khyungbird (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} khyungbird) wrote,@ 2008-03-26 20:57:00 |
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Egypt: May 14-15, 2007
The highlight of our sixth day of the tour was a trip to the Valley of the Kings, the richest site of royal Egyptian tombs. The valley is located on the west bank of the Nile, so in the morning we took a ferry across the river, where we faced our next mode of travel: donkeys. A team of riding donkeys had been provided for us (or rather, a team of normal donkeys had been provided for us to ride... they didn't have racing stripes or cost 25 gold pieces or anything), and most of us clambered onboard and followed Khaled on the long road to the tombs. A few unadventurous souls took a taxi instead. The rest of us rode our steeds along green fields, beside a canal choked with water-plants and lilies. Periodically thwacking the donkeys to get them to speed up, we rode through the fields and out to a desert highway, which climbed steadily into the hills, surrounded by barren dryness. I felt like I was in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Eventually the asphalt widened and we came to a great parking lot surrounded by the cliffs of the Valley.
VALLEY OF THE KINGS (Photos)
The Valley of the Kings is incredible. For the price of a single admission you can only enter a limited number of tombs -- I think three, with the small tomb of Tutankhamun costing extra -- but I didn't have any complaints. Apparently the site was chosen in Pharaonic times because of the good stone and the relative ease of guarding it from tomb-robbers, since it is shielded by high hills. (Still, with the exception of Tutankhamun's tomb whose entrance was buried beneath rubble, all the crypts had been robbed well before the 20th century. A few thousand years is a long time.) In the visitor's center was a model showing a cross-section of the interior of the mountains, which were riddled with tombs, descending incredibly deep. They would make perfect bomb shelters. The tombs are relatively linear and don't connect to one another -- in fact, one wonders at times how the builders avoided crashing through the roof of a preexisting tomb -- but they are deep and the carvings and paintings are beautiful. The low ceiling of one tomb was painted with thousands of stars. Human-headed snakes and fabulous monsters and deities decorated everything. You're not allowed to take photos in the tombs, so you'll have to take my word for it. Some tombs were carved high in the walls of the cliffs, reached by modern stairs; others were buried in pits. Within, the air was uniformly stale and hot, muggy and dead, much like inside the Great Pyramid. A few tombs are in poor condition, or being restored, and are not open to the public.
After this dungeon crawl I was ready for a drink or a break, but our guide led us out to a rocky gulley behind the visitor's center, where our donkeys were waiting. Instead of taking the road, we would be going down the hills the hard way, i.e., going directly over them. Our donkeys clambered over heaps of loose stone as we climbed, climbed to the east. With our overactive imaginations we assumed that every shard, every piece of loose rock might be a fragment of some ostraca, a door-carving from some tomb. Donkeys are slow, but very easy to ride, and extremely strong for their size. They're so small I felt sorry for them, particularly for the donkey bearing the weight of six-foot-plus Jake Forbes. When we reached the top of the cliff and saw the Temple of Hapshepsut hundreds of feet below us, we clung worriedly to the donkeys, who rode unconcernedly along the brink. It was a long way down, and I wondered how far you could fall and live. We had to ride single file, and there was a scary moment when a donkey seemed to briefly lose its footing. Glancing down from the heights in trepidation, I saw a small niche in the cliff wall a few feet down, about big enough for a person to fit into, which was completely filled with discarded plastic water bottles. This took me back to reality and I managed to stay on the donkey as it clambered down the hills back towards the Nile.
The rest of the day passed uneventfully with internet cafes and wanderings in Luxor. The next morning I woke incredibly early for the most expensive (and worth it) option I chose for the entire tour: a balloon ride. Before the sun rose, I was already back on the west bank of the Nile, where a truck drove us out into a field where two hot air balloons were waiting. I'd been in a hot air balloon before, but I had forgotten how the engine blasts fire into the balloon just a few feet from your face, forcing you to turn away from it. The balloon inflated, the engine roared, and we rose, accompanied by the sound of tourists taking out their cameras. I went into recording mode. Periodically, I had to remind myself not just to take photos, to actually look with my own eyes, to realize I was in a balloon in Egypt, to try to soak it in, to connect.
