The Trouble with the Russians...or a Change in Plans II

The Trouble with the Russians or Change in Plans II

Alexandria was warm enough, cool enough, cheap enough, and sociable enough but there comes a time when one must move on. My plan was to leave in early June and spend a couple of months touring and living in Russia. Even after reading somewhere that Moscow is the most expensive city in the world, I reasoned, I’ll just take a quick look around western Russia and be off to Irkutsk in Siberia and that will be reasonably priced. I don’t know why I thought that. If prices are high in Seattle, will that make Fairbanks a bargain?
Irkutsk is halfway across Russia. I would travel by train, spend a month or so there, and then continue on east to the Pacific. I’d hop planes possibly through China to Japan and fly from Tokyo to Anchorage. Such was the plan.
I’d found a sane cyber café run by a gray-headed guy who disallowed music, games, and snot-nosed kids. I surfed until I found the application for a Russian visa, downloaded into my flash recorder, and took it home to fill out. I had to remember what year I had left Texas Tech, what my former wife’s maiden name was, and where she was born. I had to admit my expertise with firearms, “In the years 1965-66, I shot kangaroo.” I had never developed any skills with explosives or radio active materials, shucks, but they did want to know. So after a few backs and forths to the cyber café, I was ready to attach an extra passport photo to my app and go see the Russians.
By this time I’d made friends with a bunch of retirees who hung out at a sidewalk café on El Corniche’. Mr. Farouk was the best at English and he and I became great friends. I wanted to know about Alexandria; he wanted to know about Alaska. He told me to go to Ramal Station which was about two or three blocks away and take the Number Two tram. “Two” in Arabic numerals looks like a Greek gamma on uppers.
The name of the jumping off place slips my mine but I found the Two and had to detrain immediately. I had gotten onto the ladies car but then the conductor took my money, twenty-five piastas (the only thing I can remember that you can use a twenty-five piasta note for. It’s about a nickel. Beggars won’t even take them.) And I told him the name of the station. Of course everybody on my end of the car overheard me. As the crowd would change at stops, each time, the people getting off would tell the people getting on to tell me when we got to that station. It was a real group effort and when I left the tram, everybody waved good-bye.
Well it was a perfectly good day and having found the consulate, I was told that this was not the day to deal with me. Come back tomorrow between something like nine and twelve. I bought a peach and went back to wait for the tram to downtown.
Next day after being hollered at for not entering the correct door, and told to wait my turn in a large room, and since I was first in line (nobody else around) I went in to talk to the man behind the thick glass and through the two-way intercom, he dealt his way through my papers and looked over my passport as if something was missing. I didn’t have an invitation! I have never been “invited” into a country in my life. The door was always open and while I surely had to get a visa ahead of entering some of them, I never needed an invitation. So after explaining this to me (he did speak very good English through the intercom) he told that for a price I could get an invitation through an Egyptian travel agency. Remembering upper Egypt travel agents, that didn’t sound good. My considering retiring on Lake Baikal didn’t sound good to him. The Cold War was over. The Wall was down. Nevertheless it was time for me to go look for another peach.
Mr. Farouk, who is something of a traveler, and I pondered this development over many cups of tea. I was so put out with the suggestion of going through an Egyptian tour office, that I had forgotten the name of the business who obtains invitations. Well, I want to go to Russia, expensive or not, bureaucratic or not, it’s there and I want to get to the other side of it, so I had Yvonne, the desk clerk at the hotel, call to ask about the tourist office. I have a thing about talking over telephones in foreign countries. They always crackle and sound funny. The Russians knew it was me even though she didn’t give my name. Nobody else in Alexandria with five million plus people wanted to go to Russia. They said that I couldn’t make an application until I had established an address in the country from which I applied and the required time for establishing the address was for six months.
Yvonne hung up the receiver and I told her that I had always wanted to return to
England. I had never seen Scotland, Ireland, or Wales and since it didn’t look like I was going to get a seat on the Trans-Siberian Railway, now was my chance.

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Settling into Alexandria

There’s a half dozen ways of seeing a new part of the world. “Taking in the sights” is probably the most popular. But in the Middle Ages, tourism started with religious pilgrimages such as you find in Canterbury Tales. Another way to “see” a country is to flop on their beaches. Sharm El Sheik on the south of the Sinai Peninsula is a world class strip of sand where swimmers, divers, and floppers come. Eco tourism is a reason to go see the world “before it’s changed.” The national park in Sitka has a bird list that one can request and you can check off the species as you walk quickly along the Totem Loop. I saw a fellow sitting in the first row of the lounge of a ferry. He was armed with an expensive pair of binoculars and a secretary. He called out the bird flocks he saw, the number of specimens, and she quickly recorded what he said. A little different from the beach people are the spa people. They come for massages and to be steamed and soaked and to be mudded and cleaned and perfumed. I guess these folks have their ancestry in the nineteenth century when people who could afford not to work “took the waters” but you might trace the hot springs bathing back to the Romans. Then there is the shopper, who knows a deal when he or she sees it. The cultural visitor walks the halls of art museums, watches native dancers, and listens to the local music. In Alexandria you can enjoy Egyptian music or European Classical. The opera house is as exquisite as the craftsmanship in a Swiss watch. Then there is just cheap living and dope. This made Kodaikanal a favorite with the young people. So there are a stack of reasons for leaving home and skipping across foreign lands or stopping off for a while. You just can’t hire a camel in the Tanana Valley.
If you are a reader of many of my blog pieces, the central DNA of my travels is to find a place(s) to retire. In one blog I listed my priorities. Cheap living being somewhere near the top as I recall. The Rouda Hotel was reasonable enough but the plumbing and the hired help finally drove me to look for another hotel. When the plumbing backed up, I reported it to the unfriendly undertaker at the desk. He called in his maintenance man, who couldn’t find a plunger to fit the hole where he pumped away. The plunger he did use was made of plastic, which is not suitable to the task. Then when he, another maid, and Miss Muddy all began asking for a tip, I felt that it was time to leave. I intended to give a tip but not until the job was done and it never got done. This is not the way of the Rouda so to make a long story short, I left the room with the plastic plunger and the contents of a sewer pipe lying about my bathroom floor and I’ve moved to the Union Hotel. Furthermore, nobody got a tip. My present hotel room (two star) runs a little more than ten dollars a night, which was about the same as many of the places I stayed in India.
I just finished a breakfast of beans, bread, and a salad of tomatoes (picked fresh and with flavor,) onions, and cucumbers. There are green peppers that are about as hot as jalapeños for the adventurous. I passed on them. The price of the breakfast eaten standing up at a street cart? Less than a dollar. No tea. You have to go round the corner to El Corniche and a sidewalk café for a glass of hot tea and as you enjoy sipping, you look out over the Eastern Harbor. Tough life. Waitress’s name is Turaiya and she’s as quick witted as they come. Now by the third glass of tea you will have equaled the price of the breakfast. With tea and tip, you are up to two dollars. You can spend five times that in a sit down, look over the menu place. I like both, rationalizing that I seldom eat more than twice a day, I can afford either.
I found one sit down place that served fuul, this is the bean dish, a chunk of white cheese with sliced vegetables, the pita, and tea for about $2.50 or more depending on the tip. The hired help proved to be so lazy that I had to give up on them. I thought that they might just relax to the point of giving up breathing and performing CPR on lazy waiters was more than I can deal with before breakfast. I miss that slab of salty white cheese though.
My foreigner status makes me deaf (except to the noise of the traffic,) dumb I can say “thank you” but not much else, and partially blind (I can’t read Arabic.) So boarding a minibus for a run down the Corniche to the library was an experience with unintended consequences. I gave the guy a one pound note (18 cents) and he gave me change. I didn’t want change. The people on the bus “said” that I must take the change. If I can ride a mile through bad traffic, it’s damn well worth 18 cents. You get the driver to stop by saying, “Showk-rum.” That’s “thank you” and then I gave him back his change. I could have taken a cab for thirty-six cents but then I add in a thirty-six cent tip. Walking is good for your health unless you are hit by a yellow cab or anything else moving at 35 miles an hour plus. I looked up the street and saw about a half-dozen of these yellow and black bastards bearing down on me. Only a beekeeper can put this sight into context. But until I learn basic Arabic, the transportation system is somewhat out of reach. I think I may get a fist full of Egyptian pound notes and go down to ride the street cars. That would be a good day’s adventure. I did that in Buenos Aires and had a fine time.
The area where I live is pretty much uptown, shops, banks, and offices with just a little cracking plaster. I took a walk to the catacombs, which was too damn far for me to walk, but I went through a huge market area near Pompey’s Pillar (with no more connection to Pompey that Cleopatra’s Needle has with the last Ptolemy,) and then into an industrial section. After prowling the catacombs (second century A.D,) I walked off along a canal and using the sun for direction got lost far from El Corniche but accidentally returned the way I’d come rather than going back to the waterfront.
And the point of all this – the thesis sentence? I want to know how to use a place. I want to find a city, town, village where I can find my way around, get what I want (like some AA batteries) and enjoy the place. I do like museums and the opera house but where can you buy Q-tips?
One day I walked west on El Corniche, around the curve, and to the Pharos, the site of the Lighthouse. Long walk, good tan, a most interesting fort built about twenty years before Columbus sailed for the West. The fort was made of limestone but unlike those built in acid rain country, it looks to be built yesterday. I suppose Egypt has its quota of acid but to date, I’ve been in the country for a month and a half, not a drop of rain has fallen.[Since writing this, it did sprinkle enough to give the cars dust spots and the street people who take it upon themselves to wash or wipe off your car. Should you find your windshield wipers pulled away from the glass, you’ve been cleaned and in time will be asked for a tip.] Perhaps the fort gets restored after every shelling and is sandblasted now and then. One aspect of the design is that at the center of the keep, there is a mosque. The mosque is at the center of many things Egyptian. But even better were the kids. This was a class trip destination up to what I guess to be about the tenth grade. The fort has several levels and is essentially a square which means that should you and I meet each other going opposite ways, if we walk far enough, we’ll meet again. And little girls and boys can not resist testing what they learned on page one and two of English class. “Hello.” “How are you?” “Which country are you from?” “Welcome!” and if they got all the way to the end of that chapter in the English book they ask, “Your first trip to Egypt?” “How long have you been here?” “What do you like best about Egypt?” I tell them, “Kids who ask questions.” So we see each other at the other side of the fort and by then they remember other questions to ask. The kids are worth a lot of interestingly masoned limestone. Magic tricks go over big with them. They remember but are still not sure how you make a rock disappear. The walk out and back to the pharos was a long one but worth the effort.
Another day I went to the Odeum. This is a small amphitheater the Romans built, which served as a showplace for music and poetry performances. Since its unearthing along with the clearing of the Portico that approaches to one side, a more recent government has built a second amphitheater facing the first. In other words, when you looked at the backdrop of the modern theater, you see the Roman structure. The modern theater is a little larger than the first and so an impresario can choose the theater to fit the crowd. Furthermore if you have an overflow crowd, seat people in both theaters, which then makes a theater-in-the-round. Pray for performers with strong voices.
In this section of town there are several acres of ruins that go beyond the boundary of the Odeum. Excavation continues in the Roman residential area near by.
