The Dreaded Sixty-Seven Steps

What the hell was I thinking!?!

Obviously, I wasn't.

One would assume that, given the realities of a slowly-but-surely deteriorating hip and related messed-up knee, not to mention the taxation imposed on those self-same joints by two glorious weeks of scaling hillsides and sand dunes, climbing in and out of tomb shafts and corridors, and trekking for kilometers across the desert, I would have given more consideration to the wisdom of reserving a room on the top floor of a country hotel. It didn't even occur to me to check if there was a lift or elevator.

To my defense, the reservations were made over three months ago. I had no idea.

I guess I was lured by the romance of the roof top terrace, the views across the Nile to the great temples and beyond.

When we got here ten days ago, I thought "Wow, that' going to be interesting!" We'd just have to take it slow, and by the end of our stay here we'd be stronger and have glutei maximi made of steel! Yeah, right.

Now that both Denny and I have been sick and weakened by this debilitating infection, climbing up or down has been a sometimes near-insurmountable challenge.

I must admit that I have skipped a meal or two these last few days, just because trying to muster the strength to face the dreaded stairway was not going to happen.

SIXTY-SEVEN STEPS...

We pause and catch our breath at each of the six landings, looking forward to crash on the bed once we reach the bedroom.

But we are improving, no longer threatening to pass out before we reach the fourth floor.

Who knows, I may yet get those glutes of steel afterall.

While on the subject of delirious dreams

Six or seven years ago I was laid down by some bronchitis and experiencing high fever. I had just received the large coffee table book "Luxor and the Valley of the Kings" (ordered on Amazon), and was reading it in bed, before falling asleep with the book open at the aerial photo of the temple of Medinet Habu. That night I dreamed that my body was the temple. The next morning the fever had broke and I wrote down the dream as a poem. I just found it in my online email archives. Enjoy!

********************

I am the Temple and the Temple is in me,
Alive and breathing, alert and conscious.

The towering pylons of my gateway heave as I draw air,
While in the great court of appearances,
Lotiform columns dance around my middle.

My halls are vibrant with the spells of long forgotten Gods,
Potent talismans, and irrefutable truths.

I am Temple.

Perfectly ordained and symmetrical, sacred architecture turned into flesh.

I am Maat.

A great tremor brings down my hypostyle halls,
Uproots my flagpoles and reveals my crypts.

I cry: 'Why are thou destroying my walls, laying waste to my sanctuary?'

Fear not, for you are the seed of new worlds!

Burning wind scatters my stones.

The exquisitely carved reliefs of my sacred processions
Float away with increasing speed,
Gods of stone and precious inlays forever broken,
No single block ever to find its match again.

I cry: 'Why are thou dispersing my bones, crushing my head, turning me to dust?'

Fear not, for you are a new beginning!

The fire is in my eyes and my eyes are fire.
Great swirls of burning aether glow with the colors of cosmic birth.

I reach out to embrace the void,
Each finger separated by eons of time,
Grasping matter yet to exist.

Thus the Temple expands into the realm of the Gods, filling space as it creates it.

I am the Temple and the Temple is in me.

I cry.

Still sick

Hopefully the antibiotics are doing their work. Denny seems to be improving, slowly.

Nothing else to talk about.

Yellow room.

The room is painted in two or three shades of pale yellow. With the domed ceiling it is quite lovely. Might as well enjoy it since I will be bed-ridden for a couple more days at least.

Yesterday was glorious with high fever-induced dreams and associated hallucinations. By contrast, today I am just plain sick and hurting like I've been the victim of a baseball bat beating.

Started the antibiotics yesterday, just have to let the thing run its course.

Denny is starting to get better, cautiously. By Monday we will all be strong, hale and hardy and resuming our explorations.

The Revenge of the Pharaohs

I guess no extended foreign travel to exotic lands would be complete without some form of medical situation to spice things up and allow for meaningful interaction with the natives. Whether it is Vishnu, Montezuma or King Tut's revenge, when one feels the all too familiar tummy rumblings, the stage opens to a wild roller coaster ride.

