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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