The Fabulous Life of Ponteuf

And I thought Rome was old

If Cairo wasn't exactly what I was expecting (nor my cup of tea) seeing the monuments of the ancient civilization more than made up for the discomfort of being there. Egypt was first unified in 3200BC - before that lower and upper Egypt (which do not align with a map, a fact that I knew perfectly well but still had to remind myself) were essentially warring. Come those three thousand years before the glory of Rome, though, and a forward thinking pharaoh managed to unite the land of the lotus and the land of the papyrus into one. The Ankh, symbol of life, is actually a hieroglyphic image of the Nile, wide delta at the top (lower Egypt) joined by a line to the river of upper Egypt -united, they provide life to the people and the country. At a time when the peoples of Europe were probably still hunting and gathering, the Egyptians were building some pretty impressive structures -even more impressive because they are still standing.

We actually spotted the pyramids from the plane - they're pretty hard to miss, though the city of Giza runs right up to the edge of them; all the photos that show them in the middle of desert are taken from the city side, or at a clever angle. We got there early, a necessity in any month, I think, because the sun was beating down as we walked around the base of the Great Pyramid. The faces are rough, looking like a giant pile of stone cubes piled on one another - it isn't until you get quite close that you realize that the cubes are huge - they come up to Mike's shoulders. Once faced with smooth limestone, the two larger pyramids are now stripped of their clothes, but for a thin strip along the bottom of the great pyramid and a cap on the top of the second. The third pyramid, smallest by almost half, was to have been finished with pink granite, quarried all the way down the Nile in Aswan, but the pharaoh died before it was finished, so work stopped - since the pyramids, after all, are tombs. Large, impressive, still standing tombs  -but tombs. We paid to crawl into the middle one, and hot, sweaty, dirty work it was, down a ramp then up another until we were in the middle of the structure, rather claustrophobic in a plain room with a sarcophagus.

The Sphinx was more compelling, really, than the pyramids themselves. Located down the hill from the middle pyramid, near its quite complete funerary complex, the Sphinx is carved from one block of stone and missing nose notwithstanding, he's impressive. Sphinxes were symbols of protection and not uncommon, but this one is particularly huge, and seeing it gave me the shivers the way I had expected the pyramids to. It had been painted, originally, and traces of color still lurk on the royal pharonic hood - little did I know how much color I would see in the tombs in Luxor, and how amazingly vivid it would be.

The Egyptian Museum in Cairo was, for me, the highlight of that city. I wanted to say that I enjoyed the pyramids the most, but it was the mass of treasure inside that salmon pink museum that really bowled me over. Statues and carvings and bits of history, piled up and more or less lined on shelves, marginally signed, marginally protected. A few statues watched me as I walked through - the Egyptians had perfected a technique of "real" eyes made of semi-precious stones, they were perfect, and they seemed to regard us with detached amusement, real faces from the past.

The treasures from King Tutankhamen, though - truly, truly amazing. I think I expected a mask, a crook and maybe a few statues. Instead, there are rooms and rooms of treasure: chariots, chairs, bows and arrows - even the young king's shoes and clothing, right down to the linen loincloth. His burial was a series of nesting boxes - a large, room sized gold covered box, with another, then another, then another inside it, finally reaching a sarcophagus of solid quartzite, inside of which was a body shaped coffin, richly decorated, with another inside that, and inside that a coffin of solid gold that housed the actual mummy, decorated with the famous death mask molded in the features of the pharaoh. With a few exceptions, currently on tour in the US, all of this treasure was there. The sheer wealth of it, the quantity of gold and stones, the perfection of the craftsmanship of the jewelry and the furniture - all of this was overshadowed by the fact that Tutankhamen was a minor king. Selected as a boy of 9 to rule by priests who needed a pawn and possibly killed by them when he began to have a mind of his own, he did nothing extraordinary - and yet his tomb contained riches that are hard for a modern mind to imagine. The tomb of Ramses II, then  -what a glorious sight that would have been! 68 years of rule, 189 children, 52 wives: a pharaoh that powerful must have had a tomb to match.

