At 8:45 a.m. the sun was not yet oppressive, the smog not yet risen, and the Corniche relatively quiet, the trucks and tour buses having yet to come out in force. The roadway was almost free of traffic, and what there was, was picturesque: bicycles, robed men on slow-moving donkeys or in donkey-pulled carts, and the ubiquitous, garishly pretty horse-drawn taxis called caleches (another tag-end of Napoleon’s occupation). Cars passed not once in two minutes. Instead of blaring horns, diesel engines, and screamed curses, there was only a muted clip- clopping, lazy and affable.
On the face of it, then, the walk from Horizon House tothe great pharaonic temple of Amenhotep III should have been a relaxing and agreeable way to launch their stay in Egypt, a peaceful, fifteen-minute stroll through the middle of an exotic picture postcard.
Exotic it certainly was; relaxing and quiet, by no means. In six years, Gideon had almost forgotten what it was like for foreigners, especially reasonably well-dressed foreigners, to walk down a street in an Egyptian tourist center. Anytime they stopped for even a few seconds to admire the view of the Nile, or to tie a shoelace, or to wonder what lay behind some ornately gated high wall, men and boys, all with goods or services to sell, appeared from nowhere to descend enterprisingly upon them.
“Welcome in Egypt!”
“Hello, English? Where you from?”
“Caleche?”
“Taxi?”
“Felucca ride, Banana Island?”
“Just look, not buy!”
“Hello, Karnak, yes? I take for nothing.”
“Come on, at least say hello. What it can hurt?”
Sometimes laughing young men would hurl a barrage of English—probably their total arsenal—at them, seemingly just for the fun of it: “Hello! Thank you! Good evening! Bye-bye! Michael Jackson!”
By the time they were halfway to the temple, they had learned, as all visitors sooner or later did, that in order to make any progress they had to avoid the eyes of strangers and ignore the frequent questions and greetings that came their way. For New Yorkers, thought Gideon, this would probably be nothing new, but for a couple of people accustomed to the neighborly, easygoing rhythms of the Pacific Northwest it was going to take some getting used to.
“I feel like the original Ugly American,” Julie said to him as they quickened their pace past a caleche driver ecstatically welcoming them to Egypt. “How cold they must think we are. But if you say something polite you end up feeling like a—like a slab of meat in the middle of a swarm of flies. And I can’t quite tell when they’re poking fun at us.”
“I know,” Gideon said sympathetically, “but it can’t be helped. I know one Egyptologist who says it’s the worst part of being here. You can’t walk three steps—at least in a place like Luxor—without being made to feel like either a sonofabitch or a sucker. He says it’d drive him crazy if he let it.”
“So what does he do?”
Gideon shrugged. “He tries not to go out in the street.”
From a distance of two blocks, the Temple of Luxor was a letdown. They had come eager to be overwhelmed, but the famed monument had next to nothing in common with the evocative nineteenth-century paintings and drawings of a great, ruined, enigmatic temple half-buried in shifting dunes, with no signs of human habitation in sight, and only the occasional artfully posed Bedouin to give it scale. They had known, of course, that it had been largely—but not altogether—dug out of the sand, but they had failed to realize how fully in the heart of downtown Luxor it now sat, looking forlorn and not so very monumental, surrounded by wide pavements, modern buildings, and passersby who didn’t bother to give it a second glance.
But once they’d paid their admissions and entered the grounds, actually walking through the tumbled, eroded masonry, the modern city receded and the magic enveloped them. How could it not? They were in the very heart of ancient Egypt’s capital city, the ceremonial center of what had been called at various times, by various peoples, the City of Amen-Ra, the Biblical city of No, the great city of Thebes (so named by the Greeks of Homer’s time, long after its heyday).
For almost two hours they prowled over the grounds at will, drawing envious looks from groups of glazed-eyed tourists being herded by umbrella-toting guides. Mostly, they walked in silence, without even a guidebook, content to take in the grandeur and history without fussing about the details. They walked reverently through the great Colonnade of Amenhotep and along the Avenue of Sphinxes; they gawked up at the First Pylon and the colossal paired statues of Ramses II. They stood before the famous rose granite obelisk, also once part of a pair, but solitary since its twin had been shipped off to Paris’s Place de la Concorde in the 1830s.
Across the river, framed by the temple’s columns and only slightly obscured by the brown haze that had materialized over the city with the daily appearance of exhaust-belching trucks and buses, was a bleak moonscape of low, corrugated hills and arid canyons. In one of those wan, scorched canyons, Gideon knew, was the most famous, most fabulous burial complex in the history of the world.
“The Valley of the Kings,” he said. “The carefully hidden tombs of Ramses after Ramses, the grand celestial chambers of Seti I and Amenhotep, the golden treasures of Tutankhamun. Sixty-four pharaohs were buried there, Julie. The Place of Truth, they called it, the City of the Dead—”
“The Forest Lawn of Egypt,” Julie said.
He blinked.
“That’s what your friend at the Smithsonian calls it,” Julie said. “If you ask me, he has a point.”
Gideon laughed. “Was I getting a little lyrical there?”
“Just a little.”
“I think maybe we’ve done enough sightseeing for a while?”
“Could be.”
