THE PYRAMID SCHEME: VISITING KING TUT’S CONDO IN EGYPT

December 3, 2001: 1,379 days until I retire. 119 days until my daughter Elizabeth has her first baby. And eight more days until me and my 15-year-old daughter Amy leave for Egypt.
All my life I've dreamed about going to Egypt. I've saved $20 a month for years in order to go. When I was a kid, all I ever wanted to do was to become an archeologist. And as for Amy, she had just read a book called The Egypt Game about 25 times and was down with the plan. Eight more days to go. We're ready!
Or are we?
What will it mean to go into an Islamic country during Ramadan exactly four months after the World Trade Center was destroyed? "Go to Egypt? Now? In the middle of the bombing of Afghanistan?" cried my pregnant daughter Elizabeth. "That's crazy! Don't do this to me, Mom! I want my baby to have a grandmother." But Overseas Adventure Travel wouldn't refund our money and so off we are going. Wish us luck.
December 9, 2001: Shopping: Shoes. "Shopping -- shoes." Shopping/shoes. All the anxiety of trip preparation has suddenly focused on my feet! I've tried on 20 different pairs of shoes on three different occasions. I bought two pairs of shoes. They were not right. I went through my closet four times. I tried on all of Amy's shoes. I've got nothing!
Instead of focusing on the fact that we're going into the Middle East when part of it is a war zone; that we're flying Egypt Air out of JFK; that I just did two weeks work in three days in order to leave my boss caught up at the office.... Shoe anxiety is easier to handle. And I'm not done packing either.
Rick Steves on TV last night recommended, "Have everything packed and ready two days before the trip." Moist towelettes? Medicine for upset stomachs? And Amy's famous maxim, "Never travel to a foreign country without gel." I'm always a nervous wreck before I go anywhere, even before a trip across the bay to San Francisco. I make a lousy traveler. So why do I go? Because the alternative is to stay home.
"To reach any significant goal, you must leave your comfort zone," sez my Franklin Planner. Well, I'm about to leave it bigtime. And I'm a nervous wreck.
December 11, 2001: Went to the Tibet Café for one last dinner with my son Matt last night. It was just like old times in Lhasa – except of course there weren’t any yak burgers on the menu.
Got to the airport four hours early to be prepared for security contingencies. Ha! We coulda slept in. No one was at the airport. We were the only people in the check-in line, the only people going through the X-ray machine. The only people ordering greasy pizza at the snack bar.
Now it's "brain in a jar" time. Would it not be utterly cool to be able to stash one's brain in a jar and/or turn a switch to turn off thoughts for the next 20 hours of travel time? What did our cave-man ancestors do to keep from going ga-ga while waiting in their igloos for winter to go away?
"I'm bored," stated Amy, huddled in a cocoon of CD player and hand-held video games.
"Brain in a jar," I replied. Oh. That reminds me of the old attorney joke, "But Sir," asked the lawyer, "If you didn't check the corpse's pulse, didn't check his breathing, didn't check his heart, then how did you know he was dead?"
"Because his brain was in a jar on my desk, Sir!" replied the coroner. "Only lawyers can have no brains and still be alive."
At that point they called our flight. We got on board and waited like good little passengers for our movie and our meal. "This is American Airlines Flight 16 to New York. You have ten more minutes of cell time usage." Brain cells?
Then we survived How the Grinch Stole Christmas and airline food. Then we flew over New York City and I cried when I saw what Ground Zero looked like. "Amy," I said, "See Manhattan down there?"
"Oooh! I see the Statue of Liberty!"
"No, Amy. Focus. You see all those skyscrapers...there?"
"Yes."
"See that space that looks like a gigantic parking lot right in the middle of Manhattan? That's Ground Zero." Ground Zero was huge.
25 minutes later, we were at JFK Terminal Four with approximately 600 luggage-bearing Egyptians all wondering why the check-in line wasn't moving.
"It's a computer breakdown," said the man next to us and we waited two hours while discovering how nice Egyptians were. Amy played travel Sorry with an Egyptian-American seventh grade girl who was returning to Egypt with her family. "Don't ever wear shorts in Egypt," she warned Amy. "You will get hit on."
"No, I'm used to that. I'm from Berkeley," replied Amy.
"No, it's nothing like that. It's like nothing you've ever experienced. But other than that, Egypt is great!"
Then we boarded the plane and it was only 12 midnight -- and we had 11 hours left to go! Amy was holding up really well. Even me.
Did I mention that the American Airlines stewardess who served our meals on the flight to New York went to a high school on the other side of the city limits from my high school? We middle-class suburban girls considered the boys from her working-class school to be cute and sexy and dangerous. Sort of the 1950s equivalent of Eminem. And did I mention that the stewardess gave us a free blanket from First Class when we left because it was New York City and I was worried that we would be cold? We weren't. But it was a wonderful gesture that endeared American Airlines to me forever.
December 12, 2001: 109 days until I become a grandmother? The Egypt Air flight was remarkably smooth and although we're all crammed in here like sardines and it was impossible to sleep more than 20 minutes at a time, we survived. Or at least we will survive. We land in Cairo in one-half hour!
All of our tour group is apparently on board but I have only met the mother-daughter travelers from Tallahassee, Florida so far.
Amy managed to sleep several hours even though she couldn't take her contacts out. "Mother! Why didn't you tell me that we couldn't get at our luggage in New York," she lamented -- and stared straight ahead unblinking for the first four hours of the flight. Then she fell asleep and woke up without tears.
Ramadan etiquette: When they served breakfast at 4 pm Cairo time, it was daylight outside. During the month of Ramadan, Muslims are not supposed to eat between sunrise and sunset. To eat or not to eat? All my Egyptian fellow-passengers dug right in. "Is it okay to eat?" I asked the passenger next to me.
"People who are traveling are exempt." We're traveling. Cool. The plane landed at 6 pm Cairo time.
8:30 pm Cairo time: We sat around the airport waiting for luggage. We sat around the tour bus waiting for people waiting for luggage. Has nobody here even heard of jet lag? Dinner! Hotel! Now! Please!
All the people on the tour seem really nice. Teachers, nurses....
December 12, 2001 (Thursday): The Cairo Museum of Antiquities. We actually saw the actual body and skin and bones and teeth and hair and everything of King Ramses II, one of the most legendary men to ever live. Guess what? He was bald. And he was very, very dead. It was a very "dust to dust" kind of thing.
There sure were a lot of antiquities stuffed haphazardly into this run-down museum. Well worth the trip. I recommend it. Our tour guide said, "Every museum in the world has a major Egyptian collection. And there are many, many private collections throughout the world as well -- plus the hundred thousand items in this museum." The Egyptians produced a lot of stuff.
Some say this was because, in ancient Egypt, everyone was an artist and everyone got to be creative.
Then we ate lunch and drove around in traffic for a while. Cairenes try to jam as many lanes of traffic into a two-lane street as they possibly can. All the cars drive very fast with only an inch or two separating every car. It's nerve-wracking.
We actually got to see the Nile. It's a bunch of football fields wide. As wide as the Mississippi? Hard to tell. As wide as the Yangtze? Almost. It's a lovely river.
Last night after dinner -- chicken fettuccine and chocolate mousse -- we walked across the street from our hotel in order to see a pyramid. We just crossed the street and there it was, sticking up from behind a fence.
"They're not as big as I thought they'd be," I told Amy. "I thought they'd be bigger."
This guy in a long dress -- lots of men wear long dresses in Egypt -- said he'd take us to the pyramids. He dragged me and Amy into a back alley from where the top of a pyramid showed up in the moonlight from behind a fence. The alleyway started to look kind of deserted.
Then suddenly two men bounded into the alley, riding a very large camel. This was too much for Amy. "I'm out of here." I gave the man a dollar, thanked him very much and ran. End of pyramid adventure.
Cairo -- yes we are still driving around in holiday traffic. The end of Ramadan is a major holiday in Egypt, sort of like Christmas is in the US. Everyone goes out shopping for it and Cairo looks like any other big city in China or Mexico or anywhere else third-worldish -- without traffic restrictions or your more stringent types of building permits. Cairo traffic sucks. Why are we doing this? Driving and driving and driving? I want to see pyramids! I want to put my poor jet-lagged brain back in a jar! Amy fell asleep.
A lot of the buildings are made of brick in Cairo. 50% of them appear to be unfinished. What does this mean? It means that I am jet-lagged and need to go back to the hotel for a rest.
Ah. Now we are going back to the hotel. I hate to say this but the pyramids just look sort of stupid and out-of-place peeking out from behind semi-finished, semi-high-rise apartment houses. These dinky, out-of-context pyramids seem to piss me off. I guess it's because the painting of them that I have at home hanging on my bedroom wall shows them with palm trees and the beautiful Nile flowing by in front of them.
December 14, 2001: "Now we are going to have dinner with an Egyptian family," said our guide And we did. "This is camel meat. It actually has a very low cholesterol count." Actually, it tasted like very rich/greasy beef.
The home where we visited was a vast apartment -- reminiscent of those grand old flats in New York City, overlooking Central Park. Each room was cavernous and there were a lot of them. "Within this building and neighborhood," our host told us, "we have created the atmosphere of a village. All of us are inter-related. In this building alone we have aunts, cousins, parents and grandparents. When we held a wedding celebration last month, 17,000 people were invited."
"17,000?"
