January 2: By car to the Wadi el-Natron. El Anba Beshoi and el-Sourian Monasteries.

The Desert Highway connects Cairo and Alexandria through a stretch of what was once desert, i suppose, but is now an endless series of billboards, truck farms, orchards, and the carefully concealed entrances to the wealthies' country estates. It's a highway that, as one of us observed, never drew the attention of Lady Bird Johnson. We left the hotel early in the morning with our usual escort of police to drive about two-thirds of the way to Alexandria on this road to reach the Wadi Natrun. The Wadi -- the word is Arabic for a large intermittent stream bed -- was home, from the third century CE, to an increasingly numerous band of strange men (and some women) driven to find God in isolation and practices of physical deprivation. Soon enough some of them came together in groups for mutual support, rather than living in the desert alone, and founded the communal living arrangements that became known as monasteries. Several founded in the fourth century CE still exist and are still supporting monks -- two of those were our destination, and the reason we found ourselves speeding along this less than picturesque highway.

El Anba Beshoi was founded in the 330s CE by Peshoute, one of the most famous of the early Egyptian monks. (His biography exists in Greek and Coptic recensions, and we have a collection of sayings many of which are attributed to him.) The main church dates likewise to the fourth century CE, though the roof you see today was put on later. We saw the inside of the church with its icons and decorations, and listened in on a service in a little chapel officiated by three priests. The best part, though, was the keep -- a tower accessible only by a drawbridge (today fixed in place) which provided the monks protection from marauding Bedouin. (Many monks were killed in raids in past centuries.) Inside was everything monks might need to survive an attack -- a mill for grinding grain (the kids played the role of the mule that powered the mill in the old days), a bakery, a chapel, a library, and a little "cave" on the roof in which monks could hide as a last resort.

Our guide here was Nikodemos, a cheerful monk with good English who delighted in quizzing us about Biblical matters to show up our shameful ignorance (especially, I suspect, the theologically suspect understanding of god's word held by the lapsed Catholics among us).

The other monastery, Sourian, had even more interesting sites, but was harder to tour -- because we happened to arrive at the same moment as a big Italian tour group. We had to share the monastic guide, and tended to get shoved into the corners. The guide's English was too heavily accented for the kids, and there were long pauses while the group's guide translated from English to Italian. But the sites made up for a lot. Just the past couple of years a group from Leiden University, who had come to clean the frescoes, discovered underneath the existing, visible frescoes, other, older paintings -- the oldest of which go back to the early years of the monastery. The colors are extraordinary, the scenes fresh and lively. The head of the team, Karel I, has written a preliminary report with lots of good photos. For me the big surprise was the realization that monks from Syria, speaking Syriac, had founded the place (hence the name!), and had left evidence of their origin in the Syriac inscriptions on the frescoes.

The other novel -- and kind of creepy, to tell the truth -- feature of Sourian was a reconstructed communal meal, with dummies standing in for the monks and a figure representing the bishop coming for a visit. I'm not sure exactly what made this scene so strange; the simple fact that they set it up, or the almost ghost-like feel of the black-robed figures, indistinguishable, especially with their hoods, from the men who shepherded us around?

Though not exactly flourishing, monasticism isn't quite yet dead in Egypt either. Nikodemos told us that his house held about 160 monks, and that altogether in Egypt there were about 1500. While that's less than the entire student body of Trinity College, it doesn't seem to me a trivial number for a profession whose numbers have been in steep decline all over Christendom. Greece is almost 100% Orthodox, yet the monasteries there that have not been abandoned are often held down by a handful of monks. In Egypt, whose Christian population is a minority, monasticism cannot be an appealing life. Yet the houses attract enough acolytes to guarantee their continuation (indeed 160 seemed to me a very healthy number for an establishment that could be plopped down in Trinity's main Quad with plenty of room to spare).

January 3: By car across the desert to the Fayoum. The Oasis.

When we think of Egypt we tend to think of that strip of cultivated land along the Nile. The tour guides like to remind you that Egyptians use only 8% (or 6, or 10) of the surface area of the country; the rest is desert. (I'll come back in another context to the implication of worthlessness in those last four words.) But it's not quite so. West of the Nile, in the desert stretching out toward Libya, lie a series of oases. They have been occupied since way back and cultivated since agriculture began in Egypt, or soon afterwards. Siwah is famous for its shrine of Ammon, consulted by Alexander the Great who said the god told him Zeus, i.e., Ammon, was his real father; the others, though larger, are less renowned. They all owe their cultivability to the fact that they lie low, mostly a few or some tens of meters below sea level. The Sahara is not waterless, at least in the sense that no water is to be found; in fact each year an estimated two million cubic meters of water flow west into Egypt from Libya -- but deep underground. The oases are low enough that that water flows close enough to the surface that it could be tapped in the days of hand-dug wells. So in the Roman period at Kharga (al-Kharija on the map), for example, hundreds of wells as deep as 250 meters brought underground water up for irrigation. The oasis closest to the Nile -- so close in fact that a good share of its water is actually diverted Nile water -- is the Fayoum. In the Hellenistic period, under those Ptolemaic kings whose handiwork we have seen so often in the temples we have visited, the Fayoum became the object of intensive reclamation works -- some historians have seen their efforts here as the most extensive agricultural reclamation project ever undertake in antiquity. We happen to know a fair amount about it because of records preserved on papyri, especially in the so-called Zenon archive. Some of these documents were to figure in my course on Greek agriculture I would be teaching in January and February at the American School. So a lot of reasons converged for me making it imperative to see the Fayoum.

