Encore

After my last blogpost, some of you out there may have concluded that I had reached the end of my Egypt posts. I am sorry to disappoint you because here's another Egypt post containing eight more of the photographs I took.

I suspected that the top picture - of an Egyptian policeman  in The Valley of the Kings would prove especially appealing to any gay gentlemen who happen to visit this blog.

Below this marvellous block statue of Yamunedjeh caught my eye in Luxor Museum. He was a royal herald to Thuthmosis III who was reigning Egypt in 1450 BC...

Above, at Karnak Temple In Luxor, I spotted that cheeky sparrow having a rest on one of the criosphinxes. Below - tourists are circling the statue of a scarab beetle for good luck.

Above, Egyptian humour on a Nile ferryboat at Luxor. Below, the sign on a very famous tomb. Tutankhamun means living image of the god Amun.

Above I spotted this shop sign in Edfu. It will amuse some football,fans because Mo Salah is the name of Egypt's greatest ever player. Below - one of the most incredible things I saw in Egypt. It is the Nileometer on Elephantine Island, Aswan. The carved lines on that flight of very ancient stone steps were for marking annual flood levels. Flooding heralded fertility with more bountiful harvests to follow and thereby tax levels in Ancient Egypt could be adjusted up or down.

22/3/56

If he had lived, my younger brother Simon would have been seventy years old today - but he died on July 19th 2022 at the age of 67. I wrote a poem in his memory on the evening of his passing. Let me share it with you again...

⦿

Song for Simon

No more

Wood pigeons cooing

Morse coded messages

From the ridge tiles

Nor painted ladies

Shimmying through open windows -

Fluttering like tiny Bhutanese prayer flags.

No more the dark two a.m.

Wondering who I am

Recalling paths unfollowed,

Regrets twinkling

Like distant stars.

No more struggling for breath

Or cowering in the shade of death.

It’s over.

No more plans

And no more schemes,

No more

Elusive butterfly dreams.

Your words are destined to stay unsaid

Now that you have joined the dead.

    No more…

No more.

⦿

Looking back almost four years now... His was not the happiest of lives. He lived in the shadows of who he might have been.  His mind was significantly affected by smoking weed and cannabis resin. Always a cigarette smoker. at times he also drank too much and his attitude to the world and people  beyond his door was filled with scorn because Simon always knew best. I was often the convenient recipient of his venom.

He made my mother's life a misery. He kept returning to her like a bad penny. She was often afraid of him and his weird moods. He could be very aggressive and said horrible things to her. Sometimes she barricaded her bedroom door - wedging a chair against the door handle in case he came into her bedroom in the middle of the night. But she was his mother and in spite of everything she was there for him. She considered it her maternal duty.

For about seven years - between the ages of 28 and 35, Simon had a relationship with a local woman called Linda. Shirley and I liked her a lot. Linda was the best thing that ever happened to Simon. They bought a little house together in Hornsea on the North Sea coast and for a while he seemed like a changed man. I might even dare to say that he was happy... briefly.

But then the nastiness started up again. This time targeted not  at my mother but at Linda. She also became afraid of him and very sadly, they split up. The little house was  sold and despite my protestations, Simon moved back in with my mother. 

She should have been living out her days as a merry widow but instead my monstrous brother was back to torment her, belittle her, criticise her cooking, yell at her, steal her money. It was awful and during that time she would often come over to Sheffield to stay with us. We gave her sanctuary and she could sleep peacefully in her bed before the inevitable journeys back home.

In spite of undiagnosed mental health issues and to his credit, Simon managed to earn wages throughout his troubled life. He was rarely out of work and eight months before his death through cancer, he was still working with a contractor who serviced the water infrastructure - maintaining small underground reservoirs and associated piping for example.

Sadly, he had already offloaded his cherished guitars. In his prime he was a great guitar player. Much better and more dedicated than me. He had real talent and patience when it came to strumming or picking but typically he cut away the rope that connected him with that joy.