"17,000. We take our family obligations very seriously." And he did. A young man whose income came from the travel industry, he had a well-furnished home, a lovely wife and three small children -- plus various aunts in the kitchen preparing the dinner and various children of various sisters, brothers and cousins running in and out.
Amy roughhoused with the host’s four-year-old son and I played cards with the smart and delightful seven-year-old niece, too young yet to cover her hair. She picked up the intricacies of the card game -- called "Egyptian Rat Screw" incidentally -- very quickly.
The food was delicious; a lot of Arabic food comes in bite-sized portions, meant to be eaten with one's fingers I presume. There were dolmas, cannoli-like shells stuffed with beef and rice, pieces of meat pastry cut in triangles and various honey-based squares of this and that to be popped in one's mouth for dessert. It was a nice evening.
Everything on this trip so far has been nice enough, sure, but nothing all that different than other places I have seen; not that much different from the restaurants, museums, traffic, etc. of American cities. Even the antiquities museum was not all that much more super than the Rosicrucian Museum in San Jose, CA. Well, maybe better. But when I saw the King Tut traveling exhibit at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, it was awe-inspiring. The same stuff was just lying around the antiquities museum with no dramatic lighting, descriptions or stage management. It was hard to get excited. One sort of had the feeling that all these rare items were copies or imitations and that the real stuff was off on sale at Tiffany's.
Back at the Mena House Hotel, our guide hit us with the bad news, "We have to get up at 3 am in order to fly to Aswan." Are you nuts? We're little old ladies here -- we need our sleep -- we still got major jet lag -- get over it.
December 15, 2001: Now it is 7:30 am and I am sitting in an Air Egypt plane looking down over desert and cloud masses, on my way to Aswan. I have no idea what we are going to do or see there. I am too tired to ask.
Why are there clouds? I thought it never rained in Egypt. Below the cloud cover, I can see brown and tan mountainous terrain, emphasized and highlighted with what appear to be rivers of sand snaking through all the cracks and crevices and canyons. It looks like what may have been a system of mountainous watersheds millions of years ago may have been replaced by sand. We're all too tired to care.
Then the cloud cover lifted and there was the Nile, looking just like the geography books said it would -- greenness cutting a swath through the desert -- and I realized that those mountains were mountains of sand and the gullies and "valleys" had been cut not by water but by wind. And that the Nile fought a valiant but hopeless battle to keep the sand back from engulfing the strip of green that lined its banks for a mere mile or two on either side.
"Just look at that patch of green trying to fight back all that sand," I told Amy. "That's amazing!"
"You just keep telling yourself that," she replied. "Got any cough drops?"
Wow. How do they ever keep all that sand back? They certainly don't have this in the USA! At least not yet. At one time, I am told, there never used to be a Sahara Desert either.
As we near Aswan, the mountains and gullies disappear and it is all just horizon-to-horizon sand. That's a hecka lot of sand.
6 pm: And today was the day I was actually going to see some ruins. Ha!
We were scheduled to go see the Colossi of Ramses II at Abu Simbel after waiting three more hours at the Aswan airport before transferring on to the city of Abu Simbel. What a waste of time. Apparently there had also been a direct flight here from Cairo that had left at a decent hour. Humph.
So around 1:30, we finally arrived at our hotel and I passed out cold in the lobby. Out. Cold. All my junk went flying in every direction. I couldn't even stand up afterwards and the two retired nurses in the group tried to give me artificial respiration.
So. What was the result? Everyone else got to go off to the temple and I sat around yet another hotel room thinking that for all the antiquities I’ve seen in Egypt in the last three or four days, I might as well have stayed home.
Then I got the stomach flu. So. Tonight's tour is off as well? I don't think so!
6 pm: We went to the Ramses II temple sound-and-light show. "I loved it!" said Amy. They projected a narrative of Ramses' life onto the face of the Abu Simbel temple itself and also onto the temple of his (favorite) wife Nefertari. The dramatic music, the enhanced lighting and the projected scenes all upgraded the majesty of the original colossi. It was awesome.
"Ramses’ built these Colossi out in the middle of nowhere for a very good reason -- to alert marauding tribesmen up from Africa just exactly who they were dealing with." Don't mess with the dude!
But I hadn't forgotten the "Pharaoh's Revenge" either. I already knew not to mess with the dude. I just wanted to make it to the nearest restroom!
Amy has been supremely helpful on this trip. She has helped people on and off the buses, airplanes, monuments, etc. and on Sunday she will help people on and off camels and feluccas. Good job, Amy.
We stayed in a wonderful hotel today. Each room has a dome which resembled a Nubian house -- I guess. And I was wrong about the sand erosion. Our guide said, "No, it was caused by water." So I could be wrong about Nubian houses too. But the hotel was located on an especially blue and clear part of Lake Nasser. And a mosquito just bit me!
Yikes, there's another one! On the face, on the neck, on the hands. So much for sleep. After all that jet-lag, I just couldn't get to sleep. So I read. Then I listened to Amy breathe. Then I got up and took a walk along the shores of Lake Nasser.
December 15, 2001: Omelettes for breakfast. Then, because I had missed seeing it yesterday, a hotel employee dropped me off at the Ramses’ II colossi and I had my own personal tour. It was amazing. There was nobody there! Not even a caretaker. Not even a couple of German tourists! I had the grand temples of Abu Simbel all to myself! I took pictures of myself standing in front of the stone reliefs. Think stone here. Think mountains of stone, dressed to impress.
Inside the temple, carved in the rock, it was -- what? Cave-like? No. It was inspiring. It was like someone wanted to make something very, very special and hopefully something that would last. Would 4,000 years be considered long enough? Sure. Even Ramses' body, back in the Cairo Museum, lasted 4,000 years and it was only made of flesh and blood.
Will I make it through the next plane ride this afternoon and all the way to evening and bedtime? Will I be able to sleep tonight or am I doomed to go without sleep forever? Is that the Pharaoh's Curse? But at least the Pharaoh has stopped taking his revenge on my stomach!
I was glad that I made the extra effort to go out to the colossi today. It finally put me in touch with ancient Egypt. And the nice people at the Seti Hotel made modern Egypt memorable too. I could see living here in a little house on the Nile. It's not that much different than Mexico. Except that speaking Arabic is a bitch.
1 pm: It was a 17-minute plane ride to Aswan. I looked on the map. "Abu Simbel is down here at the end of the world," I told Amy. "It's 3/4 inch from the border of Sudan." I hadn't realized how far south we had been. No wonder Ramses built his colossi all the way down there. He was marking his territory.
At Aswan, we visited the High Dam. Compared to the Hoover Dam, it wasn't very high at all. But it was thick as hell. "There is enough stone filler in this dam to build 17 pyramids," said our guide. There was a four-lane highway across the top of the dam and a rest stop too. We stopped. "Ooooh," said Amy. "Look at the little puppies! Aren't they cute?" They were cute. They were also skin and bones. We went over to the little refreshment stand and asked the guy, "Got any dog food?"
"No dog food."
"But look -- they got Halls Menthol-lyptus!" said Amy, who had developed a wheezing cough and heavy sniffles. We bought Cherry-flavored Halls right there in the middle of the High Aswan Dam. We also bought Nabisco wafers -- the waffle-y kind with the layers that I used to eat when I was a kid -- and Amy split them equally between herself and the two puppies.
At Aswan, we took a ferry to a posh hotel located on an island in the middle of the Nile. Oh, and before that we ate lunch at what our itinerary called "The Old Cataract Hotel," where Agatha Christie wrote many of her mysteries while her husband was working in Egypt. But we just went to a restaurant next door to the hotel instead.
The meal consisted of four different types of humus and home-made "pita" bread to dip into the humus. The bread was made in stone ovens and was all puffy and warm and much more culinarily interesting than the flat bland stuff we buy in the stores. We also had rice -- Egyptians make wonderful rice. Better even than Chinese restaurants -- and eggplant casserole and chicken; grilled and pressed. For dessert we had five different kinds of baklava.
Then we went to this hotel on an island accessible only by boat. But it was modern and luxurious with the American-quality rooms. We slept for two hours. Then a cannon was fired, the sun set and Ramadan officially ended. Everyone in the city cheered and honked horns and patted themselves on the back for surviving yet another year of fasting. And it had been hard for them. Our guide had been forced to sit and watch us eat for the past five days.
"There are five pillars to Islam," he told us. "One: The God we all worship -- Christian, Muslim and Jew -- is all the same God; Jehovah from the Old Testament. Second, we give alms to those in need. Third, we pray five times a day. Fourth, we fast during the month of Ramadan. And fifth, we -- oh rats, what was number five? I am writing this at 3:45 am so I'm not the sharpest tack in the box. I'm still not sleeping very well. Jihad! Right. No, not Jihad. Jihad , however, doesn’t mean blow stuff up. It means more like conversion by example. Now I remember. It was Hajj -- pilgrimage. Every man and woman is required to tour Mecca once in their lifetime. Me! I'll go! Add it to the list. Ankor Watt, the Potola in Tibet, Manchu Picchu, Ayers Rock, the Pyramids, Mecca. Certain places in the world are sacred. I want to see them all. I want some of that sacredness to rub off on me so that I can become a better person.