The opera house has presented a company of mimes and the Cairo Symphony Orchestra. It was definitely a kids’ night with the mimes, who did put on a good performance but with the orchestra, there were about the same number of people on one side of the footlights as the other. I’m in a city of five million. A near empty opera house is not a good sign. The music was very good. The Cairo Opera Ballet Troupe will present “Odessa Ballet” this Friday. I hope to be there. Since I don’t wear a tie and a tie is required to get inside the theater, I leave my Alaska Driver’s License hostage with the ticket seller while I borrow a tie. The lady matched the NPS green of a jacket I bought off the street in India with a tie of her selection. I was disappointed on my next visit to find that someone had already made off with “my” tie. The tickets so far run from $7.50 to $10.00 U.S. [Sunday, it didn’t happen this way. One, the published schedule was wrong and secondly, the ballet is “Odysseus – The Hero”]
I spend the lion’s share of my time writing and rewriting the blog. A few hours a week go to checking email. I take leisurely breakfasts and luppers. I stop on the street and visit with people. There are about a million cats here in Alexandria. Almost no dogs. Two street conversations came up about cats yesterday. There is a beautiful tabby who has been treated well. It is not at all wild and lounges on hoods of cars and it waits to be scratched. I try to keep my hands in my pockets. But I haven’t seen the cat in several days so I asked the lady who runs a hole-in-the-wall shop about the cat. I petted an imaginary cat to get the question across. She was amused that I had missed the cat. After calling over several young men, I was informed that the cat was not really hers. Like the other million cats, it wanders the streets but she keeps some cheese for it when it comes by. Something works. Unlike the others, the cat is not feral.
Then a little further down the street a cat had taken up a defensive position under the back axel of a parked car. That’s where they all take shelter when auto and foot traffic get heavy. The young man thought the cat should come out from beneath the car. This time a young lady was my translator and I told them that they should take a squeegee with a long handle and “urge” the cat gently from beneath the car. This didn’t translate. I got the squeegee and carefully demonstrated. The cat moved, I was thanked, and I walked on. With their denning up beneath cars, the cats are pretty rough looking. Then there are some who are missing tails and other body parts. Mange is common. No fun being a cat in Alexandria unless you’ve got a nice lady who feeds you cheese, a warm automobile hood to relax on, and a foreigner who knows better to come by and scratch you behind the ear.
One day I was on my way down Rue Nabi Daniel and saw a crowd gathered round a black sedan. I don’t do crowds and surely not agitated crowds as this one seemed to be. I thought at first that the gathering had to do with a labor dispute. The police were there as they had been during a wage protest in another part of the neighborhood. Nobody getting too wild at this point. I watched from across the street. Finally I asked two pretty women, one pushing a stroller, if they spoke English. They did and spoke well. “What’s going on over there?” “There is a baby locked in a car.” It was getting on into the afternoon and the sunshine cleared the tops of the building on my side of the street and fell on the car. I walked on. This was a problem that I couldn’t solve with a long-handled squeegee. I had a meal at the Bistrot and then came back. The crowd and the car were gone. In a shop I asked the owner what had happened. He too spoke English and said that they got the baby out. The parent/guardian did finally return. The crowd gave the baby back and the car owner drove away with a broken window. Alexandria has its problems. It has strong points as well.
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The Library at First Glance

In the early nineties, I asked the Kettleson Library in Sitka to come lose with about forty dollars to buy a new book, I’d seen in the magazine, The Smithsonian. I was anxious that the book be worth the expenditure that I wasn’t willing to make. Any book that costs over five dollars seems too expensive to me but then I’m reliving my youth. Another reason for my not buying the book is that the sailboat I lived on with sweating bulkheads is not a good environment for a book. Then one day I got a call that The Smithsonian Book of Books had arrived. For the next week I had the pleasure of turning pages, looking at beautiful illustrations, and reading about a favorite subject, books. The book covered many aspects – printing, binding, selling, etc. One section was on libraries. This was the first I heard that they planned to construct a great library in the ancient city that gave us, not just an archive, but our first library? The book had a photo of an architectural model of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and it was beautiful! Here was a library that would specialize in early civilization up through the Classical Period. I guess that was then that I decided that I’d have to go to Alexandria.
Now I had arrived and made my way again like the lemming toward the sea. I had seen a map of the city somewhere, probably on line where I’d been following the progress of the Bibliotheca's construction. If I kept the afternoon on my left hand and kept walking, I’d see the sea and I knew that the library would be to the east. So walk I did, finding that I had almost walked to the Lonely Planet hotels before doubling back to the mud wrestler’s den. What I wasn’t expecting was the sweep of a crescent shaped beach along, which a street called “El Corniche,” the spelling mine because they changed the name to Avenue 26 July and I don’t know where to look it up. Nobody is sure what happened of 26 July but they do things like that. India has been at it for years. Another example is the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is called the Alexandria Library. I can’t help it. El Corniche is two rivers of traffic rushing in opposite directions separated by a sliver of an island. I may have thought about crossing the street to walk on a stone walk just inside a limestone wall. You could look out over the Eastern Harbor, which was almost encircled by land and island. But I wanted to get to the library in three dimensions, rather than flattened like a paper doll by car tires. As in India, there is no posted speed limit so essentially El Corniche is a double raceway with pedestrians doing a run/stop/run to jaywalk across this street. Remembering the technique I’d learned in India, I looked for old ladies or young mothers with toddlers and fell in on the lee of them, reasoning that a driver has to take them out before hitting me. Of course by my not crossing to the sea wall, I had to cross all the other streets coming into El Cornishe, “feeder streams.” Nobody ran over the old ladies and I looked as far as I could see to a distant white monument standing on a point of land. Having been on line over the years and studying maps, I somehow I knew that the library would be near there. If it was less than a mile to monument, it wasn’t too much less than a mile. One thing cheered me as I strode along. I found Pizza Hut! Of course not an American Pizza Hut with hog meat and jalapeños but I could pretend.
With the monument reached I looked around the point and there lay acres and acres (36,770 square meters) of Bibliotheca Alexandrina! Someone somewhere decided that they should spend a little under two hundred million dollars for a cache of knowledge. The Alexandrian Light House was listed as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. This elegantly shaped building is surely one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World.
The first thing that draws the eye is a great disk of a roof which looks up toward the sky in the northwest. The roof is made of windows with sail-like coverings. It could be that the shades can be adjusted to the strength of the sun during the different seasons. If the entire length of the façade is 305 meters the distance across, the reading room beneath the disk measures 160 meters. Then just this side of the disk stands a sphere in which a planetarium is housed. To the right is a separate building for conferences, which has a restaurant to serve a banquet if needed. The court in between was crossed and recrossed by different people busying themselves with different endeavors. The architectural shapes of the buildings are a feast but one of them had a design flaw. The paint or plaster peeled and the complex has been open for only about eight years. Hopefully that may be altered in time to withstand all the centuries to come.
Not having the brochures with me, I believe, there at least four museums. There is a theater for video and a music hall in the building as well as meeting rooms. Every medium presently available has been included. But the first thing you see and that is most likely what people come for is the great reading room beneath the disk shaped roof with its windows. Once you buy a ticket for a couple of dollars U.S. you go across a lobby and through gates into the great room. There are multilevels, which remind me of a football stadium, with different subjects or services on each level but at the same time all this is unified like knowledge into one room. History and Rhetoric has one level. Literature has a level. One level for Religion. The library is designed to one day house eight million books.
By signing up, the library gives you an hour on a computer. Of course, games and rock ‘n roll are prohibited but while you can google and surf the net, there is no email server on these computers. Should you want to bring in your own lap top, while there is a bunch of paper work and permits to get, I’m told they have a server broadcast throughout the facility. There are so many things to do at the Bibliotheca, I’ve not got around to seeing what all they do have. The restrooms are clean. And should your legs tire, there are elevators to solve all the up and down. Of course, since you are probably reading this in a place where you can google, punch in “Bibliotheca Alexandrina.” There is a ream of information on line and possibly tailored to answer your questions.
Unless there is a special program, the library closes at seven p.m. This was just about sundown. I came out onto the paved courtyard at about the call to evening prayer that echoes back and forth across the city, the cries from the different mosques competing with the hum of tires on pavement. Since it was time for me to head back for supper and the hotel, I walked west toward the evening sky. The crescent of El Cornishe curves round the reflecting harbor and past a dozen domes and minarets of mosques to the Pharos in the distance. Today there is a 15th century fort standing at land’s end. But this is the site of that other wonder of the world, the Alexandrian Lighthouse. And as I walked along immersed in the swish of the traffic, I looked up over my shoulder and up. It was an idle thought but I wonder how many craters across the Moon’s face are named for men who studied here first during the Ptolemaic dynasty and then under the Caesars.
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Sunrise in Alexandria

My seat mate was another lawyer, who couldn’t speak much English but who tried very hard to communicate…and he did. He said his name was “Annie” and that he was going down to Alexandria to take care of some business and would return by the late afternoon train. Now explaining all that for somebody who can’t speak English is not bad. Furthermore, Annie was a very warm person and was very interested in my enjoying Egypt. His interest in my travels was heartening and while I’ve spun stories about lesser people, the “Annies” of Egypt, or for that matter of any country of the world, are many. It gives you a positive take on being a human being.
The car was filled with a clientele who wore suits and ties…perhaps more lawyers. When the sun did rise, I saw small farms – almost gardens along the side of the track. Not being a farm boy I can’t tell you much about the crops and while Annie tried valiantly to explain, there was a limit to our sign language.
One thing that did catch my eye was a conical structure of about two stories, rising up in villages and near homesteads. They were whitewashed and had holes drilled into the sides with a little perch stick just below the hole. If I were a pigeon, I’d move into such an apartment. Before many days would pass I learned that cats outnumbered dogs in this part of the world and that would make me even more apt to choose a conical apartment. But are the Egyptians such bird lovers that they want to build an elaborate adobe or cob structure for their pets?
I’m writing this weeks later and only this morning asked a lawyer, (no, actually a judge) who speaks English, what the cones were for. Pigeons! OK, why? “Because people are crazy!” Brace yourself, bird lovers, this guy would not vote for Barack Obama because he is black “and you don’t want a Black for president.” The judge paints his world with a very wide brush. I hesitate to tell him that I studied literature while at the university. But how ever confused he becomes I finally found out that somehow you can get inside these coots and snatch a bird for a meal. And the New Yorkers bought chicken for supper tonight!
I asked him about another “pent house” standing on stanchions on tops of high buildings. They look like guard towers at the corners of a prison camp. There are a number of them here in Alexandria. I keep looking for a sniper but there doesn’t seem to be one. Come to find out that this too is a dove coot but the city folks don’t want to haul dirt to the roof and instead build with scrap wood. Imagine eating all the dove you want and out of season! If I ever get an acre of land again, the outhouse goes up (down) first but then I think I’ll look for dove coot designs.
The little homesteads gave way to urban clutter but it was sometime before I realized that this was the south edge of Alexandria. We were nearly there! Alexandria has five million people, I’m told, and is big enough to have two train stations and a nick name, “Alex.” No, not for me. This city had better have more class than an “Alex,” if I were to stay here. On the backburner I had wondered what I would do or where I would go if this blending of East and West turned out to be a place I wanted to avoid. I had no plan “B.” Here’s hoping for plan “A.” After the first station and as I watched the buildings grow taller.
