Curses

Day 9 - Luxor

We'd arrived in Luxor despite, or rather because of, Egypt's magical ability to bend our plans to its cynical will. After the wedding we hadn't made it downriver to Kom Ombo as I wanted because the wind wasn't with us. Maybe Captain Migo always wanted to trot out this excuse as he could more easily pickup another fare in Aswan but after toiling against the wind for half an hour I was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Even the elements here are trying to cheat you. Back to Aswan then, I could live with that. What I found harder to live with was the fact that the entire structure of Aswan Railway Station, physical and procedural, was made of graft. Rule 1 in ensuring you don't get ripped off as tourists in a country know for ripping off tourists is to remove the human from the equation. For example book your accomodation online through a reputable website. Or, if you fancy a ride around town in a horse and cart then negotiate the price with the horse, they'll be doing all the work anyway. Uber is the best example of this maxim. While I would not defend the company ordinarily I do take a great amount of pleasure in walking out of an airport and strolling past the gaggle of taxi drivers trying to lure me into their cabs for an ill-defined 'cheap price' and ordering an Uber (other app-based firms may be available) for a pre-defined cheap price. Those other drivers enjoyed their salad days of ruthlessly exploiting the naïve tourist. Or even the less naïve tourist who had to give into their racket as I often did. As an aside I'm not sure Mike and I would have got through six months of India without him murdering a tuk-tuk driver. Those drivers in their pomp, making up prices on the spot, charging the maximum they could get would no doubt say "this is the free market!", "supply and demand!", "take it or leave it!". Well lads what I would say is that this is still the free market it just seems to have shifted away from you, take it or leave it. They extracted all my sympathy along with my money long ago, fuck them. There is, however, no Uber for trains and the aforementioned four walls of Aswan Railway Station formed a temple to corruption. We knew we were likely to be taken for a ride if we went to the ticket desk but, upon spotting a ticket machine, gleefully thought we could implement rule 1. Many, many despairing taps of the screen later it was clear that this lump of electronics would not sell us the tickets to Cairo that we needed and was complicit in the scam. What are they paying you, machine? What's your cut? I approached the miasmic chaos of the ticket desk prepared to be bent over in a rudimentary but efficient way. I knew the price a local would pay was about $4 but as I neither walked nor talked like an Egyptian (though did look like one according to guy in Cap d'Or) there would be a markup, I smiled my sweetest smile. 1000%, one-thousand-percent, was not the markup I was prepared for. They'd gone too far and I walked away in disgust. Mike and I sat outside for a while trying to make the Egyptian Railways website work but, really, it was never designed for working. Sometimes you have to admit you can't beat the system and that they've closed all avenues you could take to beat it. We went back inside and back to the desk. We were then ushered into a back office and went through some bizarre process whereby we handed $80 in cash to a guy who counted it and then handed it to another man who counted it and placed it into an envelope like we were ordering a hit. I'd probably mind less if they were a bit more genial about it. That would lubricate the hand they slip into your pocket. But they treat it like some grave and unenviable task. Maybe I should give them some lupins.
Back to Luxor. Or rather Karnak. If the pyramids were known to me, and, somewhat lessened by that then the Hypostyle Hall wasn't. I stood in front of one of the central columns and I was awed. They rose 24 metres into the air and their cylindrical girth seemed unending which is the nature of circles I grant you. The closer I stood the more imposing they became and the more mortal I felt. If the pyramids were steps to the heavens then these columns surely propped them up.

