Egypt 2019

As we climbed into the small not-quite shoulder high wicker basket, anchored by a strap to a truck, lest we accidentally begin to proceed sideways, I had to time to think, “This may be the stupidest thing I have ever done.” (And that’s some competitive bar to pass!) Nonetheless, in I went with the others.

We weren’t the first balloon to get up and out. As we got to the field, the first hot air balloons were already ascending toward the moon. Ghostly. Unworldly.

In the pre-dawn

Crowded little space, holding about half a dozen people on either side of the center box which held the pilot in his solitary (if constricted) splendor. Wicker, so, creaky and presumably flammable, and here was a guy deploying a gas jet that, as you can see below, shot out several feet.

Lighting up

All told there were, by my rough count, 21 balloons on the field, all of them hurrying to make the most of the calm, still, early morning air. Not the sort of thing you see every day.

We were a little late getting off, but not much. It was scarcely dawn and we were already in the air. You can’t quite see the Nile here, but anyway we’re looking east, unless the sun was VERY confused.

Dawn from the air

(Rotten photo, sorry)

We weren’t up all that long. An hour, maybe. Our pilot brought us high, higher than the others, showing us the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens at the same time, which requires some altitude! (It was only after we were safely on ground again that he told us he was used to much bigger balloons, and wasn’t all that familiar with the controls on our little vessel. I thanked him for not telling us earlier.)

Landing mechanism is ingenious and simple. He lands, he is met by a ground crew that links the carriage to a tow rope, and they pull it (he keeping it still inflated and thus friction-free) until they get to a place where they are ready to take it down. He slowly deflates the balloon and as the lower end deflates, the ground crew gathers it up and flemishes it (at least, if it were sheets on a ship, that’s what they would be doing): they fold it neatly so that at the end the balloon itself is like a serpentine rope, ready to be stowed on a truck. Then it’s back to the everyday world.

Back on the ground again.

As it turned out, NOT the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. One of my better moves, actually. Flying the way flying ought to be and rarely is: Silent, serene, open-air, slow-motion. (Slow cabin service, though. Still waiting for someone to offer coffee.) A nice start to another day.

Who goes to Egypt without seeing the Pyramids? But there’s seeing, and seeing. When Ruth and Ehab bring us to the pyramids and temples, they give us time to experience them, not merely to glance at them, check them off our mental list, and move along. So our interaction is different from that obtained by people on what my brother calls Tourist Time.

On our first day, we went to Dashur, where few tourists go. On Tuesday, we’re ready for Giza, where everybody goes. This morning’s exercise is to see what everybody sees. We’ll look around, go into the second pyramid, and come out to do other things, knowing that tonight we’re going to have the Great Pyramid to ourselves — just our 12 tourists and three guides — for two hours. Are we looking forward to it? You guess.

A popular destination!

You see photos of the pyramids, but it’s hard to put them into perspective. A pile of stone without a yardstick is just a pile of stone to the eye, no matter what the mind knows. So, you hear that the great pyramid extends over 15 acres (roughly 7 hectares, I think), but what does that mean? The scale is too big; there’s nothing to compare it to. How easy is it even to envision 15 acres? Here’s an easier way: Look at the size of the people and the size of the blocks, and try to remember that the great pyramid is said to contain two million such blocks. And try to absorb the fact that we couldn’t do anything like it today.

Notice the relative scale of blocks and people

I don’t know about you, but I always thought of the pyramids as being all by themselves in the desert — which they are — without being able to realize that they are also within easy eyesight of the city of 30 million people east of the Nile. Nonetheless, that’s where they are. Three pyramids and the Sphinx, eternally placed, infinitely alone — and if you stay at the right hotel, you look right out on them.

It can be hard to remember, but just across the river from Giza is Cairo, home to 30 million people, several of whom have come to visit.

If you’re interested in the pyramids, you know something of the controversies: why they were built, how they were built; when they were built. Like every other unqualified person, I have my opinion, but in the face of this massive stone reality, how important are opinions and theories? I do maintain, though, that this is not a work that was accomplished by ignorant slaves using copper chisels!

And tell me this: Why would they leave the face of the rock partially smoothed and partially not, as it is here? (This, even disregarding the question of how they smoothed it.) I’ve been puzzling over it ever since I saw it.

First day, by design, rather than start us off at the crowded Giza plateau, Ruth and Ehab take us to see the relatively unfrequented pyramids at Dashur: The Red Pyramid (“the shining one”), the so-called Bent Pyramid (“the southern shining one”), and, from a distance, the largely ruined (because made of mud brick) Black Pyramid. We board out tour bus for the first time.

Surprisingly roomy and comfortable, complete with ice chest always filled with bottled water.