Though I stopped loving him decades before he became a human skeleton, I am proud to say that I was there for him at the end. It is what my parents would have wanted.

As folk will often say tritely when death occurs... he is at peace now.

Cruising

Shirley and I had never been on any kind of cruise before and we had always spurned the idea of "all inclusive" holidays. So booking a Nile cruise aboard the "Al Horeya" was something of a departure for us. We fancied Egypt but not the idea of making independent arrangements as we have so often done in the past.

All cruise boats on The Nile look similar. They need to fit through the locks at Esna and they need to pass under bridges. Our boat had five decks with the top one being a lounge area complete with a bar,  a small swimming pool and two little jacuzzi pools. I swam in the pool twice.

Our cabin (Number 420) was on the fourth deck and we were pretty happy with it. The twin beds that butted up with each other were spacious and the pure white Egyptian cotton bedding was smooth and clean. The little bathroom was perfectly serviceable and the hot water supply was reliable. There was a narrow Juliet balcony overlooking the river. The only thing I did not appreciate was that there was a locked connecting door to our neighbours' cabin. Fortunately the couple next door were as quiet as us. The majority of cabins did not have that issue.

Fourth floor housekeeping was undertaken by two young men - Mustafa and Mahmoud who were always smiley and always there. They kept sculpting our towels. See below...

Most passengers ate down on Deck 2 where the Lazeeza restaurant was located. Here breakfast and lunch were buffet affairs. For evening meals there was waiter service.

We were very happy with the food choices and at lunch and dinner there was always something different on the menu. At breakfast I had a freshly made omelette every day after watching it being made by happy Mohamed in his tall toque blanche.

One lunchtime Shirley and I raved about the spinach tagine and I even got the recipe from the head chef. He seemed delighted to be asked.

There were 140 passengers on the boat and eighty two members of staff. We found them all to be diligent, welcoming and smiley. By the way - there were no women in the staff team with only one working woman on board - our holiday rep from Shropshire - Katie. She was very nice and had a fine singing voice too.

We found ourselves conversing at length with several other couples on our boat and this was an enjoyable part of the experience. There were some very nice people but one or two whose main topic of conversation was themselves - where they had been, what they had achieved, what they thought. Once stung, you made a point of avoiding these windbags. There were two widows sharing a cabin, a brother chaperoning his disabled brother and two pairs of gay men who were very comfortable with the holiday experience even though homosexuality is still highly stigmatized in Egypt.

There was a lovely, relaxed atmosphere on board and if someone had said to me - this is how the rest of your life will be from now on, I would not have minded.

Cruising along The Nile with a G&T in your hand. There are far worse things you could spend your remaining time doing.

Faces

 As someone who sees the world in pictures, I often wish that there were no barriers to taking photographs of people's faces. It's tricky territory. But every face hides a lifetime of experiences, achievements and disappointments. Sometimes faces speak more of a foreign country than sights - such as those that The Nile reveals when you are cruising upon it.

In Egypt, I managed to capture a few faces. Current faces in addition to the many faces we saw in tombs and on the walls of temples. At Edfu, I gave the man at the top fifty Egyptian pounds for his image which seemed to disgruntle him. Fifty Egyptian pounds is about seventy pence in British money or $1 US.

This second portrait is of Fatma - our lovely Nubian guide on Elephantine Island, Aswan. She kindly agreed to my request and I said that the reason I wished to take her photo was because she had a nice face.

I spotted this mural on Elephantine Island. I guess that she is also a Nubian woman. The same artist had decorated some other walls in the neighbourhood.

Ayman was our onboard Egyptologist. He knew a lot and was certainly blessed with the gift of the gab but he didn't seem to understand that what people sometimes require is peace and quiet and time to absorb what they are seeing.

This lad was steering our "felucca" sailing boat across The Nile and was happy to pose when I asked him.