After Ramadan was over, all the Muslims went shopping. We did too. We took a ferry across the Nile to the bazaar and wandered happily down a narrow street for ten or twelve blocks, watching the ordinary people shop for the grand feast that ends Ramadan -- sort of like our Christmas dinner/Easter parade outfit combined. Everyone was buying new clothes and going to the barber and the butcher. We went to a spice shop and I purchased saffron and curry.
I also bought two very ugly toy camels, a scarf, a bust of Nefertiti and a fez for Matt. "How much did you pay for the fez," asked our guide.
"$15."
"$15! You were robbed! That hat is worth about $3! What were you thinking! You got gypped!"
"But I bargained him down from $30," I replied defensively. And I had fun doing it too. And I bought the Nefertiti from a nice young man who was persistent that I buy something so I said, "Here is two dollars. Pick me out your favorite thing." And he handed me the little wooden queen. But I surely got taken by the ugly camels. $3 each! Hand-sewn vinyl.
Then we went to an internet café and for ten pounds Egyptian money, I got to let everyone at home know that I was safe, having a good time and was the only one interested in an ugly camel.
December 16, 2001: 4 am. The muezzin just made his call -- one hour later than in Ramadan. I guess the faithful are being allowed to sleep in.
Amy is wheezing and blowing her nose and sucking on cough drops in the bed next to me. And reading The Hobbit. We have to get up at 6 am to go ride a camel across the desert to a Coptic monastery. "Maybe we should go back to sleep," said Amy.
6 am: Pack, breakfast, camels. Nobody should have to ride a camel against their will! It's cruel and unusual punishment.
We got in a boat and went to Lord Kitchener's botanical garden island. Lots of green, lots of stray cats, lots of ghosts of English officers and ladies in nineteenth century costumes promenading up and down the paths between the palms and ferns and coffee trees. Er, coffee bushes. Lots of greenery. Then we sailed to the north bank of the Nile and were suddenly in desert again. My camel's name was Mona Lisa. There was Mickey Mouse, Superman, etc. They all bawled like those creatures in the Star Wars movies. They all had bad teeth. They all shook every bone in your body when they walked. And getting on and off wasn't too fun either.
"Nuh-uh. You ain't getting me on one of them," stated Amy.
"I'll give you ten Egyptian pounds if you do it."
"Hell no."
"15 Egyptian pounds."
"You must be crazy. Them animals is mean. And they have bad breath too."
"15 Egyptian pound and a dollar. Last offer."
"Not me! Unh-uh. No way."
"Okay. You turned down my last offer. Now you gotta do it for free." Amy and I compromised. She rode a donkey. There were 15 camel riders looking like Lawrence of Arabia at the siege of Aqaba plus Amy on a donkey. Cute.
So we rode out and up into the desert stronghold of the St. Simeon Monastery ruins. And I didn't get bit by a camel or nothing. The monastery was a fortress-like edifice about the size of a small stone mountain, with a view of hills and dunes in every direction. The high walls were of brick. The monastery was formidable, meant to repel the most dangerous barbarian, the longest siege.
Inside the crumbling walls and blue-sky-roofed main basilica, there was the cross-like layout common to all older churches; naves and all. On the walls of the basilica were dimly limned paintings of the apostles -- probably painted by monks from a linage whose predecessors knew Jesus himself. The place had a quiet and holy feeling. I kissed my fingers and touched them to a wall, a Byzantine Christian gesture of reverence.
An elderly caretaker saw me make this simple gesture of piety and called me over to him. "I -- Coptic," he whispered. "Come. I show you." I followed him. He took me to the alter stone of the church, its sacred heart, and gestured with his hand for me to touch the wall. The whole place sang to me and I was feeling blessed and very religious.
The old man, dressed in a jalaba and fez-like prayer cap, pointed at a small -- two foot by three foot by two foot -- brick container connected to a clay pipe. "Baptism," he said. I felt honored and sanctified and intrigued.
The old man then indicated that I should follow him. Our guide was explaining history to the rest of the group and I left them there in the sunlit expanses of the old church ruins and followed the old man into the cell area of the monastery.
"Here they sleep," the old man said, indicating pallets made out of hard clay lining the walls of a twelve by eight foot cell. The beds looked mighty uncomfortable. Outside the cells was a low-ceilinged prayer chapel with early Byzantine icons of apostles painted on the walls in simple style.
The old man pointed up to two chinks in the low ceiling. "Here. And here," he said. "Prayer." He held his arms up and looped his thumb and index fingers through the chinks. Apparently the monks used these as supports to hold their arms to heaven as they prayed. "You try," he said.
I stepped in place and reached my arms up over my head. I closed my eyes and felt the mystery and power of the place course through me. I was in awe.
And I was completely vulnerable. That dirty old man made a lunge for my breast! "Agggh," I squeaked, completely shocked. My eyes flew open. Then the horny little bastard lied to me!
"Breathe," he said. Like he had been trying to give me breathing lessons and save my soul instead of just trying to feel me up. And he looked so sincere -- like a child molester who convinces his victim that what he is doing isn't dirty and reprehensible but a holy expression of love -- that I was actually taken in by him. It would have been obvious to any heads-up guy that this leacher was a creep who did this often and had his act quite down -- but girls and women are trained in denial and, although I felt uneasy enough to not be alone with the guy again, it took me several more hours to actually realize that I had been had.
I even tipped the creep.
Jesus wept.
Then we went back down the mountain on the camels and the burro and my camel man, a young boy in a 1980s Adidas running suit, tapped Mona Lisa on the knees with a stick and she bellowed and bawled but finally condescended to set herself down so that I could dismount.
We got in the boat and were ferried back across the Nile to the Temple of Philae, on an island mid-way between the Aswan high and low dams.
Philae was built by the Ptolemy crew. "Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 333 BC," said our guide. I think that's the date. The whole island was covered with massive columns -- three stories high, weighing hundreds of tons each, out on an island on the Nile. Go figure. These particular massive stones had gotten to this island via modern machinery however, when UNESCO moved them in order to avoid having the waters of the Nile drown the original island temple when the high dam was put in. I understand how that could have been done. But how on earth did the ancient Egyptians get them to the original island in the first place? Aliens? Probably not. The Ptolemy rulers were Greeks. They would have written stories about aliens and gossiped it all over the ancient world. Cleopatra herself would have spilled the beans.
Here’s something that someone just told me, that I didn't know before . "All the Ptolemies were pure Greek, racially at least. But because Cleopatra the Seventh was the last of a 300-year-old line of Greeks who had lived in Egypt, she thought like an Egyptian and was referred to as an Egyptian. But she was actually Greek."
Cleopatra was more than a vamp; even more than an incarnation of Elizabeth Taylor. She was a political genius who rose from the ashes again and again and again. Her brother's regents tried to kill her, ban her, degrade her, seize her power again and again but she just kept popping up. Sure she backed Anthony who was a loser, but he was her only option. Augustus Caesar was gay!
Cleopatra was a remarkable woman.
So. Here we were at the Philae Temple, awed by its awe and playing catch with oranges with our security escort -- him and me and Amy. Everywhere we go in Egypt, some dude dressed in olive pants and an olive sweater and carrying an AK-47 over his shoulder comes with us. Army guys. They are all very nice. And we are glad to have them. But make no mistake, Americans in Egypt are in far less danger than Egyptians in America are. People are really nice here.
But the Philae temple was built in Greek times, the monastery was Byzantine and the colossi were Middle Kingdom – and they are all very impressive. Yet it is the Old Kingdom stuff that is supposed to be the Right Stuff. This is an amazing because, as the author of "The Serpent in the Sky" pointed out, have you ever heard of a culture that starts at its apex and then goes downhill? China, India, etc. built themselves up from the Stone Age. Not Egypt. It suddenly appeared on the banks of the Nile at the height of its glory. Go figure. Maybe Atlantis relocated here after the big flood that even the Bible refers to.
What's my point? I'm really looking forward to seeing Luxor, Karnak and Sakarra. Philae was big but it wasn't artistically awesome. I wasn't overpowered by spirituality. And I'd better be. If you can't be overpowered by spirituality, what's the point of building a temple? Lhasa, Manchu Picchu, Ankor Watt, Jerusalem, Mecca – I want to see them all before I die.
I keep hoping that some of this spirituality will rub off on me. I wanna be Enlightened.
After Philae, we went to the quarries in Aswan to see the famous "unfinished obelisk," a gigantic piece of granite that had been left lying on its side because of its cracks and flaws. It made you wonder how they moved all that stuff. Mental telepathy? It could have been. No one -- not even Cleopatra -- gossiped about the secrets of the inner temples so they might have had psychic powers regarding which nobody spilled the beans. But more than likely it wasn't mental telepathy because even if those dudes were straining their brains bigtime, the obelisk was still a really big rock.
Then we went aboard our cruise ship, the MS Ninfea Due (Italian for "Mermaid II"), got settled in our staterooms and had lunch. For $100, Amy and I got separate rooms. Worth every penny! Especially after that time we had been cooped up together in some tiny little cabin on the Yangtze for five days and almost killed each other.
Oops, I forgot. We stopped at a papyrus gallery in Aswan and learned how papyrus was made -- you cut the stems to the desired length, cut strips, roll the moisture out of it with a rolling pin, mat the strips together, leave it in a press for a week and voila! Then they showed us some wonderful paintings.
"I don't want to get any," I told the salesman. "Just looking,"
"But look at this Scorpio design," said Amy. "They'll do my cartouche!" Okay. "And look at this one of winged justice. It's the same blue as Lily's room!" Okay. "And here are some ducks! Ruby loves ducks!" They were nice. We ended up spending $75 and, actually, probably got our money's worth.
