest staggered in in their twos and threes as I finished up eating, gathering up an American coffee and heading out to the terrace for a few moments with Pynchon and Gravity’s Rainbow.

We hopped on the bus and travelled the short distance up Al-Haram, past the Mena House Golf Course to the Giza Necropolis and the Great Pyramids. You know the ones: Khafre (Chephren), Menkaure (Mykerinos), and Khufu (Cheops). There are actually six, all told, counting the Queens’ burial pyramids. But there’s more to the necropolis than just pyramids; there’s a whole complex of workers’ village, workshops and their surrounding cemeteries, too. They’d been building pyramids here for decades after those of Saqqara, so there was a sprawling community about. FYI: there’s been no evidence of vast masses of Hebrew slaves, just Egyptians tolling at erecting enormous tombs for religious reasons, the burial of their living god, the Pharaoh. There’s been accounting tablets, work tallies, and love poems unearthed, but no chains, no mass graves, no slavery.

We disembarked well before the entrance, coming upon the arms of the Great Sphinx long before the pyramids and cemeteries, where we were told the official history of the sphinx and nothing about how the head is out of proportion to the rest of the body and how the body may actually predate the pyramids themselves, the statue potentially recycled from an earlier lion, originally carved during a wetter age. Egyptologists don’t buy that theory, but geologists note the tell-tale signs of water erosion on the lower body, something the Egyptologists, having no instruction on how rock wears when subjected to either wind and sand or water, immediately dismiss. I nodded agreement to all our guide Ahmed was saying while inspecting the water erosion for myself.

When we came upon the pyramids, we were informed that we could not climb or enter the pyramids like we did at Saqqara. I was a little angry at that, but what was there to do? We milled about, looking to get better shots of the big three without too many of the hundreds of tourists in attendance. I backed away, only to be set upon by Arabs holding a camel.

“Would I like my picture taken on the camel?” they asked.

“I have one with me on a camel, already,” I said.

“Ah, but with the pyramids behind you?”

They had me there.

I handed over my camera, they helped me aboard, and began to draw me away. We were headed out into the desert, the crowds of tourists thinning out. I grew nervous.
“Hey,” I said, “where are we going?”

“To get a better shot,” they said, drawing me away even faster, looking back over their shoulders at where we’d come from. That made me look back too, astonished at the distance covered in so short a time.

“Stop,” I yelled.

They didn’t.

I threw my leg back over the camel, and slid off, headless of whether I might hurt myself upon landing.
“Give me my camera,” I demanded, stalking the guy who had it, who was backing away. “Give it to me or I start screaming for help.”

They tried to calm me. They tried to reason with me. They tried to get me back on the camel, reaching out and taking hold of me, trying to direct me back onto the animal, gripping me harder than I was comfortable with. By that time, any form of persuasion was more than I was comfortable with. They stopped only when I shoved them away. They finally handed the camera over and I began to walk away, back the way I thought we’d come, throwing a nervous glance back over my shoulder once or twice.
My trajectory was a slightly off. The teeming masses threw me off, and before long I was headed a few degrees off course. You’d be amazed what a difference a few degrees can make. Maybe not; observe a golf ball when sliced. I didn’t know it at the time but I was making for the wrong pyramid and soon found myself walking around the far side of the Pyramids, and not sure which pyramid, either. Tourists were few and far between. I didn’t see any of my people and wondered if I ought to backtrack. But backtrack to where? I was hopelessly turned around.

I thought a little altitude might help. I mounted the hill surrounding the complex, meaning to find my way back to the entrance. It was a hot walk, the sun beating down on my head. When I’d almost completed my trek, I saw my bus, “Contiki” in bright bold letters splashed across the side. It was driving away. Driving away? I couldn’t believe it. They were leaving me. I panicked. I ran, waving my arms, thinking I’d already done this once before in South Africa. What the hell? I thought. Why were they leaving me? I couldn’t have been gone that long! What’s with buses and their not doing headcounts….

The bus stopped, I breathed a sigh of relief and climbed aboard, and found myself the subject of some questioning. “Where the hell did you go?” they asked. “We saw you on a camel headed out into the desert.”

I didn’t answer at first, not believing what I was hearing. And no one thought to chase after me? I thought, and said as much.

