An Athenian Diary

 

32

 

On the Road with Kids, Part 3

 

The Athenian Diary Goes to Egypt

 

December 26-27, 2003

 

 

 

December 26: From Athens to Cairo/al-Qahira

 

The flight left 30 minutes late (I have noticed that such delays are rare now in the United States, unlike when I first began to travel by air). In compensation, they fed us on a flight of less than two hours. And the food was perfectly edible, too. Surrounded by excited Greeks, we may be the only Americans on the plane.

 

Cairo airport's a madhouse -- five or more flights have arrived almost simultaneously, overwhelming the currency exchange offices, the visa window, passport control. For $15 a head we get our visas -- two cute little stamps we are obliged to stick into our passports ourselves. Just beyond the gate we are met by Moustafa, our angel from LONT, who rushes us (as much as this is possible) through the bureaucracy and into an absolute ocean of luggage -- piled up everywhere on the floor, having overwhelmed the system. Wading through, we search desperately; Will has the best eye for distinguishing our black suitcases from the hundreds of other black suitcases.

 

I seem to have a penchant for arriving in new places by night. We speed through Cairo, a whirl of lights and brilliant mosques with glimmering minarets, to the Safir Hotel in Dokki, our home for (it turns out) about four hours. Everyone else shepherds the kids to bed while I hunker in the lobby with Moustafa to transfer into his hands our slabs of cash (a responsibility that, it will turn out, was not wisely entrusted to me). Then a few hours of sleep before arising again before dawn for another rush to the airport, for our flight down to Luxor.

 

December 27: From Cairo/al-Qahira to Luxor/al-Uqşur -- on the good ship Ra I. Temple of Karnak and Temple of Luxor in the town of Luxor; the Colossi of Memnon and the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut. The Valley of the Kings. Sailing to Esna.

For a wonderful introduction to the Valley of the Kings, see the Theban Mapping Project.

 

Another flight on Egypt Air brought us from Cairo to Luxor in just about 30 minutes. Luxor is a small town by Egyptian standards -- about 200,000 people (compared to Cairo's 16-18 million), thriving on tourism and sugar cane. Driving from the little airport (where some East Asian tourists, wary of disease, sported surgical masks in the baggage claim area), we saw acres of sugar cane growing under the brilliant Egyptian sun. All up and down the Nile between here and Aswan, cane was king -- not wheat, which Egypt desperately needs, nor cotton, the colonial crop -- in the field, in the refinery, with its billowing black smoke visible a dozen kilometers up and down the river, or -- as we later found in the Fayoum -- ground up fresh to make a drink tasting curiously of sugar and chlorophyll.

 

At the Luxor airport we met our guide for the next few days -- Emad. He turned out to be perfect for us -- funny, smart, well-informed, sensitive to our interests, and excellent with the kids. He was delighted when I expressed interest in learning some Arabic, and provided lessons every afternoon on the sun-soaked upper deck of the Ra. He shepherded us through temples and tombs and fetched a doctor when one of our party fell sick. We were really sad to see the last of him just a few days later, days whose fullness and expanse made them feel like weeks of pleasure and fun.

 

We found tied up to the quay on the east bank of the Nile, at the south end of Luxor, the Ra I -- one of 360 cruise ships that ply the Nile. The Ra I turned out not to be either the fastest, or the most luxurious, ship on the river, but it was perfect for us, cruising along at a slow enough pace that you could watch the doings on the banks of the river, lie in the sun, or study your Egyptian archaeology.

 

However, no time today to lounge on the boat. Our schedule called for seeing the sights at Luxor -- in one day doing what is usually done in two, or three. So we piled back into the mini-van with Emad, and headed out for the west bank of the Nile.

 

West, in ancient Egyptian thought, represented death -- so the cemeteries and temples connected with the other world lay on the west bank of the Nile. In the case of the Valley of the Kings, the other bank meant a series of gullies and washes carved into the brilliant yellow sandstone of the Libyan desert, under a hilltop whose pyramidal shape -- so they say -- determined the choice of these waterless domains for the tombs of pharaoh after pharaoh. We visited four tombs -- those of Ramses III, Set II, Ramses IX, and -- of course -- Tutankhamen. They had all been robbed out in antiquity, except for Tutankhamen's, whose treasures reside in numbing splendor in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. But the robbers were interested only in the gold. They left wholly undisturbed the astonishing decorations on the walls -- thousands upon thousands of hieroglyphs, recording the words of the Book of the Dead, and detailed carvings of gods and boats and men, all still brilliant with the original paint, blues and reds and yellows and greens. Pictures are forbidden so I can't share with you here our direct experience; I can only say that it left me stunned and speechless. It's the freshness that gets you -- these tombs look as thought they were finished only a decade ago, not 3500 years or more. One can only imagine Howard Carter's astonishment in 1922 when he peered into such a tomb and saw not only the carvings and inscriptions, but all the funeral equipment, undisturbed. . . .

