Sand Castles in the Sun.

  “From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.”

      -Napoleon Bonaparte

  Make a list of the world’s great ancient sites and amazing archeological finds and I am certain that Egypt will be on your list with the Pyramids of Giza the only of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing.  It is a site I have always wanted to see, and it is now a site I am glad to have seen.  I was in Egypt several months ago and the beginning of the journey I got a ride out to Giza in the morning and bartered for a camel and a guide.  My guide, a 25 year old Bedouin, hopped on a small horse, and I on a large camel, and we rode out through the desert and over sand dunes and hills, and though just outside the city, it felt like a real desert experience.  Only sand in rolling dunes lay in the views ahead of me, with camel and horses trekking through the emptiness of sand.  Camels are ornery creatures, and very large.  I felt tall riding on top of his humped back.  My camel was the tallest and biggest one I could find and the ride was a bumpy and wobbly experience, but there I was, riding a camel over sand dunes in the deserts of Giza staring at the great pyramids of Egypt.  There are many pyramids there, but three stand as the most famous and impressive, sitting tall in the middle, a giant collection of perfectly cut stone the color of the sand so wonderfully surrounding them.   I tried to imagine this site 4,000 – 5,000 years ago when it was built, juxtaposed in a harmonious contrast against an endless horizon and a sea of sand.  It would have been the tallest building in the world back then, and would have seemed all at once to be a giant geometric sand pile, how it blended in color, and also a great monument worthy only of gods, placed there by some other worldly beings.  They still stand majestic, but back then, can you imagine it? The pharaohs were all just kids in the sand box that is Egypt, stuck on building sand castles in the sun.

 

My camel and I, fast friends, moved along across the desert, snapping photos of sand and sky and monuments to ancient pharaohs.  How it must have been to be a pharaoh, convinced of your own deity.  Around the pyramids were burial sites of laborers who died in building them, and how it must have been to be a laborer and slave to the pharaohs.  Here I am, somewhere in between, and yet, better off than both.  Has any pharaoh ever trod the Great Wall of China, or hiked the steep mountainside of Wayna Pichu?  These pyramids are some of the greatest tourist sites in the world, and yet how many people will I ever meet who have been there.  Al Hamdulilah, Sadiqi.  Thanks be to God, my friend.  These pyramids loomed large, more impressive than I thought they would be, made so by the blankness and contrast of empty desert, by the camouflage of blending in to orange colored sands of desert.  They were massive, and alone, and proud in silence and solitude. 

  Of course, at Giza, I also saw the Sphinx, part man, part woman, part lion.  It sat down in resting pose, knowing it was the king of this jungle, this desert.  It seemed to guard over the pyramids, tombs of the pharaohs, patiently sitting as though resting in the shade, only regal in how it sat, how it stared and held its chin and gaze.  “Look at me, I am King.”  The pyramids were more impressive, due to size alone, though the Sphinx in carved out shape called for more inquiry, symbolic in the very parts of its body, man, woman, and beast.  I saw them all, pyramids and statues, tombs and temples.  I rode around the city and walked the hallways of the Egyptian Museum, filled with stones and statues, jewelry, board , and sketches made by slaves on limestone tabs, weapons and boats, and sarcophagi of kings and queens, and of course, the kings and queens themselves, their mummified bodies embalmed to last eternity.  Have you ever stared at a body nearly 5,000 years old and seen not bone, but skin and teeth and hair clinging to their emaciated frames?  They looked like the cursed souls from the Pirates of the Caribbean movie.  Their skin was taught and tight, shrunken and stretched out over bone, seemingly nothing underneath.  Their teeth were stained and rotting like a smoker’s addicted to sugar who never brushes. The hair was gray and yellow and coarse, and their eyes sewed in.  There are reasons that mummies have become creatures of fear and horror, dead bodies clinging obstinately to life, ghastly and ghoulish. 