December 17, 2001: Now we are cruising down/up the Nile toward Kom Tofu or something. And eating a gourmet lunch.
And I forgot that we also went to the Nubian Museum yesterday. "This museum won an international prize," said our guide.
"Yeah, the display cases are set up perfectly; the museum building is a jewel; every item is labeled and described -- but the contents of the collection suck." Dioramas of Nubian villages and arrow points from the stone age were the highlights of the displays. "Too bad they couldn't have the wonderful setting of this museum combined with the exquisite and awesome contents of the Cairo Museum."
"They’re working on it," replied our guide. "They're building a new museum out by the Pyramids." Good.
What else? Amy has made friends with everyone on the tour. They all love her. And she is very reasonable about what she buys. She really is more interested in the antiquities and the people than she is in the souvenirs. She is turning out to be a real person and deep. I'm very proud of her.
Now we are sailing toward Kom Ombo. More Ptolemaic colossal ruins. "Impressing by overwhelming," seems to be the Ptolemaic motto. Sure. I'm overwhelmed. We juggled oranges again and gave them to some Arab kids who probably would have preferred money but were not the sick, starving and/or maimed beggars one sees in the streets of really poor countries. Perhaps Egypt is hiding their poor -- poor in the sense of starving/maimed/etcetera -- but I have not seen them. Everyone so far seems poor but healthy, literate, positive, okay.
Tonight we have a Nubian floorshow onboard.
8:30 pm: Some guy dressed up as a witch doctor/lion king jumped out at us and clowned fiercely. A retired military nurse got up and danced with him. He was great. They had drummers as well and three men doing Arabic/Nubian folk dances.
Now it's time to go to sleep. I'm still doing the jet lag thing and I'm tired.
December 18, 2001: After touring Kom Tofu, we all bargained for jalabas in the bazaar between the ruins and the boat. That was fun. I was on to these guys this time. "Only pay ten Egyptians pounds total for the jalabas," our guide had warned us.
"25 dollars US!" cried the vender. That's 100 Egyptian pounds.
"No way! Five pounds!" The vender looked disgusted.
"This is the finest cotton," he claimed with all sincerity. Right. It was the stuff that Halloween costumes were made of back in the States. This all was starting to sound like a cliche, a Hollywood version of bargaining.
"Junk!" I shouted. But then our guide told me to just be quiet and let the vendor wear himself out. "Six pounds," I said.
"30! This fine garment is worth 30 pounds Egyptian." Then Amy wanted a crocheted cap with spangles and the whole thing started again. "A genuine hand-made craft item from Nubia," said the guy.
"Machine-made in Cairo," I replied. Amy got cold feet and offered the vendor five pounds. What was she thinking? That he was never going to sell it to her? "Shh!" I said. "I can get it for 2."
"No you can’t! It’s my hat. Give them 5!" So now I was not only arguing with the guy, I was arguing with my back-stabbing daughter. And that ungrateful Amy was actually mad at me when I sealed the deal for 3.
So Amy ended up with a deep forest green jalaba and Nubian cap for the "Dress Egyptian" party on board the ship that night. I wore my black jalaba and a long scarf pinned at the throat like the local women wear. I looked so much like one of those pathetic subdued older women one sometimes sees on the streets that it scared all the Egyptian men from the crew. It certainly scared me.
After a half-hour of wearing that outfit, I felt too trapped to leave it on for the rest of the evening. "If I keep this on much longer," I told Amy, "they’ll make me cook, clean house and raise children for the rest of my life." My worst nightmare! But Amy looked cute in her outfit and the dinner was a big success.
I went to bed early and actually almost slept through the night.
December 18, 2001: We had the usual buffet breakfast of omelettes and pastries and yogurt and tea. Then we went off to see more Ptolemaic ruins at Edfu. "Not more Ptolemaic ruins," I cried. "What, were they trying to out-Egypt the Egyptians?" Our ship docked and we got into horse carriages and drove through the crowded streets of Edfu, a sleepy old Muslim town with narrow streets filled with bazaars. I didn’t see no Ptolemaic ruins anywhere but then we stopped, got out, slid through a gap in a wall and there they were. Guess what? In Edfu, sheer enormity alone was enough to carry the day.
This place was truly awesome.
The temple facade was at least four stories high. Then there was an inner sanctum that contained what sincerely looked like the original Ark of the Covenant
itself – and had a rating of at least a "7" on the spirituality scale. I was impressed with Edfu.
Then the carriage guy whipped his poor skinny horse a lot and we went back to the boat for lunch – chicken Parmesan and apple tarts. And they had done my laundry while I was gone.
3:00 pm: I just spent $30 at the ship’s souvenir shop for an 18-karat ring with a cartouche of Cleopatra on it. Amy bought a sterling silver ankh (key of life) and a chain and a silver ring covered with ankhs. And we still have about $200 left.
Tipping: I tip everybody all of the time. That’s what I do. Feed the money back into the economy directly, skipping the middlemen. It’s good value. And I always give money to beggars too for the same reason but there aren’t very many in Egypt.
Oh – one more thing. After touring the main temple in Edfu, I went off to look at the "birth house" where the Pharaoh’s mother is supposed to have been impregnated by God – sound familiar? The virgin birth was an Egyptian myth originally. Anyway, I was looking at the birth house and this old guy comes up to me and sez, "Come with me and I’ll show you the baby." And he starts to walk down this dark side-aisle away from everybody.
Even though I knew that this guy wanted to show me a picture of the Madonna and child that was a common motif in Egyptian art and even though I wanted to see it, I had learned my lesson at St. Simeon. I was not going to go down no more dark alleys with no more strange Egyptian old men!
The carriage ride back to the boat was quaint and old-fashioned; even to the point that our driver whipped his half-starved horse again and again, just like a Dickens scene from 19th century England. Or was it "Black Beauty"?
Back at the ship, we were entertained by the obligatory cruise ship diversions of napkin-folding demonstrations, how to cut cantaloupes and potatoes into meaningful art statements and Bingo games. Actually, Bingo was cool. Amy or I took turns winning all four games – a Straitwell clean sweep. We won $15.00 total and an "I Love Egypt" post card kit.
I also nosed around and got a tour of the cruise ship next to us that was shuffling German tourists through the ruins. I also found a small shack down on the dock (six feet by six feet max) with one computer and a hand-painted sign reading "Internet Café). I was totally pleased with myself – Matt had sent me a long e-mail with news from home.
December 19, 2001: It’s Wednesday. Six days left. At 6:15 am, our boat traveled through the lock at Esna and we were on our way to Luxor and Karnak. Oops. Maybe not. We just ran into the jetty. I have no idea why.
"This boat travels at 10 miles per hour," said our guide. "It will take us – do the math – about 10 hours to travel from Aswan to Luxor." We did it in stages, parking here and there overnight.
Why are we still aground on the jetty? Who knows.
The weather here is around 65 degrees Fahrenheit yet all the navigators at the lock and all the people walking on the quays are in jackets and mufflers, wrapped up to their noses. "For them it is winter," explained our guide. "These very same people will have energy and feel perfectly comfortable next summer when the temperature is 140 degrees."
Speaking of clothes, most of the men here wear jalabas, even the older boys. The younger girls dress in pastel polyester pantsuits reminiscent of the 1970s. The little girls, in honor of The Feast (the feast after Ramadan, which lasts three days and is the feast) wear K-Mart-style frilly dresses and patent leather shoes. Married women wear black jalabas and black shawls and black scarves – black from head to foot. Marriage as an act of mourning? Why not.
Egyptian society consists of normal, everyday people interacting together in the normal, everyday manner of people everywhere. They call to each other, chat, laugh, work, play, communicate, take care of business just like any street scene in the States – relaxed, busy, happy.
The only difference is that there are no women participating.
We are still aground. Must I get up, get dressed, leave my nice warm bed and go find out what’s up? Nah. They’ll tell me soon enough if we are supposed to be sinking. There – the engine’s started again. We’re backing up.
There goes a man on a bicycle, riding along the "Cornishe", what the Egyptians call a street next to a river. "Hey, guy," I feel like shouting, "how do you keep your jalaba from getting caught in the bike chain?" A mystery of the Orient. I was never able to do it.
The next problem I need to deal with – it is my nature to worry about stuff and I certainly do – is where I am going to get my next book to read. I traded books with the professor from Texas. She got my Barbara Kingsolver book which I had just finished and I got a Patricia Cornwell mystery in exchange. It’s all about arson investigations and people burning to death. Excuse me but I am not interested in that kind of Death on the Nile. Something more cheery please. Aargh! I can’t stand the thought of having nothing to read!
Now we must be in the lock because the quayside is rising dramatically outside my window. Now it is higher than the boat! Yep, there is a gate at either end of the ship. The lock itself appears to be four or five stories high. There are bumpers on the side of the boat to keep it from banging against the quay. I look out my window straight into a wall. I should take a picture.
Now the northbound lock is open and we have dropped 50 feet and we are starting to move ponderously forward toward Luxor – and breakfast.
1:15 pm: Today was a lazy day. I played solitaire, taught Hassam the waiter how to play solitaire and watched Death on the Nile with Amy and two other Texas ladies. And read. Someone found me an old Irving Wallace novel called The Seventh Secret, about how Adolph Hitler might still be alive. Which reminded me of George W. Bush, who seems to make huge mistake after huge mistake and still not end up in jail.