Thankfully we had nothing to do in the afternoon except laze around Mena House, taking in the sun, trying to lure a little tan onto our flesh. Derik and Jackie and I chatted a lot. I found myself watching Jackie more than I ought to have, having grown rather fond of her over the last few days. But we only had one other full day remaining and she was more than a couple years younger and had not once cast an inquisitive eye in my direction, so I let my crush lie unrequited. There were more conversations with the others too, engaging in that time-honoured tradition of letting loose one or two secrets to those intimate strangers one finds along the way while travelling together.

That evening, after an early supper, we were back on the bus, and brought to the limits of the Necropolis. We took our seats and were to be treated to a light show and history lesson, painted on the bodies of the Pyramids and Sphinx. There was music, there was a suitably Orson Wells-esque voice overlaid, relating the truncated version of three thousand years of history while pictures snapped and flowed across the structures. Everyone wooed and aahed and applauded as expected.

We found our way to the Mena House bar, eager to just have a night out where we talked about anything but Egypt.

Our host and I found ourselves settled onto barstools, slightly away from the others for a while, comparing notes. We were of a similar age, staring the end of our youth down. What had we sowed? What had we reaped?

I’m ready to pack this in, he admitted to me. I’ve no roots, he said. A man my age ought to have built something by now.

I’d been rooted to a spot, I noted. But I hadn’t set down any roots, either.

I think we were both in need of some.

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.

Karnak

I had to get up before dawn the next day, so I was a good boy the night before. A pleasant surprise. I was pleased to find Ahmed already in attendance in the dining room, already brewing me up a Turkish coffee when I arrived. I needed it. I was up before the others, as usual. That said, I did not wake naturally. A wake-up call rousted me from my slumber at 4 am, so when I gained the dining room, I felt like death. I was exhausted. I wondered how Ahmed felt. He was still up when I went to bed.

We were in a shuttle within the hour, brought to another pier to board a water taxi, and were across a Nile that was just as a shimmer of motion in the faint grey light that was just then peeking over the horizon. We stepped onto a cold dock, crossed a road and a ditch and then a field, making for a spot of orange flame in the distance. Drawing closer, we saw a sheet of coloured cloth laid out over the field, still ducky shades of whatever brightness they’d soon become at that hour. A large wicker basket lay on its side at the base of the massive stretch of cloth, long ropes connecting one to the other.
Flame flew from a nozzle, jetting heat into the hole at the base, the cloth rippling as the air filled it. Then it rose slightly, swelling, still held close to the ground by the ropes.

Only about six of our group opted to take a ride in a Balloon at dawn to watch the sun rise up from the Red Sea. I don’t understand why more didn’t. Maybe the early hour scared them off. Their loss. I was excited about the prospect of flying in a balloon. I’d never been in one before. But to catch the sun rise over the Nile at dawn, we had to already be aloft when it did, hence our early start.

I asked why the basket was lying on its side. That was the only way the board it, I was told. There was no side ladder or flaps to open. We slid in, one atop the other like cordwood.

A further intense blast rushed into the balloon, hot even at a distance, smelling of propane. The tether ropes relaxed and the balloon rose higher, finally standing on end, taking up the slack on what ropes were not already taut. The final anchor ropes were released and the basket tilted upright. I held on to a rope and the rim of the basket as tightly as I could as we swung upright, our bodies jostled, tossed into the center as we swung up under the balloon. Most of us kept to our feet, but a few crumpled to the bottom. Then I felt our leaving the ground. We swung like a pendulum for a moment, until the ground crew stabilized us, then released us. More heat blasted into the balloon and we rose and rose and rose, finally slowing as the pilot eased off on the flame.

It was fun. We laughed as we swung to and fro, finding our places around the basket, our weight balancing it fully. The propane reduced to a pilot light, all we heard was the rustle of the wind carrying us downriver.

Then the sun rose, a red blaze that split the blue and grey below, casting long shadows and revealing the Nile and fields and desert in relief. We saw golden red sand cut by a band of green, the center a ribbon of blue, green and then gold again as irrigation ended. Hatshepsut’s temple resolved from the rock face to the west. It was stunning. It was beautiful. It was a little brisk up there too.

The landing was rough, smooth by their reckoning. We slid to the ground, the basket dragging and tilting until friction had taken its full grip and nearly upended us. There was a nervous “whooo,” and then laughter as we slapped back to the ground.