Annie and I said good bye and I made my way out the door of the terminal. I knew the names of some Small Planet hotels that were up by the Eastern Harbor. One of them was the Union. Looking at the sun (a sure way for me to get turned around….well, I never liked the idea of daylight savings time anyway) I, like an Alaskan lemming, made my way toward the sea. Unfortunately Rue el Nabi Daniel takes a dogleg in the last “two hundred meters” and thinking that I was lost when I wasn’t, I took a fellow’s advice and turned around and doubled back almost to the train station to a place called the Rouda Hotel. The “oh” is silent. I think I know how it got its name. Now after a walk like that with pack and brief case (well, lawyers carried them) I was ready to accept just about what was in front of me. I’m going to bring a folding wheelbarrow on my next journey around the world. Although I was one of the earliest of traveling backpackers (nice people carried suitcases in the fifties,) it is time to get with the wheel(s.) So I bought the idea of taking a place here. The room had an unmade bed and an unmade maid to go with it. She hit me up for a tip before she would make the bed. The lady moonlighted as a mud wrestler so I didn’t argue with her. The desk clerk had the personality of Digger O’Dell, an unfriendly undertaker. There were a couple of people who made me think that the hotel was not a Mafia front but I would meet them later. Tip paid, bed made, I went to sleep in the early afternoon. That was my first day in Alexandria.
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Luxor

The Australians and I were met, in Luxor by a guide and dropped off at the Winsor Hotel, which was a nice enough place. As I said, there are many cooks stirring any pot in Egypt. This was a “guide” who met you at the bus or train and saw that you were ensconced in a hotel and then there were the guides who actually took you to a site and informed you as to what you were looking at.
Part of the ritual of registering at a hotel was to show your passport to the receptionist. She then took it to their copying machine, Xeroxed it, and retaining the copy, returned your passport to you. She got the first part down just fine. She remembered to take my passport. I waited. I looked around at the guide and I waited a few more minutes. The receptionist then told me to go to my room and drop off my pack and when I got back to the lobby the passport would be returned to me. Separating myself from my passport is like separating me from my wallet, or pants and shoes. But when in Luxor…. The room was nice enough and when I got back to the desk in ten or fifteen minutes, the passport had not been copied. I began to grumble or rumble. She smiled sweetly and told me to wait. How many passports can you copy in twenty or twenty-five minutes? Finally she took the document away and came back to give it to me (two or three minutes, she walked slowly.) I looked to my guide for an answer. “It’s the Egyptian System,” he said. He had added a new phrase to my collection of expressions of frustration. Shabarat would have pulled his hair and screamed, “Incredible India!” Same problem, different continent.
Then Mark showed up. He was to be my information guide and we were to be picked up and taken to the temple complex. With a name like Mark, I guess correctly that he was a Christian, Coptic. He was also high quality as a guide, as good as Abdul in Cairo. So then off to the temples we went and I wandered through layers of dynasties of a thousand years and which was enough time to bury the two sites with light layers of dust and sand at the end of each storm. The temples were huge and impressive but by now it was as if I had been trotted into my fifteenth Catholic church, I can remember almost nothing as to what was said. Mark had a strong voice, good delivery, and did not lose anyone. It hope that I was looking at what Egypt would produce in the future of tourism.
Before moving on, I do remember one bit of information that I found interesting about the temples…not just these, any temple will do. You can often see the original paint on the underside of the lintels. But you can also see soot from smoke. I assumed that it was torch, lamp, or candle smoke. Mark told a different story. Keep in mind that had you been wandering these ruins two centuries back, you might bump your head on a lintel. Today, after excavation, they are thirty or forty feet up there. Mark said that over the ages people moved into the temples and of course built cooking fires. I’ve lived in cabins, sod houses, aboard ships, tents with and without frames, caves, and for almost two decades a sailboat. I must try the ruins of a temple someday.
The next morning, we were off at the break of day with Mark, first to see the Colossi of Memnon. The two giants sit on a plane with almost nothing around. The story goes that the great statues were built at the entrance of a temple but within the flood plane of the Nile. The rest of the temple dissolved over the ages; only the statues remain. David Roberts was here during the 19 century and produced a wonderful series of paintings of Egyptian antiquities…some of which show people living in the forgotten temples. He painted a picture of these giants facing the sunrise. Since their features have been broken, he went round to the west and painted the sun coming up almost blotting out the statutes with glare. It is the knowing to choose such a moment and view point that makes a great painter or photographer. Copies of his portfolio can be bought all up and down the Nile.
Then we drove to the Valley of the Queens where a woman, Hatshetsut, did a real spin on her family history so as to prove that she was a man and therefore qualified to be pharaoh, visual inspection not withstanding. She built a great temple tomb complex across the river from Luxor and for her trouble, her face was chiseled off by the young pharaoh from whom she usurped the throne. With the passing of the millennia the temple had fallen apart. The European archaeologist (I think Poles) had taken on the task of reconstruction. The complex, which is approached up several flights of stairs, must measure a good 300 yards from end to end. It could be even longer and gives a panoramic eyeful.
We drove over to the Valley of the Kings. Mark asked if anyone wanted to go to Tutankhamen’s tomb, that it would cost another few pounds. I passed. I later wondered if that was a good idea. I will not read about the tombs or the pharaohs that I did visit but I may well read the story of how Howard Carter discovered “Tut’s” tomb. All the tombs were robbed within a generation except Tutankhamen’s. Therefore his was the most undisturbed of any of the tombs. I asked Mark why the tomb seemed, while not robbed, in disarray. He told me that within 15 years of the tomb’s being sealed, that robbers did get in but that they for some reason did not complete the robbery. Ah, a mystery which could lead a writer down a thousand passageways. The day Carter opened the tomb is now officially “Luxor Day,” which is an annually locally celebrated holiday. As I said, the funerary objects are on display in Cairo, while Tutankhamen’s remains lie (and I’m sure heavily protected against further disturbance) beyond an unpretentious opening in a rather small tomb. Mark said that the size of the tomb correlates with the lengths of the reign. While we were not allowed to visit his tomb due to ongoing restoration, Rameses II must have a very long passage way and a large room for his mummy. He died in his nineties. Clean living and plenty of fresh air, probably. When they discovered the tomb of Merneptah I, 1213-1203BC, who had inscribed on his purloined stele, “Israel is wasted, bare of seed,” the mummy was not in the tomb. Those who take the Bible literally were not surprised. Hadn’t the pharaoh driven his chariot into the watery jaws of the Red Sea? But later, a tomb was discovered where Merneptah along with a good number (guess a dozen or more) mummies had been cached. That then was the end of one explanation of the pharaoh’s absents and the beginning of a mystery as to how he and the other pharaohs reached another tomb. You don’t need a dull razor blade to see the potential in these oddities. What is needed is a good library with a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica and a long, quiet winter. I’d write this in a footnote if I knew how to make one but I think EB skips over Merneptah I. While the incomplete index runs from L to Z, Merneptah is missing. Transliteration could be cause. I didn’t read all the “M” entries.
On coming back across the river and bidding Mark good bye, I lounged around the hotel waiting for my train. In the evening when the time did come, my town guide arrived but other than giving me the ticket and writing out English instructions, he could not bestir himself to see that I got into the right car and the seat reserved for me. I was thoroughly glad to have this Tour Guide Period of my life end…temporarily. I was to go to Cairo and then someone who needed a tip was to help me buy a ticket to Alexandria was to meet me. Why the Luxor agent couldn’t give me a ticket to Alexandria, I don’t remember. But I did find the right car and the right seat. Assuming that the number system we use in the West is Arabic in origin, the Arabs have developed a new way of expressing them. The “one” looks like a “one” and “nine” is recognizable but “five” is an “oh” and “zero” is a “dot” midway up the numeral it follows. It really doesn’t take long to learn and you can practice reading license plates because many are written with both scripts. It could be that by this time I had learned the numbers but I would have liked to be seen to the train. A half hour out of a well tipped guide’s time is not that much of a loss. So in time, in time….
In Cairo where my ticket stopped I got off the train and roamed around the station looking for my promised ticket bearer. It was a relief to me that he wasn’t there. I did meet a lawyer who was very helpful in trying to call Mr. Mattie, who didn’t answer, and lining me out with a “tourist assistant.” The latter gets quotation marks because he couldn’t speak anything but Arabic but he was smart enough to figure out that I didn’t want to stay in Cairo, that I did want to go to Alexandria, and he knew where I would buy the ticket. If you put up with the language hassle, traveling is very cheap in Egypt. I can’t remember what the charge down to the delta was but nothing to make you catch your breath.
The train showed up in a short time and I leaned back in a reclining chair in an air-conditioned car and dozed as we ticked off the miles to what I hoped would be the real star of Egypt, Alexandria.
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Aswan

Aswan is about as far up the river as you can go and still be in Egypt. It’s the site of the Low and the High Dam. The British built the Low Dam around 1905 while the High Dam was built in the mid fifties. This later era was a time of turmoil as an independent Egypt took on its own personality – the personality of Gamal Abdul Nasser. It was an anti imperialist period and the new governments were given wide birth and free rein over their affairs. Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. The British, the French, and the Israelis made a counter attack. Eisenhower moved one or more carriers into striking distance of the conflict and told the three countries to back off. Great Britain was stunned by their being called down by their ally. The French went home to grumble over freedom fries. And the Israelis scurried out of the Sinai to make other plans for other times.
Next up Nasser decided that he would make the desert bloom, a popular American/Israeli concept. This would be done by building a great dam on the upper Nile creating the largest man-made lake in the world. The problem was that Nasser’s appetite for agricultural improvement was more than he could pay for. France and Britain were in no mood to foot the bill. The U.S. was the world’s leader in foreign aid but between lobbies in America and Nasser’s independent nature, the U.S. demurred. The U.S.S.R. did not. They sent specialist and equipment and money into Egypt and the project began. There was much Cold War anxious rhetoric within America. The Communist were getting a foot hold in North Africa and the Middle East, the story went. But when the dam was build, the Russians were asked to go home. How this went down with folks in Moscow, perhaps I’ll find out in time to come. But first on the Aswan itinerary was to see the “high dam.”
We boarded a small bus and drove off across the Low Dam, which was more of a causeway than anything else. I supposed that water from the Low Dam had irrigated some cotton crops but modern Egypt needed a higher dam and for that, we had to drive on.
Three Australian sat behind me on the bus. We didn’t know it then but we’d be spending the better part of a week together. They were all young and from Melbourne and knew as much about the Outback as they did about the craters on the Moon. They were all over six feet tall and weighed better than 250 pounds. It made me think that the milk bars may have been more effective than I’d remembered. As we road along, I pointed out an outcrop of rock(s) imbedded in the sand near the road and remarked at how similar that patch of ground was to the first horizontal views we got of the Martian landscape. I had looked long and hard at those three dimensional pictures and they were a good match for the desert at this spot. These young men quickly came up with the scenario that NASA had faked the Martian desert by making photos in Egypt as has been charged that NASA staged the lunar expeditions out of Hollywood. We all laughed but what I seriously wondered about was the similarity between the Mars’s chemical composition and Earth’s. And as is supposed, there was water action on Mars. We weren’t all that far from the Nile.
The High Dam is over a hundred meters high, I believe the lady said. It has more finished rock work and towers and other decorative details than does the dam at Lake Brady but it’s no Grand Coulee and is nothing like the Hoover Dam. But it does the job, which is to back up many square miles of fresh water for power and agricultural use. I wish I’d asked, but I don’t think that the lake will be exploited for recreational use, at least not yet. There were no plastic bags in the water above the dam. From the other side, the wind came ripping up from below the dam and I asked about if anyone had thought of wind generated power. The lady said that the wind was unusual and normally the top of the dam was still and hot. The weather in April in Egypt to date is a pleasant shirt sleeve affair. My friends in Alaska email me a different story.