Now we are sailing off to Luxor to actually visit the Temple of Karnak. "Karnak will blow your mind," are our guide’s exact words. That is what I am here for!
The conversation around the lunch table today definitely did not blow my mind. "How about them Broncos," was pretty much the gist. What about the status of women in Egypt? What good books have you read? "What do you think we will be doing in five years?" I asked. "Does anyone have any ideas or expectations?" Silence.
At one point I brought up George Bush and his sad excuse for a foreign policy. Everyone got up and left. I went and brushed my teeth. Maybe I didn’t have bad breath but there appears to be something about me that puts people off – even boring Broncos fans. I wish it wasn’t that way. But Hell, if people adored me I’d be stuck with them and couldn’t ever be the misfit loner that I am.
Anyway, we watched Death on the Nile in the lounge. Mia Farrow did it, by the way. And after the violence of the Patricia Cornwell book with the forensic examiner poking around in half-burned bodies and being chased by serial killers, the book on Hitler seemed almost tame. Go figure.
4:30 pm: We are back from Karnak. Karnak was so massive – it almost reached the sky. Honest. There were 130 pillars in the Hypostalic Hall. Each one was 20 feet wide at the base and four stories tall. We went through a lot of film. Amy took a picture of me playing solitaire on the main alter! Sacrilegious? Hell, no. What could be more devotional than solitaire?
We all stood around in awe. Wanna know what it looked like? Go there yourself.
Then after a few hours of wandering around Karnak’s back lot we all got tired and – yes – even – eventually – bored and went back to the boat for tea. Getting tired and bored at Karnak is the height of alienation from self. Freud/Sarte/Camus would have nodded their head up and down and muttered, "Behold the jaded modern man. Too much stimulation." Hell, I just flew 12,000 miles on an airplane. That leaves one unimpressed with a pile of rocks. I saw the Twin Towers burn on national TV. A man walked on the moon; the electric blanket; the internet. It takes a lot to impress modern man these days. But Karnak was way impressive from a "Wonders of the World" point of view.
From a spiritual point of view, Karnak had been pretty much been de-activated by time and tourists. St. Simeon and Abu Simbel felt more holy.
Despite my grand desire to be transformed out of myself and to use my new enlightened state to become an aid to mankind, no, my mind was not blown at Karnak. Sadly, Karnak was not a life-changing experience. I still know how to whine.
The farewell dinner on the boat was nice – candlelight and baked Alaska and white-gloved waiters. I ran around handing out tips to the waiters and crew but my heart wasn’t in it. I just wanted to go to bed and sleep. Frankly, I worry about me. I look in the mirror and I see an old lady (with ugly hair) and I think, I’ve never had an adulthood. Just straight from unhappy childhood to unhappy old age. I watch one of the older women on the tour and she has so much fun in life! She was a surgical nurse in the army and head of nursing at a major hospital. Now she tours the world with a twinkle in her eye.
Hell, even Amy tours the world with a twinkle in her eye. Why can’t I enjoy life too?
My Cleopatra cartouche ring that I had ordered was ready last night. We were sitting in the lounge watching the folkloric show – a guy was doing a whirling dervish demonstration – and the boat’s shopkeeper gestured me over. "Your ring has arrived from Luxor. Try it on."
"I can’t get it past the second knuckle."
"I’ll get you another one tomorrow."
"Sure." I just know that the ring will arrive and it won’t fit and I’ll have to give it to one of my other daughters when I get home. Poor me! Forced to float down the Nile and be waited on by white-gloved waiters and tour ruined temples. Sigh.
December 20, 2001: There was the 6:00 am wake-up call. Time to go see Luxor. Oops, correction – we went to see tombs today. "This is the Valley of the Kings," said our guide, pointing up a road winding in the direction of some starkly barren sandstone cliffs. From there, we took a little train through an opening in the rock-faced cliffs and into the valley. The train looked like Thomas the Tank Engine.
"Here is the famous KV5 tomb that was recently discovered by the Thebes Mapping Project. Nineteenth-century archeologists had thought they had found a minor tomb and then Howard Carter had re-buried its entrance while excavating the King Tut find. The Mapping Project rediscovered the tomb and when they began to map its interior, they discovered 32 more chambers; each one was designed for a son of Ramses II, who lived to age 90 and actually out-lived a bunch of the sons." But that tomb was closed.
Next we have the tomb of Ramses III." Or did he say Ramses IV? This tomb was open. It went deep into the side of the mountain. Lots of painted walls. Here you are, under tons of stone; looking at life-sized painting of the gods, the deceased and the various cobras and crocodiles and things that supply and protect Ramses; wondering how they carved these huge passages and rooms out of solid rock and if you could possibly sneak a photograph in without being caught by a guard. I finally started to think that these tombs were pretty hot stuff.
Then we wandered around a bit in the valley. It wasn’t a very big valley. Amy got all excited because she had seen an American teenage boy who was actually her age and actually cute. Then we all got our pictures taken in front of King Tut’s tomb.
"It costs $10 to go in there," said our guide, "and it’s only one little room – not even worth it."
"But I want to see it anyway," I said.
"But why? There’s not much there."
"Because when I’m back home in Berkeley sitting around my kitchen table, I don’t want to kick myself for not seeing King Tut’s tomb when I has the chance."
"Go for it," said our guide. "But you have to go way down there – to the ticket booth." Amy actually volunteered to run get my ticket for me – but only after I offered her money of course.
I went down, down, down into Tut’s tomb. It was worth every penny. All the other places looked like they’d been painted 3,000 years ago. Tut’s tomb looked like it had been painted yesterday. There was a sarcophagus with Tut’s actual mummy in it, covered with one of Tut’s signature mummy shells. And there were two colorfully gilded and painted walls. It was a masterpiece, something unique and moving and one-of-a-kind. Like the Sistine Chapel or Monet’s water lily panels at the New York museum. I was in the presence of art. Good job, Jane.
Then we went off to the Valley of the Queens, saw Queen Hat-Cheap-Suit’s temple and saw the prime minister of Jordan’s escorted Mercedes caravan speed by. The prime minister had been touring ruins just behind us all the way down from Aswan. We had just missed him at the Nubian Museum, Edfu and Karnak. But this time I waved to him from right next to his car. He didn’t wave back.
Anyway, only 150 people per day are allowed into Queen Nefetari’s tomb so as not to destroy the paintings but our guide actually got us tickets. Nefetari was Ramses II’s trophy wife. She was beautiful. Her tomb had three main chambers of five to eight small rooms each. Her face was painted on every wall. She was beautiful. Nefetari’s tomb was also beautiful. Massive isn’t everything. Massive architecture impresses and awes – for a while. But art and beauty inspire and find a place in your dreams.
In The Seventh Secret, the book I found (or the chief nurse found for me) aboard the boat, they talked about the type of architecture that Adolph Hitler favored. He liked his buildings to inspire fear. And they did. But was it art? Nah.
9:30 pm: We went to a sound and light show at Karnak and it was too long. As we walked through the ruins, each section we walked past was lit up individually as a narrator said, "Each part of this temple was constructed by a different Pharaoh." Then half the temple lit up. "Ramses II". Then one little puny waist-high statue in the form of a lion lit up. "This statue was the contribution of Tutankhamen, the boy king who died in adolescence; brother of the poet Aknaten." From what I had read, Aknaten was an authoritarian boor, touting his religion and damning others like he was a Baptist fundamentalist at a burlesque show!
This part of the sound and light show was interesting. The rest was boring repetition. Afterwards, Amy went to McDonalds with our guide and the Texas professor and I hit the internet café. Again.
December 21, 2001: Luxor was better. We all liked Luxor. Karnak was too big, too grand, too grandiose. Luxor was scaled down just enough to appeal to mere humans such as myself. For such a grandiose monument, it possessed a rather cozy feeling.
I was once again pursued through the ruins by the obligatory aging monument guard. I think they must e-mail ahead to their counterparts, "Jane’s coming. Jane’s coming. See if you can get her alone!" My reputation among the fellahin goes before me! "The queen progresses toward her guardians like the Nile through the desert," saith their e-mail in the ancient cadence. "Prepare the way for her. Litter her path with lotus buds! Get her alone and hiss in her ear of wondrous offerings!"
Apparently the Middle Kingdom was more famous for its literature than for its art. So that explains why Karnak missed its mark. And that’s why the classic cadence of Middle Kingdom poetry is revered. And that’s also probably why all these dirty old men send each other "Jane Alerts" over the internet.
I bought the Luxor guy off with a one-dollar bill.
Then we went to a Catholic school and orphanage run by Italian sisters. There was a piano teacher in our group and she commandeered the piano and we all sang Christmas carols. Suddenly my eyes filled with tears and I realized that we were in a Muslim country and we were missing Christmas.
Then one of the sisters gave us a lecture on the school and the orphanage. "It was founded by the archeologists working on Nefetari’s tomb at the end of the nineteenth century. We have 700 girls. 24 of them are orphans. I myself came from Malta but I speak Arabic. We teach in English and Arabic. We get a little support from the mother office in Rome but there is so much need and so little resources." She then gave an urgent appeal for funds that was a masterpiece of combining compassion with guilt. Amy and I gladly combined our resources and donated $15.00.
