1976

Greetings!

Time once again for your Famous World Traveller’s annual report. This time a Nile Cruise, in April. Does that phrase conjure up a vision of luxury, leisure, good food, relaxation, glamour, etc. in exotic settings reminiscent of the Pharaohs, Antony & Cleopatra, and the heyday of the British Empire? Right. Now add to that a combination of overpowering heat, dust, sandstorms, flies, sweat, gastroenteritis, beggars and sundry blackguardly types, and a gruelling sightseeing program that would serve the Army in good stead as commando training for desert warfare. We walked, climbed, and stumbled up hills and down into tombs, across desert sands, rocks, rubble, weeds, in and out of temples and other ruins, on foot, and were hurtled to and from some of the sites by rickety buses, rickety taxis, tractors, donkeys, and antique horse-carriages, sometimes having to disembark and board ship by means of makeshift planks, ropes and stones along the river edge when other boats got to the docking area ahead of us. In short, a trip something like a cross between “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The African Queen,” with a touch of “The Desert Fox” thrown in. But once back on the boat after our commando-workouts, we reverted to vestiges of the good old British Empire way of wife, taking a sedate afternoon tea in the lounge-bar, dressing for dinner, sipping cool drinks while listening to erudite lectures by an Oxford Egyptologist, and dining on good meals served by Egyptian stewards dressed in bright red gold-trimmed galabiyehs and white turbans.

Our group consisted of 53 passengers, mostly English, with a sizeable number of Americans and Canadians thrown  in. Our ship, the M.S. “Delta,” was an old but quite gracious and comfortable number shaped something like a Mississippi steamboat, but of course without paddlewheel. Gliding along the silent river watching the daily life of the fellahin (peasants) along the shoes, especially in the very early morning when the rosy glow of the sunrise added to the beauty of the picturesque scene was a particularly enjoyable feature of the cruise. It gave one a marvelous and restful feeling of utter timelessness, watching a way of life that in many ways had literally not changed since the days of the pharaohs 6,000 years ago. Native-costumed women fill their clay amphorae with water from the river and men in loose galabiyehs lead a camel, donkey along the dusty pathways while a beatific-faced water-buffalo wallows happily in the water. Egypt is essentially this narrow strip of intensively cultivated land / (luxuriant crops) on either side of the Nile, the rest being desert which begins abruptly at the edge of this strip - perhaps rest being desert which begins abruptly at the edge of this strip - perhaps hilly, rolling or flat, but all desert, which flows with golden and rosy hues as the light changes in early morning or at sunset. Beautiful. Then occasionally a modern note may intrude, such as a jet plane roaring momentarily overhead, or the odd truck rumbling through a village. The ancient temples were built in the cultivated areas, but the dead were always buried (and still are) in the desert, so one must trek over into it to look into the famous tombs of the pharaohs, where of course the dry heat p eserved the frescoes, mummies, and other objects buried with the dead, all these thousands of years.

Our trip started at Cairo, and we sailed some 600 miles up the Nile, stopping all along the way to look at the various points of interest, the voyage ending at Aswan, with an air excursion from there to Abu Simbel, and then a return to Cairo by air. Despite my having done quite a bit of preparatory “homework” reading, I still had a hard time grasping all the history and keeping the various sites straight in my mind, and I won’t attempt to describe them all, but just hit the high spots. The ancient Egyptian religion with its assortment of bizarre gods, some with animal heads, the sacred animals, etc., and the pharaohs’ role in all this, still strikes me as weird, and the stylized formality of the art work representing gods and pharaohs generally does not have a lot of appeal for me, except in regard to the artistic skill involved; but the art representing animals and daily activities of the people is full of life and charm as well as artistic beauty and skill, and I could really enjoy that sort of frescoes and carvings. And while the enormous pyramids are staggering in conception and execution, I was delighted by an appealing little “baby pyramid” the workmen who built the royal tombs at the Valley of the Kings at Thebes had built for themselves in the area of their own living quarters.

The “Step Pyramid” of Zoser at SAKKARA, the first pyramid ever built in Egypt, designed by their formidable architect/doctor/”deity.” Imhotep, was the most impressive in a way - possibly because it took some considerable endurance see it at all, since at that point we were engulfed in a sandstorm (khamsin), which made struggling through the sand against such a stiff wind with sand blasting into your eyes, nose, mouth, hair, clothes etc. - despite hat, sunglasses and face mask (scarf tied round nose and mouth) - a real challenge. It was at this point, exhausted by heat, flies and the heavy sightseeing program, that I began to question that this could really be called a “vacation,” muttering to myself that “Peter O’Toole got PAID for this sort of thing, and here we are paying to do it!” There are several interesting tombs around this area with marvelous carvings and frescoes. But don’t travel as late as April if you want to avoid the sandstorm scene.