We were back before breakfast, then herded back onto a bus and off to Karnak and its vast array of decayed temples, chapels, pylons, and buildings. We passed through its towering entrance, guarded by two phalanx of crouched rams, fully half of them decapitated, through the gap in the high wall and into the maze within. We spent a lot of time looking up as we inched past truly gigantic columns, most of them reconstructed, many of their glyphs defaced by the chisels of descendants and the devout.

The afternoon was reserved for Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple, its splendor tainted by the memory of the seventy Greek tourists slaughtered on its steps by terrorists just two years before. There were quite a few soldiers in attendance when we arrived; indeed, there’d been plenty of armed soldiers in attendance wherever we went.

The temple is a reconstruction. Just about everything having to do with Hatshepsut is a reconstruction. The Past had done its best to erase her from history, in the most literal way possible. It, they, had chiseled away her cartouches and images. At the Deir el-Bahari temple, her statues were torn down and in many cases, smashed or disfigured before being buried in a pit. At Karnak, they walled up her obelisks. Pharaohs and their administrators liked saving money, so instead of building new monuments for the burial of Thutmose III, they used the grand structures built by Hatshepsut.

But they were not as thorough as they might have been. She’s still there, if you look carefully. It’s hard to make a female image male. And there was other evidence, too. People are people, whenever they lived. We saw graffiti amid the stonework, some of it truly ancient, some of it pornographic in nature. There seemed to be some speculation as to whether Hatshepsut and Senenmut were lovers after the death of her husband, Thutmose II. Senenmut, a man who rose from fairly humble origins to be a prominent courtier, her chief builder, was probably the most powerful man of his time, and only slightly less so than Pharaoh. He would have always been in attendance. Maybe more than he needed be. There were crude engravings in the stonework, usually in discreet places, suggesting what the artist believed were their preferred positions.

The day grown long, we made our way back to the boat and our lazy passage north. We skipped all of central Egypt. It was still considered unsafe, so we steamed downriver all through the night while we slept, waking in Cairo

Vast, teeming Cairo. Chaotic Cairo.

It was a completely modern city. And it was like stepping back in time.

Luxor

There was a lot to see in both Luxor and Karnak, so the next two days were full, maybe too full. Or maybe I should say that they would have been if I hadn’t slept in. I did that first day. We had our costume party the night before, after crossing the Edsa locks; there was a lot of booze and, I didn’t know it then, but I was starting to become a morning person. This is not to say that I wasn’t hung-over, because I was. Too many late nights were hard on me. You’d think I’d have learned that the year before while in South Africa, but I’m tenaciously stubborn when I want to be. I’d always been a nocturne, most young adults are, but I wasn’t a young adult anymore, no matter how much I wanted to believe otherwise. I went to bed late, and I slept in. By the time I woke, the group had already left the boat, off for a dawn felucca sail up and down the Nile. I was a little angry with myself at first, but when I thought about it, I really didn’t mind that much. Aside from being able to say that I’d sat in a felucca, the excursion didn’t appeal to me that much.

I took the time to recover, I drank liters of water, and I lazed about the top sun deck, trying to get a bit of a tan. It was not ideal tanning weather. A relentless cool wind had risen up that morning, and I found myself clutching the beach towel around myself for much of the time.

The others returned long before lunch, joining me on deck for the bit of free time allotted us before lunch and filled me in on what I missed. It wasn’t much. They said they’d have preferred to sleep in. There was nothing to do once they boarded the sailboat, just sit about watching the banks flow past and the sun rise higher. And like I said, it was cold.

We took the time for another time-honoured tradition while lazing about, we got to know each other a little more. The Californians told me more tales than I really wished to know. I knew that John and his “friend” had a somewhat complex relationship. I had no idea how complex. There were drugs; apparently a lot of them. And, there was an accommodation. According to John, they were just friends; but watching her, I could see that she was of a different mindset. It was obvious to me that she was in love with him. Madly in love with him. And they shared a room. They had sex. It should have been a cut and dried relationship, in my opinion; but I’d never heard of friends-with benefits before.
But on a positive note, John’s luggage finally caught up with him. He’d been living out of his carry-on for days, and he said things were getting a little funky, despite his washing a couple things in the sink in the evening. I was happy for him, if a little confused as to what to think after his friends had tattled their tales. Personally, I think they should have kept them to themselves. It’s well and good to seek solace for one’s self, it’s quite another to tell stories out of turn.