On the way out the door, I asked the holy sister to bless me. She did. "I will pray for you today." Then she thought for a moment, mentally calculated her abilities and obligations. Then she smiled triumphantly. "And I will pray for you tomorrow too!" Well worth the $15. She was the real goods.
Then we went to a local book store and I bought The Search for Omm Sety and a scarab ring. "This ring is just like one I had 32 years ago," I told the guy at the cash register, all filed with nostalgia.
"38 Egyptian pounds please."
Amy went off with the Texas professor to McDonalds again. I went home to the Winter Palace Hotel and ate lots and lots of flan (as good as any I’d had in Mexico!) At the pool-side restaurant. Sitting around a resort hotel pool that could have been in Hawaii, Acapulco or Bali, I felt like I was sneaking an afternoon of normal, generic vacation into this wonderful-but-hectic tour. Did I feel guilty? Sure. But boy it felt good. Then Amy came back and we played Egyptian Rat Screw until it was time to go on a sunset felucca sail on the Nile.
Then we stuffed ourselves at dinner on 25 different kinds of dessert. Suddenly Amy jumped up, outraged. "Okay, you guys. Who stole my camel?" She had bought a cute, cuddly stuffed baby camel at the hotel gift shop. No, no one had stolen her camel. It was on the floor under her chair.
After dinner, we strolled through the bazaar. When one shopkeeper saw the sticker Amy had stuck to her forehead earlier that read, "700 Egyptian pounds," he asked her if she was for sale.
"I’ll even offer you 1,000 pounds."
"You wouldn’t want her," I joked. "She won’t cook and clean for you and stay quietly at home and out of your way!" The clerk did not laugh, however. He was in dead earnest. He actually thought he could buy her. He pulled out his wallet and showed me a 10,000-pound note. He was serious! As if I would sell my daughter.
Later Amy said, "I was worried there for a while. I thought you were actually going to do it!" No way.
December 22, 2001: I woke up this morning feeling all alienated and overfed. "I either need to learn to get along with people better or join a nunnery," I told Amy. The answer was obvious – but should it be a Catholic nunnery or a Buddhist nunnery? I wish I had the knack of a) tolerating people and b) having people like me. When I am alone, I can handle all the rate of input the world hands me yet when I am alone my learning curve goes way down, I have nothing to bounce my thoughts off of – and I get lonely. Will I ever learn to get along with people?
Moving right along – there was a meeting of all the foreign ministers of the Arab League in Cairo on Thursday. They voted to censor Ariel Sharon and Israel for violating the "Land for Peace" treaty. "I guess we can’t go to the Arab League conference, can we?" I asked our guide.
"Were you invited?"
"Well, no, but...I have great ideas!" Guess what? We didn’t get to go. Sigh.
But we did go back to Cairo; by air. The chief nurse was deathly sick from food poisoning – and also she had gone to the hotel beauty parlor yesterday and they had fried her hair. "Maybe it was the bad hair that did you in, Chief," I said. She laughed feebly. Somehow she made it to the airport and through 25 security checks and through Cairo traffic – everyone was still excited from Egypt’s team winning the All-Africa soccer cup and was driving with extra bravado – to the Old Palace Marriott Hotel. The chief nurse made it!
At lunch, Amy suddenly started crying. "I’m homesick. I just want to go home. I just want to see my friends and talk on the phone and be a normal teenage girl." We all felt really bad for her. She took a deep breath, ate some rubber chicken and felt better. It had been a long day, a long trip; we had seen every antiquity in all of Egypt in just ten days. And Amy had made friends and gone along with the program and even gone without TV! She was entitled to a momentary breakdown.
After lunch, a woman in our group from upstate New York and I walked around the neighborhood. We saw some tree-lined streets reminiscent of Paris or something old and European. We saw the Islamic Ceramic Museum and an Anglican church cathedral shaped like a crown roast of beef and filled with Senegalese Africans.
"I want to do something meaningful," I had said to our guide at lunch. "Is the Egyptian Congress in session? Are the ministers still around?"
"I don’t know what to suggest," replied our guide, "but there are a lot of diplomats and foreign dignitaries that stay right at this hotel." He was right. I could see Middle Eastern movers and shakers right here in the lobby.
"Okay. Good point," I replied. "And I know exactly where to find them too. I’m off to the casino!" So I took my $5.00 worth of tokens and went to play the slots with the ghost of King Farouk.
Amy went to our room and watched the Comedy Channel. How good can it get?
5 pm: Amy happily sat through episodes of Married with Children, Sister Sister and Moesha, all sprawled out on our hotel room’s king-sized bed. Then, when we went off to check out the casino, she got busted for being too young by a fierce-looking Egyptian woman in shades manning its front desk. And I lost six more dollars. There were some Arabian sheiks there at the high-rolling tables and for one second I considered the possibility of flirting with a rich Saudi oil baron but they were short and fat and ugly and their white jalabas made them look like they were wearing sheets with pockets and their red-and-white-checkered headgear resembled an Italian restaurant table cloth.
The hotel is crawling with Saudis, all dressed exactly alike. It’s as if they were all wearing boy Scout uniforms and were afraid to look even a millimeter different from any other boy in the troop. Strange that such "fierce desert tribes" types should work so hard to conform.
Then I went to the hotel’s business center and e-mailed friends and family at the rate of $4 for 15 minutes but the computer was much faster than the little second-floor hole-in-the-wall internet café in Luxor or the shack-on-the-dock at Esna.
My hair looks terrible and I’ve worn the same outfit for two weeks. I walk around the hotel convinced that they will throw me out at any minute for being a homeless street person. But they don’t. I guess they figure that if a white person can get all the way to Egypt they must have bucks up somewhere. However, it would take a billion dollars to stop me from feeling insecure. Low self-esteem seems to be hard-wired into my very soul.
8 pm: "Why do you take so many photographs," asked Amy. "You’re always taking pictures."
"Because when I get home, I want to know that I’ve been someplace else and I want to remember where I’ve been."
"But why do you or me always have to be in the photos?"
"So I will know that I – me – Jane was there. And that I dragged you along with me – because I’m the best mother in the world." Amy laughed.
After a group meeting in our guide’s hotel room that was also a celebration of the wedding anniversary of one of the couples in the group (Their tenth? Thirtieth? Forty-fifth? They tell everyone a different story), we went out walking again in cosmopolitan Cairo; the section with the European flavor. Narrow, tree-lined streets with small shops and sidewalk cafes and old-world architecture. Guess what Amy bought? Camouflage tennis shoes. For real. And a camouflage purse to match. "I can wear them with my camo pants and top and have a matching camo outfit to wear to the pyramids tomorrow! How good is that!"
Back at the Marriott, we were tired and hungry and treated ourselves to room service. Jane: "What to you want?"
Amy: "No contest. The California burger!" It came and was delicious and Amy gobbled it all up. "This guacamole is store-bought," was her only complaint.
December 23, 2001, 6 am: Pyramids today! Yea! "The bas reliefs in this little tomb are full of life. Some of them are even humorous," said our guide as we entered some little tomb over by the step pyramid of Sakkara. And he was right.
"I’m glad you showed us all that grandiose, stilted, cookie-cutter New Kingdom stuff first," I commented, "so we could appreciate the real thing and what they were so egotistically trying to imitate but could not." The Old Kingdom stuff was the best and it went downhill from there. Everything else was just copies of the art and beauty of the earlier period.
But how did the originals start out so fine in the first place? Isn’t art supposed to progress and get better? This is the mystery of Egypt.
There was a little pyramid next to the-tomb-that-looked-like-a-house. The little pyramid looked like a pile of rock rubble but it had an inside and we clambered down a narrow passageway into its insides. Stooping way over, we duck-walked downhill for about 50 feet to the main chamber and a small side-chamber with a wonderful echo and spooky vibes. Someone would have to pay me big bucks to spend the night there. I sang a Christmas carol and the echo made it sound like I was a soloist with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir instead of just tone-deaf little me.
Back to the Christianity theme. I’m always surprised at how deeply the roots of the Judeo-Christian religion are embedded in Egyptian myths. Today we learned that the date for Christmas was Egyptian originally, before the Greeks and Romans took it over. And every temple we visited seemed to have a trinity of gods. In this particular temple, there was the creation story – which had been lifted from Egypt by the Jews. The cross had been styled after the ankh. The relationship between god and king in ancient Egypt is the same as the relationship between God and Jesus in Christianity. And I already mentioned the divine impregnation and virgin birth connections, right? Circumcision was an Egyptian idea. Monotheism. What else? Almost everything Christian was lifted chapter and verse from the Egyptians. The Resurrection. The Book of Revelations is very close to the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Hell is an Egyptian concept. Judgment Day. Rising up from our graves when the trumpet calls? Embalming! Burial.
The only thing uniquely Christian; the only thing earth-shakingly new and important to Jesus; the only thing that truly matters about Christianity and that is the only thing most often ignored by Christians is The Golden Rule. "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" is the height of western civilization and Jesus’s great contribution to the evolution of the human race. Go, Jesus! Although it too might have been Egyptian. Never forget that Jesus was raised in Egypt.
Moving right along, we piled back in the bus and drove to Sakkara, the step pyramid, stopping on the way to pick up pottery shards.
"These pieces are ancient Egyptian, 4,000 years old," said our guide. There was a sea of them.