A visit to TELL EL AMARNA,  where Pharaoh Akhenaton had set up his palace and tried to jettison all the gods except one, the sun-god, is notable in that his policy was so unpopular everything was razed to the ground after his demise, and our old friend Tut Ankh Amon subsequently reinstated the whole pantheon of gods, to everyone’s relief. Lots of potsherds from Akhenaton’s period are still lying around the area with a few remaining building foundations. On learning what an unprepossessing-looking pharaoh he was, I wondered what his beautiful wife Nefertiti thought about him. (Incidentally, a lovely natural stone carving of her head is in the Cairo Museum, and she’s just as beautiful  without paint as she is in the colored bust now in the Museum in West Berlin, which I saw last year.)

At ABYDOS, one is flabbergasted by “Om Seti,” a genteel little elderly English lady who has lived in this ghastly hot, dusty, wretched village for years, acting as a guide to the temples, since she thinks she is the reincarnation of the mother of Pharaoh Seti I, and is “at home” here. Actually she is very intelligent and charming.

Also while moored at Luxor we turned out at 0600 hours to cross over to the West Bank to tackle THEBES,  visiting all sorts of tombs and temples at the Valley of the Kings, Queens, etc., before the heat became totally intolerable. Must be one of the hottest places on earth. Tut Ank Amon’s tomb is amazingly small for the quantity and size of his mummy-cases, statues, furniture and other art object crammed in there. One mummy-case is still there on display, and all the rest of the things are in the Cairo Museum (in fact, now just about to start touring the United States). Tut was only about 19 years old when he was apparently murdered by a heavy clout on the head (power politics in its more basic form). I liked Amenophis II’s tomb with gorgeous dark blue ceiling with white drawings, and the tombs of the nobles Kaht and Menna, with charming paintings of scenes of daily life of the period. Carved reliefs in white limestone in the tomb of Vizier Ramo were beautiful too. The Ramesseum (Ramesses II) offers the fallen head and other bits and pieces of this famous pharaoh’s gigantic statue, which was the “Ozymandias” of Shelley’s poem (“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings - Look on my work ye mighty, and despair!”). But Shelley never actually went there, so he failed to describe the scene accurately. The relief carving of Ramesses III hunting a wild bull on the temple wall at Medinet Habu is a beautiful piece of work, full of life and grace.

(I must insert a reminder here that because of the heavy dust in the air almost everywhere we went, many of our group were sathed in some sort of makeshift face-masks (scarves, handkerchiefs, towels, even a few genuine surgical masks). We were also constantly smearing ourselves with insect repellant and frantically swatting at thousands of flies with our Egyptian fly-whisks -- either the posh carved wooden ones with graceful horsehair whisks, or el cheapo ones made from split palm leaves -- the latter having greater clout, but less “class.”)

Had great fun prowling round the Luxor souks (bazaars) -- little shops and street vendors with fascinating and beautiful displays of all kinds of exotic spices, baskets of dates in all shapes and colors, furniture makers, hardware, cloth merchants, galabiyeh-makers who can run up a garment with custom embroidery, and the whole place teeming with life and color, exotic sounds and scents. Bought some of the wonderful Egyptian cotton fabric to make dresses.

On Easter morning we each received a circular braided pastry with 2 colored eggs embedded therein, apparently the custom for the Coptic Easter, though I believe their Easter ws to be the following Sunday. A stop at ESNA to see the Temple of Khnum (Ptolemaic & Roman period) was dramatized by our having to be escorted by the ship’s crew and local mounted tourist police to protect us against unfriendly natives (particularly those waving scorpions at us). Emperor Domitian is shown smiting his enemies on one wall and Trajan smiting his on another. We were told that up near the roof there are graffiti left by Napoleon’s soldiers at a later date, but couldn’t get up there to look. (Incidentally a few other villages had more casual (non-uniformed) versions of the tourist police to defend us against nuisance children/beggars etc. by literally beating them and driving them away, but they are something like the flies in their number and persistence.)

EDFU is noted for having the most complete temple remaining in Egypt (Ptolemaic period), but I remember this place chiefly for the wildest ride of my experience. Can you visualize a whole fleet of those 1905 carriages tearing through a dusty little village at a full gallop, literally racing each other to the temple, a scene something like the Den Hur chariot race or an old John Wayne movie. I was riding backwards on the footboard, hanging on for dear life, sharing the carriage with 3 other ladies who did not seem to find the whole thing as hilarious as I did

KOM OMBO was pleasant - the air had cleared a bit, so with clear sky, bright blue Nile (instead of murky), and the Ptolemaic temple attractively situated by the river with a few palms, it was a more appealing setting than most. This temple (like others located right on the river) has a Nilometer (welllike stair arrangement for measuring rise & fall of the river in the old days, which was useful in gauging success of future crops and thereby setting tax-rates.) There were some deep well-like pools to keep sacred crocodiles in and a small shallow “wading pool” for the baby crocodiles. A pile of old stinking crocodile mummies was stacked up in a small Roman temple at the side. Walls of the main temple had carvings illustrating the various surgical instruments in use at the time, which were all easily identified by a doctor in our group.