Next on the itinerary was a small temple complex within sight of the dam. It took a open boat trip out to an island and the lady gave us a quick description of the place and we were turned loose to wander. I’d hoped that temples and tombs would bring alive some of the Egyptology I’d never bothered to learn but the lesson to be learned is, “Hit the books!” So as the sun sank slowly into the west, I hurried back to the hotel to get to bed early. Tomorrow we would board the bus at 4 A.M for Abu Simbel!
And stumbling onto the bus into the dark I found in the words of C.W. McCall, “We got a convoy!” Just exactly why we needed a convoy, I’m not sure. Abu Simbel was one of those wonders connected with the flooding caused by the high dam. Many temples were drown but it was decided that this complex of two temples built by Rameses II was too important to allow to soak for the next thousand years or so. The archaeologist cut it apart and carried it to higher ground. It could be that the temple was the only reason to build a road into this region and since there are no service stations, garages, or hotels, that the government would accompany a convoy per day, guaranteeing that nobody gets stranded alone on the highway. But why a 4 o’clock start? Well there might be two convoys, one in the AM and the other post meridian. The Egyptian tourist industry is like a factory which frets about its efficiency more than it does its product, the experience. And while nobody expects to be shot, it could be that the threat of terrorism may well figure into it. But is the reasoning that no killer would bother getting up at three in the morning to go shoot somebody? But by dawn’s early light, I’d discovered that unless you are a desert lover, you’d missed nothing. The place still looked like Mars.
One thing that made me feel at home on the drive out was that they drove on both sides of the road as Indian drivers would. Things were different here though. One is that there were no hills and not much in the way of curves; the other was nobody was coming in the other way. We had entered the Big Empty.
When we arrived along with two parking lots of busses and minivans, I told the guide that I was going to the W.C. (the Egyptian word for restroom.) And then I asked, “You’ll be here?” He nodded. When I got out of the restroom, the minibus had disappeared. Furthermore, I had forgotten to note anything that would identify the minibus. I spotted an Australian couple from our bus and we lined up to pay the entrance fee not covered in the tour package. We were in two separate lines but by the time I’d made change and had my ticket, they were gone. I walked out onto a path leading round a great birm, that I would find, formed the back of the temples…in other words the man-made hill against which the temples were built. Nobody on the path that I knew, just a thousand strangers all of whom where with their tour guides. Around the hill, I saw the temples awash in milling people. Somewhere there was a tour missing one perturbed member. Then I found the Aussie again. He had just heard an explanation of the temple complex and was going inside. I had been inside, not so much looking at the pharaohs and gods but attempting to find my lost tour. An English speaking guide that had delivered the talk was now speaking Spanish and while I understood a bit, his Arabic delivery afterwards didn’t help me at all. Then he turned to me and asked me if I had any questions. “If not, I’m going over there beneath that tree.” He walked off through a crowd and after I got tired of trying to locate the Australians, I went to the tree. It was the right tree. There might be another for a couple of hundred miles. What was missing was the English speaking guide. That was the fourth slip in a little over an hour. You will now understand that I never entertained the idea of becoming a sleuth. It took me another hour, maybe longer, to find the bus. By the way the three Australian men from the High Dam tour of the day before but who were on another tour, helped me find my bus. And again the convoy formed and we roared over the empty (except for the convoy) highway and back to Aswan.
Here’s what I got out of the talk. The larger of the two temples is fronted by four colossi of Rameses the Great. That’s Number Two to his friends. Each statue was a little older than the other showing the pharaoh at four stages in his life. The man ruled, I believe, longer than any other pharaoh and so it is appropriate that there be a likeness which would be familiar to the different generations who he may have outlived. That’s it. My recommendation is buy the book with lots of pictures, read in English, and pass up the road race across a landscape where the only landmarks are the stars and they move. The guide in the bus was upset that no one gave him a tip.
I boarded a felucca that afternoon for a two day trip toward Luxor. A felucca has essentially a cat boat hull (mast set well forward and has a retractable centerboard) with a lateen sail, a triangular sail with a long yard spreading the cloth. It looks like a Sunfish on steroids. After the chase through the desert, I was ready for something more sedentary. There were about ten passengers and too many sailors captained by a skipper who should have been doing something else than entertaining himself by showing what a smart man he was. There always seems to be more “sailors” or any other kind of employees than are needed. I don’t think that anybody gets paid but maybe this is the way to keep busy in a country that has an awful unemployment problem.
A fresh wind blew up river but our centerboard and cat-sized rudder held into the downriver current. We moved out smartly, heeling sharply enough that I had to change my sitting position on each tack.
There was a nice lady, who traveled alone and who spoke English, Italian, and Albanian (her native language) who talked with a beautiful Italian woman who spoke good English. The pretty lady had an American husband/boyfriend who was a researcher in brain studies. I asked him questions about sleep. He said, contrary to what I had believed that rest actually comes between the dreams. He said that no one knows just why we sleep but he pointed out that many creatures seem to need it and that we spend a third of our lives in that semi-conscious state. I had asked him an appropriate question because as we bedded down that night, I kept him and the Albanian lady awake with my snoring. I must remember to not sleep communally. Hearing people snore is restful to me. It’s not so with others.
We tied up for pit stops and for the night but the next morning our “talented” skipper got in our face again with a discussion as to whether we should have coffee or tea. The Albanian lady had asked for coffee and instead of delivering the coffee, he made fun of her for disturbing him while he made tea. Egypt has a way to go before they catch up with the ease of managing tourist as you might encounter in Hawaii. A damn long way to go and this guy was the retard. The woman decided to leave the tour. She had had enough of him. As it turned out, about half the people had signed up for only one night on the boat and all that were left were the Australians and me. Boarding and stepping off the boat was tricky. The gangplank was narrow and wiggled a little in the Nile’s mud. The young men gave me a steadying hand when they could. They had helped me find the bus the day before. Somebody still considered others. They would do other favors as time went on. And furthermore, they slept soundly. My snoring didn’t bother them in the least.
So off we went with fewer passengers and with only two sailors. Captain Loudmouth had business ashore. We had our cook who was fifty but who looked as old as the Sphinx and a kid of thirteen…and that’s all we needed. The boy sailed the ship, the old man cooked and made sure we had plenty of tea, and Australians and I told stories (ah, the deck ran red with kangaroo blood) and even the wind had calmed a little and you could sit or lie for hours without changing your position. Sailing and dog driving are the two quietest ways of moving over the Earth’s surface. If you try to picture us that day, paint it quiet. At one point in the afternoon I got to thinking about tip time. What I would give would most likely be kept by the captain so I passed the boy and the old man a five pound each. This amounts to about a dollar and I wondered if they’d think it too little. But out of the corner of my eye, I caught the two of them grinning at each other.
The Nile is perhaps three quarter of a mile wide and with little wind and just the two who made up the crew and the four of us passengers, I never spent a more peaceful day. From time to time “steamers” came thrashing by filled with the more elegant trade and as I thought it over, I knew that I would probably never drift the Nile in a felucca again but I wondered how much better having a private stateroom on a tour ship would be. Probably more professional but that’s an assumption.
We were joined by the captain and crew that evening which was a downer. He was still complaining about the Albanian lady. At least she did make an impression on an otherwise thick skull. It was a relief to be off to Luxor the next day.
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The Museum, the Mosque, and the ATM

The Museum, the Mosque, and the ATM
Abdul met me the next morning and took me to the Cairo Museum. Of course the foreign visitor admission was not covered by the tour price but I was almost becoming accustomed to that.
I, long ago, learned that you get out of a subject what effort you invest. My knowledge of Egyptology is cursory in that I know the names of four or five pharaohs and little more. Going into this museum and enjoying it would be in direct proportion to what knowledge I carried. But with Abdul with me, a few doors of information opened that I hadn’t known about.
He showed me a stele on which a pharaoh’s victories were listed. As I recall this was made of granite and since seeing the stele, I’ve read that had I looked at the reverse side, I’d have seen that the device had been taken from earlier pharaoh’s tomb or temple and recycled. Why not write on both sides of the page? The later pharaoh, Merneptah, had bested a list of opponents but one victory stood out since it was darkened by the oil in the hand by being touched over the years. Merneptah said that he had destroyed and dispersed the Jews. To be precise, “Israel is wasted, bare of seed.” I need to do some more reading on this fellow since this is the “second source” as far as the existence of Jews, the Old Testament being the first. Abdul said that what this could mean was that Merneptah may have been the pharaoh of Exodus. The darken hieroglyphics were not caused just by hands of Jews and Christians touching the stone. The Moslems are very interested in the account left by Moses and Mohammad. I’m writing this in Alexandria. There’s a good library just down the street. I must look up Merneptah. (Since I wrote this, I did find mention of Merneptah, not in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is incomplete, but on Wikipedia. The date of the hieroglyphics on the purloined stele was 1207 BC. The source comes from the Oxford History of Ancient Egypt edited by Ian Shaw but the article was authored by Jacobus Van Dijk, page 302.)
The museum is very large and with so much to distract one, I don’t remember seeing much on Rameses II but Amenhotep IV a.k.a. Akhenaton shared a room with his beautiful wife, Nefrititi. This is the first person in recorded history (carved in stone) who believed in one god. It is something of a stretch to connect his nominee, Ra, the sun, with Jehovah but then my grasp of the religious situation in these early times is shaky. This pharaoh cut a different figure in other ways as well. He allowed himself to be depicted with his wife and children in an informal manner, which had not been done before or since. Furthermore while pharaohs are depicted as looking as much alike as peas in a pod, one glance at Akhenaton and you don’t forget him. His face was longer than even El Greco would have stretched it. His eyes were more oriental than western, looking down a long nose and over thick lips. While Rameses II and others where presented as flat bellied and broad shouldered, Amenhotep IV had a paunch and broad hips. Akhenaton was a one of a kind in his thinking as well as his appearance.
The star of the museum is the funerary objects found in the tomb of Tutankhamen in the 1922 by Howard Carter. The entire collection is on display except for the mummy itself. The pharaoh lies in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The objects are crafted to perfection.
A part of the museum that I did not go into, (another charge) is a section focusing on mummification. Some things I need to save for a second trip.
After the museum, Abdul took me to the “old quarter” of Cairo. This was a warren of passages leading this way and that. One gets overload after a while. We visited a papyrus paper factory and a synagogue. Until the creation of Israel, Cairo had a large population of Jews. Abdul said that there were now only about 150 now living here. The government takes care of the synagogue as part of their support of Egypt’s cultural heritage.
We also stopped in at a Coptic church. Christians generally think of Palestine as being “the holy land.” In this part of the world, the Coptic Church thinks of Egypt as being part of that area. Because of “the Slaughter of the Innocents,” Mary and Joseph did not return to Nazareth but moved on to Egypt where the story goes they stayed until it was safe to return to the Galilee. The Christians here believe they’ve discovered where the sacred family lived…right here in Cairo! You can google the date of Cairo’s founding, which is much later than the time of Christ but the local belief is that there was some kind of settlement that could support a carpenter and that it housed the Family. Of course the Coptic Church built a church over the site.