LUXOR BALLOON RIDE (Photos)
I love drawing aerial shots, and I wanted to see the landscape all at once, so I knew this would be great reference. Unfortunately, I'd set my camera on the lowest possible resolution without realizing it, but I still took dozens of photos. The green of the farmland, the palm trees, the pink and blue and tan houses passed beneath us. Many of the houses, I saw, were roofless, and in one I distinctly saw a bed (I couldn't tell if it was occupied) and a ceiling fan hanging suspended from a single beam. Sadly, I was briefly reminded of a level from Counterstrike. The Colossi of Memnon stood out among the farmland, and I saw countless temples and archaeological sites, some no more than foundations, riddled with holes like ant-infested ground. On the eastern edge of the farmland, a road demarcated the start of the dry land. Beyond lay the bluffs, and beyond them, the Valley of the Kings. On the bad side of the dry land, just over the hill from the Valley, is a ramshackle village named Qurna or Gurna, which is famous for the generations of tomb robbers that dwell there. I wondered if they were still fencing artifacts, still digging up antiquities beneath their homes. The wind carried the balloons north, and soon we started to descend. The ground was so riddled with diggings I wondered if we would crash down into the open pit of a tomb. But we drifted over the road out into the desert, and braced ourselves against the basket as the balloons skidded into the beige-colored sand. Two trucks converged on our crash site and helped the tourists out of the basket, then gathered up the deflating skin of the balloon.
Finally, when the balloon was successfully manhandled, the balloon crew linked their arms and did a song-and-dance for the tourists. When it was done, one of the balloon guides -- who had narrated our flight -- placed a hat on the ground. "There is a snake in this hat, but it only comes out if you feed it money!" A few people placed some pounds in the hat, including myself, but apparently not enough to tempt the snake. Without any hard feelings, the truck drivers sped us away from the crash site and towards the docks and downtown area to the east.
MEMNON AND THE WEST BANK (Photos)
Instead of going all the way back to Luxor, though, I decided to spend the rest of the day in the West Bank, walking around on foot. My first stop was the Colossi of Memnon, a pair of statues which were particularly famous in Greco-Roman times. The Greeks and Romans (like most people, I guess) were pretty culturally chauvinistic; they rarely bothered to learn foreign languages, and when they encountered gods or heroes from other cultures, they usually worked them into their own belief systems. Thus, when ancient Greek writers wrote about the Egyptian god Amun, they usually just referred to the god as Zeus (who they considered to be Amun's nearest equivalent) rather than even mentioning the name "Amun". This habit, known as interpretatio graeca, could be considered to have good motivations, bringing together conflicting belief systems into a harmonious whole. And after all, if there really are gods, it makes sense that different people would have different names for them, rather than the Egyptian gods just controlling Egypt, the Greek gods just controlling Greece, etc, like in some fantasy RPG. But the practical result of Hellenism, of the Greek domination of the Mediterranean (not to pin the blame solely on interpretatio graeca, of course) was often that Greek presumptions and prejudices would be accepted whereas actual indigenous traditions were forgotten. Scarcely any Greeks or Romans bothered learning Egyptian demotic script or the "sacred" hieroglyphs, and vast amounts of knowledge were forgotten. As someone wrote in a review of the book Berossos and Manetho, "The winners write the history books... more importantly, the winners read them." In the case of the Colossi of Memnon, the Greeks, not knowing who the statues were originally modeled after -- and apparently unwilling or unable to find an Egyptian who knew -- named them after Memnon, a mythological Ethiopian hero from the Trojan War. "Big statues in southern Egypt, near Ethiopia...? Who's the biggest African king mentioned in Greek mythology? They must be statues of Memnon, of course!" The name stuck, just like other invented Greek names. The very name "Egypt", for instance, was a Greek name which replaced the Ancient Egyptians' original name for their country, "Kemet." Like "Germany" as opposed to "Deutschland", or "Japan" as opposed to "Nihon."
Although today they are so beaten and thrashed that their faces are essentially sanded away, the Colossi are still impressive. I photographed them from several angles as shepherds drove their flocks through the fields nearby, and then I went wandering off towards the Temple of Hapshepsut, which I had previously seen from the air. I was supposed to meet Jake and some of the other tourists there. Soon I was walking alone on the highway at the edge of the desert, with Gurna on the left of me, an ancient village of mud-brick houses seemingly growing out of the sand. I saw almost no people at first, but soon there was movement, and a flood of little kids -- about six years old on average, boys and girls both -- came pouring out from between the buildings and cheerfully ran up to me. Following along behind them was an adult man with a mustache, like a child-herder. He was wearing a bluish-grey djellaba and smoking a cigarette. He had a faint crease in the area between his eyebrows, as if from squinting into the sun.