ASWAN was my favorite place - a pleasant town almost like our conception of a resort, with some trees, flowers, etc. (trees are very scarce in Egypt), and graceful felucca boats one can ride around in (fun) - we went over to Elephantine Island to see some ruins and the beautiful botanical gardens with herons, hoopoes & other interesting birds. The old Aga Khan is buried on the West Bank but we did not have time to go over there to his tomb. We inspected the Aswan High Dam (spectacular engineering feat, which left much of the surrounding countryside like a moonscape of red-rock rubble). Aswan’s souks are fun, too, with fantastic spices, dates, bunches of garlic with leaves still on, etc. For a change of pace in transport, we roared off by Egypt Air’s Boeing 737 to ABU SIMBEL to see the Great Temple of Ramesses II and smaller temple of wife Nefertari, which were so dramatically rescued from “drowning” in the rising waters of the Nile when the Aswan Dam was built a few years ago. These temples were cut up into blocks, moved piecemeal and reassembled in a new location, the back and top covered with a protective cement dome, in turn covered with naturallooking rock and earth. You can’t even see where the “seams” are in the temple - a fantastic piece of work. The project was designed by a Swedish architectural/engineering firm and the work was carried out by a consortium of European companies, and concluded in 1969. The funds for this job were subscribed to by dozens of countries and the sands of individuals all over the world, an international effort that has made Abu Simbel a wonder of the modern world as well as of the ancient world, and Ramesses II would no doubt think no more than was his due, as Egypt’s greatest pharaoh. (One can tell from the face of his statues, here was a man of strength.)

The cruise part of our trip ended at Aswan and we flew back to CAIRO to wind up our holiday at the Sheraton Hotel (!), where I was approximately roomed in no. 1,0001. Did a bit more sightseeing, including the Sphinx & pyramids at GIZEH which I had seen years ago. Cairo’s urban sprawl has encroached out to the very edge of this desert now, with commercialised aspects such as amusement park, & a place for spectators to watch the Son et Lumiere show (far inferior to the one at Karnak), and so the poor old Sphinx and pyramids don’t seem quite so remote, mysterious and dramatic as they were used to. We visited the Papyrus Institute in Cairo, to learn how papyrus paper was made, and one can buy pieces of same with painted copies of ancient designs, which are rather nice tourist purchase items. A halfvisit to the Cairo Museum could only hit the high spots, including Tut Ankh Amon treasures (astounding). Cairo is more or less just another big noisy, smoggy city full of traffic jams like everywhere else, but it has perhaps a bit more local in its markets, mosques, etc., and the Nile winding through it. “People-watching” at the Sheraton was interesting, the guests being a fascinating mix of East-meets-West, where some Arabs in traditional costume mill about among others in fabulous, glamorous modern gowns or suits. Gambling casino a big draw here for affluent Arabs. There was a delightful Easter display in the lobby of live baby chicks, ducklings and rabbits in an enclosure decorated with a gorgeous big crepe paper “ball,” swan and eggs. Children were delighted, and I also.

By tradition, Joseph and Mary and the infant Jesus are said to have taken refuge in a crypt in the Old Quarter of Cairo (at that time being the Jewish Quarter and known as “Babylon in Egypt”). This crypt was subsequently incorporated in St. Sargus’ Church (4th or 5th AD). Christianity was brought to Egypt by St. Mark & St. Peter, A.D. 45. This Old Quarter remains the quarter of the Christians and Jews of Cairo to this day, and I visited this area on my own when we first arrived, going to St. Sargus’ Church and one other, plus Ben EzraSynagogue and the Coptic Museum. The Copts are the Egyptian Christians, and I marvelled at their tenacity in hanging on in Egypt all these years, despite severepersecution by the Roman Empire, the Islamic (Arab) Conquest, and the Orthodox Church, from whose doctrine they differed, in viewing the nature of Christ as purely divine (instead of as a combination of divine and human), and thus being condemned as heretics for this “Monophysite” view, at the Council of Chalcedon, A.D. 451. The little churches I visited resembled a non-affluent, somewhat primitive version of a Greek Orthodox church. I was also touched by the fact that in a country full of the most annoying, shameless beggars who pester you incessantly for baksheesh (handouts), the one person who really deserved  a tip -- the chap who appeared out of nowhere and appointed himself my guide thru the confusing maze of little winding streets of Old Cairo -- refused to take my offering, and instead clasped my hand in his, as if to indicate that he was a fellow Christian and would not think of taking my money for his good deed.

It seems fitting to end this Christmas letter on a note of respect for these exotic and courageous Christians in a Moslem land. May I also say if any of you readers have an interest in visiting Egypt, contact me for a “nitty-gritty checklist” for some very basic pointers and items to take along, to make the trip a bit easier. It is a fascinating place to visit but one must be prepared, and be fairly hardy.

Meanwhile, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!