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Fingerprints of the Gods

Day 5 - Cairo
Another day, another sunrise. I hadn't signed up for this one. We'd arrived back at Sharm el-Sheikh airport at 4:30AM after managing to find a bus in Suez that was going south. Have you ever tried to explain to airport staff in Egypt that you need another passport stamp because the one you have doesn't let you go to Egypt? It is an agonising task and the language barrier was formidable. Their solution was to fob us off onto the next colleague who would ask the same question as the last one - "which your flight?" There was an inability to fathom why we were there if we weren't getting a flight. None of them could take even an intellectual baby-step towards understanding our issue. Initiative had been thoroughly trained out of them if it ever existed in the first place. An hour and 20 minutes later we got to someone with good enough English and an alert enough mind to allow us to elaborate on our problem. The airport Einstein took us to a small back office, pulled a stamp from the filing cabinet and with a thunk we had what we came for. That was all it took.
By 6AM we were by the beach watching that red disc emerging from the sea and waiting on somewhere, anywhere to open and give us coffee. By 8:30AM we were in the bus depot again. Wearily dragging ourselves up the steps to the bus I reasoned that sometimes you just have to keep on keeping on. Approaching Suez again I cannot say I expected things would play out any differently, you could say my faith in Egyptians was at a low ebb. Mike was ready to abandon the country entirely should we be turned back again. The border control agent looks sternly at us and then flips through passports once and then twice...and then hands them back. We were through the border and by that evening we'd reached Cairo. Only took 26 hours.
Ancient Egyptians were the first people that really captured my imagination as a child. They had something that Romans or knights in armour or cowboys didn't seem to have. Their history stretched back so much further into the murk of a time beyond our comprehension, here be dragons and such. I was aided in my fantastical conceit by the works of Graham Hancock. In his books he argues for the existence of an advanced civilisation 13,000 years ago that was destroyed by comet impacts. The few survivors passed on their knowledge to the nascent Egyptians and, lo, pyramids. Weathering patterns on the sphinx that suggested a far greater age than conventionally agreed fascinated me. There were suggestions of a secret chamber beneath the paws that the Egyptian Antiquities Organisation refused to investigate. Why wouldn't they just check? What did they have to hide? Curse you Zahi Hawass you stooge! Hancock's ideas aren't respected in the world of archaeology and as I got older I became a little more rigorous in my application of scientific theory to my beliefs but the affection for Egypt remained. It still has the sphinxes and pyramids and pharaohs and mummies. As I stood before the great pyramid of Khufu at the age of 41 I wondered what had taken me so long. They do say never meet your idols though and it wasn't the mouth-agape, speech-stifling experience I might have expected. How many times have you seen a picture of the great pyramid, read about its astonishing features? Seeing it in person meekly confirms the pre-expressed awe. There is no way to un-know it. I longed in the moment to be Herodotus cresting a ridge after a long camel ride from Heliopolis and first seeing those mountains made by men. Standing there in a stark and empty desert, no Burger King nearby, they must have seemed otherworldly, impossible, a mirage in the heat haze. Nothing could have prepared him adequately and that is discovery. That is adventure when there is not option but to go and to see. But there is no solution to this problem I was experiencing except spectacular ignorance and that is no solution at all.

We'd booked the 7:45PM sleeper train from Cairo to the south of the country. Having completed our pyramiding with Djoser's early effort of c2650BC we had some time to kill. What on earth would Mike and I do with time to kill? There were no windows to give a clue as to the happenings inside but we had tracked down one of Cairo's baladi bars. As I pushed open the door I could make out a dingy, cigarette-smoke-fugged drinking establishment entirely populated by locals. It was perfect. having been here since 1908 it had the kind of heritage that appeals to me too. We ordered two Stella and along with them came bowls of lupin beans, cucumber and chickpeas. The weight of my recent trials eased in the gloom and I could feel the trip beginning to take its intended effect. My life in the UK might still have been in the balance, awaiting someone's shoe to come crashing down, but behind that opaque door I was Schrödinger's cat, both happy and sad. Our cabin on the train was commodious enough but try as we might the window would not open. When the train manager came to check tickets he couldn't shift it either. Ahmed was genial sort and invited us to his office to take the air. We got to talking and mentioned how we worked in the rail industry too. We mentioned how train manager was a well-paid job in the UK which piqued his interest. Encouraging him to look into the possibilities he asked for a rough salary estimate. When he heard the number the look that came over his face was one of...defeat. Suddenly the enthusiasm was gone. The relative enormity of that number had made the idea into some idle fantasy that could never be realised. In his mind it seemed he was as likely to be made pharaoh as to get a job in the UK. It was sad to see someone so firmly believe that better things were so out of reach. But maybe he was right? It brought to mind a conversation I'd had back home several months previously. It was with a highly-experienced physician from Egypt and he explained how the General Medical Council wouldn't recognise his qualifications. He explained this to me as he drove his Uber. There was time in the morning to enjoy a breakfast of bread, bread and bread as Upper Egypt appeared through the window. The long journey had passed without incident, we were getting better at this. Next stop Aswan.
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Location: Giza, El Omraniya, Giza Governorate, Egypt

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