"Are you going to the Temple of Hapshepsut?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, as the kids milled around me.
"It will take you an hour to walk there if you take the road," he said. "There's a shortcut through Gurna. I'll show you. Ten pounds."
"No thanks, I'll walk," I said. I thought it would be sort of interesting to walk through Gurna, but I wasn't sure I had a ten-pound note, and I didn't want to ask him to change a 50. So I went back to the highway. the kids tagged along after me for a long time, very young and friendly and persistent, trying to sell me little handicrafts. Eventually I decided to give some baksheesh to a little girl, and while I was digging the pound note out of my wallet I noticed that I did, in fact, have a ten-pound note. I had a change of heart and walked back to where the man with the cigarette was still waiting by the side of the road.
"Okay, I'll do it," I said. "Ten pounds, right?"
"Yes," he said. I gave him ten pounds (or was it five pounds?). He said something in Egyptian to one of the little boys, a little cute kid about kindergarten-age. "Machmood here (I'm sure I'm misspelling his name) will show you the way."
The little boy smiled and started to lead the way between the houses. For a short time we were followed by a crowd of other urchins, trying goodnaturedly to get me to pick them for a guide instead: "Sir, don't go with him!" "Sir, don't go with Machmood, he's crazy!" But we soon outpaced them. He was a very smart, bilingual little kid. As he led me onward towards the faraway bluffs he made small talk.
"Where are you from?" he asked.
"I'm from America," I said.
"Are you married?"
"No," I said. I smiled as I reflected on how unimaginably old I must look to this six-year-old Egyptian boy: me, 32 years old, with my muttonchops and glasses. When I was six years old the adults had been... adults, some alien creatures, not real human beings... and even the seven-year-olds had looked like intimidating macho figures. I clearly remember imagining the seven-year-olds riding around the playground with leather jackets and motorcycles. I used to have a fantasy that all adults were monsters wearing masks, and when you got old enough, they would "have a talk" with you and reveal themselves and strip away *your* mask too, and there, behind your familiar face, would be a hideous thing. I remembered too that when I was a little kid, I'd thought that when I grew up I would just spontaneously *change*: my appearance would become unrecognizable, and I'd be a grown man with a beefy jaw and a broad chest and huge muscles, probably playing sports, wearing a baseball shirt, making out with cheerleaders. My vision of the future Jason Thompson was an entirely different creature from "me". The future came, of course (except for the huge muscles, sports and cheerleaders), but instead of striking me like a sudden lightning bolt, it came so slowly that I never saw it happening, and the outline of the six-year-old Jason Thompson never completely died, or perhaps it died in its sleep, like an old beloved pet, never realizing that it died. And the same for the 12-year-old me, and the 16-year-old, the 21-year-old, 26-year-old, and so on and so on, all the way up to the present one. When I thought of my previous selves I thought of a phrase from the Bible, the phrase, "Let the dead bury their own dead." (Yes, I'm really drumming up the monotheism on this trip. I'll talk about the vulture goddess later.) They are laid atop one another inside me, or in some distant place, like the hardened rings on a tree, or like the Egyptian temples that were rebuilt over and over on the same site.
"Inshallah," he said, the very common Arabic expression which means "god willing."
"Inshallah," I replied.
Soon we came to the end of the village, and there, a long stretch of dirt and rock stood between me and the parking lot, and beyond it, the Temple of Hapshepsut with its steps and pillars. His work done, my guide asked for baksheesh. "Sir, a few pounds." I didn't have any more small change, so I dug around in my backpack for something else to give him. I gave him a phone card with about 10 or 20 pounds on it, which I hope he was able to exchange to someone for even a fraction of its worth, and a whole bunch of pencils, remembering my encounter with the pencil-hungry steward on the train. I also gave him some tourist stuff that had come with the balloon ride, which was probably worthless, but it was the best I could think of. At first he was disappointed that I didn't give him any money, but I think that my random gifts were finally good enough. "Thank you," he said as I left. And I said "thank you" and waved goodbye. I had gone a few hundred steps when I turned and saw the little boy waving from the top of a small ridge, and I waved back, and Machmood turned and went back to Gurna, and I continued on my way.