We boarded a large minibus that took us to what we were told was a spectacular restaurant. This was going to be a real treat, we were told. We shuffled in, took our table, and I left for a bio break.
Washrooms can be a bit of a shock when travelling and this one was no different. There was a little brass bidet spout sticking up in the dead centre of the toilet bowl, strategically placed so that the user wouldn’t need much paper. Water pressure can be problematic in Egypt, despite its being typically nestled up against a river. Whether that was because the pumps were old or whether the pipes were insufficient to the task, the end result was the same. Egyptian toilets didn’t swallow much paper. The least they could have done was ensure that little brass spout was clean, but they hadn’t.

I returned in time to order. Much to my surprise, there was only one thing on the menu: chicken. You could order a quarter chicken meal or a half chicken meal. I hated chicken. Couldn’t stand it. Not my mother’s, not KFC’s. I ordered a quarter chicken, hoping for more starches and veggies. They must have mixed up my order, or didn’t bother to honour it since everyone else had ordered a half chicken and the final quarter would have gone to waste had they not served it to me, because they brought me a half chicken, too. I decided to nibble at the offending bird, lest I be starving the rest of the day.
Oh my God! It was fantastic! I’d never tasted anything so good in my whole life. I gobbled the whole half down, wishing I had the other. I came to the conclusion that my mother must not cook chicken very well. Sorry Mom. Maybe it was just a spice thing.

After lunch, we were bused to the Valley of the Kings. The morning’s cool breeze was only a memory by then. The sun was high, its baking begun. Shadows shrunk to toe marks. We were happy to descend into the tombs after Ahmed gave us the first part of the lecture, how the Pharaohs had abandoned building pyramids for the easier to hide subterranean tombs. The pyramids were too big, too conspicuous, and too easy prey to tomb robbers. I noted the roughly pyramid shaped hill that loomed over the valley, earning me more brownie points in Ahmed’s eyes. Like I said, I knew a lot about Egyptian history. University and television documentaries are thorough, if you pay attention to that sort of stuff.

I did not enter Tut’s tomb. I’d already seen Ramesses’ (III) and Seti’s (I), and since Tut’s had been stripped bare, I couldn’t see myself through to paying another forty American to see another empty space, no matter how famous. More than a few of us came to the same conclusion, joining together for an iced tea under the café canopy, instead. Those who did pay tried to convince us that the extra entry fee had been worth it, but their enthusiasm rang false in their eyes when they spoke about what they’d seen.

Before returning to the boat for supper, we visited the Amun Temple. It was immense. It was spectacular. But the day was waning, the sun had worn us down and we were tired. Ahmed left us for a few minutes, trusting that we’d wait, which we did, but we were growing bored, so our host took up the slack and spoke on what we were seeing when asked, warning us not to say anything about it. Only Egyptians can lecture on Egyptian history in Egypt. It’s the law. Really, it’s a crime for any non-Egyptian to do so. That creates employment for the locals, but in truth, Egyptians aren’t the only people who know a lot about its history. Our host did alright; he’d listened to enough of those lectures in the time he’d been guiding tours to not speak with some authority on the subject. He could have been fined though, so none of us ratted him out.

By the time we boarded the bus for our return to the boat, we were half frozen again. The wind had picked up after sunset, funnelling between and whisking around the temple’s pillars, and the temperature plummeted with it, the Libyan Desert being, well, a desert.

I was pleased to see the boat again, even more pleased to bask under a hot shower.

The Nile

We spent a second day in Aswan, or a portion of one, anyways. There were sites to see: the Libyan Desert, for one, and the Unfinished Obelisk, for another. The desert was golden red, its knife edge contrasting vividly against the green of the black lands (it’s what the ancients called them: the Red Lands and the Black Lands, one sand, the other soil). Its border was literally a straight line, desert to the east, crops and trees to the west.

It was hot, hot for me, at any rate; at forty-three degrees, hot for most, I’d imagine. But it was dry, and as long as I took to the shade, tolerable, comfortable, even.

But I was not afforded the luxury of shade at the Unfinished Obelisk. It baked under the sun, its crack black with a shade denied us. More unfinished obelisks were scattered about, their shaped carved out of the rock to one degree or another. How long did to take to chisel it out from the rock with only bronze and stone tools? And how many others were abandoned once a flaw had been discovered, or worse still, cracked when near completion like the Unfinished Obelisk did?