At the church, we talked theology. The Copts use icons as does all the Eastern Church. I found an Annunciation and explained that Gabriel was telling Mary that she would become “the Mother of God.” Abdul was generally quiet and collected. He jumped as if someone had stuck an ice cube in his ear. As with Tauheed I forget that there is little distance between Belief and Knowledge. So I stopped and told him that I was not trying to proselytize but merely explaining what several million people believe. He calmed down and said that he understood. Another icon showed Christ working the miracle of the loaves and fishes. I got that story confused with the wedding feast story where Jesus turned water into wine. “Jesus drank wine?!” I knew Moslems recognized the historical Jesus but have never gotten the particulars on the subject. When you are talking to a True Believer, whose faith prohibits alcohol, such a story as a prophet drinking is a jolt. Imagine if someone told a Jew that he could forget the manna, Moses was heavily into grass. It doesn’t fit with the traditional view.
As I remember there was a rather understated iconostas and behind that were three chapels. Abdul showed me into the one on the left from the congregations point of view. I didn’t expect to step behind the iconostas. It was time for me to be surprised. He pointed down a set of stairs which was said to the Holy Family's quarters during the years in Egypt.
After lunch we went to one of Cairo’s oldest mosques. Not surprising, the courtyard was enormous. Abdul showed me the indention in the wall which represented Mecca. We sat in the shade of the cloister and he told me that in Islam, Jesus was believed to be a major prophet on par with Moses. But that there is one God and Mohammad is his prophet. He said that Mary was a virgin but that God had created Jesus just as he had Adam, not necessarily out of dust but by willing Mary’s pregnancy. And in no way did Allah claim parentage of Jesus. Allah just made it happen.
The Cairo part of the tour was over and I needed to get ready for the train journey to Aswan in “Upper Egypt” but near the south border of the country. In America with the exception of the Yukon, the rivers run down hill which is south. To be “sold down the river” means among other things that you are going south. Upper and Lower Egypt divide at about Cairo. Anyhow I needed to pack to get ready. I needed some cash for “walking around money” as well.
A story thrives on conflict and adversity and what would I have to tell you if it weren’t for the invention of the ATM? All I had to do was draw a couple hundred dollars worth of Egyptian pounds, have a quiet supper prepared by the pleasant lady who worked the roof-top at the hotel, and meet my driver at the appointed hour in late evening. Life was good until I found a functional ATM.
Assuming this story lives until another generation of readers comes along, they might be interested in know how these machines behaved and misbehaved at an earlier time. There are two sets of controls on this particular machine. You punch the screen to get it to do some things as to select English as its operating language and for other matters, “Cancel,” “Enter,” and something else, you punch keys on a board below the screens. I tried to punch “Enter” on the screen and on the third try, the machine decided that I had dallied too long and swallowed my card. To be certain, the bank had closed fifteen minutes earlier. So here I was in downtown Cairo, having had my pocket picked again by the arrogance of the world banking institution! As my former wife used to say when angered, “I’m going to write to the government!”
Back at the hotel, I called Mr. Mattie. “No problem!” I shook. Isn’t that what the guillotine operator answered to Marie Antoinette when she accidentally stepped on his foot and said, “Excuse me!” But Mr. Mattie was as good as his word. He canceled the pick up and ticket for tonight’s train and told hotel manager not to charge me for another night. What had been depressing one moment had turned out to be a rest of twenty-four hours in another minute. “No problem.” I got a good night’s sleep and in the morning Ahmed came to get me to do battle with the bank. The Egyptians don’t screw around. I was out of the office with my card in hand and off to find another ATM that would not decide that I had taken too much time deciding which of the buttons to punch next. Ahmed, who spoke pretty good English, was a comer and I hope he goes far…as well as the bank employee who cut the nonsense and gave back my property.
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Into the Tomb

I’d been warned about the low overhead. No, it wasn’t because people were shorter in those days. The low ceiling was just a design decision. So the bending low, I expected, but what did surprise me was the temperature. I thought it would be cool down there but in rethinking that if a rock (in this case a stack of them) has been lying in the sun at the same latitude south as Presidio, Texas or Needles, California, the heat should not be much of a surprise. Down the tunnel led and then up, I met people who either had had enough of the heat or had got all the way back to the tomb. I went on, laying knots on the back of my head reminding me to show a little humility for the builders and previous resident.
Then I did stand up. I’d reached the burial chamber, which was dimly lit. The chamber measured about 25 feet across and about 50 or more feet long. Above was a gabled ceiling. There were no hieroglyphics and the only “furniture” was a stone coffin at one end of the room and an old fellow who was to interpret and who was in need of a tip. I gave him one. Anyone who would willingly put up with this heat had earned a pound or two. I think I lost a pound or two in sweat.
I’m running on memory and with no connection to the internet so if I misspell “Belzoni,” I apologize. He had painted his name high and safe above any possible graffiti and left the date in the early 19th century of his entering the tomb. Keep in mind that in the infancy of archaeology that there were some rough techniques and rougher technicians but Belzoni was to his field what Attila was to diplomacy.
Back out of the pyramid, I bought a bottle of water to replac what soaked my shirt. I wanted to leave the plastic bottle somewhere it would be taken away, preferably with the fellow who sold the water. So while downing the water, I paused a moment and looked up at the structure I’d just been inside. There are some things that can not be photographed or even explained. The sequoias of California must be seen to give you the sense of scale. The forest and tundra of Alaska and Canada can give an inexplicable sense of space. And these pyramids are the most massive structures I’ve ever stood next to. I know mountains are taller and greater in size but when you look up at the noonday sun glinting on the edges of the thousands of stones set one at a time, you feel something akin to gravity drawing on you. The pyramids are something to be experienced first hand. There is no substitute.
Camel and driver awaited me on the south side of the pyramids and holding on to both saddle horns, I rose up with less surprise and probably more grace than previously. We took a different route back, more easterly from the pyramids. I saw an odd goblet of stone and wondered how it was formed. No need to ask the camel driver. I’d ask Abdul when I saw him. A quarter hour later, the goblet came abeam on the left and it became the profile of the Sphinx. We rocked on down the slight incline, my watching the face as we came more in front of the statue. The driver asked if I wanted to get down so as to walk closer. We were in camel range just as we had been at the pyramid. Hanging on to both horns, we settled down and somehow I climbed off. My legs were hurting from the endless walking a tourist does plus the unusual exercise of clamping my knees into a camel saddle. So I walked round at a distance in front of the Sphinx and had a little surprise. The Sphinx is a pharos’s head carved onto a lion’s body. After the millennia of storms and sometime gentle breezes, the statue was nearly covered in sand. This was removed exposing the front legs and paws. The photos, I suspect because of their wide angle lenses, make the legs look much longer than they do to the eye, perhaps twice as long. When you see the Sphinx, the front legs are much more in proper lion-like proportions. Of course, for a few extra pounds, you could go up and stand right by the Sphinx. My hundred yard distance seemed good enough. I walked around viewing on the statue’s left side. There is a road here for people who can’t deal with camels, camel drivers, and who don’t want to walk across miles of sand. There is even a sidewalk by the paved road. Four or five polished vehicles pulled and parked by the curb and men in suits and dark glasses got out and looked in all directions except toward the Sphinx. Then one suited European climbed out of his car, pulled out a camera, and snapped a picture. I had by then walked into the group but it could be that the bodyguards though that anybody so unfashionable as to wearing NPS issue shoes would surely not harm their charge. The picture taken, the new pharos looked me over suspiciously and then climbed back into his car and they were away by the time I doubled back. Who he was, I’ll never know and I wondered if my not showing enough interest, to stop to ask, hurt the man’s feelings. Whoever he was, he was surly must be worth killing.
So there lay my camel with the driver sitting beside him and leaning back on the old animal’s bulk. The driver seemed happy to see me. The camel wasn’t saying anything one way or another. Then I was reminded that I was 71 years old. I couldn’t get my leg over the saddle. My leg muscles were too tight. I was beginning to hurt. If I ever imagined myself as a latter day T.E. Lawrence, the image disappeared as the driver lifted me onto the saddle. The camel lacked its earlier ambition and there was none of this jumping up and let’s-get-going behavior. So back we went across the lose sand, the driver urging the animal on with tugs and shouts of the Egyptian equivalent of “Giddy up!” I tried to help out by calling, “Mush!” but the camel ignored his native language and didn’t speak English either. The driver encouraged me to kick the camel in the ribs with my heels but my legs weren’t functional by this point. I was going to remember this ride for a time to come. The driver turned us both lose once within the confines of the street, hoping that the camel would trot on home but we had had enough for the day and perhaps for me for a lifetime. In an earlier time, the activity might well have been as exciting as dog driving but the sun was going down on my generation and it was time to think of other things.
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To Cairo

On the flight out of Delhi to Bahrain, I sat next to a young couple with a small child that needed milk, food, and sleep. During the sleep time, the father told me that he worked as an engineer in Bahrain and that the three of them had gone home to India to see family and friends on their holiday ever two years. Since they spoke English as fluently as I, we talked on about India, its virtues, its failings, and its future. Since they were expatriates their view point varied from those who live out their lives on the subcontinent. When we landed in Bahrain, they, of course, left the plane as did about half the other passengers. And when we flew on, I had my pick of almost any window seat. I chose one aft of the wing on the portside. Where after leaving the turquoise to ink blue of the Persian Gulf, we began the flight over the Arabian Peninsula. While I craned my neck looking down through the mid day winds carrying sand and dust, what I saw at ground level was more sand and dust. We probably flew at 30,000 feet or more so you couldn’t see any cactus or broom weed down there but I suspect the main reason was that there was no cactus or broom weed. We were half way across the peninsula before I saw an outcrop of rock growing, maybe being covered. If you could find water down there beneath that sand, you’ve found one great place to raise watermelons!
Then more rocks began to appear and in time the Gulf of Aqaba stretched out below but the haze of sand shrouded the view of it intersecting the Red Sea at the tip of the Sinai. Whether the water is really prettier here than other seas and oceans, it’s hard to tell. After looking over the desolation of sand and rock, the relief of seeing anything other than a rusty beige of the desert might create a bias. The Red Sea passed below and we entered Egyptian air space. For the first time, I was looking down on a corner of Africa!
Then in the descent we entered the dust and a moment before the “fasten your seatbelts” sign came on, I should have crossed over to the starboard. I wanted to see the Nile and possibly the pyramids but that wasn’t to be. No need to worry. Both would be in place when we got to the ground.
Before leaving the airport, Mr. Mattie sold me a tour of Upper Egypt. His fast talk let me know that he considered himself expert in the matter of lining up a tour. You need somebody who knows east from west in tourism. I asked for a cursory tour of upriver, nothing too elegant. Mr. Mattie flipped his wrist in a rather dramatic fashion as he showed me a clause in our contract that I was to inform the Ministry of Tourism if what was promised was not delivered. Where had I seen that gesture before? No, Mr. Mattie, I don’t want to find the pharmacy. I want to see the temple at Abu Simbel.
Mr. Mattie’s man drove me through the more expensive sections of Cairo. I think the name of the area was Heliopolis. Cairo’s reputation had preceded my arrival. The city of sixteen million was said to be a pit. At least on this highway into town, it looked like any other city. It did have some stains on the building but what city is free of soot? There were poor areas, I’m sure, but what city does not have them? What pleased me was that everybody drove on the right side of the road and because there was a divider between us and the oncoming lane and there were no Indian drivers in sight, nobody drove toward you in your lane. We were soon on a backstreet, which was quieter, grayer, and more in shadow but while Cairo wouldn’t make my short list as places to retire, I was pleasantly surprised that it was nothing like I’d heard.