I saw Ramses II, actually, in the Royal Mummies room. All in all, I think I saw close to twenty royal mummies. I find them fascinating, if a bit macabre: some look so lifelike that they might sit up and wonder why their skin is so brittle. Ramses II still has a large shock of white hair ?another king had masses of curly black hair piled on his shoulders. Some are still wrapped completely in linen, and others look, for lack of a better term, moth eaten. I suppose that's not so surprising for a 4000 year old body - the age fights in my mind with what seems reasonable. How can I possibly be looking at the face of a man dead for so long? Knowing that the organs and brain were removed during mummification, I see even more clearly that the body is just a shell. These pharaohs are off in the underworld somewhere, not locked in cases in modern Cairo?

The Valley of the Kings on the West Bank of Luxor completed our tomb hunting for the trip, and these tombs, hidden from the outside, outdid the pyramids with their interiors. The walls and ceilings were completely painted, covered in the stories of the pharaoh's life and instructions for the afterlife, and the paint, some 3000 years old, was still bright and intense in many of the tombs. Ceilings painted blue, scattered with white stars, the blue paint made from ground lapis, green paint from malachite: even the art materials were expensive, but they lasted. Standing in those tombs, looking at Horus and Isis and Nut and Amon Ra, time rewinds - these gods seem current. I expect that the landscape outside hasn't changed - the land around the tombs is beyond barren; not even scraggly weeds manage to exist. The sun beats down and in the distance, a thin line of green delineates the Nile, the ultimate lifeline of Egypt.

In Luxor, on the East Bank (west for death, east for life) the temples of Luxor and Karnak lie three kilometers apart. Once connected by a ceremonial road, lined on both sides with more than three thousand sphinxes, these temples were actively used for worship of the gods. During the four months of flood, boats would sail in procession between the two temples for a ceremony. When a king reached thirty years of rule, it was in the ceremonial court of the Luxor temple that he fought a lion to determine his worthiness to continue ruling. The temples are imposing spaces - huge pylons delineate the courtyards, some would have supported roofs, making the interior mystical and shadowed. All the stone surfaces, most about 15 stories high, were painted vibrantly. Again, I'm shocked not only at the scope of the structure but the age, and the work it must have taken to construct it so many thousands of years ago.

The theory I had always heard was that the pharaohs were able to build such massive structures because of slave labor, but our guides told us that in fact most monumental temples were built by the farmers during the flood season, four months a year. In this way the pharaohs solved the problem of seasonal unemployment and made sure that their important places of worship were build by friendly hands. I'd never heard this before, but I'd never heard most of the things I learned about ancient Egypt, either. The timeline alone is staggering: the periods of chaos between the Old and Middle Kingdoms are longer than the entire history of the US. I tend to think of Cleopatra, but she came so much later - the Greeks ruled Egypt from about 300 - 100 BC when the Romans took it over, but the country had been unified since 3200 BC. It is hard to comprehend that many years of continuity, but somehow the Egyptians managed it.

As we've traveled through Europe we've seen a number of Egyptian obelisks, most recently in Istanbul and Rome. Out of context, they seem simple and out of place - I've wondered if, in fact, they were really copies. Standing in a open space in Karnak between two standing obelisks, our guide pointed out empty spaces and told us in which cities the obelisks that had stood there now lived. Istanbul, Paris, Rome. One empty base, he pointed out, once supported the obelisk that now stands in St. Peter's Square in Rome. Feeling like we've come full circle, we stood open mouthed. From Istanbul to Rome to Egypt we've steadily moved backwards through history, and for a Westerner, we've come to the end of the line. Egypt: ancient, mystical and shockingly preserved -the glories of the past overshadowed all else. Watching the sun set over the Nile, red and pink slipping behind the black fringe of palms on the horizon, I could do no more than wonder at the privilege of being able to walk, for a time, with the pharaohs.