Khaled, the owner of the El Fayrouz with his German-born wife Susan, kindly offers to drive us to the doctor's office at six o'clock. The road to Habu is much more quiet than it was earlier in the day. The near-riot at the one gas station has mostly dissipated by now and we ride unencumbered in Khaled's dusty old Mercedes sedan. Arriving at Habu, he takes the dirt road around the back of the village, skirting the perimeter of the great temple, to avoid the area where the mourning families are still gathering. I'll learn later in the evening that traditionally, funerals used to last a full week -- and still do in some of the more remote rural areas -- but now are mostly reduced to a three-day period, allowing for a long procession of friends and relatives to come pay their respects to the grieving family and bring offerings of food. It does remind me of the millennia-old carved and painted scenes I have seen in the tombs...

We enter the waiting room. Three men and two women are already sitting on low benches, waiting for their turn. Khaled sits and waits with us. A television tuned to what must be Egypt's version of C-Span shows corpulent men in their pinstripe suits and Rolex watches caught in the act of law-making. I wouldn't trust any of them, and the other sitters in the room seem equally unimpressed. True democracy is still a far-fetched dream here. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton briefly appears on the screen, with Arabic subtitles. Someone needs to tell her to fire her hair dresser immediately.

Through the door opening in the thick plastered mudbrick wall, I see slender men in their elegant galabeyas balancing huge platters of food on their heads, walking slowly towards the wake. It seems like an image from a surrealist movie. Indeed, this whole day unfolds like a movie.

It's our turn and I go in with Denny. Dr. Boutros is a handsome man of Coptic background, probably in his fifties, intelligent, animated and straightforward. Highly educated, he comes from a well-to-do Cairo family, but has chosen to come practice in this rural area, charging a nominal fee for consultations. By contrast, he tells us of his brother who practices psychiatry in San Francisco, California, making all sorts of money. He quickly diagnoses Denny's ailment. It is an intestinal bug, most likely food-borne, that is spreading to his other systems. By this time Denny is very weak, having not retained any food in over three days. We're getting up to go and Denny immediately needs to sit back down on the bench, looking like he's going to pass out. He's all gray, cold and clammy and the last time I ever saw him looking this good he was having a heart attack six years ago... I am freaking out, yet with my best measured and composed voice I mention that earlier medical event to the doctor. He's already taken Denny's pulse and blood pressure, which were fine, so he dismisses that possibility and instead puts a salt tablet on Denny's tongue. With all the fluids he's been losing -- and replenished only with water -- his electrolytes levels are just plain depleted. Dr. Boutros adds fizzy electrolytes packets to the prescription.

We swing by a pharmacy on the way back, where we find all the necessary antibiotics and supplements on the list.

The consultation and prescriptions cost us all of £145 LE, or about $24.00 US dollars. Local villagers only pay a fraction of that. No wonder they love him to pieces.

This morning Denny seems to have a bit more spark in his eyes, whereas I've had obsessive dreams all night (arranging and re-aligning countless unidentified carved stone blocks, over and over again, trying to make sense of them). Sisyphus pushing his boulder uphill... I'm trying to convince myself that the aches and pains are due to all sorts of hitherto unknown muscles that were awakened by my day of digging in the trench. But over breakfast I have to confront the evidence: I too have a fever, chills and feel like crap. I barely make it up the stairs to the room, running out of steam halfway.

I guess I'll get to see the good doctor Boutros again...

A Village in Mourning

Before I got to the temple at Medinet Habu this morning, I had a mission: that of finding the office of Dr. Boutros and making an appointment for Denny who doesn't seem to be getting the upper hand on this respiratory/intestinal bug he caught. Dr. Boutros comes highly recommended. Even one of the hotel guest, a French woman who is also a physician, told me he was the man to see. He lives and works in the little village right in front of the temple enclosure. The cab driver who took me there knew him well, saying he is a good doctor, kinda crazy, but a good doctor.

