Circumnavigation

I've had visitors this winter, as I do most winters, and we've had some unseasonably warm clear days to explore the Cairo area. Of course, one of the required visits is to the Giza plateau and on one of my visits there I took a series of photos as we walked around the Great Pyramid so that I could share the experience. The imagination soars with the mention of the Pyramids of Giza and most people who haven't visited Egypt visualise three lonely silhouettes in the desert against a blue sky, a view of them that must be achieved from a distance. The reality of the pyramids is quite different, a reality that some people find disappointing but one that I find never fails to engage me.

To approach the Giza plateau, one drives up an asphalt road from Pyramids Road dodging young men who run out into the road to try to convince the drivers of incoming cars that the ONLY way to see the pyramids is by following them to an area below the plateau where visitors will be mounted on camels, horses, or carriages (sometimes at great expense if the touts are lucky) in the stables opposite the Mena House Hotel and transported up the hill. Their claims are utter rubbish and it is quite possible, and in my mind preferable, to drive up to the entrance, buy tickets for the visitors and the car and then drive on in. There is a parking lot that overlooks the camel stables opposite the Mena House which provides a good spot from which to foray out to explore the pyramids.

As we walk across the stone to the Great Pyramid on a Friday morning, the sheer size of the pyramid never fails to strike. From a distance tiny figures gather along the eastern face of Khufu's pyramid facing the Nile Valley, crawling part way up the stones...as we approach it becomes clear that these are people who are climbing the staircase that has been cut into the enormous stones so that they might enter the tiny cramped passage that leads up to the chamber in the center with the enormous sarcophagus. The impressive weight of the stones, the size of each one, the effort that must have been expended to pile all of them up, is stupifying...but still the passages are extremely uncomfortable and visits inside pyramids are highly overrated in my mind.

As we make our way along the face, we pass Egyptian families out for a day in the open air. Fathers photograph offspring with mobile phone cameras while mothers sit comfortably on the lowest layer of stones dispensing sandwiches and chips. The children are all over the place. Most families in Cairo live in apartments, so to be out in this much space with virtually nothing breakable at hand induces a state of exhilaration in the younger set that is only matched perhaps by watching a set of goat kids bouncing madly around ricocheting off each other and any other object in their immediate vicinity.

As we round the southern side of the pyramid we find ourselves in the area where iron railings protect some of the more active albeit less observant of the young visitors from pitching headlong into the pits that once held the solar boats, beautiful graceful craft made of Lebanese cedar and held together with palm fiber rope. The best preserved of these is in the Solar Boat Museum on the western side of the pyramid, an odd rather banana-shaped structure that provides a climate controlled environment to preserve the reconstructed boat.

The new regulations restrict the camel and horse men who offer the services of their sometimes rather dubious mounts to the south side of the Great Pyramid, the area around the parking lot by the middle pyramid, and the panoramic view point out in the desert where it is still possible to photograph the pyramids in their lonely majesty. After glancing around quickly to determine that a collision with one of the plateau's four footed denizens was not imminent, we had to look up and admire the view of the stones reaching up into the sky. We are so physically lazy in our lives now that it seems quite impossible that these massive boulders should have been moved simply by muscle power, but in those days there were four months during the summer when most of the population of Egypt was available for labour such as this while they waited for the Nile flood to recede. Four months is a long time to go fishing and it makes the concept of the masses of labourers much more understandable.

Rounding the southwest corner of the pyramid we could see the middle pyramid with its limestone sheath still intact at the tip and the oddly shaped Solar Boat Museum next to our pyramid. The middle pyramid always looks larger than the Great Pyramid but this apparently is because it is built on a higher platform of rock. Just before the museum a pair of female visitors were debating with some camel handlers for a ride. As we wandered past we were regaled with squeals and laughter as they experienced the seesaw action of a camel rising to its feet and starting off.

As we headed back towards the parking lot along the north face of the pyramid, we were reminded of the winter winds that we had avoided on the west face. Other visitors were coming towards us with pauses for photographs as they wandered along. At Giza, photographing photographers is inevitable. Some young men tried to look tough and strong while surreptitiously zipping up jackets against the chill of the wind whenever the sun crept behind a cloud, and later we assisted a pair of newlyweds from the Delta with a photo on a mobile phone against the background of the middle pyramid of Khafre.

As we approached our starting point on the east face of Khufu's pyramid, we noticed that the crowds were getting thicker as more and more visitors arrived. Some of them were visiting the nobles' tombs at the northeastern corner while others were making their ways in carriages, on foot, on horseback or camelback towards the smaller pyramids or the panoramic view point out in the desert.