The hotel was simple enough. My room was clean and there was a restaurant of sorts on the roof. You say, food and they delivered up what they had made. What was really nice is both the serving help were very pleasant. The lady never stopped smiling. For the shoestring traveler, having friendly hired help is not always the case.
I was picked up by a driver the next morning and then the two of us picked up the official guide, Abdul. He spoke English well and had studied Egyptology at the university. We drove along the river and then crossed over into Giza. The discerning eye would have been able to tell the two cities apart. The undiscerning eye could too. At first they was nothing more than flashing glimpses between buildings but then as we got nearer, the pyramids rose above all else. And that’s one way to tell Giza from Cairo.
In time the automobile traffic was replaced by horses and camels. This section of town was where the old money and the new movie stars kept their Arabians. Grooms led the horses out for exercise and for training. One horse danced by the side of this narrow alley-like street. Imagine my living all these years without a dancing horse.
A small pickup drove by loaded with camels. Three of them in the bed! Ever wonder how to get that much camel wedged in such a narrow space? The camels faced forward so the could watch the on coming traffic. There was a rope rigged across the bed and just above the necks of the camel. I’m a long way from my Camel Care and Feeding Merit Badge but it seems that camels stay in place if there is a retainer across the top of the lower neck. Time’s up! They loaded a camel on either side of the pickup and the third one lay down between the other two.
We stopped by a courtyard and got out. I had no idea what was happening but found that if I wanted to see the pyramids up close, I’d need a camel and a driver to get me there. That wasn’t true but that was the spiel. I took a chair and someone brought tea and then the games began. I would find out that there were charges which were not covered by what I paid Mr. Mattie. The first offer was a deluxe tour for about $165 US.
“Abdul, we gotta go!”
Then they presented the second plan. I didn’t feel like walking the two or three miles out to the pyramids but it seemed that they got me mixed up with a movie star and while that might be easy to do, I have the proof that there is mistaken identity by looking into my wallet. How could I turn Plan Two down? I told them, “Very easily.” Then what was my offer. I told them fifty dollars and while they held back their tears of disappointment, they took it.
Abdul, who wouldn’t be accompanying me, gave me a quick run down on what I was to expect. I was to go into the second pyramid called Khufu. And what was a wonder is they promised me the fifteen Egyptian pounds admission fee!
Then I met my camel. Like me, he was gray and I suspect in camel years he was about my age. He seemed about as enthusiastic as a kid going to see the dentist. He was saddled and ready to walk. Before I go too far, the saddle was long overdue for its 50,000 check-up. Camel saddles have bags on either side of the animal. Not even the newest member of an outing club could fill those bags. The point was moot because wear had reduced the bags to tatters. I did hope for a comfortable seat. There are two saddle horns, one forward, one aft. I think I was supposed to hang onto both of them, not just the one in front of me.
I threw my leg over the saddle and found that the camel is the only individual that I’d met since leaving New York who decided to start a little early. The camel hiked up his rear end and having a death grip on the forward saddle horn, resisting gravity and the inertia of the rump coming up (I think that this was a short wheel base camel,) I manage to stay aboard. Then the front legs unfolded and I had a fairly level saddle on which to sit. The introduction was a close call and in the days to come, I’d nurse some pulled muscles beneath my right shoulder blade. Then with a gentle sway from side to side, we walked off through the alleys and onto the erasable sandy track of a couple of centuries of tourist who came before. We were off to see structures built over four thousand years ago, when men decided to build mountains out of stone.
It was still before noon and the date would fall around April Fools, which is why the temperature was fairly mild. After a mile or so, my guide began chattering about something which needed a yes/no answer. Since I had no idea what he was talking about, I wouldn’t give him an answer. After five or ten minutes of the incomprehensible, another camel driver rode by and explained that we’d be going uphill and that my driver wanted to ride with me. Would that be all right with me? So by now learning that whatever you can accomplish with one saddle horn, you can do better by using two, down we came. My driver climbed on and we were off again. Having walked uphill on sand dunes, it wasn’t hard to be a little charitable.
There are three great pyramids with Cheops being the tallest. According to Abdul, there are only 500 visitors allowed into Cheops per day. You have to have reservations and someone decided that I didn’t want to go. They decided correctly. A generic pyramid would do for the first trip round. Abdul told me also that the burial chamber of Khufu was plain and that there would be a lot of stooping and bending to get to the tomb. Should you see a picture of the three pyramids, Khufu is the one in the middle and is the only one on which a little of the veneer of smoothed limestone still remains close to the peak. Ancients, here, in Rome, and Athens, recycled stone into other buildings. In England farmers were encouraged to take stone from the castles that were no longer needed…except for a rebellion. Lapis means stone from which we get the word “dilapidated.” Recycling the outer layer was one thing. No one wanted to take on the building blocks, any of which would measure larger than a SUV.
The driver dismounted, and we walked on with the driver encouraging the camel to walk faster and the camel paying him no mind. In time as the pyramids rose even higher, the driver coaxed the camel down and I slid off. My legs hurt from gripping the animal with my knees. The driver dug in his pocket, after asking me if I were sure I wanted to go into the pyramid, and gave me the 15 pounds Egyptian and in ten minutes or so, I had circled round Khufu, found the ticket booth, and looked down into the dark passage way leading into the center of the pyramid. I’ve explored caves, worked in a mine about 4000 feet under ground, but looking into that black hole, my guess was that this would prove a different experience.
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Amritsar

Amritsar lies between Delhi and Srinagar and a little to the west over near the Indian-Pakistani border. The problem is that you can’t just drop down to Amritsar on a return from Srinagar to Delhi. You must fly back to Delhi and then return north…and a little to the west. I suspect that the post office will not allow the pilots to carry maps in the cockpit and that they must make the flight by memory. Some pilots know the way from Delhi to Srinagar and some know their way to Amritsar. Just change the crew at Delhi and the Pakistanis will be completely confused. So am I. “Incredible India!” in Shabarat’s words and I get to sleep in a hotel room for four hours, make long runs to and from the airport made more interesting by the tour agency sending out Hindi speakers that take you to the wrong airport. Anyhow if you saw the movie Gandhi, you may guess one of my reasons for wanting to go to Amritsar. Another is that it is a border town that piqued my interest. The tour agent had given me another reason.
The beautiful site of Amritsar is the Sikh place of worship, the Golden Temple. It is surrounded by a tank and the tank is encircled by a broad walkway which is enclosed in a wall of administrative offices, a place where pilgrims are fed, and shops facing inward.
This temple was the site of a shootout between the Indian governmental forces and the Sikh separatist. The temple was damaged and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was gunned down by her Sikh bodyguards in retribution. Mob violence followed where about 3,000 people were killed, mostly Sikhs by lynchings.
The sun shown down on this day while barefoot, I joined the line of pilgrims and slowly made my way along a causeway and into the center of the complex. I heard music before I got to the building and remembered Tauheed criticism of the taped music playing over and over again at the Hindu temple in Srinagar. When I arrived inside the temple, I saw musicians playing and a cleric reading from a very large book. He read silently and we filed around the closed off center where this activity was in progress. On the second floor, people (men and women mixed) sat in the corners and prayed. Some read from the Korans they carried. There was a railing that kept one from falling from this mezzanine. Looking down onto the first floor, I could see the reader and the musicians. The place was alight with electric lights as well as sunlight coming through the open windows. I made my way back to the walkway beyond the tank’s edge to a cloister where you could get out of the sun and it was acceptable to lie on the marble floor. I took a rest. My guide had other business but met me at a prearranged place where I unsuccessfully tried to take a nap. Having had only about three or four hours of sleep the night before takes its toll. I sure wish the pilots had been allowed to carry those maps.
In the afternoon after “fooding” I walked into where some very bad things were done by some people to some other people. The British pushed through a bill, the Rowlatt Act, that became law which prohibited assembly. In 1919 an assembly was called to protest the law. This was done in an enclosed area of I’d guess ten acres. A General Dyer got wind of the meeting, called out the Gurkas and an armored vehicle, and marched into the only egress of the enclosure and set the Gurkas to shooting into the crowd. One source, The Lonely Planet Guide, states that 400 people were killed outright and 1500 were injured. The armored vehicle was not used in the massacre because the entrance lane was too narrow for it to join in. Some shots went high and struck a wall against which people huddled. There was a well nearby and 120 bodies were later taken from the well into which the people leapt. There are many sites in India which are historical or holy. This garden, since planted, lays claim to both aspects. The actions changed minds in both India and Great Brittan and while Independence would come almost thirty years later, this action was one, which even the staunchest advocates of the Raj could not put out of their minds.
In the evening my guide loaded me up in a taxi and off we went to the border station, Attari/Wagah. The place is known for two reasons. One, it is the only overland opening in the border between Pakistan and India. Two, there is a military exercise every evening, which after much fanfare, each country lowers its flag. It proves to be a time to both show off and to demonstrate that the two countries can live together side by side. So it is a mixture of a peace happening mixed with the posturing of a football game. Mercifully, they did away with the football. We got their after many of the Indians had gathered. I walked into the crowd with my guide behind me. One of the advantages of having over a period of years been raised drinking a swimming pool full of milk, is that I’m a little taller than most Indians. So I could see above the heads in front of me…well some of them. These border guards start at six feet and grow up from there. Just in case you don’t notice their height, they wear an accordion folded cockscomb on their turbans. That gives them another 10 inches which crowds seven feet. They are all young, nice looking men, and are athletes the likes of which are never seen in Texas. These guys can march faster than a horse trots and do high-kicks that would be the envy of any full back or cheer leader. One of them spotted my white hair and red complexion and I was ordered to go to the VIP section. I looked around for my guide and he was gone. Losing guides are about as easy as leaving a tip so I decided that he could find me, see that I got back to the hotel, or else there was the acacia tree option. I was only following my orders and found a place to sit on a step. There is something a little undemocratic about this but I paid attention to what was going on in the middle of the street and overlooked my privilege due to being born beyond the borders of India.
An impromptu dance was in progress on the pavement. This was accompanied by nationalistic shouts and slogans. About a dozen folks, mostly young people, danced to music coming through the PA system. Probably there were more Indians than any other nation but there were plenty of other nations. Later an Indian girl in her teens danced a traditional dance alone, at least for a while. She was joined by a young European woman, who had no idea about the dance movement, and the woman did cause a bit of distraction. She was asked to sit down which she did. Then the soldiers marched forth to the applause of the crowd. You could see through the barred gate marking the border so you could you could watch the Pakistanis if the program got too quiet on the Indian side. Each side waved a great national flag. What had been “people together” dance now became partisan. You can never find a football when you need one.
So with high stepping and quick stepping and back and forth to the gate, which was finally opened to the roaring cheers of both sides, the smartly uniformed six footers marched onto the border, the officers briefly shook hands, salutes exchanged, and then the soldiers lowered their nation’s flag slowly and in unison. The half-hour to forty-five minute choreography was worth the trip but I wondered whether this brought the two nations closer together or simply reestablished their rather artificial tribalism. I watched from Punjab (India) and as far as you could see to the west across the border, was all Punjab (Pakistan.) The flags were stowed away in the early dusk and the crowd broke up. This was no pro football crowd but was large enough to lose a short guide. I climbed up on a landing and let him find me.
The last and first light of day are shorter the nearer you get to the equator but as we drove back to Amritsar from the border, I had plenty of light to look at the depth of defensive military installations. For all the strut and hand-shaking and in concert flag lowering, the defenses go on and on for miles. The Indian-Pakistani paradox asks the twin questions, one, was the national division necessary, and two, could a greater India, which would have included all of Pakistan and Bangladesh, have survived the separatist movements without the threat of aggression by an outside force? The last act of the border ritual was once more closing the barred gate.