We went to the mosque in the afternoon. It was medieval, lacking the intricate tile works we’d soon come to expect within them. Turkish carpets were spread throughout, as we’d come to expect, dispelling the rocky damp, muffling the echoes. What I did not expect was the confusion I felt, and was sure we all felt, when one of the imams sang out the call to prayer for us, his trailing voice leaving a vacuum of silence once the echo had died away. “Were we to tip?” I wondered. He didn’t have his hand out, like everyone else did. There was the expectation of tips and baksheesh wherever we went. Take my picture? Tip me. Need directions? Tip me. That might be fine for those others we met, but this was a holy man. This was a Temple. I pressed my hands together and bowed my head in thanks to the Holy Man, somehow feeling cheap for not having tipped him, yet finding it impossible to tip a “priest.”
There was more than just sightseeing on the agenda. There was shopping to be done. We were tourists, after all. We all wanted souvenirs, keepsakes and props for bragging purposes. What I wanted was a mother-of-pearl chessboard. I didn’t find one, but I didn’t expect that I would there, not outside Cairo. I wasn’t worried. Rumour had it that you can find just about anything in the Khan el-Khalili, the oldest continuously active market in the world, and we were going there once we returned to Cairo. What I found was an airy V-neck shirt of the lightest and whitest Egyptian cotton. And a Bedouin robe. I bought that for an upcoming costume party we were having, otherwise I’d have let it lie, and would have bought a couple more shirts instead. The robe was a waste of money. When would I ever have the need to wear it? Little else interested me, so I was one of the first to make my way back to the boat, Jackie and Derik with me.

I almost didn’t make it. The repositioning of the boats was afoot, something we were unaware of upon returning. We arrived to find our boat no longer on the pier but were instructed that we could still get it by passing through the one that was. There was even a sign to say so. We were also told to hurry. We had to pass through three other boats to get to ours in fact, all moored together, double and triple parked against one another, through one increasingly shuttering lobby after another until we came upon our own, our staff gesturing for us to “Shnell! Shnell!” That’s German for “hurry up!” by the way. Our boat was already pulling away from the others, the narrowest of gaps between the deck we were on and the one we were making for inching wider as we watched. We began to run. I leapt across the narrow gap, just after Jackie and Derik, the last to gain the deck before we were separate from those other decks.
I showered. I made my way to the dining room, noting the time and that we had still not tied back up to the docks yet. The sun had set, the wind had risen, the temperature had plummeted.

While we ate, we noticed the rest of our party through the window, huddled together and clutching one another on the pier we’d narrowly almost been left behind on, their newly purchased robes thrown on and their clothes pressed flat against their bodies. They spotted us, warm, our bellies full. We waved. What else could we do?

Once they were back on the boat, we departed, they ate, and we retired to sleep off our passage to Edfu.
Mornings had become a ritual for me. I was usually the first to rise (I suppose I was beginning to transform into a morning person then), so I’d bring my copy of Gravity’ Rainbow down to the dining room to await the others’ risings. I’d find a cup of Turkish coffee waiting for me at the bar. Ahmed (our bartender, not our Egyptologist) had suggested that I try one my first morning when I’d asked for an espresso. I did. I found it strong, battery acid strong; but I declared it very good, just the same. It was, but it was also very small, no larger than the espresso I’d originally asked for, yet so thick it left a pool of mud at the bottom of the cup when complete. It’s amazing what you’ll grow accustomed to; by the third morning I found regular coffee bland.

The others stumbled in one at a time. “Mornings,” were mumbled. We ate, we disembarked, we were shuttled by ass-drawn carts to the temples. There were temples everywhere we went. There were mosques everywhere too. Edfu was no exception. The town is known for its Ptolemaic temple, built between 237 BC and 57 BC, into the reign of Cleopatra. Of all the temple remains in Egypt, the Temple of Horus at Edfu is the most completely preserved. Built from sandstone blocks, the huge temple was constructed over the site of a smaller New Kingdom temple, oriented east to west, facing the river. The later structure faces north to south and leaves the ruined remains of the older temple’s pylon to be seen on the east side of the first court.