For all that we are specs beneath those heavens a temple like this is the work of a mightily confident people. A people convinced they stood at the very edge of time, where humanity bleeds from the force of its momentum. Well the Pharaohs were convinced, the people probably did the bleeding. The more humble sort that constructed or paid the taxes that funded it may have given less thought to their place in eternity. The most impressive physical endevours of makind do raise the question in my mind of whether all the beauty was worth it. The resources expended on a project like this could have been spent on food and shelter for the poor instead. A lot of food and shelter. Was their disenfranchisement worth it so mankind could pat itself on the back and so I have something to look at? That makes a pyramid, a hall, a terracotta army seem trivial. And perhaps they are. But perhaps they serve as a point of unity. Perhaps as a species we need something to work towards together, that reinforces our sense of community. An international space station has more virtue than a giant tomb but, while the ancient Egyptians were excellent astronomers, the former was a bit beyond them. And the Babylonians would have smuggled whores aboard anyway. Something like the Great Pyramid reveals the curious duality of human nature. The craving to be part of something bigger and share its rewards but also the desire for power and self-glorification that allows someone to conceive of such a monument.
After Karnak Mike retired to the Bob Marley Peace Hostel to have phone-sex with his husband and to flash his penis at other guests experience a towel mishap in the hallway. Not really fancying either of those pastimes I instead went to be amongst my people in the Valley of the Kings. The diametric opposite of a pyramid must be digging a hole in the ground to inter your earthly remains and a cache of bling. But what holes! There's 65 of them built between 1539 and 1075BC. With the notable exception of you-know-who all the rest of the Pharaohs have seen their tombs plundered for the bling which, as I previously said, suggests the average Egyptian wasn't quite as invested in these grand projects as royalty was. Time hasn't been kind to the decoration either but the best preserved are still spectacular and like being in a time capsule three and a half thousand years old, which, thinking about it, is exactly what they are. Even without the contents you can feel the strangeness of the world in which they were built.

A rich world full of imagery and ideas. Next it was a visit to the mortuary temple of Hapshetsut. It is a stunning pavilion atop terraces gently sloping from a cliff face and holds Egypt's second female pharaoh. There was a final stop at the Ramesseum so I could feel like Percy Bysshe Shelley's traveller. I don't even know if Shelley ever visited Egypt but his traveller, Diadoros, certainly did. He was a Greek historian from the 1st century BC and the ruins he saw were ancient even then. For all the wonder that modern archaeology has unearthed there is also the wonder of buried mystery, vast and trunkless. Standing in a desert explained by hieroglyphics or folk memory or not at all. Boundless and bare and just there. And what would Ozymandias think of Diadoros or Shelley as we contemplate his broken monument? Disbelief in our lack of belief maybe. At our secular interest in his god-given might? Cartouche or custard factory, neither stops the clock. We never stop trying though. If prostitution is the world's oldest occupation then maybe stone-carver is the second.
Memento mori.

P.s that seemed a rather poignant moment to end this entry on but, alas, travel is often memorable for gurgling tummies as much as golden mummies. After getting back to the hostel I found Mike both clothed and relaxed which was an odd combination for sure. We hit the streets in search of dinner. And given that it had been 13 years since our regretful Colombian stew we decided that it was time for another culinary adventure. A brightly lit cart provided it. There is no way to give you insight into the person who gazed expectantly through the grease-speckled glass. No way to understand the things he said or why he thought a couple of off-white specimens such as Mike and I would enjoy some off-white specimens such as these.

He enthused and cajoled, confident in the wares. Why not some of the black stuff too? I cannot explain but that person was me. Clearly I'd left the Valley of the Kings with Tutankamun's curse on me. After ordering up a length of cow intestine (for that is what it was) and some of the rice we retired to the hostel roof deck. Jah wouldn't save us from the curse however. A first bite went well, tasty, meaty. A second also, nice texture to the rice. A third and the ship begins to list. A few sips of beer and the ship is steady again. A fourth bite of the intestinal tube and we were holed under the water line. We can eat no more but it's no use, the stomach is in our stomachs. And the brain is informing them, rapidly and in detail, of the crimes of the mouth. Like that appetites are gone, any morsels still making their now-endless journey between our molars are deposited into a nearby bin. Even the beer tastes sour afterwards. It takes guts to choose your dinner as unwisely as this.