This young man was on security duty by The Avenue of The Sphinxes in Luxor. Naturally, he needed a hundred pounds after snapping a picture of an old Yorkshire couple in their sun hats with Luxor Temple looming behind them - like the perfect backdrop for Verdi's "Aida"...

By the way, the tall obelisk on the left was meant to be balanced with a similar granite needle on the right but it was stolen by France in the nineteenth century and re-erected in Paris at Le Place de la Concorde. In my humble opinion, they should give it back. 

Sideshow

Not many rivers flow from south to north. The Nile is the most significant river on that small list. It has two sources. The Blue Nile rises in the mountains of Ethiopia. The White Nile begins its journey in Africa's great lakes region. These two parent rivers meet in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan.

Then the great river flows north to Aswan which is southern Egypt's most significant city. Moving further north it is about 140 miles to Luxor which in ancient times was known as Thebes. This was the very cradle of Egyptian civilisation - an economic and cultural awakening that endured for three thousand years.

It hardly ever rains in central Egypt. Without The Nile, Egypt would have been an inhospitable and barren desert. The river brought the means to exist and prosper. To this day, The Nile nourishes the land to both east and west, forming green strips of agricultural land. Even in ancient times, Egyptians knew how to divert river water - building canals and irrigation ditches. All wealth grew out of The Nile.

Unlike Steve Reed who cruised from Cairo to Aswan in 2019, Shirley and I drifted from Luxor to Aswan and back again. The banks of The Nile were like a sideshow or even a slideshow sliding by. You never knew what you might see.

Sometimes people waved. Here a fishing boat. There a mosque and the muezzin calling  believers to prayer. Here a woman washing pots. There an egret flashing white  in front of dense date palms. Ruins. A remote railway station. A white 4X4 vehicle on a beach. And all the while - The Nile flowing northwards like an everlasting dream.

Messaging

Hieroglyphs were everywhere. Carved into temple walls. Lining the subterranean tombs in The Valley of the Kings. Painted on coffins. Carved into statuettes. Engraved  upon jewellery. Not artwork or mere decoration but messages to gods and to educated people and to those who would follow later. Everything you saw meant something.

Most ancient Egyptians were illiterate. They tilled the soil, fished in the river, harvested crops or responded to the commands of their superiors. Royal families operated at an entirely different level. After all, they were themselves god-like.

Ordinary people were generally excluded from the main temple sites which were reserved for the priesthood and obviously the blessed rulers with their families and entourages.

None of this is new to you. In the western world, Egyptian iconography been familiar for decades. We may not know what it all means but we have seen it. Some of us have long known of the principal Egyptian gods: Ra, Osiris, Anubis, Isis, Amun and  Horus - the falcon god.

Ancient Egypt coloured both the Greek and Roman worlds. Those invaders marvelled at what had been achieved in The Land of the Pharaohs over countless centuries and sought to adopt that knowledge, attach themselves to that wonderment.

And always the symbolism, the hieroglyphs. With this blogpost there are just a few examples of random images of messaging I  chose to photograph - speaking to us from three or four thousand years ago.

Mind blowing.

Amenhotep

Seen just yesterday morning in Luxor Museum. It is the magnificent granite crowned head of King Amenhotep III. Once it was attached to a colossal statue that was one of many that decorated his funeral temple on the west bank of The Nile opposite Luxor. He inhabited the New Kingdom of Egypt some 3350 years ago and was the ruling pharaoh for forty five years.  Tutankhamun was his grandson.

His reign marked a time of exceptional prosperity and grandeur, during which Egypt reached the height of its artistic and international influence, making him one of ancient Egypt's greatest pharaohs. He was also one of the few pharaohs worshipped as a deity during his lifetime.

What a remarkable privilege it was to be in the very room where that beautifully carved granite head now resides. It might have been machine-made just last year but it was expertly hand-carved, smoothed and polished over a thousand years before those three wise men allegedly arrived in Bethlehem.

Egypt... so many stories, so many puzzles, so much magnificence... and through it all ran The Nile.