We started out early morning in our van with Mohammed our driver and Mohammed from the agency. As before, a police escort accompanied us. I felt like we had flags waving from the car crying -- hey guys, here's the Americans! The road leads southwest, more or less, out of Cairo; once you leave the city behind, the desert asserts itself quickly. Unlike the road to Wadi Natron, this patch of pavement had few signs, and fewer signs of life. Some kilometers out of Cairo, we passed a massive necropolis -- acres and acres of mausoleums, built back from the road, many still under construction. The Egyptians bury their dead -- like the New Orleans-eans -- above ground; there's no room, or not much, left in Cairo, and so the government appropriated this huge patch of ground in the desert. Families own a joint mausoleum where their dead are housed; they come to visit regularly -- it must be an inconvenience to have to drive out here, but no doubt it is also a matter of what they can afford, and I'm sure this desert graveyard is much cheaper.

Our first stop was Karanis, an ancient town excavated by the University of Michigan. Perched on the edge of desert and greenery, it offers an unparalleled introduction to the Fayoum -- for the desert really does go right up to the cultivated land, which, from the hills of sand that blanket the site, looks like an Arizona golf course. The site itself was a moderate sized town in antiquity, which has yielded a lot of written material. The chief sights are the two temples to Sobek the crocodile god. In Roman times there was a tank by the temple in which baby crocodiles were kept to be fed by Roman tourists; there's an ancient papyrus that details the entertainments for a visiting Roman government official that includes an opportunity to feed the critters. The entrance stairway and the monumental doorway of the South Temple still stand, with walls hemming in either side.

The site itself is mostly a mass of sand absolutely littered with the sherds of pots; the kids kept picking them up, horrified that the archaeologists had simply left them carelessly all over the ground. But the kids also delighted in the sand, heaped up in great piles against the walls of

 ancient buildings, a perfect invitation to play.

From Karanis we drove to Medinet Fayum, the central town of the Fayum. It's a lively place, with a delightful town square right in the middle of things that features a set of water wheels connected with the irrigation works of the region. The guidebook said that the wheels were removed for cleaning in January, but luckily for us they hadn't yet been taken away, and we could contemplate their slow, endless rotation, symbol of the returning agricultural year and abundance of food produced by a combination of endless sun, warm weather, and a sufficiency of water. I couldn't resist the call of the square, with its cafe, music, people sitting around in leisure in the warm sun, and so I suggested we break here for a while. The kids tried a sugar cane drink made fresh as we watched by grinding up a whole cane in a machine, out of which poured a murky, yellowish-green liquid. Edie described the flavor as "chlorophyll;" the kids tasted it gamely but -- not entirely surprisingly -- were not charmed by this local delicacy.

But the square itself was all we could hope for -- delicious drinks (including that wonderful Egyptian coffee with cardamom in it) and a playground for the kids. For a few moments we escaped the endless oversight of our police escort and could pretend that we were here. Of course, one could feel -- at least I could feel -- the radiated impatience of the cops, who wanted us in the car and on the way, doing tourism through the window of a speeding vehicle. Edie and Ellen seized the opportunity presented by the hawkers clustered around our car to do a little impromptu shopping, and came away -- thanks to Will's skillful bargaining -- with a bunch of shapely Fayum baskets, a local specialty.

Once safely ensconced back in our car, I witnessed a scene that left me feeling both anger and shame. The street hawkers, no doubt jealous of the success of one of their colleagues, had clustered about our van after we had gotten in, presenting their wares to the windows and shouting their virtues. The cops kept shooing them away, they kept returning. Finally, one of the cops kicked one of the hawkers -- a man whose offense was nothing more than not taking "no" for an answer. In the rush that ensued as we pulled away, I sat frozen in the car, not knowing what to do. I wish I had said something; I wish I had at least apologized to the vendor, who not only failed to make a sale but whose memory of these American visitors includes a swift kick in the shins from a nasty cop.

From Medinet Fayum we drove north to the lake Qayun. In antiquity it was called Lake Moeris and occupied a considerably greater surface area than it does today. Even shrunken and salty, it remains impressive in this landscape, the escarpment that defines the basin a yellow smudge on the far horizon. The lake is a stopover point for many migrating birds, though we arrived at the wrong season; concerns about its ability to support the migrators link to its worsening condition. The road hugs the shore; there is no vegetation, hardly a stand of reeds; a few birds way out of the water, too distant to be identified; a sad prospect.

The visit to the Fayum was the least successful of our outings. The interests of the police overtopped ours; we were sped through the landscape so fast that I couldn't even spot good places to stop and look around, possibly take a photograph, before they were gone. I wanted some nice pictures of the canals, but got hardly one; and only a few of the rich fields, cattle, stands of crops and date palms. Tourism through the automobile window. As Edie aptly remarked, the Fayum is a place that should be toured on foot, talking with the farmers. Perhaps one day soon I will return to do a better tour here, centered on Medinet Fayum, with time, without police.

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