December 31: Back to Cairo.

We said our early-morning good-byes to the Ra I and its fine crew -- leaving behind a nice tip for everyone, as is the custom always and everywhere (but these folks earned it, let me tell you). Off to the airport, good-byes to wonderful Emad, and back onto an Egypt Air plane for the return to Cairo, where we were reinstalled in the Safir Hotel (John and Ellen and Will and Emma in a suite with two bedrooms and a sitting room!), with the balance of the day free to unwind and get ready for the classic monuments of Cairo.

January 1: In Cairo. Pyramids, Sphinx. Egyptian Museum. Citadel. Mohamed Ali Mosque. Khan el-Khalili Bazaar.

Today marks the start of our encounters with the police -- the Tourist Police. They have an office in the hotel, right by the door; one or two of their number, in their greenish "tourist police" uniforms with colorful shoulder patches, lounge always at a desk by the metal detector. Morning starts fine -- Mohammed arrives with car and driver (another Mohammed) and our guide, Amgad. We collect ourselves in the lobby after breakfast, including John, who has been feeling poorly but says he'll be damned if he goes to Egypt and doesn't see the Pyramids and the Sphinx. Out the door, we pile into the van, ready to go -- and wait.

After a while I get out to try to find out the cause of the delay. Amgad is engaged in a discussion with a Tourist Police officer. The officer is snarling and looks quite unpleasant. As I watch, he pushes someone forcefully on the chest. I take Amgad aside to ask what is happening. He tells me that the office is insisting we have a police escort in the van; Amgad has refused, saying there is no requirement for such an escort and the van is already packed. The officer insists, and in the end, prevails. I am not impressed.

Later that day we return to the hotel for lunch and to drop off John, who's feeling poorly. We arrange with Amgad to meet up again at 2. Two comes and goes; no Amgad. After about 30 minutes I head up to our room to call the travel agency. While I'm gone, Edie witnesses Amgad led away in handcuffs. It requires the intervention of the owner of the agency to get him released. Off we go for the afternoon tour, a good hour late (this means in the end a mad rush through the Egyptian Museum), Amgad smiling and insisting we put the incident out of our minds. A few days later, he asks us to write a letter on his behalf; the Tourist Guide Syndicate is pursuing a complaint against the police. We met with the head of the Syndicate and several board members who inform us that Amgad was completely right in the dispute, the officer wrong. We write the letter, hoping it will help.

This is the only such incident we see in Egypt.

Okay, the Pyramids. It's impossible to say anything new (at least by me) about these iconic structures. Who hasn't seen the pictures? And that's exactly what they look like, except that they are so big that when you are right up against them, you can't really comprehend them. The tops are invisible when you're standing up against them; all you see is a massive wall of sloping stone up, and sky. Originally they were clad in smoothed stone, but that has been robbed out over the centuries; only the medium sized one still keeps its crown of cladding, to give a sense of how they must have looked when new. In some ways I think they have more dignity -- and are more impressive -- when seen, especially unexpectedly, from a great distance, glimpsed, for example, from the porch of the mosque of Mohammed Ali (that's the photograph, taken at sunset, on the main page of this entry of the diary) through the haze of Cairo, or between palms off the highway returning from the Fayum.

For an additional fee (of course!) you can go inside the small one. The path slopes down steeply 30^o, and you scramble against gravity on a wooden floor. The tunnel is low; I bumped my head several times. At the bottom are a false chamber and the real one, lined in red granite.

The hit of the visit here is, however, not these unimaginably old structures -- approaching now 5000! -- (even if I keep thinking about the Grateful Dead's September 1978, concerts here -- the last on the 16th played under a full moon -- when they used the burial chamber of the Great Pyramid as an echo chamber) but the camel ride. The camel owners linger near the best "viewing site" of the pyramids, where all the tourists come for their standard shots. The camels wear colorful kits, which cannot however disguise the fundamental look of contempt in their eyes. After the usual negotiations -- for the deluxe ride, rather than just sitting and posing -- we prepare to mount. This is not an easy business. The creatures kneel and you scramble up on their backs. No stirrups give purchase to your feet. You hang on to the pommel of the saddle, your partner behind hangs on to you. (Under other circumstances this would undoubtedly be great fun.) Then the came gets up! It does this hind legs first, so that you are pitched forward suddenly and fiercely, then front legs, pitching you back again. Unsettled in the saddle from this procedure you suddenly find yourself moving along with a bizarre rocking gait -- for the camel isn't interested in waiting for you to get yourself situated. At first I was sure I was gong to fall off, but after a couple of minutes I found the rhythm of is gait, and started to enjoy it. I can imagine setting out on a long caravan trekking across the Sahara to fetch gold, salt, and slaves from cities extraordinarily distant like Timbuktu. There are companies today that specialize in running camel safaris, two weeks across the desert on the backs of these surly creatures. Let's go!

