The Living God

July 8th:

Wake at 2:30. Hotel staff raps on my door seconds later. I dress, grab my camera and head downstairs. My stomach begins to hurt almost immediately; I won't belabor that point in this entry except to say that the day was more suspenseful than would've been ideal, and that you haven't experienced indignation until you've had a bathroom attendant demand cash from you before he'll hand over the toilet paper.

The bus is packed, one of twenty or more in a police-escorted convoy full of tourists. The police are necessary, as it turns out, because this route has been attacked by terrorists before, and for a variety of reasons -- many of them having to do, allegedly, with US funds allocated for Egypt for each American tourist permitted in-country -- the Egyptian government is quite solicitous of American tourists' perception of safety. I'm too tired to notice much beyond the bus' regrettably intermittent air-conditioning, a state of affairs that's almost worse than no air-con at all since one never has the chance to acclimate to either setting.

Two hours' drive gets us to Abu Simbel, Temple of Ramses II. The international political tensions of the '50s led to the construction of an unsurprisingly poorly-planned dam on the Aswan river, which runs directly by Abu Simbel. When the flood water threatened to overrun one of Egypt's prize possessions, they picked the whole thing up piecemeal and moved it 60 meters uphill, going so far as to construct an entire rocky hillside to house it.

And a good thing too, because it's tremendous. You've seen pictures, I'm sure -- three gigantic sandstone effigies of Ramses II, with just the legs of the fourth visible after the torso tumbled in the early 20th century. Two are seated on each side of the entrance to his temple. His favored children stand at his feet, and representations of his best wife, Nefertari, stand miniscule to the side. Lines of captured Asian and African slaves are carven in relief on the side of the entrance, which leads into a thirty-foot hallway flanked by colossal representations of the Gods whose company he joined when he died. Claustrophia-inducing chambers branch off of the main hallway, and all of the walls are decorated with reliefs of his victories -- martial, political, theological and marital. Nothing is carved fewer than five feet off the ground, so even the minimally-exaggerated scales of the represented figures seem superhuman. At the back of the temple another statue of Ramses is seated next to three major gods of the Egyptian pantheon; twice a year, on his birthday and on his day of ascension, the sun's light reaches this chamber, illuminating each figure in turn from left to right or right to left with the exception of the God of Darkness, who remains always shrouded.

It's mind-blowing.

There's an argument, I suppose, that the graffiti all over the site detracts from the grandeur of these immortal ruins. I'm not sure I agree -- seeing the dates and names carven in chests, on walls, in the figures of the almighty gods themselves, I'm reminded of the fallibility of all things, and of the generations of explorers who fought their way to this site and, exhausted and amazed, put their names among the superstructures of the righteous as if to say, "I, too, exist!"

What I don't like is the tourists -- greasy, sweaty, corpulent, near-translucent, sunburned about the neck, posing like the King Tut dancers we all loved on SNL, complaining about the infernal heat and panting heavily after hauling themselves off the bus -- and the E-Z-Serv, anodyne unmistakably tourist culture that's grown up around this greatest of monuments. Not all the tourists look or act this way, obviously, but I've been in Ethiopia or Egypt for two weeks now and I could count the overweight people I've seen on one hand. Yes, Western-style living has its advantages, but it's easy to see where the stereotype comes from. And enough of them carry such an economy-distorting disposable income that their interest brings with them lines of palm trees, phalanxes of stores and tchotchkes and ice cream shops that sell their wares at five times the normal price. The Temple feels caged, a prisoner held thousands of years from its own time to entertain the idle whimsy of the moneyed classes. Ramses' legacy is deracinated, bereft of the cultural context that would lend credence to his efforts or validation to his dreams of immortality. He is diminished before us.

I don't know why the caged bird sings, but I can guess why he might throw himself against the bars until either impact or mercy set him free.

I'm awed and shell-shocked at the same time. Some of this might be dehydration; I slurp desperately at my water bottle and head back to the bus.

2 hours of cramped driving later and we're back in Aswan, which Wikipedia describes as the driest town on Earth. We've run the gamut of local sights, sounds and tastes, and I decide that I've had my fill of Egypt. A quick trip to the internet cafe, where the kids are still playing Halflife over the LAN, yields me a ticket to Israel. I grip hands ceremoniously with D., say farewell, and hop what turns out to be a 15-hour ride to Cairo.