I find the office alright -- his name is painted above the door -- but Mr. Boutros is not there. He usually opens his office at six in the evening, or so I am told...

Meanwhile the little village of Habu is in turmoil. A woman died unexpectedly yesterday. We even heard about it at the hotel. Details are missing but apparently she collapsed quite suddenly, having shown no signs of illness. When we arrive at Habu the place is crowded with people, cars, motorcycles and camels. Everybody came to honor the life of a daughter, sister, mother and wife who was well loved. Men and women dressed in black crowd the dusty road. I stick out like a sore thumb, but fortunately nobody pays me any attention.

Later, after visiting the temple, I come back again to see if by miracle the good doctor would be back already (he is not). The streets are now deserted, except for a lone donkey, too young to be put to work. His coat is thick and fuzzy like a plush toy. He lets me pet him on the head and stroke his furry ears.

We will be back at six this evening.

The crush of humanity

With my legendary luck, I arrive at Medinet Habu as five busloads of high school children, augmented by one each of German, French and British tourists, are spilling their contents at the entrance. It will be just peachy to try to see anything, let alone take photographs...

I take my time and wander off into the smaller adjacent temple of Amun, started around the time of Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis III, and added to through the Ptolemaic period. Interesting to see how the style evolves from New Kingdom to Late Period. Crews from the Chicago House are conducting conservation work there and a large part of the temple is cordoned off, which doesn't prevent two young pubescent women in their brightly colored scarves from going over the rope to take cellphone pictures of each other in provocative poses in front of the carved reliefs. The photos are probably already uploaded on their FaceBook pages. Speaking of which, as I brave the crush of humanity to enter the main temple, at least a dozen kids ask to be photographed with me. I have to wonder what they see in this middle-aged bearded foreigner...

My patience pays off, and after maybe 30 minutes a teacher blows a whistle to summon the kids back to the waiting buses. How far did they come from to spend such little time here? Cairo? Alexandria? I can't help but wonder what, if anything, they will retain of their visit. Just one more obligatory school trip perhaps.

The monumental fortified gate at the entrance of the precinct is unique in Pharaonic architecture. It is called a Migdol and is said to be inspired by fortifications in the Levant. It was the point of entry into a massive enclosure wall made of unfired mud brick. Within that enclosure is the aforementioned temple of Amun, the chapels of the Adoratrices of Amun, the memorial temple of Rameses III proper, its adjacent palace and a number of ancillary buildings, store rooms etc.

Most impressive to me is the perfect alignment -- en enfilade -- of the buildings. From the Migdol gate one can see all the way into the vanishing point of the Holy of Holies. Strangely enough it reminds me of Versailles or the Louvre seen from Les Tuileries in Paris. I guess royal architecture from all eras find their common ground in the grandiosity of their perspective.

The kids are gone and the tourists have splintered into smaller groups. I venture into the main temple, which is the most complete and well-preserved of all the memorial temples of the West Bank. Many column, wall and ceiling decorations retain much of their original color. Use of color was very symbolic in ancient Egypt. Skin color in particular. Men had reddish skin while women were represented with more of a golden tan. As far as the gods were concerned, however, skin tones ran the gamut. I already knew that Amun had blue skin (sky color), and Osiris was green (regeneration), but I am here surprised to see that the lioness-headed Sekhmet had the loveliest turquoise as a foundation.

There used to be an early Christian Church built into the second courtyard, of which no trace remains. One can infer its presence by the removal of the original Osirian pillars, and the strange square sockets carved at regular intervals into the architrave around the courtyard, presumably to hold supporting beams.

The palace intrigues me. Rather small and intimate one would think for such a great king, but one must remember that Pharaoh wouldn't hold court here, it was just a place to stay and rest while visiting for ceremonies and celebrations, or to survey the construction progress. The king's bathroom shows one of the earliest instances of a shower stall with indoor plumbing. Ah, luxury!