The Temple was amazing up close, with long low steps that seem to go on forever, and I soon met up with Jake and the others. Although they don't advertise this fact, the Temple was the site of a horrible massacre in 1997, in which 60 tourists were gunned down by Islamic fundamentalists. The Temple rests in a corner between sheer cliffs -- the same cliffs which I had looked down from on donkeyback the day before -- and there is nowhere to run, so the terrorists had killed the guards and trapped the tourists within the structure, and gunned them down, one by one. I didn't see any bulletholes or bloodstains, but I wondered what it had been like. After looking around, we went back to the parking lot and hired a taxi which took us to some of the other sites on the West Bank: Medinet Habu, and Deir el Medineh, the "worker's village" where the people who worked on the tombs had *their* cozy tombs. In one small temple I made the faux pas of taking a flash photograph of some ancient, faded paintings (the flash photography can damage the paint).
As the sky turned over to afternoon the taxi driver convinced us (or did we ask him?) to stop by one of the specialties of Luxor: an alabaster salesroom. Alabaster is a fairly fragile, but beautiful stone, and the alabaster wares are made in two different styles: machine-worked, which is shiny and glossy and smooth as glass, and hand-worked, which is finer and has a more glittery, mica-like appearance. The unctuous salesman, whose English was excellent, tried to convince us to buy this or that as we browsed the one-room shop. Luckily for myself, one of my companions that day was an excellent haggler, who managed to get what seemed like a pretty good price for a small alabaster jar. After he agreed to her price, I picked up a just slightly smaller jar and offered just slightly less than she had paid for hers. He pleasantly suggested a higher price. I repeated my original offer with a vague, smiling, "I don't really care if I buy this jar" attitude. He agreed. This was mere Level 1 haggling, but it worked. As he was hastily wrapping our goods in newspaper, he asked us for a favor: could we please not tell the taxi driver that we had bought anything? (So the taxi driver wouldn't ask for his commission.) We said sure. We went out to the car with our alabaster pieces concealed in our bags, and said we didn't buy anything, but thanks for taking us there, can we get back to the ferry now? In the middle of the taxi ride, though, I forgot and I blurted out something like "Boy, we got a good price on that alabaster" or something like that. @#$%. Oh well. We made it back to the ferry and went across to the East Bank, and then the next day we began the final stage of our journey: the Western Desert.
The highlight of our sixth day of the tour was a trip to the Valley of the Kings, the richest site of royal Egyptian tombs. The valley is located on the west bank of the Nile, so in the morning we took a ferry across the river, where we faced our next mode of travel: donkeys. A team of riding donkeys had been provided for us (or rather, a team of normal donkeys had been provided for us to ride... they didn't have racing stripes or cost 25 gold pieces or anything), and most of us clambered onboard and followed Khaled on the long road to the tombs. A few unadventurous souls took a taxi instead. The rest of us rode our steeds along green fields, beside a canal choked with water-plants and lilies. Periodically thwacking the donkeys to get them to speed up, we rode through the fields and out to a desert highway, which climbed steadily into the hills, surrounded by barren dryness. I felt like I was in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Eventually the asphalt widened and we came to a great parking lot surrounded by the cliffs of the Valley.
VALLEY OF THE KINGS (Photos)
The Valley of the Kings is incredible. For the price of a single admission you can only enter a limited number of tombs -- I think three, with the small tomb of Tutankhamun costing extra -- but I didn't have any complaints. Apparently the site was chosen in Pharaonic times because of the good stone and the relative ease of guarding it from tomb-robbers, since it is shielded by high hills. (Still, with the exception of Tutankhamun's tomb whose entrance was buried beneath rubble, all the crypts had been robbed well before the 20th century. A few thousand years is a long time.) In the visitor's center was a model showing a cross-section of the interior of the mountains, which were riddled with tombs, descending incredibly deep. They would make perfect bomb shelters. The tombs are relatively linear and don't connect to one another -- in fact, one wonders at times how the builders avoided crashing through the roof of a preexisting tomb -- but they are deep and the carvings and paintings are beautiful. The low ceiling of one tomb was painted with thousands of stars. Human-headed snakes and fabulous monsters and deities decorated everything. You're not allowed to take photos in the tombs, so you'll have to take my word for it. Some tombs were carved high in the walls of the cliffs, reached by modern stairs; others were buried in pits. Within, the air was uniformly stale and hot, muggy and dead, much like inside the Great Pyramid. A few tombs are in poor condition, or being restored, and are not open to the public.
