Graceful Oblong Cylindrical Patterns

The sun has just risen over the eastern sky.  I’m on the back of the dahabiya and the morning Nile estuary here is marvelously active with life.  There are small damsel flies who skirt slowly just above the river presumably looking for food.  I worry for them.  There are also small perch that rise to the surface regularly, trying to catch small insects.  Up in the small trees above the reeds there is a wonderful range of birdlife.  Small song birds who I can’t identify are calling individually from the tree nearest me and further off in the cattails a gaggle of them are arguing.  Fifty meters on there is a stately white heron who is standing on the shore.  Two mourning doves are calling off to the left and just now a bird of prey with a wing span much larger than all safe the heron just darted out of the copse near me, reminding me in a flash of our friend Horus, the falcon god. 

How sensible it was to worship things like falcons and the sun, which has gone from being an atmospheric highlight to a source of hot discomfort in the twenty minutes or so since it has risen.  And what a strange, radical fervor must have informed the early Christians who hid out in Edfu and decided the proper thing to do was to literally deface Ra and Osiris and Horace there at the Nile temple complex. 

I paid not an insignificant amount Egyptian pounds yesterday to have my phone’s data plan charged up. There is no more data to be had this morning.  This seems implausible.  I did not do much yesterday besides check my emails.  There are undoubtedly many people expecting my reply, wondering why I haven’t been responsive.  Certainly, I didn’t expect predictability on this trip, though I have, up till now, generally enjoyed connectivity.  I’ll go see Mustafa soon to see what he has to say about this missing data.

A big bumble bee has returned.  His thunderous buzzing commands attention, an innate fear of the  of the bee sting, but as with the bumble bees back home one implicitly knows he should be harmless and with a wave or two of the hand he moves on.  One of the swallow-like birds up on the trees has caught something.  Her swallow-mates are chasing her around in graceful oblong cylindrical patterns.  Clearly, they want what she’s got.  Were they ill-gotten goods, poached from the mouth of someone who’d properly caught something, or a meal earned fair and square that others think they can poach?  Can’t say, though one of the two pursuers has given up the chase just now.  Better to save your energy, one suspects when considering the constant challenge of feeding oneself out here.

Wednesday 7/10/19