Ever since I first saw the mighty Nile snaking through its exotic land, Egypt has always been my happy place. Its swaying date palms adorning banks that nourish a people for whom my heart bleeds as the promise of the “Arab Spring”slowly fades, the reality of the uprisings broken promises slipping away like sands through an hour glass.
For a recent “significant”birthday, I visited her once again by taking a ship excursion from Port Said for the Step Pyramid of Saqqara. This included our own guide, Fatma, who could have made a successful pearl diver, she never took a breath and you know how I don’t like the competition.
Initially she looked quite promising as we piled onto the bus in dawns early light...all smiles and trendy gear and lots and lots of jewellery, (that she would try and sell to us later). As we pulled out into the rush hour traffic she started and even my earphones couldn’t completely drown out what Egyptian housewives fed their families, why Fatma had painted her front door red and her recipe for Baba Ganoush.
Nonetheless we sailed on past Memphis (the real one, not the American one) and onto Saqqara where Pharaoh Djoser built the first pyramid, the precursor to its famous brothers near Cairo.
Less visited, this huge complex incorporates colonnades, mortuary tombs and a number of Pyramids of various sizes. Structures still able to be explored without being surrounded by the incessant clamour and frenzy of jaded tourists whose only interest is a quick photo opportunity before getting back on the bus and out of reach of the heat and souvenir hawkers.
Here in a more relaxed environment, you can even slip away from the watchful eyes of guides and guards…
While the others stopped and gawped at wall carvings of long dead Kings and Queens and sniggered at paintings of naked slaves salaciously pointed out by Fatima, I took the opportunity to escape for the peace and quiet of somewhere else…anywhere.
Finding the unguarded entrance to King Teti’s pyramid, I slithered down the 10 metre ramp into the cool dark subterranean rooms. Although the contents had long since been purloined, the empty caverns were still a treasure in themselves. Obscured behind the remains of a burial sarcophagus in one of the chambers, was the hidden entrance into what was once a treasury. It had contained mind-boggling pieces of gold statuary, furniture and various artefacts some of which now languish on the dusty shelves of the Cairo Museum and others long since lost to grave robbers. The ceilings painted in blue and white pointed stars had been blackened by the smoke of years of domestic fires. Yes, believe it or not, these tombs were inhabited for years by Bedouin travellers looking for a lifetime of shelter. Cleared out by the Egyptian government as late as 1990, many of the tombs had been used as homes for generations of squatters.
Once the tombs of the dead, then the homes of the living, now…just tombs.
It was incredible to stand in this stone edifice, the silence, deafening. Even now, the outside world cannot penetrate the sanctuary within, here you are surrounded by the ghost of a long dead Pharaoh who thought he was a God.
Scrambling back up the ramp and returning to the land of the living, I was greeted by the familiar drone of Fatma expounding the virtues of the Egyptian silver industry and her bargain prices for the jewellery adorning her wrists. Following on behind the group to round a corner and see Djosers Step Pyramid currently covered in bamboo scaffolding is where our guidesuddenly blossomed and came into her own.
Transporting us back in time in a way that no book or brochure could have done and using the sight of the workmen on the framework, she was able to recreate the very building of the pyramid in front of our eyes. We were transfixed as she transformed the dusty environ, refilling the missing water features and rebuilding the complex singlehandedly using her words as building blocks as if she was the very builder Djoser himself. The reincarnation of our guide was the longed for rebirth that the ancient Pharaohs aimed for.
Later in the bus Fatma reverted back from transmogrified Egyptologist to hardened saleswoman and as I plugged my earphones back in, I realised that over the last 5000 years Egypt hasn't changed that much at all.
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