"Get one for your ceramics teacher," I told Amy but I think that our guide was pulling our leg. They looked like they were made yesterday. Many had the finger-sized groves made by using a potter’s wheel. Did they even have potters’ wheels back then? None of the shards were glazed although the terra cotta color was blackened on the outside from the firing process.
Sakkara was just your average step pyramid: Three or four stories high, made of stones stacked together. We all took a picture of the professor being kissed by a camel.
"What’s next?"
"The Memphis Museum," replied our guide, a trained Egyptologist with a great sense of humor and the patience of Job regarding tourist questions. "Memphis was the capital of Egypt and, although nothing much remains here now because of all the ancient wars and conquests, if you dig anywhere around here, you are bound to come up with temple sites, shrines and statues. There is a colossus of Ramses II here that they have been searching for a place erect for the last 20 years. They’ve dug five different sites to locate the colossus on but each time they dug, they struck a temple or statues or other prize archeological find. Finally they just built a museum around the fallen colossus and that is where we are going now."
There was also a sphinx in the courtyard of the museum. They just put it out there because it never rains in Egypt – yet everything is very green because water from the Nile is plentifully available. Imagine living where it never rains.
After the museum, we went to a carpet school. Here’s the story we were told regarding the school:
"They have kids working at these carpet schools," said our guide, "but it’s not exactly child labor. They only work three hours a day – after school. The Egyptian school system is so over-crowded that children attend in two shifts. So when the schools get out at noon, the children have nothing to do. So the carpet schools are actually of help. Also, children like the schools. They get to spend time talking with their friends." Oh. Okay. So it’s not child labor.
"The man who started these schools wanted to do something for the villagers, to make them self-sufficient so he opened this school for boys – but when the boys went there and earned extra money for their families, parents wanted to send their girls as well.
"At first the man said no," our guide continued. "He said that he could not take girls. But you see that he had a plan to get the girls educated, which was also his goal for all of the villagers, including even the adults. ‘Girls can’t do the work because they cannot read and count,’ the man told the villagers. So the upstart of this was that girls started to get an education."
"What happens to the children after they graduate from all this beneficial non-child-labor?" I asked.
"They pass a test and then begin to work out of their houses. The carpet school then sells their carpets here."
We went into the school. These cute little pre-pubescent boys and girls were tying knots with lightning speed. They shyly giggled and the carpet school rep asked if we wanted to try it. Of course the chief nurse jumped right in, and the anniversary-celebrating lady did too. One girl pantomimed to me that she wanted me to take her picture. I did. I wish I had given her money too. I don’t think too fast sometimes.
Then we went upstairs, they served us tea and turned 20-30 avaricious carpet salesmen loose on us. Yikes! I had a budget of $10. They brought me a bunch of tourist crap with camels plodding along in front of bath-towel quality pyramids. "No, no, no," I said. Then I saw a cute little (12-inch x 30-inch) carpet that I just loved.
Amy, all out of sorts from visiting tombs or something, came over. "That’s the ugliest rug I’ve ever seen," she flatly declared. "Don’t you even think of hanging that anywhere in the house where I can see it. It’s got pink in it! You know I hate pink," said Ms. Amy and stomped off.
Before this floodgate of emotion was unleashed because of the sweetest little rug in the world, our guide had bargained its price down from $80 to $25 for me and I had already signed on for it. But I wanted to please Amy.
"You got anything like it in another color," I asked.
"I have this green one but it is much, much more expensive." I looked at the green rug. It was a whole two inches longer. Big fat hairy deal. "How about $35?" That’s ten dollars more than the cute little rug.
"$45."
"Okay." I gave him back the first rug. He handed me the green one. But somehow, in the hurry of the transaction and with our guide calling us to come board the bus, he ended up taking an additional twenty-dollar bill out of my hand. Oh well. Amy would be happy – and the children would get some of the money too.
Meanwhile back at the bus, Amy still wasn’t pleased. "That is the ugliest carpet in the entire universe! Honestly mother. Where do you get your taste! This one is even uglier than the other one." It had been a long morning at the pyramids. I went to my seat and silently cried. It had all been so unfair. And now I was stuck with this ugly pea-soup rug made by the hands of child labor! I wanted to go home. With or without Amy. I’m tired. I’m tired. I’m tired.
We went someplace fancy for lunch, ate rubber chicken again and felt better. And later, when we finally got back to the hotel, I vowed to just leave the damn rug on the bus. Which I did. Just left it on the floor like a normal rug. Spite. I’m really good at it.
After the carpet factory, we finally, actually went off to see the actual pyramids that you see on post cards and one-dollar bills. It had taken us long enough – all of the freaking trip. But up close they really were big and marvelous. Five or six stories high and the base was several city blocks wide. Quite amazing. Yes, I liked them. Yes, I was glad that we came. Whoopie! After having desperately wanted to do this ever since I was eight years old and all that saving up for the trip, I finally got to see a pyramid!
Then everyone in the tour got ready to drive off to take photos. "No! Wait!" I screamed. "You promised that I could go down inside one! That’s why I came on this freaking trip!" Well, maybe not entirely, but something like that.
"Okay. Okay," said the guide. "I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You go buy your ticket. Over there." He pointed to the ticket booth. "Then we will come back and pick you up. Over there." He pointed to the ticket booth.
It was like going down a mine shaft. Bent double, I proceeded down the dark and narrow hole, slanting two flights down into solid rock. Then there was a landing, then two flights sloped up into the hot semi-darkness – hot both because of the parade of sweating bodies surrounding me and because of the weight of the sun-warmed stone above us.
I paused in my descent into Hell to take a picture of this amazing underworld. "Would you take our photo too," a young Egyptian woman and her two companions asked me in Arabic/sign language/giggles.
"Sure. Stand here." They mugged for the camera then grabbed it and took shots of me and them and then of them and me.
We snagged a passing urbane-looking Cairene tourist who looked like he probably spoke English. "Tell them to give me their address and I’ll send them the photos," I said. He did. Then we went up another hot, sloping flight and down another crowded, claustrophobic tunnel and voila! We were there – in the very heart of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. There wasn’t much there. And I was too busy giggling with my new friends to really get the full effect. There was an empty chamber the size of your living room plus a split-level burial vault area and some graffiti on the wall dated 1818.
On the way down to the burial chamber and back, we were following a young couple wherein the man was dressed in the usual preppy foreign style – Dockers and Polo gear. But the woman was dressed in full-out Paris-designed Islamic haute couture from head to foot, including a veil. The only part of her that showed was the slits for her eyes. Not the type of outfit to go mucking around in pyramids with! She could barely see down the stairs and her husband was carefully guiding her so she wouldn’t trip and break her neck. But she was out there trudging around the pyramids anyway. Good for her!
Confession: With regard to the Islamic dress code, wearing a scarf over one’s head just makes one look tacky. But wearing the full veil with the slits over one’s eyes makes one seem stylish and mysterious and – er – sexy?
After I climbed back out from the underworld, I took a lot of pictures and got back on the bus.
Then we went to the solar boat museum and saw a solar boat – as long as a football field and made from 4,000-year-old wood from the mountains of Lebanon. We were looking at 4,000-year-old wood. My writing skills are wearing down. There’s only so many ways you can describe "old’. This boat was old. And long. Long logs from long trees. How the hell did they get here all the way from Lebanon?
Oops. We still have the Sphinx to do today. Today is the first day that we actually had masses of other tourists to contend with – most of them are German. Germans are really into sightseeing in Egypt. We’ve seen them everywhere. And Japanese tourists too.
The Sphinx was no exception. We all got distracted from all this miraculous stuff by 1) The hordes of vendors descending upon us; 2) The tourists swirling around us; and 3) All the proposals of marriage that Amy received.
"I will give you ten camels for your daughter."
"Ten camels! Don’t insult me," I replied. "She is worth at least a hundred!"
"150!" bid another obviously pennyless post card vendor.
"175!" Wow. Bidding was going hot and heavy! Amy must have had strong teeth and looked like a good worker.
"200 camels!" bid the first vendor. Do the math – 3,000 Egyptian pounds for a camel times 200 divided by the 4.5 dollar exchange rate? The dude was offering me $133,000!
"Maybe I should take him up on this," I told Amy. She hit me with her purse – the camouflage one she got for $10 near the hotel.
After the Sphinx – which incidently has seen better days and wasn’t all that big – our guide announced, "Let’s now go help the economy of Egypt again." Shopping! We went to a jewelry store and bought ankhs and cartouches. Ankh bracelets and necklaces for Amy; cartouche rings and earrings for me. Amy and I got silver jewelry but then we saw how nice the really yellow gold looked like on the chief nurse and the anniversary lady and we changed our minds.
"I like the 18-karat gold they sell here," said the anniversary lady. "It stands out better." And it was really really cheap. My gold cartouche ring cost $20. Now I have a gold ring for each of my ring fingers and they look really nice.
"All of the gold you see here in Egypt, such as King Tut’s solid gold mummy suit, all of it comes from the mines in Nubia." Well, maybe he used a more archeological term than "mummy suit" but we all know the famous face mask that he was talking about.
For dinner we went on a Nile cruise. More rubber chicken. They had a belly dancer and Egyptian folk drummers, folk penny-whistle players and a folk accordionist. "Come," said the belly dancer. "Come dance with me." Amy blushed and giggled and joined her. The belly dancer pulled me up too. I was good!
"Where did you learn to shimmy like that," asked our guide.