After this dungeon crawl I was ready for a drink or a break, but our guide led us out to a rocky gulley behind the visitor's center, where our donkeys were waiting. Instead of taking the road, we would be going down the hills the hard way, i.e., going directly over them. Our donkeys clambered over heaps of loose stone as we climbed, climbed to the east. With our overactive imaginations we assumed that every shard, every piece of loose rock might be a fragment of some ostraca, a door-carving from some tomb. Donkeys are slow, but very easy to ride, and extremely strong for their size. They're so small I felt sorry for them, particularly for the donkey bearing the weight of six-foot-plus Jake Forbes. When we reached the top of the cliff and saw the Temple of Hapshepsut hundreds of feet below us, we clung worriedly to the donkeys, who rode unconcernedly along the brink. It was a long way down, and I wondered how far you could fall and live. We had to ride single file, and there was a scary moment when a donkey seemed to briefly lose its footing. Glancing down from the heights in trepidation, I saw a small niche in the cliff wall a few feet down, about big enough for a person to fit into, which was completely filled with discarded plastic water bottles. This took me back to reality and I managed to stay on the donkey as it clambered down the hills back towards the Nile.
The rest of the day passed uneventfully with internet cafes and wanderings in Luxor. The next morning I woke incredibly early for the most expensive (and worth it) option I chose for the entire tour: a balloon ride. Before the sun rose, I was already back on the west bank of the Nile, where a truck drove us out into a field where two hot air balloons were waiting. I'd been in a hot air balloon before, but I had forgotten how the engine blasts fire into the balloon just a few feet from your face, forcing you to turn away from it. The balloon inflated, the engine roared, and we rose, accompanied by the sound of tourists taking out their cameras. I went into recording mode. Periodically, I had to remind myself not just to take photos, to actually look with my own eyes, to realize I was in a balloon in Egypt, to try to soak it in, to connect.
LUXOR BALLOON RIDE (Photos)
I love drawing aerial shots, and I wanted to see the landscape all at once, so I knew this would be great reference. Unfortunately, I'd set my camera on the lowest possible resolution without realizing it, but I still took dozens of photos. The green of the farmland, the palm trees, the pink and blue and tan houses passed beneath us. Many of the houses, I saw, were roofless, and in one I distinctly saw a bed (I couldn't tell if it was occupied) and a ceiling fan hanging suspended from a single beam. Sadly, I was briefly reminded of a level from Counterstrike. The Colossi of Memnon stood out among the farmland, and I saw countless temples and archaeological sites, some no more than foundations, riddled with holes like ant-infested ground. On the eastern edge of the farmland, a road demarcated the start of the dry land. Beyond lay the bluffs, and beyond them, the Valley of the Kings. On the bad side of the dry land, just over the hill from the Valley, is a ramshackle village named Qurna or Gurna, which is famous for the generations of tomb robbers that dwell there. I wondered if they were still fencing artifacts, still digging up antiquities beneath their homes. The wind carried the balloons north, and soon we started to descend. The ground was so riddled with diggings I wondered if we would crash down into the open pit of a tomb. But we drifted over the road out into the desert, and braced ourselves against the basket as the balloons skidded into the beige-colored sand. Two trucks converged on our crash site and helped the tourists out of the basket, then gathered up the deflating skin of the balloon.
Finally, when the balloon was successfully manhandled, the balloon crew linked their arms and did a song-and-dance for the tourists. When it was done, one of the balloon guides -- who had narrated our flight -- placed a hat on the ground. "There is a snake in this hat, but it only comes out if you feed it money!" A few people placed some pounds in the hat, including myself, but apparently not enough to tempt the snake. Without any hard feelings, the truck drivers sped us away from the crash site and towards the docks and downtown area to the east.