We did not go to Tell Edfu. It’s the ancient site, and it contains more Egyptian history and is of more archaeological interest than the Ptolemaic temple, but it’s less glamorous, and visiting tourists want the glamourous stuff, and tourism is all about giving the people what they want, so we skipped it. We had a ways to go to get to Luxor and Karnak, anyways, a site that even the most historically illiterate have likely heard of. We steamed downriver to Esna and passed through the locks, an action that brought us all to the rails to watch.

That evening we had our costume party. The boys dressed like Bedouins, the girls like belly dancers. Was it fun? The turbans grew hot and only lasted an hour or so. We drank a lot. It was a Contiki party.
We woke to find ourselves in Luxor.

We’d arrived in Karnak.

 

Abu Simbel

There was little to do on the first day of the Contiki Nile Tour. The official arrival day, the others were slipping in at all hours. Those of us already there hung out at the pool, catching some rays and sleeping off our night of excess. We discovered that drinking was apt to be an expensive proposition while in Egypt: Officially a Muslim nation, alcohol was frowned upon and most Muslims didn’t actually ouch the stuff, those who did, did so sparingly, so, the only people really buying it with any regularity were tourists; need I say that it was taxed heavily. Beer was what one might call reasonably priced, wine somewhat more; but hard liquor apparently had no redeeming qualities in the eyes of the law, so a rum and coke or a gin and tonic could run you up about twenty-five American dollars, when you could expect to pay about three bucks for a beer. Ouch.

We had our meet and greet, dinner, and then we were off to take the sleeper train from Cairo to Aswan to see the dam. More introductions were had in the dining/bar car. We were the only ones in attendance. Every Egyptian who entered bought whatever they came in for and promptly disappeared back up-train to their berths. That was sensible of them, desiring sleep while we silly tourists stayed up drinking extortionary priced drinks.

Oddly, there were only Canadians and Americans on the trip, and one Kiwi Contiki host. We Canadians huddled together amid so many Americans. It’s not that we didn’t like the Americans, it was that they’d arrived in two large groups, already friends, already bonded. Derik and Jackie were from Saskatchewan. They drank. They smoked. They cursed. They were clever, and spoke in a way that declared a level of education and interests that exceeded most of the Americans. They knew some Egyptian history, something most of the Americans seemed clueless about (I ask you, who decides on an ancient Egypt vacation when clueless about ancient Egypt?). Derik and Jackie and I were of a sort, so we got on great.
But I wasn’t berthed with Derik. I was berthed with an American who asked that I not smoke in our cabin. It was a reasonable request, and as I had it in my mind to quit smoking as soon as this trip was over, I readily agreed. He had other requests, too, but I ignored most of them; they were just alpha-male bullshit that stopped when I told him that if he had any more “requests,” we were going to have a problem. I also asked him how willing he was to back up so many requests. I could have asked him to refrain snoring like a jackhammer, but that might not have been realistic. No matter, I’d prepared for the possibility. I’d packed plenty of earplugs. I was learning.

We woke to our Contiki host pounding on our berth doors as we pulled into Aswan. “Everybody up!” he demanded to some grumbling. We’d been up late. We’d had more than a few drinks. We were a little tired. We’ll call it that, tired. Few of us enjoyed the Aswan Dam. The Egyptians may have been proud of it, it was an engineering feat freeing them from their annual cycle of flooding that had both blessed and plagued them since the dawn of civilization. There was a cost, though: their soil was depleting without that annual rejuvenation, and the cost of dredging the silt before the dam must have been astronomical. Engineering feat aside, it was just a dam. I walked out on it like a good little tourist, took my pictures, and showed my appreciation by squinting into the distance and dutifully oohing and ahhing, biting my tongue, not mentioning that the dam was filling up with silt as we spoke and might be rendered useless as a power generator and flood regulator before too long. Neither has happened to my knowledge. It’s still plugging along, despite my opinion otherwise. What do I know? Nothing about dams and silt and dredging, apparently.

