Sphinxes, mummies and muezzins

It is three o'clock in the morning and it is very cold and blustery in Aswan. Cars, coaches and military jeeps are assembling to form the first convoy of the day to Abu Simbel. After the infamous Hatshepsut Temple Massacre in 1996 quite rightly, the Egyptian government takes no chances to safeguard its tourist industry. We lurch and hurtle through the dark shadows of the desert and after about three hours of minimal consciousness the dawn and its pastels caress the dunes.

We arrive and walk down to the practically indigo blue Lake Nasser as the sun kisses it and swathes it with a million golden stars. Mist, like the diaphanous white robes of the fabulous Nefertari, trails across the landscape. Abu Simbel is one of the best known sights of Ancient Egypt; three colossal seated statues (the fourth was destroyed in an earthquake a couple of years after the death of Cleopatra) portraying Ramses II, The Great, hewn out of the living rock and guarding the temple whose dedication the deified Pharaoh shared with Amun, Ptah and Hamarkhis, along with statues of Nefertari that barely reach the king's knees.

The temple had actually been moved out of its cliff face when Lake Nasser was created by the Aswan Dam. Stone by stone, fragment by fragment it was reconstituted in an enormous artificial mound along with the smaller temple of Nefertari as the goddess Hathor.

One wonders whether Egypt would have been the Egypt we know had Ramses not existed. He is immortalised in Karnak, Abu Simbel and Memphis. His name is given to modern establishments from Hilton Hotels to bazaars. No other Pharaoh in Egypt's astonishingly long history apart from Tutankhamun and Cleopatra, the first through luck and the second through notoriety, has ever captured the imagination of historians, biographers and artists in quite the same way.

Like all great builders the man must have been an utter megalomaniac. The sole purpose of his buildings was to impress. He still impresses us now in 2005. Can one just imagine what sort of an effect his creations had on the world in the 13th century BC?

As we floated down the Nile in our ever so slightly shabby gin palace with coltishly charming Mohameds and Omars to amuse us by making crocodiles and mummies out of our bathroom towels, I could not help thinking of a pharaonic Royal Progress. The banks of the Nile with their lushness and forests of palm could not have changed much since the God Kings and their Great Royal Wives were rowed from Luxor to Memphis in untold golden splendour to the sound of cymbals and lutes.

Going to Egypt was a dream that I had nurtured for a very long time. I was still a child when I came across one of my grandfather's books illustrated by lithographs of the stunning David Roberts watercolours. I was actually on the verge of going there twice before this trip and both times they were cancelled; one because of one of the Gulf Wars and the other because of the massacre at Hatshepsut's temple. This simply had to be a "third time lucky". It seemed as if there was some malignancy of Seth that was preventing me from visiting Egypt's ancient archaeological treasures as for more than half of the trip I developed acute bronchitis. So determined was I to defy this strange curse that I visited the Temple of Amun at Karnak in a wheelchair! It was either Seth giving up on me or the delightfully urbane but ultra effective ministrations of the resident doctor at the Luxor Sheraton that brought me back to my usual self.

From Abu Simbel to Luxor I had a hard time of it but it was worth the tremendous effort. I can never ever forget the poetic beauty of the Ptolemaic Temple of Isis at Philae set dramatically on an island near the Aswan Dam with its delightful Kiosk of Trajan set amidst tall papyri and reflected in the lake. This was a shrine that flourished well into the Roman period as the Romans readily adopted the more stately Isis as their goddess of Wisdom in preference to the original Minerva who was a bit too much of a hoyden for comfort.

But it is the grandeur of Karnak that epitomises the Ancient Egypt of Ramses the Great; the forest of columns, the avenues of sphinxes and the gigantic pylons that glorified Egypt's premier god, Amun, through his deified son Ramses. It was the aberration of Akhenaton, the heretic pharaoh who tried to destroy Amun's cult by replacing it by the worship of the one god, Aton, that enabled the world to gasp at the treasures buried with his successor, the boy king Tutankhamun. Such was the tumult during and after the boy king's pitifully short reign that his tomb was spared the fate of all the others and was never discovered and robbed till Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter stumbled upon it in 1922.

The discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb changed Egyptology as much as the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by one of Napoleon's officers in 1798 and the subsequent realisation that because the stone had the same words written in Hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek, one could actually read the lost Ancient Egyptian language.

This link-up to the modern age is a rare but preciously important one. Since the last descendant of Ptolemy the Great committed suicide by poisoning herself with the bite of an asp, Egypt seems to have sunk into the backwaters of history as a province of Rome and then Byzantium. With the spread of Islam, Egypt was ruled by Fatimids and Mamelukes till it then became part of the Ottoman Empire. Khedives, kings and British governors flitted in and out of 19th century Egyptian history; the crowning achievement of which was the building of the Suez Canal. Jamal Abdel Nasser put an end to all this in 1952 and founded the modern state of Egypt that we know today. Today the Great Pyramid at Giza shares a skyline with the skyscrapers of downtown Cairo and the graceful minarets of a thousand and one mosques.

So picture us in a taxi for six laden with shopping from the Khan al-Khalili bazaar. The taxi was one of the most ramshackle of jalopies that I have ever been in. One shared just one detachable winder to open or close the window while the fuel tanks bubbled merrily under our seat. The engine heaved and coughed asthmatically but built up an incredible speed, the driver hollering into his mobile phone while negotiating the dodgem-like Cairo traffic with the dexterity of Ben Hur. Suddenly, just as we were about to cross the Nile, the engine gasped, spluttered and died. The driver sprang out and people surrounded him while he peered into the smoky entrails that passed for an engine and cursed it. There was a consultation with a couple of police officers and volunteers from the crowd and we were literally forgotten inside the mummified suffocating vehicle, unable to escape as the doors could only be opened from the outside. When we were finally released we walked back to our hotel laughing all the way. Such is the chaos and utter insanity of modern Cairo; a very far cry from the order and serenity of the Egypt of Ramses the Great.

Cairo is primarily an Islamic city with the most beautiful mosques and an unbeatably vibrant atmosphere. Sitting in the famous El Fishawi, Cairo's oldest coffee house is an experience in itself as huge brass trays laden with enamelled but rather battered teapots and glasses sporting sprigs of mint are balanced by waiters with nerves of steel and incredible efficiency high above the heads of passing vendors of leather poufs, dud watches, grubby scarab bracelets and lottery tickets. Along with these are the little boys with huge wicker baskets like cages on their heads laden with puffy and hot Egyptian bread who have to keep out of the way of the coal seller carrying his huge ladle full of burning embers to keep the Shisha smokers well supplied. All around are the hundreds of thousands of shops selling anything from brass camels, horrible t-shirts and the most ghastly and alarming of repro-Egyptian kitsch to shops with the most beautifully wrought jewellery, exquisitely woven fabrics and intricately inlaid mother of pearl boxes. That epitomises Egypt today; a melange of cultures that thrives cheek by jowl in the most torturously close of proximities, Islamic and Copt, military and mercantile, tout, tourist and dupe; they are all there creating a constantly renewed fascination of a country as old and enigmatic as the Great Sphinx of Giza.

kzt@onvol.net