Postcards from the past: Desert dunes, Siwa

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Libyan desert, Postcards from the past, Siwa Oasis

January, 1998

What a day this is! While my daughter and her friends set off to explore on bikes, I book a jeep tour into the Libyan desert. We have to surrender our passports. Not as easy as it sounds. First we have to find the official to surrender them to. We drive round and round the village, passing a huge cabbage many times until it becomes my marker of the circuits. Finally we track him down and set off. Five minutes after we turn off towards the dunes we stop in a clump of eucalypts to collect firewood and bond: two people in Cairo learning Arabic; an American lawyer teaching at a university in the Ukraine; an Australian economist and human rights worker who speaks Hebrew and Hungarian and is wearing pink hippy pants; a Swedish biologist; and me, an English teacher from Broken Hill.

We set off again, placing bets about the next stop – roadworks in fact: trucks and vociferous men and a cement strip to negotiate. After that we finally enter the dunes. The driver takes mischievous delight in watching our reactions to vertical drops, and leaps out to take photos with the motor still running and the jeep held at 45° by a dodgy set of brakes.

We stop at hot springs for lunch, where I sit mesmerised by the bubbling water and its shapes, and absorb the biblical scene: dry stony hills and a well in the desert wilderness. I don’t eat: I’m nursing a rather disturbed tummy. Then a bit more dune plunging, where I take the way of the coward and slide down under my own steam. At prayer time we reach a cold lake and the guides spread out their mats on the sand.

The sun is beginning to drop and the dunes acquire angles as the shadows deepen. We climb towards a place of fossils, intricate smooth polished hieroglyphs. One is circular with a stylised flower-shape picked out in dots. I photograph madly, forlorn about my chances of capturing desert immensity. We stop again on the roof of the dunes for the sunset shots. The hills turn pink and the outline of the dunes sharpen: some of the more distant ones have the pinched top of a Cornish pasty.

Now the real fun begins. We get stuck in heavy sand and the truck is mechanically recalcitrant. When the driver opens the glove box looking for a solution, he reveals a tumble of tangled wires, greasy tools and unspooling cassettes. As he puzzles over the truck problem, something rounded and pink and blurry appears on the horizon. Slowly it breaks free of clinging sand and becomes a full moon. We watch in delight until the truck starts again, and we head back to the springs, where the guides eat their Ramadan breakfast and we sit around their campfire.

The adventure isn’t over yet. We have to take at least three run ups to crest a dune, even though we’re on the track. And then the man with the passports is “not here”, “asleep”, “come back later”. We end up in the same eating place as my daughter and her friends who are playing poker at the next table. We refuse to pay the guides until we are in possession of our passports and they join us for dinner. The captain eventually wakes up, returns our passports, and the adventures end.

A few more Siwa shots

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Postcards from the past: Cairo museum

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Cairo markets, Cairo museum, Postcards from the past

January, 1998

The Cairo Museum is just around the corner from my daughter’s apartment. En route, we pass many men with guns, a response to the recent Luxor massacre. I spend most of my first visit downstairs amongst porphyry, marble and granite … statues, sarcophagi and goblets … white and grey and brown and huge. My liking for smaller things asserts itself: flint knives; pots and beads; cuneiform tablets with the delicacy of their massed script, the clay envelopes, and the matter-of-factness of their inscriptions: “My daughter is now old enough to marry. Before, you sent my servant back with a pretty good present fast. Now it’s time to claim my daughter.” These things are more manageable than statues and columns.

I leave the basement and walk up an immense flight of marble stairs, past framed papyrus, to the golden beds of Tutankhamen. There are Carter’s photos at the opening of the tomb, and I am in the presence of the treasures he unearthed, familiar from my adolescent interest: the gold shrines, the inlaid box for clothes, the box of canopic jars, the gold and jewelled throne.

It’s Ramadan and museum closes at early. No polite requests to leave or bells ringing here: guards herd people out by clapping their hands.

When I return to the museum, daringly alone, I begin my explorations in a dingy gallery of mummiform coffins, space shared with electric fans on shopping trolleys. My eye is caught by clothing – sandals; linen robes belonging to a priestess; and food – bread and biscuits. I take in the dioramas of life in the 16th Dynasty: women weaving linen; men counting cattle; soldiers; boatmen. I revisit the Tutankhamen gallery where all the small stuff is luxuriantly displayed. The mummy jewellery is laid out as it would be in the layers of wrappings. There is a helpful guard who hurtles me from exhibit to exhibit, until I sit on the floor stubbornly and begin copying hieroglyphics from a wooden sarcophagus. It works and I’m left in peace to wander. I stand for a long time in front of my favourite item: Tutankhamen’s ecclesiastical chair, with its duck legs and subtle richness of design and colour.

We spend the afternoon in the market. There is mania in the air: men dance on tables, turning prices into rap, accompanied by rhythmic banging on a 44 gallon drum; sellers rip T-shirts out of plastic wrap and hurl them towards the crowd. We buy macaroni out of a big hessian sack and finally reach the street of tentmakers where carpets are unrolled and spread out for us. We don’t buy.

After pasta and packing we catch a taxi to the station en route to Luxor. I almost guillotine my daughter, knock the mirror on another car askew and squash my hot sweet potato between my fingers. My daughter swears none of this would happen if I travelled  light.