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The Vale of Kashmir

Indian cities do sleep and driving through the dark streets of Delhi was a quick trip to the airport with almost no traffic. The roadway was clean compared to the airport road in Mumbai. I saw a star high up above the horizon and that was a good omen. I always hope for clear weather when planning to fly. Inside the terminal which was nothing elaborate but was well scrubbed, I saw attentive adult and sleepy kids, which are what you’d expect at somewhere shortly after five in the morning. While I waited to go through the hoops and jumps of check-in and security, I looked for the dhoti men. Several women out of the hundreds wore some form of the sari but it was nearly boarding time before I saw the only man, who was probably in his sixties, wearing the wrap around garment. In another generation or two except for the country people, I suspect dhotis will be worn only by politicians. Saris will last because they show off what wants to be shown and hides pretty well what the user doesn’t want you to see. Indians are slowly getting fat and the women have always been pregnant. I had a flash of insight that I’m in a nation of 1.2 billion people and I’d see a dozen times the number of pregnant women on a July day in the U.S. than I would see on the streets of India. The Indians invented the maternity dress. And while the sari is something that bothers me at seeing all this flowing garb set in a dump of a street or sitting in close proximity of whirling sprockets on the back of a “two wheeler,” some women do look like a pleasant dream as they float across the room.
There was a heavy haze across the tarmac but a blue sky overhead. I hoped to see the mountains. Train travel is great for the up-close look at a country but a view from an airplane is a magic carpet to see the overall lay of the land. The last time I flew the world was covered with cloud and I was stuck with a channel surfer who was alternating between praying and falling asleep on my shoulder. We had a full flight but in the draw of boarding passes I got a window seat.
On the flight to Jammu we cleared the haze which was thick but not endless. This covering was different than what I usually see, in that it was capped by a white layer of cloud. The sky was its normal deep blue that you rarely see standing on the ground in temperate zones or the tropics. It’s the blue seen by mountain climbers and pilots. Towns and villages lay below with their flat roofs squared but each house at an odd angle with its neighbor. Since the buildings predate in many cases the invention of city planning…or even after planning had become common, the odd angles show either that no one paid attention to the planner or instead paid off a city official who could had enforced the planner’s decision.
When we lifted above the clouds on leaving Jammu, I could see the snow capped peaks of the Himalayan foothills. It was exciting to be flying toward “the roof of the world” but even better, I would not have to think about a bus driver’s judgment as to what catches us on hilltops or coming round the next curve when we are in the right lane. We flew on beneath a deep blue sky while below lay a few clouds, mostly haze, and the beginning of the peaks. As we proceeded, I could make out something of an abyss off the left side of the plane’s direction. The mountains ran in parallel lines but between the ridges lay a blue nothingness. Whatever was down there was buried in haze. It could be the Kashmir Valley but we didn’t seem to flying into one end and then heading for Srinagar and Lake Dahl. We were flying perpendicular to that route. So if this were not the Valley of Kashmir and if each end of this rift were closed, this great valley could hold enough water to be called a sea, rather than a lake. Later upon checking the breadth it measured 35 kilometers. We droned on, the near mountains now below us, and I still could make out nothing beneath the haze but the thought occurred to me that if this weren’t the right valley, then the “Vale of Kashmir” must really be remarkable. The poetic license here with the name is Lowell Thomas’s, who over fifty years brought a Cinerama production crew into the valley and presented an introduction to Americans of a little know corner of the Earth. I could never decide whether the word was “vale” or “veil.” This part of India is predominately Moslem and was he likening the haze to a woman’s veil? However that may be unless we banked to the left, at this speed we’d be beyond the 35 kilometers and have a new set of mountain peaks to look down on.
We banked and turned left. This was the Vale of Kashmir! The veil covered the valley floor on which held a lake with a city along its shores. I could see the washes along the mountainsides but the stream beds faded beneath the haze, not connecting to another river and that river with another along the valley floor all of which lead to a lake. But then with the pressure increasing in my ears, the haze gave way and in a few minutes, not only could I see the strands of rivers both dry and flowing braiding together to make a coherent pattern, but I could see villages and settlements and then there was a city and a corner of a lake and down we came to land at Srinagar. My neck hurt from ducking my head down and looking out my little window but what I could see as we touched down was that the mountain tops were visible through the veil. Then walking across the tarmac I found myself in a crisp spring day and that I had come to a place worth the trip.
India is said to be filled with mystery but that may be another name for confusion. Shabarat’s brother was supposed to meet me but somehow we missed. Nevertheless I found cab drivers and houseboat operators who spoke pretty good English and I enjoyed tea and conversation until I finally had to hire a cab for the run into town to find a needle, the Cathay Hotel, in the haystack of several hundred places to stay…and that’s not counting houseboats. Shabarat’s best friend, Tauheed, owned the Cathay. It had been in the family for at least three generations and it was about time to upgrade. However that may be the price was right and the manager, “Ourshed,” a phonetic spelling and I seemed to hit it off so I took the room. Shabarat’s friend was away on business, I supposed and I was hungry so they showed me a nice restaurant and I got down to basics…lunch. Ishtaq, Shabarat’s brother, who had met the plane but not me, joined me at the table and we got acquainted over curry and rice. His English was good but he was distracted by the world of his nineteen years. After lunch we walked along the street bordering the lake. Both on the lakeside as well as the business side, the street had pretty good sidewalks and since the sidewalk remained uniform, I suspect, that it was built by one contractor in one period. Beyond the low wall lay the lake and houseboats beam to beam. I asked Ishtaq whether any new houseboats were being built. I thought if might be interesting to look over the operation on the ways. He said that what you see is what you get. When these were gone, there’d be no more. Labor and materials were too costly. The boats were of different ages and conditions and what the owners would do was to patch up what gives way but as Ishtaq had told me, I saw no evidence of new boats.
After a walk we returned to the hotel and within a short time Tauheed, Shabarat’s friend, joined us. He was in his late thirties, moustached, and with a receding hair line. His hair loss bothered him and he asked if I had a remedy. A hair transplant seemed too much money and trouble but then I remembered an Upjohn treatment, which interested him. He was both intense and pensive and it was he, not Ishtaq, who would show me around the lake and city. Ishtaq was busy obtaining a passport for his sister. And so the next morning, Tauheed began our tour.
What he didn’t know was that I had walked several miles in Delhi during the days before. The first stop was a Hindu temple perched on top of a sharp pointed mountain. We drove a auto rickshaw up most of the mountain but the best was saved till last. True, the remainder of the mountain could be measured in hundreds of feet but my! what an angle of climb! Tauheed told me that when he was a school boy, the teacher would “let” them climb from lake level all the way to the temple. That should have taken a little starch out of them…but probably didn’t. Tauheed climbed gracefully enough but the pilgrims who were twice his age (my age) took the ascent slower. The walk was made of stone pavement and steps. This was not dirt, roots, and rocks route but I began feeling the hike to and through the Red Fort from the day before in Delhi catching up with me.
All the time as we climbed, I could hear a fast, tongue-tripping song, coming down from above. The tape seemed to be in a loop like an eight track. Religious music normally has all the grace of an elephant mired in a mud hole. This music had real zing. I asked Tauheed about it. He confirmed that it was religious in nature. He didn’t approve. Moslems wouldn’t have music piped out of a mosque like that, he said. That for the most part is true but the call to prayer is sung. In the U.S. we have Gospel music that sounds something like an incomplete road kill. Where did this music get the zip? I asked if this were an old Hindu hymn. He said he didn’t think so. I suspect there may be a Pentecostal reformation going on in Hindu music. Music like that might find a positive reception in the U.S. I hear snatches of it now and then from my memory and this happened three or four weeks ago.
We topped out onto a terrace to get a bird’s eye view of the city and lake but there was still a pinnacle to go. The last steps were almost like climbing a ladder and then I could see the phallus inside the small, well-lighted temple. The story I got from Tauheed, a Moslem, was that a god, who would sit on this mountain top and meditate, was surprised one day by a visitor and withdrew into this three foot high, one foot in diameter, stone. Someone had poured water or oil over the stone, which made it look as if it had experienced an orgasm. The stone phallus is common in Hindu temples and shrines. It was the stone’s polish and the light reflecting off the liquid that made this one memorable.
Tauheed’s plan was to circle the lake, which was in turn encircled with gardens from the Mogul period, some were maintained; others were not. The princes enjoyed the mountain scenery, the symmetry of their gardens, and the sound of their “river of paradise” flowing arrow straight through the garden. And according to the small paintings I’ve seen, a prince was to frolic with his ladies in some shady spot while listening to songs of his musicians. Since the gardens cover many acres and can run almost a half mile long, it looked to be plenty of room to frolic. The public benefited also because they got to build and maintain the thing. On garden two or three, I found a shade tree and while I had no lady with whom to frolic, I wouldn’t have had the energy anyway. I tried to fall asleep. My legs were ready for burial. Tauheed called his sister and while they visited for a half-hour, my legs resurrected. On garden four or five, Tauheed saw his “uncle.” An “uncle” among the Kashmiri is someone who is a distant relation or in Shabarat’s case, his “uncle” was the man who owned the shop he managed. So Uncle and two other men approached and while the hugging was going on, I introduced myself to the others. One worked for the USDA in Washington and the other was a zoologist. It amazes me how a good conversation can bring me around. I asked the zoologist about some large birds I’d seen flying with the crows. Tauheed thought they were all the same species but the bigger bird had wedge shape missing from the trailing edge of his tail. The common term the doctor said was “kite.” I’d heard of them but didn’t know what I was looking at. The man from the Department of Agriculture worked on nematodes, little round worms that raise hell with potatoes in the northwest. I subjected them to my gopher hole theory that earthworms, improved varieties of grass seed, liquid compost, and water could be dumped down gopher holes and “infect the land with life.” I blush but only for a minute. They had undoubtedly met cranks before. The idea is worth a try. There would be low evaporation of water, fertility deposited where it would do the most good (right next to the roots of living grass,) no destructive effects from ultra violet rays, and mixing the earthworms into the liquid doesn’t seem to have any bad effects on the worms…and until they worked their way to the surface, they’d get neither sunburn or be harassed by birds. Sounds good on paper. It might be fun to try. We said our good byes and I was standing straighter and walking as if I had just started the day.
As we rounded the lake, we came by a mosque where the relic of a hair from the beard of the Prophet is housed. Then evening came on and it was suppertime.
Throughout the part of the East, at least the part of where I visit, there is a social system which goes like this.
“What would you like to do?”
My answer, “I would like to do ABC.”
“We can do that but before, we must do XYZ. Come we must do X.”
“I need to do A.”
“We will do A very shortly. First we must do X,” and you do X.
The ABC in this case was to send out some maps to a friend, to visit a houseboat, and to find a consenting ATM machine. I did not want to see any scenery, visit another garden….although I did want to visit the mosque where the Prophet’s whisker is kept, if we had time. I was assured that mailing out the maps would be “no problem,” a favorite description in both Kashmir and Egypt. Having spent hours in post offices while awaiting the proper alignment of the planets, I knew better. I had airline reservations for Delhi and then to Amritsar and so there was no, “when we get around to it.” I needed to do ABC. “No problem.”