First stop, the Red Pyramid, vandalized (I don’t know how else to express it) years ago by the systematic theft of its polished outer sheath. Several of us enter the opening and descend a cramped uncomfortable shaft to an empty chamber and an empty sarcophagus. Though it is early in the day, we are accompanied by a number of fellow tourists from elsewhere, younger, very much other-directed, radiating noise, random energy, and an impressive amount of body heat. Then, like a flock of sparrows, at some invisible signal they are gone, leaving five of us and a custodian in quiet contemplation.

I am led to try to absorb the energy of the sarcophagus not by touching it, but by almost-touching it; that is, by feeling it with my energy body rather than using the tactile sense. This will lead to something important, after a while.

We emerge to see, a little more than a mile (two kilometers) across the sands, the Bent Pyramid. We are told we can walk to it if we wish, or we can climb back into the bus and drive over. It doesn’t look like a hard trek, so Sue and I decide to hike overland.

The sand is hard packed, and the terrain is only gently rolling, so of course there is no danger. Nonetheless that mile seems long enough before we’re there. But how fine, to be able to breathe, deeply, the cleanest air I can remember breathing in a long time. And what a fine cloudless morning, so silent, so still and peaceful. Not a long walk, but one to be remembered.

Looking back at two other pilgrims making the same trek

The Bent Pyramid is called that because it begins at one angle, then moves to another. There are many entertaining and unconvincing theories as to why it was built this way. The most absurd, in my opinion, is that the builders began to build, then realized that it wasn’t going to work, and changed plans in mid-stream. As if anyone outside of a lunatic asylum would begin so major a work without having done the calculations ahead of time! And as if – having fortunately discovered in time that they hadn’t known what they were doing – they then compensated with a brilliant stop-gap measure. Tell me another.

Nor is this the first pyramid to be attempted, so we don’t have to assume it was learn-as-you-go. But we don’t need to bandy arguments to appreciate the result.

What they call the Bent Pyramid

This may give you an impression of the difference between how the pyramids looked before vandalism (top of photo) and after (below). With the casing, it would have been smooth, polished, shining. Without it, well, look at it. It’s a mountain of stone partially quarried for the same of projects we don’t know about and wouldn’t care about.

Now, I’m sure whoever took all that casing said, with Jefferson, “Earth belongs to the living,” but I still take it somewhat personally.

Finally, just for the sake of completeness, a glimpse at the ruined Black Pyramid. This is as close as we came to it, or wanted to come. Mud brick can’t compete with stone, in longevity, in beauty, or in interest.

Those interested in the work of Schwaller de Lubitsch (which ought to include many of the readers of John Anthony West, Robert Schoch, Robert Bauval, etc.) ought to be interested in this beautiful set of books put out by Inner Traditions. Two sets, actually. I have owned them for a while, but it is only after being there that I am beginning to page through them slowly and, may I say, lovingly.

  

 

The view I wouldn’t see till Monday morning (photo by Tom Waggener)

That first day, Monday, I was no longer jet-lagged, but my focus was not yet united.

Airplanes carry us fast and far, and we lose our orienting frame of reference. Mid-Saturday I was in Charlottesville, Virginia. Two flights and several hours later I was in an anonymous big-city airport in Germany. This was six time-zones further east, so it was early morning rather than the midnight that my body expected. After a long jet-lagged wait, another flight, another time-zone change, and the airplane set my body down in another interchangeable big-city airport. This one happened to be named Cairo International, but it wasn’t Cairo, not yet, not really. So far, it was one more big-city airport.

Airplanes carry our bodies fast and far, but it takes us a while to reassemble our bodies and our minds and our sense of place. Jet lag isn’t just a matter of time zones. At least in my case, it’s a very good thing that our tour group arranges to have us met at the airport and shepherded safely into the van that will bring us to the hotel. Alone, tired, ten years unfamiliar with international travel, I would have found coping with forms and procedures quite an ordeal.

But getting through entry procedures doesn’t bring me to Cairo. The long ride in the little van that has been sent to bring me to the hotel begins to do that.

They say Cairo has 30 million people. I can believe it. As we take the long ring road that loops around the south of the city before turning west to cross the river, a fair number of them are contesting the streets with us.

(Thirty million people, in a total population of about 100 million! And Alexandria another 20 million, I am told. Half the population of one of the largest countries in Africa, in two cities.)

As we ride, we talk, the van driver, the tour rep, and me, and I begin to inch my way into Egypt. Naturally we talk in English, as my two words of Egyptian [“la” meaning no and “shokron” meaning thanks] wouldn’t have brought us very far. And naturally there are the occasional puzzlements, like them trying to tell me about the new pollis academy they seem to be proud of. Turned out that pollis was their pronunciation of police.) But mostly we were able to make ourselves clear to each other, at least within the usual limits of cross-cultural communication. Some things are always going to be a mystery.