Once back on the eastern face of the pyramid we wandered over to admire the view over the valley. My friend had last been in Cairo in 1971 and remembered how the area before the Giza plateau had been green fields. Now it is so built up as to be unrecognisable to early visitors, but the pollution had been blown away by the winds and we had a clear view of the Citadel across the valley. When we turned to the pyramid again and saw it as a backdrop to the cars in the parking lot, we were definitely brought back to reality and present day.
copyright 2009 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Laying Ghosts

Five years ago, June 9 was a Friday. The school year was just about over, my son was home from his first year of college, and the children were sleeping late in the house in Maadi. Five years ago I decided to slip out of the house early to go take my favourite mare for a ramble in the countryside since the desert was going to be much too hot, so I got up early, stopped by Greco for a latte, and drove out to Morad's place where my horses were stabled then. Some of my neighbours had gone out into the desert (yes, mad dogs and horsemen!), and were meeting for breakfast at Morad's aunt and uncle's house down the road, so I let myself be distracted by good company and laughter over a leisurely breakfast with friends. A country breakfast of fava beans, boiled eggs, salty white cheese, bread and coffee can last for hours and by the time we'd finished the sun was fairly high in the sky. Magdy and Janie had people drop by and the morning moved on into afternoon as we sat in the shade in their garden gossiping, chatting over the news of the day, planning equestrian events, and doing autopsies on events just past.

Around 3 pm I decided that if I was going to ride, I'd better get busy and I walked back to the stables at Morad's to get Dory ready to go. We started out alone and headed north along the canal in the shade of the huge eucalyptus trees that line the road. The dusty road was almost empty at that hour on a Friday. Friday is the main day off work for people in Egypt, and 3 pm is prime siesta time on a Friday afternoon. Dory and I had the world to ourselves. The kingfishers divebombed fish in the canal while the cattle egrets and the white egrets looked up at us on the trail occasionally as they gulped down minnows and frogs from the banks. The crows only grumbled quietly in the tops of the eucalyptus trees. Even the birds were taking time off. Sleepy village dogs couldn't be bothered to jump up from their shady spots to bark at us and just barely lifted their heads to growl.

In the heat I chose a path that kept us in as much shade as possible so we worked our way north along the canal to the asphalt road that goes from Shubramint to the desert dump for Giza. Even on a Friday the enormous trucks were moving in and out of the desert carrying the waste for the city out and bringing sand and gravel for construction in. The intersection (if it can really be called that) of this road and the Mansoureya Road is always crowded with vehicles and workers. Some enterprising individuals have set up tea shops along the road under the trees where drivers can stop for a cup of the black baladi tea and something to eat while they stretch their legs out on the woven mats that mark the area of the "shop". Some horses would find making their way through the trucks and cars intimidating, but Dory doesn't find anything intimidating anymore. She does her own looking at oncoming traffic and responds to the slightest touch from me to adjust her path around these enormous vehicles trailing streams of sand and dust.

Just before we arrived at the intersection, I placed a call to Germany. My husband had flown his Beechcraft C90 there the day before and was planning on returning that evening. I caught him as he was on the tarmac in Augsberg doing a final check on the plane before taking off. We chatted, the usual sorts of things said between people who have been partners for about 25 years, and then I asked when he expected to arrive in Cairo. I was to have the driver go to the airport at about 11 pm unless I got a phone call from Greece where he might stop to refuel if necessary. Yes sir. No problem and have a good flight. Be careful. He'd been working much too hard lately and I was happy to hear that he'd slept late that morning. Dory and I negotiated the traffic as I finished my call to Germany, and we headed on down another shady dirt road on our rather indirect way home.

That was the last time I spoke to the man that I loved more than my own life. The next morning I was a widow facing challenges that I could not even imagine at the time and my children had lost their guide, their protector, their tyrant, their father. The greyness that I remember of the morning of June 10 might not have been there in reality but it was so much there in my being that the shreds of it linger today. Five years ago I had no idea that I would be plunged into financial and corporate chaos so horrific that I wouldn't even have a moment to consider what his loss meant to me as a woman. Five years later the chaos is down to mere confusion at times, I'm out of the corporate quagmire for the most part, and I've had time to consider my loss in the peace of my home in the country. That isn't really such a blessing, I guess.

I woke this morning to the calling of the parrots and the crowing of the rooster who shares the flight cages with his little harem of hens. One of the dogs was barking at someone passing by on his way to the fields and the sparrows were arguing as usual outside my bedroom window. I shoved a dog off my foot and recognised the enormous crater where my heart used to be, and I realised that I have to come to terms with my life alone. I've had to make a trade for the quiet of the country that I love for the excitement of never knowing what fascinating plan that man would come up with next. My life now is much calmer, less stressful, but I miss the electricity, I miss the confusion, I miss the anticipation that was so much a part of it before. I miss waking up next to a large warm body that isn't a Great Dane pup who has sneaked onto the bed at night.

My life goes on. Friends have asked after me and pointed out that I've been alone for five years. Isn't it enough? Have I thought of moving on, of finding a new partner? I've realised over the past few weeks as I've reflected on this anniversary that I haven't been ready for anyone new in my life. I still haven't said good-bye. When I finished my phone call to Germany, I said "I'll see you soon." I think I've been expecting to all this time, but I know now that it isn't going to happen. Yes, I need to finally say good-bye. I need to let it go and perhaps the empty place inside will fill again. But it is so terribly hard to say.