The next morning Tauheed and I met and walked down to the shikars, the bumboat that would take you for a turn around the lake or out to a houseboat. Tauheed took the lake tour first. I had ABC on my mind but held off saying more. The boats are about 25 feet long, have a beam of four feet, maybe five. You flop shoeless amidships on pillows beneath a canopy, which sounds very decadent and is, thank God. I was not into to walking, climbing, even if there were a covey of PhDs at the end of the hike. The boatman sits aft on the stern, which is rather high above the water. He had a paddle with a heart shaped blade, with which he slowly stroked the water. It was quiet, once away from the road traffic, and half reclining was a restful way to look out at the world. Since I wasn’t panting or complaining and since it was quiet, I listened as Tauheed sang a song under breath. I asked him if it were a religious song. He was pious but he shook his head. “It’s a love song,” he said. Afterwards we talked to each other. We had to. There was no one else around. He would sing a song now and then and then we’d visit. We hadn’t done much of that up until now. If Ishtaq were around, they talked to each other. So we talked about family and a remedy to grow hair and other important thing of life. We traded stories of daughters; we had one apiece. And we did not talk about wives. He had his reasons; mine were that whenever the subject came up, I was questioned on why I had divorced and why I had not remarried. To be unmarried was something approaching the scandalous. Actually, relaxing on a shikar’s boat I didn’t find it all that scandalous and I wouldn’t have been there had I remarried. Life is like that. Since he was married, there was no need to go into why he hadn’t divorced. I meant to ask his thoughts on arranged marriages but maybe it was a gliding kite, not a house crow that distracted me. He told me about his inheriting the hotel. He was the third generation to own it and like most of the houseboats, it needed renovation, which he was doing a little at a time. He told me how he met Shabarat. It seems that both were casting about for another occupation and hit on AMWAY simultaneously. I asked him how it went and he said that you could make money but you had to stay on top of the operation all the time. Long hours. I’ve never met a veteran of any great length of time with AMWAY. The sales people must burn out quickly. Even though there was almost a twenty year difference between his age and Shabarat’s, he admired Shabarat for his drive and ambition. I knew from watching Shabarat how focused he could be.
Another subject I was curious about was religion. Tauheed said that Shabarat’s piety was another thing he admired about the young man. Like Islam’s forerunners, the worship of the pharos, Judaism, and Christianity, there is supposed to be an answer for all Life’s problems but Life is sloppy and doesn’t recognize the track that religion said that it would follow. What if a person with a pure heart and with pure intentions falls in love with someone on the prohibition list? Tauheed was an iron-clad Moslem. I’ve seen only one Moslem-born person who was other than a true believer and he was a nonbeliever. Nothing in between. Well, one might ask for forgiveness but when a commandment is broken, it can prove to be so much fun that you hate to give it up. I mean like killing. Now there is a real problem solver but killing makes just about everybody’s prohibition list whether being packed down from Mount Sinai or rising up out of your courthouse lawn like a mushroom after a good rain. And falling in love with the forbidden one is so positive, as it is disruptive. We talked about the strictness and certainty of Islam, not human frailties. Orwell created the term “double think.” That’s when you can imagine Adam and Eve chasing each other around a formal Garden of Eden with a snake giggling on a tree limb and picking up an old copy of National Geographic because you want to read about the discovery of Lucy. A person sometime carries his or her own dogfight within him or herself whether their world is filled with certainty or chaos. For the moment we took the discussion no farther.
And then much to my surprise, we dealt with “B!” “B” as in Boat. HB Chicago dead ahead! We slipped our shoes on for the walk from the bumboat, across the dock, to the houseboat and then again stepped out onto a carpet on the covered end deck. I could never figure out which was the bow and which was the stern. Then inside to the salon which was also carpeted and filled with fine furniture. It was “fine” because it was handmade locally, decorated beyond the 2x6 appearance of a picnic table, repaired where broken, and dusted to a polish. While I’ve seen prettier rooms, it had been a while. There was north light coming through the door. The owner showed us one of the bedrooms and I could find nothing I would complain about.
Jammu Kashmir is the northern state of India but once beyond the range, you are in Moslem India, and a jacket feels good in March and shoepacks, a fur cap, and long johns would have felt very good three months before. So this is a different India just as Hawaii or Alaska has little to do with the clichés of Manhattan and New England. The stove in every room was both comforting to see and made me a little homesick for the North.
Ajaz Khar was the manager, owner/operator and the person with whom you made arrangements. I had a dozen questions and his having been the third generation of his houseboats, he was the man with the answers.
How do you take the boats out of the water for bottom paint? You don’t. You pack the joints in the hull with grass. This grass grows out into the water and seals any openings that might occur. I didn’t understand the biology but my feet were dry. How many bedrooms on the boat? I seem to remember three so if you were a guest, you be meeting other people unless you had a party large enough to fill the Chicago. There are private bathrooms with hot water heaters. The bedrooms are dark as the sunlight coming through the windows is absorbed by the aged wooden panels, no plywood. Breakfast and supper are included and also covered is unlimited back-and-forth use of the shikars. Price per night – Rs. 3000 for one person who travels alone. That works out to about $75 a night. Ajaz will knock off 25% for long duration stays…like a month and 40% for winter. I’d bring some heavy wool socks. It gets cold but not enough ice forms to bother the growth of that grass holding the hull planking on.
Web page:www.chicagohouseboats.com,
email: chicagodallake@hotmail.com
You have to bring your own dictionary and Writer’s Market but they have 220 in the sockets in every room and internet next door in another houseboat owned by Ajaz.
Something of a nightmare awaited me for the afternoon. One of those “No problem” problems. I had loaded my pack with a few pounds that I needed to rid myself of and I bought some maps for a friend. The maps came from a local bookstore and Ishtaq and I had bought them a couple of days before. The main map was of India but I found some regional maps that I thought might be of interest to my friend. Tauheed and I had come up with a box for the trove but there was no brown paper or duct tape to strap everything together for a ride half way round the world. Kashmiris have a different answer for ‘hundred-mile-an-hour tape. They wrap a package in cloth and have it sewn shut. Then with magic marker, broad tip, you address the thing. I’d seen Shabarat go this procedure and it seemed to please the post office folks. When in Rome just let ‘em do it their way. I gave a grateful tip to the young man who stitched this mummy shroud closed. Then we can find nobody with a magic marker but my NPS Skillcraft still had a little ink. The man at the post office tells us we must go upstairs to talk to the overhead. Up and through the door and then I saw something you don’t want to see. There were five government servants bending over one printed form and all giving their opinion as to what they saw. What you want to see is a bureaucrat sitting alone at a desk piled high with paperwork. The latter means that they don’t have enough people to get the job done properly and when you approach, they’ll sign or stamp anything you hold out because they want to see the last of you. Five guys bending over the same desk reading the same form….no. It turned out that we dealt with a lady at another desk. This package didn’t rate five professionals. The first thing she had me do was cut into the shroud. It was like taking out my own stitches. Then out came my boxed calling cards, the Writer’s Market, and the maps. She got up from the desk, went to her purse, took out a piece of folded notebook paper and read, probably her own handwriting, that maps could not be sent through the mail.
I didn’t write about this but India is under a siege mentality. The Pakistanis will get you if you don’t watch out. Some theorists believe that India would have fallen apart if it had not been for the threat, real or imaginary, of Pakistan. I won’t take sides on the question. I’m just a guy looking for a place to live. But the lady politely explained that were this map intercepted by the wrong people, it could pinpoint possible targets of military interest. I politely explained that this was for an Alaskan geography teacher who would hold them up before his class and say, “India.” Then she held up the sheet of notebook paper and said that these were her orders….but if we wanted to get this shipped out by sunset, she told me, we might try DHL. I asked DHL why they could send the maps. “Oh, those are tourist maps.” Shabarat has an expression he yells on such occasions, “Incredible India!” So now I’m a half pound lighter having burned up some fat and a good deal of cash but like they say all through the East, “No problem.”
With what was left of the day, we took a three wheeler to see the mosque where they keep a hair from the Prophet’s beard. Tauheed bought some bird food for the mosque pigeons. He showed me some rice mixture with, I suspect, honey and butter. It is one of the most delicious concoctions I’ve ever eaten, and of course, I forgot the name. You can find it being sold or given away in or around mosques or Sikh temples.
The whisker is not on display and is only brought out to show to the faithful on religious holidays. I wasn’t interested in the relic but I would have liked to go inside the mosque. Prayers were going on so Tauheed and I walked around the courtyards. He explained that people prayed in the open air as much as beneath the roof of the mosque. Men prayed first, then the women prayed, and then the “eunuchs.” He said that the last group were rather shy and didn’t come often but could come if they decided to. Then he asked what I thought about eunuchs. I thought this occupation was outsourced with the end of harems but about fifteen minutes later of question and answer, I had an idea of whom he called eunuchs. These were transvestites, who rate somewhere below dogs in India. He asked me what I thought of them, which is another way of his saying that he disapproved of cross-dressers. This was a place where the simplicity of following the teachings came into play. No need to question. It states homosexuality is a sin. I’m not proselytizing so I didn’t ask whether he chose heterosexuality over homosexuality. It was his unquestioning faith that I listened to. With no question, any answer will do. And some how we’ve progressed both technologically as well as intellectually since the last ice age or is that an assumption?
After supper I needed to get my allowance. Tauheed went with me through the dark streets. There are sidewalks in Srinagar but the ATM machines were in another place and when there is no moon, you’d better take to the streets among the sweeping lights of automobiles. No problem? The first ATM machine didn’t work, neither did the second, then the third, no. About this time I realized that I was using my card that only worked during near encounters with comets and asteroids and at only a few banks in India. It was I that was the problem. That happens. Then as we made our way to another machine, my desire to stay away from traffic with the possibility of being run down from behind coming from the rear and my wanting to walk on the pavement collided. I stepped on the edge of the pavement, my foot slipped into the gutter, and down I went. I had a hard time getting up. I needed to sit. I thought I heard something break in the right side of my head. Two people came to me more quickly than Tauheed could move. One said that he was a doctor. The other had a motorcycle with its headlight burning to show that we had a problem and for the traffic to veer off. The doctor asked me if I were seeing double. He moved his finger in front of my face and I told him he waved one finger. Tauheed became a little testy and the two moved on. I appreciated their attention but his take is that they were just answering an incident with as much excitement as they could create. I listened to his argument but I still appreciated the motorcyclist and the doctor coming to my aid. And at the same time thinking that Tauheed could be right.
Then I matched card with machine and had enough cash to keep me out of jail. Nevertheless even after three or four weeks, it hurts to open my mouth to bite into a club sandwich. My arm is better and my hand has healed. Guess I need a course in walking or falling. No, I’m not taking up hang-gliding.
The next morning as I made ready to take a car to the airport, both Tauheed and Ishtaq and the hotel manager, Ourshed, came to see me off. The manager was a level head and Tauheed is fortunate to have him working for him. What came to mind was that with the misery of climbing stairs and walking miles added to the quiet of the bumboat, which led to conversation and to that you add seeing the houseboat caulked with living grass and then the post office lady with her instructions written plainly on notebook paper and add the anxiety of looking for an ATM and the fall, I had decided I really liked Tauheed. We had done a bunch and gone through a bunch and I guess that if that’s not the ingredients for friendship then it’s the pot it’s cooked in. He had all the answers except how to grow hair. I came with nothing and wonder if I’ve learned much. At least I’ve since hidden the credit card that doesn’t work. But I’m still sure of nothing. It was he who said to me, “Pray for me.” And because he became a friend, I have.
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