What we talked about, I have mostly forgotten, but people are people wherever you go, and we’re all concerned with the same essentials and, at the same time, we’re all pretty much mysteries to each other. Or maybe it’s just me who doesn’t have a clue. Anyway, it was a long ride and an interesting free-wheeling talk, and by the time we got to the hotel on the far side of the river, I was beginning to feel that I was in a certain place, at a certain time, rather than barreling through space neither now nor then, neither here nor there.

Then I was at the hotel, and shortly thereafter I was talking to Ruth Shilling, our tour organizer, and to Wouter Bosman, my roommate. I had met them two years before when they were in America at The Monroe Institute doing a residential course called Guidelines, and I was the guest speaker one night. (Wouter had since become an Outreach Trainer in Holland for TMI.)

And then I was energetically repacking so that I would be ready for the morning, when I would finally begin to encounter Egypt.

 

The black land

On our first day in Egypt — between pyramids, so to speak — our group stopped at a little farm called the Blue Lotus, and as we walked around it after lunch, my father’s presence was strongly with me. Dad was a farmer too, 70 when he died, two years younger than I am as I view this old, old country. In the red land, I can feel him appreciating the sheer expanse of sky and rock and sand. In the black land, he is around me as well as within me, for so much of Egypt reminds me of his farm, and his way of being.

Even in Cairo streets, I see reminders of another way of life, a sort of patchwork coping:

• Road dividers being constructed with the simplest of tools, in a very labor-intensive manner that nonetheless gets the job done.
• Men in traditional garb, riding on ancient trailer frames with single axles supporting automobile tires, being pulled by horses or undersized donkeys, talking on cell phones.
• Houses or buildings or shops under repair, the work being done piecemeal with few mechanized tools.

Old dignified Cairo buildings

I have no criticism to make of any of it. Far from it: It is an appropriate strategy for a labor-rich and capital-poor country . I saw the same thing in Peru, 20 years ago. The same mixture of modern and traditional, the same patchwork approach to change, the same make-do method of fitting means to desired ends. It’s all very familiar. It’s one part of the world that I grew up in. It’s what farming was, back in my father’s and his father’s day.

The black land’s bounty

The Blue Lotus is a sort of oasis of the past. The owner, who is half-Austrian, returned from years in Europe to live out his life on this little plot of land, hoping to reverse the tide by his personal example, I suppose, fighting despite a sense of helplessness. I talked to him as we walked around the little plot. The eye told one story, the brain, alas, another.

The eye saw the startling, exhilarating productivity of the black lands. The rows of planted palm trees. The endless onion plants, growing cheek by jowl in the absence of rows (no land to waste!), the oversized cabbages, the sheer expanse of bright, vivid green. The carefully husbanded manure piles.

But the brain saw, and conversation with the farmer confirmed, another, darker story. This three-crops-per-year climate is in a prolonged state of slowly declining fertility, and nobody knows how to reverse the decline. It has been half a century since the Aswan High Dam ended the annual overflow of the Nile. It has been something like 12 decades since the low dam that preceded it began the process. No flooding, no overflow, no deposit of fertile silt. The black land’s soil fertility is experiencing just what happens to anything that is continually drawn upon and never renewed. Farmers are trying to maintain fertility by using chemical fertilizers, but that is not going to work, as farmers throughout the world are learning by sad and irreversible experience.

One of the sweet, undersized donkeys (on the right)

After our visit, I thought about that farm from time to time, and my mind kept coming back to the donkey in the treadmill. Yes, they actually had an undersized donkey, earning his keep by spending his days walking around and around in a circle, pulling a rotating bar that pumped water from the nearby canal to the fields. He walked blindfolded, either to prevent him from getting dizzy from the endless circlings, or to prevent despair that all that walking didn’t get him anywhere. He made a decent metaphor, I thought, not just for Egyptian agriculture but all the world’s agriculture, treading the same blind circular path: Fertility depletion, chemical additives, depletion of trace minerals, further declines, etc., etc. In the process, we are creating desert, doing it in slow motion. Not just the Egyptians, certainly not just poor countries, but countries blessed with some of the richest soil God ever gave as a legacy. When you finish destroying your farmland, whether you do it in low-tech or high-tech fashion, then what do you do?

Egypt thinks in dualities: red land, black land. Desert land, arable land. Egypt survived and flourished for thousands of years — thousands, not America’s paltry 500 — by maintaining a balance. But Gurdjieff pointed out that life in duality always involves a positive, a negative, and a third, reconciling, force. Where was it?

It wasn’t until nearly our last day, three hours and more into the Sahara, less than 20 miles from the Sudan, that I saw the first hopeful sign of the presence of that reconciling force, the first promise that Egypt’s future is more hopeful than endless turns around the same treadmill.