The second leg of the day was better. We boarded a plane for a short flight to Abu Simbel. That was an engineering feat I could wrap my head around. The two temples had been carved out of the rocks they had originally inhabited and painstakingly transported and recreated on higher ground to save them from the Aswan flooding, residing now in hollow rock hills—the interior of which I’d seen in a Lonely Planet Guide episode. None of us were allowed to see their hollow, domed innards, the Egyptians believing that we should suffice with the three-thousand-three-hundred year old temples displayed out front; go figure. I was. They were spectacular, a dire warning to the Nubians to beware, that they were entering Ramesses’ domains, the most technically advanced and powerful nation on the face of the Earth. Percy Bysshe Shelley described it best, and none have better since:

I met a traveller from an antique land 

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, 

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, 

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: 

And on the pedestal these words appear: 

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: 

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' 

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare 

The lone and level sands stretch far away." 

The two enormous reliefs of Ramesses and Nefertari towered and loomed over the approach, more spectacular than anything within.

That’s not fair. The temple is as spectacular (am I using that word too often?), complex, with many side chambers. There’s a hypostyle hall within, eighteen meters long and seventeen meters wide, supported by eight huge Osirid pillars depicting the deified Ramses, linked to the god Osiris, lord of the Underworld. The colossal statues along the left-hand wall bear the white crown of Upper Egypt, while those on the opposite side are wearing the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. There are beautiful bas-reliefs on the walls of the pronaos (the hypostyle hall) depicting battle scenes of the military campaigns the ruler waged, mostly given over to the Battle of Kadesh, where the Egyptian king fought against the Hittites, but showing Egyptian victories in Libya and Nubia, too; it was erected on their southern border, after all. The most famous relief shows the king on his chariot shooting arrows against his fleeing enemies, who are being taken prisoner. The Pharaohs were all about boasts and bluster. They were powerful, after all. They were gods, after all. They wanted the world to know it, too.

There’s a second pillared hall, right after the pronaos, which has four pillars decorated with scenes of offerings to the gods. There are depictions of Ramesses and Nefertari with the sacred boats of Amun and Ra-Harakhti. This hall gives access to a transverse vestibule in the middle of which is the entrance to the sanctuary. Here, on a back wall, are rock-cut sculptures of four seated figures: Ra-Horakhty, the deified king Ramesses, and the gods Amun Ra and Ptah, the main divinities in that period. It was a spectacular start to the tour, if a little tiring.

It was brutally hot out there in the desert. I could not drink enough water. I had the ghost of a headache haunting me. You get the picture.

It was here, in Aswan and Abu Simbel, where we met Ahmed, our official guide while in Egypt. Our guide had to be Egyptian. Egyptian Law decreed it. Our Contiki representative could be our host, our organizer, our mother hen, but he could not speak on Egyptian history whilst in Egypt; to do so risked criminal charges. Only an Egyptian could lecture us on Egyptian history. Ahmed was well suited to the task. He was a university graduate, in—you guessed it—Egyptology! I was his pet. Why? I’d taken Classical History in university, a third of which was Egyptian. I was always already looking at whatever he was set to lecture us on before he began.

I discovered that first tour day that Mohammad is the most popular name for boys in Egypt, indeed, in all Muslim nations. Mohammad, Ahmad, there were rather more variations on the name; it was like being in a nation of Davids. There were a number of Davids too, by the way, there being a number of Coptic Christians there.

A few hours later, we were back on the plane, on our way back to Aswan, boarding the riverboat cruise ship that would be our home for the next few days. It was beautiful, it was luxurious, it was an elaborate mixture of colonial opulence and Muslim geometric art.

We ate, we congregated in the lounge to continue getting to know one another, we slept. It was an altogether exhausting day. Waiting does that; it exhausts me. And there was a fair bit of waiting to do that day, waiting for the bus to take us to the airport, waiting while on the Aswan Dam, which was in itself an exercise in waiting, waiting to board the plane, waiting to reboard the plane, waiting to book into the cruise.

Luckily, I had my own cabin.

I loved having my own cabin.

Not that I used it for anything other than sleep.

 

The Red Pyramid

I arrived the day before the Nile Tour was set to begin, and booked into our hotel, the Marriott Mena House. Originally a private hunting lodge, the “Mud Hut” was bought and sold and rebuilt, opened to the public in 1886. It’s a posh place, once the destination of the elite when visiting Giza to take in the pyramids. High ceilings, plush carpeting, lots of marble; you get the picture. It still has a view of the Great Pyramid, despite it being somewhat removed from the historic site, but Giza sprawls between it and them now. The sprawl is low to the ground, thankfully.

