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.