MEMNON AND THE WEST BANK (Photos)
Instead of going all the way back to Luxor, though, I decided to spend the rest of the day in the West Bank, walking around on foot. My first stop was the Colossi of Memnon, a pair of statues which were particularly famous in Greco-Roman times. The Greeks and Romans (like most people, I guess) were pretty culturally chauvinistic; they rarely bothered to learn foreign languages, and when they encountered gods or heroes from other cultures, they usually worked them into their own belief systems. Thus, when ancient Greek writers wrote about the Egyptian god Amun, they usually just referred to the god as Zeus (who they considered to be Amun's nearest equivalent) rather than even mentioning the name "Amun". This habit, known as interpretatio graeca, could be considered to have good motivations, bringing together conflicting belief systems into a harmonious whole. And after all, if there really are gods, it makes sense that different people would have different names for them, rather than the Egyptian gods just controlling Egypt, the Greek gods just controlling Greece, etc, like in some fantasy RPG. But the practical result of Hellenism, of the Greek domination of the Mediterranean (not to pin the blame solely on interpretatio graeca, of course) was often that Greek presumptions and prejudices would be accepted whereas actual indigenous traditions were forgotten. Scarcely any Greeks or Romans bothered learning Egyptian demotic script or the "sacred" hieroglyphs, and vast amounts of knowledge were forgotten. As someone wrote in a review of the book Berossos and Manetho, "The winners write the history books... more importantly, the winners read them." In the case of the Colossi of Memnon, the Greeks, not knowing who the statues were originally modeled after -- and apparently unwilling or unable to find an Egyptian who knew -- named them after Memnon, a mythological Ethiopian hero from the Trojan War. "Big statues in southern Egypt, near Ethiopia...? Who's the biggest African king mentioned in Greek mythology? They must be statues of Memnon, of course!" The name stuck, just like other invented Greek names. The very name "Egypt", for instance, was a Greek name which replaced the Ancient Egyptians' original name for their country, "Kemet." Like "Germany" as opposed to "Deutschland", or "Japan" as opposed to "Nihon."
Although today they are so beaten and thrashed that their faces are essentially sanded away, the Colossi are still impressive. I photographed them from several angles as shepherds drove their flocks through the fields nearby, and then I went wandering off towards the Temple of Hapshepsut, which I had previously seen from the air. I was supposed to meet Jake and some of the other tourists there. Soon I was walking alone on the highway at the edge of the desert, with Gurna on the left of me, an ancient village of mud-brick houses seemingly growing out of the sand. I saw almost no people at first, but soon there was movement, and a flood of little kids -- about six years old on average, boys and girls both -- came pouring out from between the buildings and cheerfully ran up to me. Following along behind them was an adult man with a mustache, like a child-herder. He was wearing a bluish-grey djellaba and smoking a cigarette. He had a faint crease in the area between his eyebrows, as if from squinting into the sun.
"Are you going to the Temple of Hapshepsut?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, as the kids milled around me.
"It will take you an hour to walk there if you take the road," he said. "There's a shortcut through Gurna. I'll show you. Ten pounds."
"No thanks, I'll walk," I said. I thought it would be sort of interesting to walk through Gurna, but I wasn't sure I had a ten-pound note, and I didn't want to ask him to change a 50. So I went back to the highway. the kids tagged along after me for a long time, very young and friendly and persistent, trying to sell me little handicrafts. Eventually I decided to give some baksheesh to a little girl, and while I was digging the pound note out of my wallet I noticed that I did, in fact, have a ten-pound note. I had a change of heart and walked back to where the man with the cigarette was still waiting by the side of the road.
"Okay, I'll do it," I said. "Ten pounds, right?"
"Yes," he said. I gave him ten pounds (or was it five pounds?). He said something in Egyptian to one of the little boys, a little cute kid about kindergarten-age. "Machmood here (I'm sure I'm misspelling his name) will show you the way."
The little boy smiled and started to lead the way between the houses. For a short time we were followed by a crowd of other urchins, trying goodnaturedly to get me to pick them for a guide instead: "Sir, don't go with him!" "Sir, don't go with Machmood, he's crazy!" But we soon outpaced them. He was a very smart, bilingual little kid. As he led me onward towards the faraway bluffs he made small talk.
"Where are you from?" he asked.
"I'm from America," I said.
"Are you married?"