 

The Valley of the Kings is set up for tourists -- little Disneyland-style trains to shuttle the tourists around, plenty of signage. The protection is there, too -- guards everywhere, heavily armed, unobtrusive (and helpful -- one of them gave Alison some water to wash her hands) but still there . . . . The Egyptian government wants nothing like another Luxor 1997 (the lengths they will go to prevent attacks on tourists became for me ultimately deeply frustrating, as you'll read below).

 

The other great site on the west bank is the Temple of Hatshepsut. For twenty years, using male iconography, she ruled Egypt as pharaoh. Her great temple celebrates her achievements, most notably an expedition she dispatched to Punt. Punt -- modern Somalia -- lay far from Egypt, inaccessible, exotic. Hatshepsut's expedition was sent not for conquest but for trade -- to bring back exotic plants and animals, to open routes to the South, to display the power of the pharaoh. It would be too romantic to see her actions as prompted purely by peaceful motives, for surely she intended to project her power. But that she chose to do so through trade instead of war says something, and offers a lesson we still have to learn.

 

Just the east side of the Nile bridge at Luxor stand the two monumental statues of Memnon. Actually of course they represent the pharaoh Amenhotep III, but the Greeks identified them with their Memnon, and the name has stuck. Early Greek travelers did what so many travelers have done -- they carved their names on the things. You can still read the inscriptions, if you are so inclined. Flaubert had a pretty strong opinion on this practice: "In the temples we read travelers' names; they strike us as petty and futile. We never write ours; there are some that must have taken three days to carve, so deeply are they cut into the stone. There are some that you keep meeting everywhere -- sublime persistence of stupidity." The last phrase makes me wonder whether Flaubert had in mind a graffito from Philae, far south in Egypt, almost at the end of the earth: "B. Mure stultus est," "B. Mure is stupid." Well. Someone took a long time applying his Latin invective to B. Mure -- whoever he was, now immortalized on the wall of a magnificent Ptolemaic temple. I suppose, from the difference in hands, that B. Mure carved his name, and some subsequent visitor later added the Latin. Did he realize his words would come to reflect not just on Mure, but perhaps even more on himself?

 

The afternoon we saw the two great temples on the east bank: Karnak and Luxor. Karnak, dedicated to the great god Amen, is the biggest surviving temple in Egypt. (I say "surviving" because the so-called Labyrinth, in the Fayoum, now virtually completely gone, dwarfed it -- and everything else in Egypt, as Greek travelers from Herodotus to Strabo reported.) The two temples were tied together originally by a 3.5 km long road lined with sphinxes, down which the statue of Amen traveled once a year for a 26-day visit to Luxor. The buildings you see today are the result of construction over centuries by different pharaohs. The core is the oldest part, and each successive addition, which expanded its size and magnificence, is later. But such was the conservatism of Egyptian temple construction that I had trouble seeing the different building phases -- it all felt completely integrated, whole.

 

Inside, you are trapped in a forest of columns -- literally, since each one would easily overtop many trees; and, as when you're in a forest, your line of sight is highly restricted -- it's easiest, in fact, just to look up. But of course it's not woods, it is all stone, massive, heavy stone. That inevitable question arises -- "How did they do that?" (Paul Theroux knows it's time to move on from Egypt when he finds himself asking it too.)

 

Like the tombs, every surface is covered with hieroglyphs. But there are little features, on a more human scale, that draw your attention. I noticed especially a little, sadly headless statue with an offering table -- priest, scribe?

 

It's hard to believe, looking at the pictures, that it's all real. It looks like nothing more than some Disney set, ready for the actors. I wonder whether this effect isn't at least in part a consequence of the way we are conditioned to think of the monuments of the past. The Romantics ground the lens through which we still see antiquity, whether we like it or not; we expect Ozymandias' ruined statue half-buried in the desert, or the vistas of decaying Greek temples that march across canvass after canvass of French Academy painters. And, in truth, this notion of how ruins should appear is not just a product of Romantic imagination. The temples in Greece are in ruins. In Egypt, the great monuments on whose actual floors we walk today were buried to their chins in sand when the Europeans came en masse with, and after, Napoleon. Flaubert, who visited Egypt in the 1820s, saw Edfu swamped in sand; the temple at Luxor was so deeply buried that a mosque, built originally on ground level, now sits high up in the air, far above the tourist's head, like a statement on the power of Islam. The Sphinx was buried literally up to its face, its nose an easy target (so the story goes) for Napoleon's bored soldiers. So when the first Romantically-inspired European travelers visited these monuments, they looked like ruins. When governments stop caring, the desert brings the sand. Tourist dollars (and euros) now keep things clean. (Karanis in the Fayoum offers another striking illustration of the principle; see below.) If you feel despair gazing on these mighty works today, it's not because they fell to pieces, it's because they didn't.

 

So look on these mighty works, and see whether you despair:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We hit the temple at Luxor by night. The sky absolutely black, a half moon and enormous Venus gleamed down on the sandstone columns and architraves. It was spooky, powerful. Like Karnak, Luxor too has a long history of construction, the last important addition made at the orders of Alexander the Great, who's depicted deep inside the sanctuary as a pharaoh, the first Greek (or Makedonian, if you prefer) to have his name converted to hieroglyphs and surrounded by a cartouche. He set the standard for his successors, right down to Kleopatra VII.

 

 

 

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