Modern (?) Egypt

Visiting Egypt was a split experience: on one hand, the time was about connecting with Ancient Egypt, land of the Pharohs - on the other, we were visiting modern Egypt (if you can use the term modern without flinching). It isn't that the country is so terribly behind, I suppose, at least in the obvious ways. Cars certainly pack the streets of Cairo, telephones and cell phones and internet all work just fine, clearly these are not people living as we all must have hundreds of years ago. And yet - riding through Cairo the first afternoon we were there, I saw more four legged power than one would expect in a major metropolis of 2006. 

Donkeys pull old fashioned carts outfitted with big round rubber tires and piled high with all manner of goods, produce and other. We were nearly sideswiped in a narrow alley by a cart loaded high with toilet paper, driver sitting cross-legged on his goods and whipping his donkey to greater speeds.  Visiting Muhammed Ali's tomb (he the ruler famous for cutting off the hands of the sculptor who made his sarcophagus so that no one else would have one as nice) somewhere in the vast expanse of the City of the Dead, we saw more transportation with actual horse power than engines. The crowded alleys around the bazaar, the neighborhood streets lined with cheap produce shops and even cheaper plastic goods emporiums had more hoof than car traffic, people dodging both the prancing animals and their copious droppings as they picked their way along. On one sidewalk, I see an entire herd of sheep in various stages of repose, regarding the traffic coolly.

It isn't that I have anything against equine traffic, but it seems a bit out of place in a city known for its pollution and overcrowding. Our driver told us that the population is 17 million, swelling by another three each day as people come to work in the city. The air is hot and dry, and except for the areas touching the Nile, the land is barren, more rocky than sandy, more dirty than clean. It doesn't rain in Cairo, consequently the buildings bear the grimy signature of the amount of traffic that grinds past them constantly, a twenty four hour a day cacophony of honking and squealing brakes. Pity, too, because many of the buildings in the center of the city are uncommonly beautiful - large open squares and intersections are lined with Art Nouveau buildings whose five or six stories of decoration put blocks in Vienna to shame.

Our guide to the pyramids and the Egyptian Museum told me that the only reason I was seeing horses was because the tourists liked to ride them, but the number I saw vying with the camels for tourist pounds at the pyramids was low in comparison to the number I saw ridden by down at the heels locals - and no tourist wants to ride in a donkey cart. The driver who collected us from the airport was a bit more open about the state of things in Cairo, or at least his opinions of them. He offered us an afternoon tour of the city, just between us, you understand, good deal, not through his tour company - we took it for lack of anything better to do and out of curiosity. He picked us up in his own car, changed from working suit to jeans and striped t-shirt bearing the incongruous combination of nautical knots and the word HANDSOME emblazoned across his back. He quickly became Handsome to us, though his name was Said, and his driving made me feel like I was in some video arcade grand prix rally game. Traffic, he said, was low, because we were there during the three feast days post-Ramadan, when businesses are shut and people are home with families. At night, though, they all reappear, clogging the walkways along the Nile, clogging the streets, clogging the river in small darting pleasure boats lit up with flashing neon. Handsome was invaluable in the bazaar, keeping the persistent salesmen away from us and bartering fiercely when I did want to buy something . I think I paid for that help, though, when we visited a local mosque, as I'm pretty sure that he told the attendant to give me a full black hooded robe rather than a simple scarf to cover my head. His normally bouncy step got bouncier, and I heard him telling Mike something excitedly; the joke was clearly at my expense.

