Worn-down Brown

I slept for a while.  But three or four hours into this ten-hour flight, I was up.  Middle two seats free between my wife and myself.  That worked well.  The Air Egypt inflight meal was rather awful.  No.  They weren’t serving wine or beer.  But it didn’t matter.  I just read and tried my best to properly anchor a perspective on this place we were now flying along toward.  Who were the Abbasids?  Who were the Mamluks?  The “medieval” period is already five thousand years into the civilizational time line there on the Nile. 

Smooth landing at 5:30AM and after a bus ride over we pause before the immigration line and look for the place to get our requisite visas.  We are directed to the bank.  Sure enough, the bank teller provides us with six visas in exchange for USD.  The immigration officer peals them off and slaps them in, one by one and we proceed to baggage claim where we spy a kiosk where SIM cards from Orange can be procured.  Soon we’ve all got them in and are told to wait thirty-minutes for a text message to activate. 

After ninety-minutes of waiting for this text and sneaking back in past customs and hearing the staff’s earnest assurances that it would only be thirty more minutes, we decided to give up and just trust that the enabling text message would finally arrive.  I couldn’t seem to get Uber to work with my China cell and my stepson discovered there was no service available to order a large van to accommodate the six of us.  This all seemed to vex us considerably until we gave up on Uber and decided to simply negotiate a van with one of the many touts and this went very smooth. 

Now we’re speeding into the city.  The buildings all seem to be a consistent shade of worn-down brown.  There are remarkable shapes of mosques and minarets other buildings jutting into the sky along the side of the highway. The dusty, dirty, faded nobility reminds me of Delhi or Rangoon and then after an underpass, there it is, the longest river in the world.  We pass a pair of lions and cross the Nile.  It looks much thinner than I’d imagine till I realize we’re passing over an island, which the river straddles and we cross the other forked course.

Many hours later we are there, just like I’d long imagined.  My family and I are posing for photos in front of the pyramids at Giza.  It’s all indescribably majestic and somehow all the guides’ directives and photo-opps and cops on camels who want backsheesh and fretting about whether or not to see the light show all sounds far away for a moment, when I just stare at the three remarkable shapes.  I so wish I could go off to the side and quietly sit and contemplate these fundamental icons that are there now, in front of me.  But there are family and my pale Irish skin could take much sitting around and for now we are back in our horse drawn cart, under a bit of shade, plodding along so we can stand beside the 4800 year old marvels and wonder as everyone else has for the last five millennium how on earth these stones were put in place. 

Tuesday, 07/02/19