Luxor is the city in southern Egypt divided into the West and East Bank of the Nile. The two banks on opposite shores of the river are polar opposites, and I didn't much like the East Bank where the hassling was especially bad along the waterfront, and there was nothing aesthetically pleasing about the place, none whatsoever. And this is coming from someone who can see beauty in a junkyard [rf: “hidden gems” post]. The other side- the West Bank- was a stark contrast from this ugly and uninteresting East Bank, for it contained the Valley of the Kings, where Howard Carter discovered the tomb of King Tut:
“At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues and gold everywhere the glint of gold.“
- the famous lines describing the moment of the most amazing discovery he would ever make. Gives me the shivers whenever I read it. Back in the days of ancient Egypt, people devoted a lot of time to attending to the dead. Also, there was a much more intense belief in the power of the written word, literally. The blue and gold paints were still in decent condition, and every inch of the tombs' rocky innards were covered with angular men and women, cartouches, and owls, ankhs, scarabs, quails, reeds, and other hieroglyphs that the ancients seemed to believe would protect and/or assist the dead just by being written- carved- into the stone walls of the chamber. We spotted several carvings of men with dicks erect at perfectly 90 degree angles, and in the coolest tomb (probably one of the Ramses, I forget which), there was an elaborate blue-and-gold painting of the story of the goddess who swallows and gives birth to the sun every day.
We nearly got into trouble with the police here because one of the unofficial guards waited around until he was sure we had taken pictures, then randomly chose Max to threaten with police action if he didn't give payment for the picture.
We were ALL taking pictures.
I just met another Egyptian here in Erbil, and mentioned the opinion that most Egyptians are poor, so this whole corrupt baksheesh culture should be considered in a sympathetic light. The Egyptian shook his head and said it was more than poverty; it was a social sickness. Thinking of this particular incident in which the self-appointed guard quite deviously walked away in order to give us time to sneak pictures, and then returned to catch us red-handed- makes me want to side with the second opinion. They can be nasty. They can be unpleasant. The corruption can be sickening. Perhaps it is a sickness that ought to be treated. The part that makes me mad is that he acted as if he had all the authority in the world to charge us, threaten us, snatch one of our phones without permission, and blackmail us, when in reality, he had not a shred of authority to do any of the above. It also pissed me off when I would go to the bathroom and have to tip someone just for handing me a paper towel, when I could damn well have gotten it myself. Did I ask for the service? Uh, no...Did the owner of the building ask you to stand at the door collecting coins? Uh, no! Well, I can't be too sure about that. And maybe I'm just being an utter snob.
After encounters like this and all the hassling, it was really nice and a huge relief to meet Hussein. Hussein was the taxi driver who drove us to and from Hetsepshut, the pillared structure built right into the face of a mountain, still somewhere on the West Bank of Luxor.
In his hand he holds an ankh, the symbol for eternal life. So much for that.
Dogs mirror the Colossi of Memnon
On the way to Hetsepshut, he showed us a little notebook he carried around with him in the cab, each page filled with a message from travelers from all over the world who had been chauffered by Hussein, messages in their respective languages, including one in Korean. I could tell this little book meant a lot to him. It was like his well-worn passport, except he never went anywhere; people came to him and brought their exotic letters and words and marked his book with them like souvenirs, as proof that he had seen the world through others' eyes, heard their stories, seen what they looked like, heard what they sounded like. On the way from Hetsepshut, I kept asking him where he lived, whether we had passed his house yet, how 'bout now? How 'bout now? Until he got the unsubtle hint and invited us all over for tea. I don't think I had aimed to get invited to his house, but now that I think about it, I guess that's what it sounded like.
We drove toward the road to Aswan. I remember low, colorful walls on either side and a long, straight road. It was around sunset. He parked on the left side, we crossed the street, and followed him past the wall and into his home. It was spacious, there were many rooms with colorful walls in sky blues and sea greens- even a good-sized guest room with piles of thick blankets like in the Princess and the Pea-, but it was all unmistakably poor. The stall-like bathrooms with holes in the ground for pissing and dumping were fulsome-looking, I remember, but the walls were a cheery sky blue. One room was being used as a barn to house his pigeons, chickens, and a cow that had given birth just days ago (so that would make it 2 cows). Pigeons were good for sex, Hussein told us. Was everything slightly exotic good for sex? I wondered. One side of the house was being built up into a restaurant. Rather than saving up a lot of money over a long period of time and then building the restaurant all at once, Hussein was building it up a few stones at a time, making small progress every week or every month, but progress nonetheless. I liked his patience, his self-created purposes. He was going to call his restaurant “Sunset” because just over the back wall of where the restaurant was going to be, the guests would have a great view of the sunset every evening over his neighbor's field of several acres.
During the tour, we'd met his adorable 2-year-old son whose name I can't recall, and afterward, we met the rest of his family- his daughter and his brother's family because his brother had died, or something. There were a lot of women there is all I remember, and they all came forward and shook our hands without hesitation, without the modesty or the downward gaze decreed by their religion when woman meets man, though the older women wore the black burkhas. In southern Egypt, it seemed, Islam took on a more cultural significance rather than a religious one. We sat with Hussein on a wooden bench propped against a wall in the sitting room. The women built a roaring fire right on the dirt floor for the nightly family gathering, and they served us sweet tea. He did not have lots of money, Hussein admitted to us, but he had a large extended family to care for, and that cared for him in return. He was rich here, said the taxi driver, putting his large palm over his heart. In the firelight, Hussein's little son danced around for us in the silly way that kids dance. I can't believe I still think kids are cute after finding out what devils they can be. I wrote a short message in his little notebook and we all signed it, making our mark in the Book of Hussein.
The next day, I sat in a felucca with two Jews and an anti-Semitic, chauvinist boatman, waiting futilely for the wind to pick up. It never picked up. We picked up and left for the train station.
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