Entering our third month

The Nile downtown

We have been here just over two months. Fall is clearly here and it’s lovely—the days are mild, the nights cool and breezy, and I can wear long sleeves in comfort. Not a drop of rain has fallen, but the days are shorter; it reminds us that though we live in a desert, it is pretty far north in latitude (about 28 degrees).

We had our first out-of-town houseguests, Nancy and Tom McCandlish, and now feel fully capable of hosting people. Their coming spurred me into cleaning up the guest room, formerly known as the junk room, and scuba gear is now stowed neatly instead of being strewn about. Nancy and Tom were very complimentary about our flat, which though it started as very beige, is now surprisingly pretty.

Djoser's Step Pyramid, Nancy, Tom, Harris, me

Learning from guide Ali, Dashur pyramids on the horizon

We took Nancy and Tom on a whirlwind tour of some parts of Cairo they had not already seen during their tour package up the Nile. Emad drove us and we packed ourselves into his Hyundai and hightailed it out to Saqqara to visit the first pyramid every built and some gorgeous noble tombs. The pyramid of Djoser (or Zoser) was an experiment. Instead of a mastaba (or trapezoidal structure whose walls slant inward), Djoser’s architect Imhotep had the idea of putting a series of mastabas on top of each other, each decreasing in size, each built of local white limestone. The result is a pyramid but with the appearance of steps, hence its nickname, “the Step Pyramid.” Considering this was done around 2600 BC with stone tools and no wheels, it’s even more amazing. 

Bas relief Saqqara tomb, Nile fishing; note the croc below!

The Old Kingdom tombs in the area were amazing as well. Our favorite was that of a princess, Idra. Its walls are covered with bas-reliefs, shallow three-dimensional carvings that were painted, and depict the gathering of everything the princess would need in the afterlife. Details like cattle swimming a river to be herded up, with fish beneath and a calf bleating and sticking out its tongue to its mother, amazed us. You can practically hear the honking geese, splashing fish, and lowing oxen. One thing that we continually mused over was how much effort went into making the afterlife of the rich so plush. Surely it took at least a lifetime just to create the tombs and monuments, and it’s hard for the modern mind to comprehend such a long view and shoring up such wealth.

There’s a new museum at Saqqara that contains wonderful pieces from the tombs and pyramid, from mummies to some of the over 40,000 stone vessels found underneath Djoser’s pyramid. In fact, there is so much at Saqqara that it is the largest ancient funerary area in the country, with more tombs than the Valley of the Kings.

Detail of Saqqara tomb, frightened calf and its mother

Nancy and Tom atop the Citadel

The Alabaster Mosque

After our visit to Saqqara and a leisurely lunch, Emad tore through the traffic to get us to the Citadel in Cairo to visit the Alabaster Mosque (aka, the Mosque of Muhammed Aly), built around 1848. Its style was intended to out-do the great mosques of the 17^th century in Turkey, particularly those designed by Sinan for Suleyman the Magnificent (like the Blue Mosque in Istanbul). The Cairo mosque is very grand, and indeed covered in soft reflective alabaster, but I prefer the originals in Turkey. But the view from the peak on which the mosque sits lays the city out beneath you.

Chilly for the first time!

Aboard the felucca

After relaxing at the flat from our touring, we gathered a feast housekeeper Kiki had made of kefta, tahini, veggies, potatos, cake, Egyptian bread, some wine and sodas, and went to the Corniche to step off into a felucca for a quiet picnic dinner. A young friend of Nancy and Tom’s, Radwa Khairy, joined on our sail up and down the Nile, accompanied by jazz on Harris’s portable speakers and iPod. It was so breezy and cool that it marked the first time I’ve been cold other than sitting in overly air conditioned rooms!

Then it was back to work for me, the airport for Nancy and Tom, and business as usual. Harris gave a talk at AUC on John Milton as a revolutionary, and demonstrated how his poetry was both revolutionary literature and bespoke Milton’s politics. It was masterful. BTW, we wish we could be in New York City on  Saturday, 3 December, 11:30-2:00, at the Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th Street (just east of 7th Ave) to celebrate Annie Fitzgerald’s life. If any reading this are going, please celebrate her for us.

PS: our favorite sighting while touring Cairo: an old pickup truck in downtown traffic with a horse standing up in the flatbed. Also, flocks of goats by the roadside in preparation for Eid. The holiday celebrates what the Hebrew and Christian Bible call the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham (or near-sacrifice) and the Qu’ran calls the sacrifice of his other son, Ismail. It’s a huge national holiday, and we are using the time to go scuba diving. Big surprise…..