I saw a small gathering near the front desk, reading the notice board, their fingers pointing to and tracing the text on the page with the Contiki logo splayed across its top margin. I thought it likely that these were some of the people I’d be spending the next week with, so I walked over to them.

“Contiki?” I asked.

They were, so we made our introductions. They were from Southern California. Their names fell from my memory even as they uttered them. Except one. One name stuck: John. Not only is that my middle name, he and I had already met, in a way. We’d been conversing for a couple months on the Contiki website. Contiki’s great for that, having dedicated message boards and chat rooms where past and present attendees could meet and greet prior to their trip.

We finished checking in, got our room keys and we all promised to meet up in the bar to get to know one another better; or they me, in their case. One of them had gathered up a few pamphlets from the front desk and they were leafing through them when I arrived.

“We’re thinking about starting our vacation early,” one of the girls said. “We were thinking about going to Saqqara. It’s not on our itinerary and we may not get another chance.”

I was in. We were off. We hired a couple cars and were there within the hour. It was hot. There was no air-conditioning, but at the speed we were travelling along Salah Salem and the Ring Road, that wasn’t much of an issue. We were thankful of the speed later, for yet another reason. We arrived not a moment too soon. That’s a silly saying, isn’t it? We only arrived in the nick of time. We were actually late. The site was almost empty of tourists and they were actually closing up for the day—nothing a little palm greasing didn’t alleviate. We consulted our cabbies, expecting to have to grease their palms too, but they told us not to worry, that we’d hired them for the day. That was a pleasant discovery, a little surprising as well, considering they’d cost less than most cab fares I’d ever had. They closed the gates behind us and escorted us to the base of the Red Pyramid, pointing up to a platform about two-thirds of the way up its flank, where a small group of tourists were just then emerging from the bowels of Sneferu’s tomb.

That’s a long way up, I thought before beginning my assent. If not for the stair cut into the blocks that climbed its steep northern slope, the assent would have been really taxing, each rise a couple meters in height. We were already winded when we passed those tourists on their way down.
“Is the climb worth it?” I asked those descending.

“Spectacular,” they said as they passed. That was encouraging.

We caught our breath for a moment before entering the passage. It was steep. Impossibly steep. It was tight, too. And blessedly cool. Three feet high and four feet wide, it sloped down like a ladder at 27° for two hundred feet before landing on a short horizontal passage. I descended facing away from the laddered steps, white-knuckling the bannisters that follow on either side. I tried facing the “stair” for a few feet before finding that way impossible; I couldn’t see where I was going; I had to stare down between my legs just to find the next rung. Not that facing away was much easier. I still had to stare down between my knees to fix a foot on the rung, the view inviting vertigo. It was steeper than I originally imagined. My legs had begun to cramp by the time I reached the landing. We rested there a moment, marveling at the engineering we saw there: a vaulted chamber whose corbelled roof rose forty feet high, rising in eleven steps. We pressed on. At the southern end of the chamber, but offset to the west, another short horizontal passage led into a second chamber. It was so low we had to bend double or crawl to gain the other side. From there, we climbed large wooden staircase that wound up the southern wall to another entrance to another short horizontal passage (as low as the other) that lead to a third and final chamber with another corbelled roof fifty feet high. Unlike the first two chambers, which had fine smooth floors on the same level as the passages, the floor of the third chamber was very rough and sunk below the level of the access passage. It smelled of dust and eons. The walls were blacked by centuries of smoking torches and the breath of the teeming multitudes who’d already passed through them for centuries prior to my own passage. I suspect that a fragment of my own breath lingers there with theirs too now, likely to outlast me as theirs has them. It’s the only thing of mine I left behind, unlike those others. There was graffiti everywhere up there. Everyone who’d made that trek in decades past had left their mark. 

I put my nose to the stonework, trying and failing to see a flaw in the stonework seams. I even tried to slip a corner of a banknote between them, to no avail. I wondered how they’d fit those stones so perfectly, how many hours they must have ground one limestone stone against the other to make so perfect a surface. I wondered if we could do such a thing now.

We climbed back up on burning legs, our backs as tasked as our calves and thighs.

My legs ached for days afterwards. But to my mind, it was worth it. I’d walked and crawled and climbed through one of the oldest man-made structures on the planet. I’d walked in the footsteps of the ancients.

I’d do it again in an instant.