"The same place I learned to swear and drink beer – my old college sorority."
December 24, 2001: It’s really hard to remember about Christmas when one is staying in a Muslim country. Tonight is Christmas Eve. Without a Christmas tree and my son to give presents to, it just seems like one more ordinary day.
"Today we go to look at Islamic Cairo," our guide announced. Islamic Cairo was very impressive. The first mosque we visited, the mosque of Mohammed Ali, had been built in the thirteenth century. "This one was constructed around the same time as Europe’s medieval cathedrals." Interesting. It had exactly the same massive facade presentation as the temple at Karnak – equally as high and as grand. As if the Muslims had decided that they were not about to be outdone by infidels and ancient pagans. Inside the mosque there was ornate carving equal to and having the same feeling as some of the elaborate wood and stone carving at Notre Dame or Chartres.
"The airshafts inside the mosques are to let in light," said our guide.
"But what do they do when it rains?" someone asked. "What happens to all the beautiful hand-knotted rugs?" We had to check our shoes when entering to protect the rugs which in turn protected the elegant marble floors.
"As you remember, it never rains in Egypt," replied our guide. "Rain here is like snow in southern California. It is an event that we remember for years."
The mosque itself had many half-domes, supported by carved wood stalagmites. There was a main courtyard where Muslims attending services on Fridays all faced Mecca and prayed. "The imam here is one of the top Islamic scholars in Egypt," said our guide, "and leads the Friday jumma prayers from here." The front part of the mosque was in the east and indeed the mosque itself was aligned to face Mecca. Lots of beautiful geometrical shapes surrounded the front area.
A man in a jalaba approached us. He obviously knew our guide. "I will do a call to prayer," he said. He had very good lungs.
Later the man approached me. "If you come with me, I will show you the next hall," he said. I glanced over at our guide with a quick "Is this man safe to be alone with" look because after St. Simeon, I was taking no chances. Our guide gave me a "Yes, completely safe" nod in return.
We went to the Great Hall behind the altar and the man gave the call to prayer again. "I am the Imam here," he said – and I suddenly realized how honored I had been and felt ashamed that I had doubted this holy man. But, geez Louise, it seemed like someone at every single Egyptian temple between here and Aswan has singled me out somehow as having "sucker" or "libertine" tattooed on my forehead and I had learned the hard way to be wary. But this sort of behavior apparently went on in tourist attractions – but not in mosques.
The Citadel was next; another gigantic Islamic shrine – domes, minarets, the whole nine yards. The main mosque was like a basilica, with its many half-domes and wide interior space. I stood in the very middle of the place, soaking in ambiance from under the 50-foot diameter half-dome five stories above my head.
"Watch out," said our guide. "The chandelier you are standing under weighs two tons!" But I was perfectly safe.
We had lunch in the middle of a warren of narrow streets and shops that composed Cairo’s main bazaar. Afterwards we wandered around. I bought another gold ring and some cheap necklaces. Our guide, Amy, the anniversary couple and the piano teacher parked themselves at a café that offered up the water pipe experience. A waiter gave us all our own plastic mouthpieces, which connected to a hose which connected to a traditional hookah set in the middle of our table.
The anniversary wife was a pro at making water pipes gurgle and bubble. "You inhale deeply," she instructed. "This causes the water in the lower glass bowl to bubble as the smoke from the tobacco in the brazier at the top of the pipe gets filtered and cooled. Then you just smoke it. You don’t have to inhale the smoke itself once you get started." She and the professor had tried smoking a water pipe back in Aswan and had just loved it, even though they were – and still are – non-smokers.
Then I looked around and there was young Amy, puffing away. Yikes! And when the owner of the silver shop next door to the café overheard our conversation regarding Amy’s latest bride price, he came out and shouted, "400 camels!"
We all laughed except Amy who giggled and blushed and said, "Leave me alone!"
In the countryside, women wore scarves usually, but in "cosmopolitan" Cairo, we saw a lot more women wearing full veils, especially at the fancy Marriott Hotel and here at the bazaar. But then perhaps they were visiting from Saudi Arabia.
In the last few weeks, I have gone through ten rolls of film, snapping photos of all the various aspects of Egypt. And I went a little nuts at the bazaar. There was so much to see!
As we climbed back on the bus, I started talking to Amy about that idiot George Bush. "September 11 would never have happened on Clinton’s watch,"
I said.
The chief nurse overheard me. "You’re talking about my President. I worked hard to get him elected."
"Bush was never elected. He stole that election!" I replied. "He’s not my president. He’s nobody’s President."
The chief nurse was furious. Our easy-going, good-natured chief nurse blew her top. "If you don’t like George Bush, then go live in some other country." Yikes! I hadn’t heard that since Vietnam!
"But if Bush hadn’t walked out of the Durban conference, hadn’t supported Ariel Sharon, hadn’t snubbed the ecology summit in Japan, etc., hadn’t made it very clear that it was his way or the highway...."
The professor spoke up from three rows back on the bus. "But Jane, bin Ladin had been planning this for five years."
"He had?"
"Yes."
"Oh.... Well...." But then I remembered George the First and Reagan and their stupid foreign policy mistakes such as arming Sadam Hussein and deserting the Afghan freedom fighters and supporting the Saudi tyrants and training bin Ladin, etc. "But Bush Senior created, armed and trained bin Ladin. George the Second only lit the fuse," I replied. Then, having gotten that off our chests, the chief nurse and I changed the subject before we ended up trying to kill each other right there on the bus. "Let’s just hope for world peace," I said and she graciously agreed.
Our guide turned out to be a master of helping out us poor benighted tourists on our last afternoon in Egypt. Not only did he secure an extra suitcase for Amy to take all our stuff back in (for only $4 by the way); not only did he find Amy’s lost ankh bracelet for her; not only did he send a courier to the jewelry shop to buy me some gold cartouche earrings at some ridiculously low price – he actually called up the carpet school and had the head salesman himself bring my sweet little rug to the hotel for me all the way from Memphis in rush-hour traffic!
"Is this the rug you wanted," asked the head salesman.
"Yes, oh, yes! Oh thank you!" I gave him a big hug. Now I had my little carpet. I was happy. It was time to go home. We had our traditional rubber chicken farewell dinner at a restaurant on the Nile and then went back to the hotel to pack and leave for the airport.
You don’t even want to know how much fun it is to fly for eleven hours straight one more time. Not! But I gotta admit that Egypt Air once again offered a smooth flight and one that was less crowded than when we flew over, when the plane had been crammed with travelers going back to Egypt to celebrate the feast at the end of Ramadan.
Amy and some of the others from the group slept most of the way back to the states but I couldn’t sleep, although I dozed occasionally by pulling my food tray down and resting my pillow and my head there.
At JFK airport, I hatched an insane scheme, which actually worked! "Is it possible to take a cab to see Ground Zero between flights?" I asked the customs agent. "Our plane leaves at 11:00 am." It was 7:30 am now.
"Theoretically, yes," he replied. "It’s about a 35-minute drive. But there’ll be too much traffic." Then he blinked. "But wait! Today is Christmas Day! No traffic! Go for it!" And we did.
We asked the cab dispatcher the price. "$35 each way." We only had $55 total. "You could stop at an ATM on the way." Done! We piled into a cab driven by a surly foreigner named Mr. Sahota. He looked Pakistani or Indian. He put the pedal to the metal.
Christmas Day 2001 at Ground Zero brought tears to our eyes. The area was cordoned off. No one could enter it except the emergency workers. And they were still working there even on Christmas. A very nice man in a hardhat told me that the site was still off limits. We settled for saying a prayer for world peace in front of an impromptu shrine set up in front of a church.
Candles had been lit by the families of victims who had come to spend Christmas with the memories of their loved ones. An otherwise elegant and well-dressed African-American woman wandered past us, her eyes glazed over with confusion and grief as she searched the shrine for some kind of reassurance and relief on this holy day.
Our respects having been paid, we jumped back in the cab and Mr. Sahota gunned it back to JFK. We made it in plenty of time and the cabbie smiled as I shook his hand and thanked him for being so game. He had really gotten into the spirit of our quest. I tipped him $20 out of pure gratitude and then we sprinted off to the plane and home and 12 hours sleep and Matt and America and my family and dreams of a belated Christmas dinner at the Claremont Hotel and being back on the internet to write letters to George Bush informing him how he could do better. (Bush had to do better. He had to step up to the plate and finally be worthy of the great country that he usurped.)
As I told Matt upon arriving back from 15 glorious days in Egypt, "The miracle of Egypt is not the glory of her pyramids or the awesomeness of her temples and mosques but rather that her millions and millions of people cooperate and intertwine to create the complex organization of people, things and events that constitutes their day-to-day life. The children get educated. The food arrives on the table. The buildings get built. The buses and trains and airplanes run.
"And the miracle of America is that the same thing happens over here. Everyone intermeshes to create a daily life that works for all. The toilets flush. The traffic flows. The work gets done. The tendency toward chaos is overcome. That is the Miracle of Egypt. And of America too.
"I would think twice before toying with chaos if I were the President of America. The chaos theory is a hard one to fight. How much more glamourous it seems or feels to march off to war or drop bombs – but the truly heroic thing is for Congress to vote money for schools, education, medical supplies, the protection of children and the furtherance of true democracy. Any fool can drop a bomb. The silent heroes are the ones who make the world run smoothly day by day.