There's an awesome scene in Lawrence of Arabia where Peter Toole looks out into the vast, empty dessert and says, "I love the dessert..." I've always admired that particular breed of Arabists, Englishmen, spies, cartographers, scholars, and mischief-makers who fell in love with the 360 degree vistas of sand and sky they found in the middle east. I saw the same love up close in the face of a young man I met this evening at Barnes and Noble. I was scouring through the travel section and came across: The Egyptian Pyramids. I guess he saw I had a keen interest in Egypt and very shyly asked if I wanted to visit Egypt? YES!
We quickly entered into a vivid conversation about his life in Egypt, roaring around in a 4x4 Jeep, sleeping under the stars, and answerable to no one. The only thing in sight would be a fire crackling, throwing off sparks at a distance. His belly, full of delicious roasted lamb and surrounded as far as the eye could see by nothing but the dark rises of an ocean of sand. Those were the nights.
He told me that Egyptians are surprisingly friendly towards Americans and you actually hear a "hello" , "thank you", and "welcome" here and there. Speaking of surprises, the cab drivers are truly wonderful in an unbelievably crowded and unruly city where there are no traffic lights. There apparently seems to be a language of car horns, honks, coded beeps, and taps containing a large vocabulary of implications as the bumper to bumper cars intermingle with the floods of pedestrians. He explained to me how Pythagorus would have been dazzled to see the traffic pattern in Cairo. Enough about the traffic, give me food!
A typical dish of Egpyt is ful. Ful is smashed fava beans cooked in a copper pot with olive oil and garlic and served with large amounts of flatbread - referred to by the locals as "stone in the stomach." Precisely the solid style food needed for the daily adventures in the dessert. Since pharonic times, the poor and working class have filled up on the stuff as pretty much their principal meal of the day. If you're doing well monetary wise, you get an egg with it and perhaps some chopped pickled vegetables. The problem is most Egyptians aren't doing well, and most do not know what three meals a day is - Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner. They just know Ful once a day.
Nonetheless, there is a place where traffic, poverty, and language does not matter. A majestic landscape designed by Imhotep, built by the Pharaohs, and considered to be the oldest monumental structures on earth: The Egyptian Pyramids. There are 138 discovered pyramids in Egypt but the best known ones are on the outskirts of Cairo, known as Giza. The most famous pyramid being Khufu, the largest of the pyramids at Giza and is the only one of the Ancient Wonders of the World still in existence today. The mystery and majesty of the Pyramids is beautiful and intriguing to me as they were built with the belief that they were steps serving as a gigantic stairyway for the soul of the deceased pharaoh to ascend to heaven. The shape of the Pyramid was designed to be representative of the descending rays of the sun.
Interested? Amazed? Perhaps....Is Egypt a place with a long magical past awaiting the future? I do not know that I will ever understand the Pyramids and its history, I do not know why a young man would take time to explain to me the beauty of his country in a Barnes and Noble store, and I do not know why there are certain places that plague our curiosity. However, after the travels I had with this young man by his extremely descriptive conversation about his homeland, I DO understand why the Arabists, Englishmen, Cartographers, Scholars, and mischief-makers fell in love with the 360 degree vistas of sand and sky....
For the young man, a night in Egpyt, meant a night with far away sparks under the star-kissed sky...
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