Down the slope of the plateau where the Pyramids rest squats the Sphinx. Here too is an iconic image, hard to see afresh. The face is weather-beaten, maybe worse after decades of Cairo smog than centuries of desert sand -- and the abuses of the troops of Napoleon, who are said to have shot the nose off. This was an easier task in 1798, for the Sphinx, like every other ancient structure in Egypt, was buried up to its chin in sand. The general opinion about its origin and meaning now seems to be that when the site was being cleared to construct the Mummification Temple (see below), a mass of bedrock projecting up posed an insuperable problem of removal; rather than tackle it, the architects of the Pyramid complex proposed converting it into a massive statue of Cheops, the Pharaoh buried in the Great Pyramid. This is a good story -- I have no idea whether there is any evidence to support it -- but I doubt the part that imagines the Egyptians stymied in the face of a mere mass of rock. When you consider what they accomplished, I have no doubt they could have removed this obstacle if they had wanted to. I would suppose instead that they saw a use for the rock and exploited it. Whatever the truth, the monument stands, as inscrutable as ever (unless you take it as just a portrait), ready like a screen to accept whatever fantasies of power or insignificance you may want to project.

The least remarked monument in this area, but one of the most important, is the Mummification Temple. The burial enterprise in ancient Egypt of each pharaoh embraced not just the final resting place, but all the appurtences necessary to ready him for the afterlife. The mummification process, which took 70 days, was itself a sacred act, performed by priests, for which a special sacred space had to be constructed -- this was the Mummification Temple. Within the temple were special tables for preparation of the body, over which statues of gods watched from a series of niches. A ramp led from the temple to the Pyramid, up which the body was transported when the mummification was complete. (The table in the picture to the left is not from the temple here but from the site of Karanis in the Fayum.)

The afternoon was devoted to two sights in Cairo -- the Citadel and the Egyptian Museum. The Citadel is the mediaeval heart of Cairo -- the seat of all the great Islamic dynasties that ruled the country from the days of the Crusades to the eve of modernity. In the face of the extraordinary ancient monuments of the country, one sometimes forgets the 1400 years of history following the end of antiquity. But rulers of incredible power and wealth controlled Cairo over the centuries, and left their mark on the architecture of the city. The Citadel stands on a rise on the east side of the city; driving there from the center of town, you follow the route of a mediaeval aqueduct that supplied the occupants with fresh water. The main feature is Saladin's Keep, a massive round tower pierced here and there by a few windows. Saladin is the ruler who defeated the Crusaders in Palestine; he remains a hero in much of the Middle East, and one of the few mediaeval Middle Eastern rulers -- the other being Harun ar-Rashid -- who is both recognized and regarded with a certain admiration (sometimes) in the West. Within the Citadel are a whole series of buildings, some commercial, some built as guest houses for the rulers' visitors, some governmental; we had time for little more thank gawking at these.

The main attraction on the Citadel is the great Mosque of Mohammed Ali. Ali was the capable and pro-British ruler of Egypt in the early nineteenth century. Originally a governor of Egypt for the Ottoman sultan, he split with Istanbul over military differences and established himself as an independent ruler in Egypt, with British support. He ruled Egypt, the Sudan, Palestine, and other former provinces of the Ottoman Empire; he might have ended that power completely, had the British not finally checked his ambitions. His mosque stands as a scandalous and arrogant display of his authority -- it imitates the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, which was built by the Ottoman sultans, and features two minarets, when mosques built by governors were permitted but one. It is a stunningly beautiful building inside, austere yet light and charming, full of colors (especially green, the color of the Prophet); its expansive porch, with a colonnade around and the obligatory fountain in the middle, commands a stunning view of Cairo, the Nile, and the Pyramids to the west.

From the ceiling dangles an immense chandelier, no doubt originally dazzling with candles, but even electric illumination is impressive. The floors are soft with huge carpets; I wanted to lie down and roll on them. Luckily, because you have to take your shoes off in mosques, I could wiggle my toes through my socks into the plush pile.

It's really a dignified and beautiful building -- and striking for another reason: it's the only Islamic structure on the quick tour of Cairo, indeed the only Islamic structure slotted into the schedule for us. Later I met a guide who specializes in Islamic architectural tours; we lamented a bit together about the absence of this history of Egypt from the standard tourist's itinerary. Maybe one day I'll go back and do just an Islamic tour with him -- wanna come?

In the afternoon we visited the Cairo Museum -- unfortunately no pictures of the inside because you can't use flash. It's a museum still untouched by modern museum exhibition practices -- the walls are dark, the halls just cases of stuff, often not well labeled; no interactive exhibits, TV screens, videos telling you "The Story of Egypt" -- the kinds of things even the stodgiest old museum in the States already has. I kept thinking, this place must look exactly as the Brits who designed it left it (the motto inscribed on the facade outside is in Latin, after all -- this is a monument of British imperialism that is impossible to mistake). But as we wandered the exhibition halls, squinting in the dark, it became obvious that the Cairo Museum simply doesn't need any tarting up -- it is, as Edie remarked, your Art History 101 textbook come alive. Every room boasts a dozen famous objects you've seen a hundred times except now you're there right in front of them. It's impossible to begin to give you an idea of what it's like -- imagine, though, the rooms devoted to the grave goods of king Tutankhamen's tomb. Gold armor, clothes, chairs and thrones; eight sarcophagi, the last three gold; board games; you name it. (The riches buried with this two-bit boy king make the "treasures" of Grave Circle A at Mycenae look like chicken feed.) Every room is like that -- the paintings from the Fayoum, statues, on and on. The best room of all was possibly the room with unwrapped mummies, including the 3500 year old corpse of the mighty Ramses II, who died in his nineties after ruling Egypt for decades with an iron fist -- and you could still see it in his face. The couple of hours we had there sufficed to do little more than whet the appetite, dizzy the soul.

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