The 'Real' Egypt (part 4 of 6)

“Don’t tip them!” Moumoud shouts at us as men approach leading the camels we’ll ride to the Pyramids.

“Camel ride!” the men shout. “Baksheesh!” Baksheesh is tips or alms. The men obviously want them.

I’m lost in foreign culture and ways. Is Moumoud being a jerk? Are these people poor? Their clothes are a bit dirty but perhaps that’s the natural way a robe and turban look when you work amid the sand all day. I want to tip them, but is a dollar too much? Is it offensively low? Will they think I pity them? I don’t want them to think that. Or are they hoping I’m a foolish American tourist who drops cash into every hand thrust out at me?

I slip away from the unknowable at the sight of the camels. Have you ever seen a movie in which camels walk before a sunset? It looks so graceful and serene, but that’s all Hollywood. These lumbering beasts are as capable of such fluid movements as they would be of breaking into an arabesque. The men pull at the ropes, almost dragging the stubborn animals behind them. It seems it would be easier for me to sit on the ground, have them tie the rope to my legs, and drag me.

The men race to us, yanking their camels after them. A man stops before me. “Come!” he invites and demands. I step forward, Alf behind me. We have to ride two per camel. I stare up at the ten-foot high animal. “How do I get on?” I ask with a laugh.

The man pulls at the rope and fires a volley of rough sounding Arabic at his camel which responds with a curled lip and a jerk of it’s head. The man yanks again. The camel emits a loud hacking sound, like the noise Linda Blair made when she barfed on her exorcist, and refuses to budge. Infuriated, the man somehow makes the same horrid sound back at the camel. The beast drops to its front two knees then drops the back two to rest on the ground. A ridiculous red and gold padded saddle that looks like a harem pillow presents itself to me.

I get on, and Alf follows suit. “Damn this thing smells!” he growls. Only then do I realize the scent should bother me. I just don’t care to let it. The camel rises up and I grab onto the saddle so as not to fall off. The man drags the camel, which seems bent on going in any direction except toward the Pyramids, after him. The whole thing seems mightily inefficient and could easily be an “I Love Lucy” skit, but I dismiss this thought. I’m riding a camel! How Egyptian!

At that moment I see an image that wipes out everything else in my mind. The Pyramids are before us and from behind one a silvery car emerges and drives away. The juxtaposition of those structures from thousands of years ago and the 20th century technology knocks me for a loop. This country has been around forever. Pyramids, cars, America. It’s all a blink in the eye to the history of Egypt.

I wonder about the man tugging the camel. What would he think of my idea that riding a camel is Egyptian? Is it a stereotype? Why does he drag me on this camel when cars are available? Is it pride in the history of his country? Is it a quick buck? It is demeaning? Is any of this Egyptian? What is it to be Egyptian?

The camel ride is over and we stand before the Pyramids. They’re as big and silent as Time. Yet the pyramids are an illusion of Egypt. In movies they are grand and imposing, and I started this paragraph with an impressive statement about their presence. It’s very true but, at the same time, unless you’re at some photogenic vantage point, the Pyramids are rather underwhelming in a certain sense. They are tall, but in the desert there are no trees or buildings to give real scale to them. Their magnificence is muted. When you look up the face of the Pyramid from its base, it’s a series of large rocks shrinking into the distance and the top of the Pyramid represents a rounded arc rather than a point.

Worst of all, it’s impossible to get a picture of them “up close.” They’re too big. You can choose to see a lot of detail of the dozen blocks right in front of you or you can stand far away and see the whole structure while the individual stones fade into one another.

I reach out and touch the stones as if they have magical properties. How many hands over the past several thousand years have rested in that exact spot? A worker pushing the stone as part of his duty to his king and god? A conquering Roman soldier? A shifty tomb raider of unknown origin? An explorer from Napoleon’s France? Who knows?

At that moment, I’m treated to one of the students on the tour asking our Egyptian guide what she thinks about theories that aliens built the Pyramids because the ancient Egyptians couldn’t have done it alone. I wanted to slide under the Pyramids in embarrassment.

“You see over there?” the guide said, clearly irritated, and pointed to what looked like a series of rocky hills not far from us.

“Yeah,” was the dull reply.

“Those are quarries. The rock was craved out and placed here. Ancient Egypt was an agrarian society and the land was flooded for several months every year. A huge portion of the population was out of work and their king was their god.” She turned away and answered other questions, apparently mastering her outrage.

I looked at the quarries and wondered what I would think of an Egyptian standing before the Declaration of Independence and asking if aliens had written it for us. My faux pax at the mosque was a simple mistake, but the question about aliens was different. And it wasn’t the first or the last incident of this type I’d witness. Why did my fellow Americans have to say such stupid things?


End Part 4...I'll be posting a part a day for the next week.