"No," I said. I smiled as I reflected on how unimaginably old I must look to this six-year-old Egyptian boy: me, 32 years old, with my muttonchops and glasses. When I was six years old the adults had been... adults, some alien creatures, not real human beings... and even the seven-year-olds had looked like intimidating macho figures. I clearly remember imagining the seven-year-olds riding around the playground with leather jackets and motorcycles. I used to have a fantasy that all adults were monsters wearing masks, and when you got old enough, they would "have a talk" with you and reveal themselves and strip away *your* mask too, and there, behind your familiar face, would be a hideous thing. I remembered too that when I was a little kid, I'd thought that when I grew up I would just spontaneously *change*: my appearance would become unrecognizable, and I'd be a grown man with a beefy jaw and a broad chest and huge muscles, probably playing sports, wearing a baseball shirt, making out with cheerleaders. My vision of the future Jason Thompson was an entirely different creature from "me". The future came, of course (except for the huge muscles, sports and cheerleaders), but instead of striking me like a sudden lightning bolt, it came so slowly that I never saw it happening, and the outline of the six-year-old Jason Thompson never completely died, or perhaps it died in its sleep, like an old beloved pet, never realizing that it died. And the same for the 12-year-old me, and the 16-year-old, the 21-year-old, 26-year-old, and so on and so on, all the way up to the present one. When I thought of my previous selves I thought of a phrase from the Bible, the phrase, "Let the dead bury their own dead." (Yes, I'm really drumming up the monotheism on this trip. I'll talk about the vulture goddess later.) They are laid atop one another inside me, or in some distant place, like the hardened rings on a tree, or like the Egyptian temples that were rebuilt over and over on the same site.
"Inshallah," he said, the very common Arabic expression which means "god willing."
"Inshallah," I replied.
Soon we came to the end of the village, and there, a long stretch of dirt and rock stood between me and the parking lot, and beyond it, the Temple of Hapshepsut with its steps and pillars. His work done, my guide asked for baksheesh. "Sir, a few pounds." I didn't have any more small change, so I dug around in my backpack for something else to give him. I gave him a phone card with about 10 or 20 pounds on it, which I hope he was able to exchange to someone for even a fraction of its worth, and a whole bunch of pencils, remembering my encounter with the pencil-hungry steward on the train. I also gave him some tourist stuff that had come with the balloon ride, which was probably worthless, but it was the best I could think of. At first he was disappointed that I didn't give him any money, but I think that my random gifts were finally good enough. "Thank you," he said as I left. And I said "thank you" and waved goodbye. I had gone a few hundred steps when I turned and saw the little boy waving from the top of a small ridge, and I waved back, and Machmood turned and went back to Gurna, and I continued on my way.
The Temple was amazing up close, with long low steps that seem to go on forever, and I soon met up with Jake and the others. Although they don't advertise this fact, the Temple was the site of a horrible massacre in 1997, in which 60 tourists were gunned down by Islamic fundamentalists. The Temple rests in a corner between sheer cliffs -- the same cliffs which I had looked down from on donkeyback the day before -- and there is nowhere to run, so the terrorists had killed the guards and trapped the tourists within the structure, and gunned them down, one by one. I didn't see any bulletholes or bloodstains, but I wondered what it had been like. After looking around, we went back to the parking lot and hired a taxi which took us to some of the other sites on the West Bank: Medinet Habu, and Deir el Medineh, the "worker's village" where the people who worked on the tombs had *their* cozy tombs. In one small temple I made the faux pas of taking a flash photograph of some ancient, faded paintings (the flash photography can damage the paint).
As the sky turned over to afternoon the taxi driver convinced us (or did we ask him?) to stop by one of the specialties of Luxor: an alabaster salesroom. Alabaster is a fairly fragile, but beautiful stone, and the alabaster wares are made in two different styles: machine-worked, which is shiny and glossy and smooth as glass, and hand-worked, which is finer and has a more glittery, mica-like appearance. The unctuous salesman, whose English was excellent, tried to convince us to buy this or that as we browsed the one-room shop. Luckily for myself, one of my companions that day was an excellent haggler, who managed to get what seemed like a pretty good price for a small alabaster jar. After he agreed to her price, I picked up a just slightly smaller jar and offered just slightly less than she had paid for hers. He pleasantly suggested a higher price. I repeated my original offer with a vague, smiling, "I don't really care if I buy this jar" attitude. He agreed. This was mere Level 1 haggling, but it worked. As he was hastily wrapping our goods in newspaper, he asked us for a favor: could we please not tell the taxi driver that we had bought anything? (So the taxi driver wouldn't ask for his commission.) We said sure. We went out to the car with our alabaster pieces concealed in our bags, and said we didn't buy anything, but thanks for taking us there, can we get back to the ferry now? In the middle of the taxi ride, though, I forgot and I blurted out something like "Boy, we got a good price on that alabaster" or something like that. @#$%. Oh well. We made it back to the ferry and went across to the East Bank, and then the next day we began the final stage of our journey: the Western Desert.