I explored Cairo some, walking around the hectic filthy streets, and decided not to stay long, so I hopped aboard a night train headed for Aswan a long and cold ride through the dark night of a desert winter.  I arrived in Aswan and made it to a hotel near the rail station and immediately began to walk the city and the local bazaar.  It was different there in the south of Egypt than in Cairo.  It was much more traditional.  Everyone was dressed in robes and head scarves, following their Nubian traditions.  It is such a different desert than what we have in the UAE.  It is much more fertile, blessed with the winding waters of the Nile.  On the train ride down I stared out the window and it seemed I was back in Southeast Asia, with green, green fields and scattered palm trees around water buffalo and men out plowing and picking the fields in the light of early light of morning.  It surprised me to see such lush fields, showing that such immense waters as does the Nile provide can turn even a sandy desert  in to a fertile plain.  Most of the train ride down was farmland, and the desert reminded me of Arizona, with rocks and hills and the farms and fields, and how the trees and bushes mixed in with the sand and desert.  Yes, it is a better desert than we have in Ruwais.  It has a pastoral charm, with men in robes and scarves riding donkeys or camels through dirt roads of small stone and clay villages.  It is a life from years ago, with horse carts and mules and sand blowing from soft to harsh through towns landscaped around the desert.  Camels and donkeys were taken through villages and out to the desert or to markets as the only form of transportation for the Nubian and Egyptian people. 

  I took a small ferry out to the Temples of Philae, on a small island in the lake created by the Aswan and High Dams on the Nile River.  We slowly motored out to the island with the pillars of the temple rising above the reeds and tall grasses and flowering bushes around the banks of the island.  I walked around the temples, and inside gazing at statues and carvings of gods and goddesses, particularly Isis and Osiris, gods steeped in an ancient Egyptian love story.  The walls were covered in Hieroglyphics and carvings of priests and gods in human and animal form.  It was a sacred temple only for the priest who would bring offerings from the common people to serve to the gods.  Philae was impressive, but Upper Egypt, as Southern Egypt is called due to the flow of the Nile River running south to north, proved to hold more impressive sites. 

  I was also able to visit Abu Simbel, several hours south and near the Sudan border.  I hate being so close to a country and not being able to visit it.  On the drive down, I watched the sun rise up over that empty desert, casting shades of orange and yellow on to the sand, the colors of a genuine desert morning, where wind swept sands gathered and piled in perfect symmetrical mounds that looked from a distance like replicas of the great pyramids, but these were likely formed over hundreds or thousands of years by wind alone.  It was desert there, in every sense of the word. 

  Abu Simbel is a fantastic amazement.  There are two temples there, built under Ramses II, and wow, what a sight.  Each temple is carved out of the mountain, like an Ancient and Egyptian Mt. Rushmore, only with perfectly carved out rooms going deep in to the mountain, the stone walls inside perfectly preserving the hieroglyphics and intricate carvings and sketches on the flat smooth walls.  Many carvings and pillars stood inside the temple, detailed and beautiful sandstone brown, but most impressive were the enormous carvings of the pharaoh and gods carved out of the front of the mountain that guarded tall above the entrance.  Everything about the temple was fascinating and awe-inspiring, to think of such detail and intricacy carved in to a stone mountain.  Truly Abu Simbel must be among the most impressive monuments and temples in the world.  I walked it, and gazed at every inch of workmanship, such sites I have seen, such places I have been to. 

                         



Monumental ancient artwork
Burial ground for pharaohs past
Tombs unlike another structure
Built to startle…built to last.
Reaching upward to an apex
Massive stones…each placed with care
Slowly bending to erosion
Centuries old…we find them there.
Mystic shapes claimed to have power
Health and wealth both to be gained
Geometric shape of wonder
Origins…left unexplained.
Filled with artifacts and treasures
Gold and silver, stone and clay
Placed beside the ancient ruler
Meant to help him…on his way.
Living in the plains of rulers
Sandstorms etch away their girth
Future years will find them missing
Lost within…the sands of earth.

 “Pyramids.” – M.E. Gaines.