He tells us that the current president is corrupt and useless, shows us the presidential palace and the clear divide between the haves and have nots (though frankly, I don't think the "haves" have it so great) and asserts that the country was better with a king. He's also put out that it used to be possible to smoke hash in a felucca on the Nile because the powers that be also smoked hash?now, he says sadly, it isn't so easy. The police make about $40 a month, so bribery is common: Handsome was hit for a 3000 pound fine - (about $500) for getting caught with a joint in the car. I don't think I need to spell out the theme, here, but we liked Handsome. He'd been married to a British woman for twelve years when she up and left, taking their daughter and breaking off contact completely - he showed us tattered photos from his glove box of a younger self with a curly haired daughter, then told us how much, even still, he liked European-minded women.

He was a sad sort of character, and while we were certainly a money source to be cultivated, he seemed to take a real interest in our wellbeing, warning us of potential scams and turning up at the hotel mid afternoon the next day to find us because he was worried that with the museum closing early, we'd have nothing to do and wouldn't know where to eat. We'd managed, of course, but took him up on his offer of a felucca ride on the Nile at sunset for $5 each. He got us to the Giza train station early and then waited with us for our train, installing us in the sleeping car and shyly giving us a bag of fruit he'd bought for our trip ?though he was very worried that we hadn't packed any beer. The grapes and fresh dates and guava hadn't cost him much, but the thought behind it was kind and much appreciated in a land where people will run you down to open the door for you, proclaiming "Welcome!" only to stick an empty palm in your face once you've passed through the portal. Handsome told us that the only way to deal with people was to ignore them, but I never really got used to treating people with what felt, to me, like total rudeness.

The most interesting tidbit from Handsome, though, came on our felucca ride. Sailing along the Nile, the city was almost peaceful, the little pleasure boats flashing their lights in the distance, quiet but for the rushing of the water and the slight luff of the sail. The sun had set and the buildings along the river were lit up, reflecting bits of light onto the dark water. Warm and lightly smoky air carried the sounds of happy people and the sugary smell of roasting corn and sweet potatoes to us as we lolled, contented. Abruptly, Handsome leans forward. "Mike,?he says, "can we talk about women?? "Egyptian women,"he continues, "they fool around. They make love with their boyfriends, they go with men because they are poor, their fathers can't provide for them, but then, on their wedding day, before they go to the hairdresser, they go to the doctor. The doctor, he makes them a virgin again, stitch stitch, and they are good to go.?" "Can you imagine," he asks, "imagine starting out your married life that way?" We're both jaw-dropped by this point, and he takes that as encouragement, and shared disgust. "And why, why is this what they have to do? Because of the bloody Egyptian men, that's why. They want to fool around, fool around, then they expect the woman to be a virgin. Bah! Stupid Egyptian men!" On this point I can agree, and I express shock that "re-virginization" is actually real, not just an urban legend. No, he assures me, 70% of Cairo women follow this pattern.

He then shares some personal stories which frankly should have remained that way, so I feel free to tell him that I'm rather horrified by the women covering their heads, let alone veiled all in black, down to the black gloved fingertip. "Ahhh," he says. "Don't let that fool you. They look that way so they can be anonymous, so that they can go out at night to a boyfriend and no one notices." The black veiled ones, he says, are often the most corrupt. I admit that I did feel rather unnoticed in my black robe at the mosque and he nods knowingly. I wonder at the truth to all this, but on the way to the station he points out the girls who are dressed properly but clearly entwined with young men, and I have to concede that he probably has a point.

Clearly, Egypt isn't exactly what it seems, and certainly isn't what I expected. When we wake up in Luxor the next morning, we're truly in a rural community. Here, the donkey carts are piled high with produce only, and the men driving them cruise up and down the street eating their own wares as advertising. Cattle and goats roam freely along the roadside and it is obvious that everyone not involved in the tourist trade is actively farming for a living. This is not a modern Egypt at all - this is the lifestyle that people were leading 3000 years ago, it seems, in the Egypt of my idea. The Egypt of my reality clearly another experience altogether, and one I wasn't expecting. I enjoyed it, in an odd sort of way, but I won't be lining up to immigrate any time soon.