Leaving the South for Alexandria

Luxor

Quiet smooth departure, farewell to the Temple of Luxor, massive columns against the sunrise, the alley of the Sphinxes and the spare Temple of Karnak.

The evening before we had disembarked at Esna, its typically dusty streets and crumbled concrete, to a famous temple which had just closed. The venders ran after us with their wares, as an exhausted white ass crumbled in the dust, her large eyes wary, her ears twitching back and forth. We decided to bargain for a jellabah. Four men and a boy ruffled through their huge store of jellabahs till I chose a beautifully embroidered one, and Jacques began his aggressive, impassive bargaining. The men were shocked, and pleaded with me (trapped as I was among the heavy male shouting) why don't you help us? Il est dur, I said. We get it for 10 euros, quite a deal, and the men are fuming.  And I am ready to leave behind all the badly abused horses and burros, their exhausted, traumatized eyes.

Pyramids beyond the city

Our flight from Luxor descends to Cairo's rosy beige sand and we board our bus for Alexandria. Cairo is working hard on making the desert bloom, but construction is halted everywhere. Endless unfinished buildings have no rooftops, but upper story brick floors bristle with steel struts, or simply crumble while still uninhabited. Since the revolution, everything from garbage collection to postal service has suffered.

Cairo's contrasts

Contrasts: gated communities of nouveau riche villas sit next to dusty tin and concrete enclaves. Roads of corrugated tin stores with beasts of burden trudging in the dust adjoin sudden fields of green crops with sheep, oxen and asses. People came to live on the outskirts of Cairo for the fertile Nile, but their construction has buried all the greenery under crumbling brick and plaster bidonvilles. Where units have been stuccoed and painted they have an attractive Moorish style, but more often bright laundry hangs from battered, unfinished concrete. And lo, the Pyramids can be seen, topping all the dust and smog and dilapidated buildings.

Raising pigeons

Out on the Desert Road to Alexandria are acres of vegetables tended by squatting men in jellabas and their livestock. Palm trees whose lower dry branches still cover the trunk border long-needled pines, orchards and vineyards. On the side of the road, selling their wares, vendors sit in tents of sticks and plastic. The canal has stretched up from Abu Simbel to yield crops and flowering pink fruit trees. I smile at a pickup truck of teenagers and they have quick smiles to return, waving two hands in the air. The pickups have ornately covered headboards in the back, and personalized mottos (Trust No One, Rambo, etc.). Everywhere are pigeon towers, for Egyptian feasts. They look like beehives, meters high and aerated with holes and nooks. Oranges are spilled frequently in piles on the sides of the road.

1930's Alexandria

Three hours later we are in Alexandria, which is freezing, a fierce wind blowing on the rough Mediterranean. We arrive at Athenios, a Greek restaurant still looking like 1930, still gaudy and golden with an ersatz Nike at the entrance, though the tablecloths were stained and a box of Kleenex serves as napkins. Still, the tomato fish soup is superb. We stroll around the dusty décor, nostalgic for Alexandria' golden ages.

Amphitheatre

One of those ages is being excavated around a Roman amphitheatre. The area was continuously inhabited from Ptolemaic times until Late Antiquity (3rd c BC-7th c AD), leaving behind mosaic floors amid crumbling stone. In the Byzantine period this was a dense maze of small houses with shops and small workshops specializing in glass and bronze production. The remains of a red brick Roman bath of the 4th c AD was once an expanse of vaults and domes, with a sumptuously decorated interior, underground heating and aqueducts.

Water heating for the baths

The Roman theatre was used for 300 years, falling into ruin only after the Islamic conquest. It was a small theatre for music performances, later expanded. Greek graffiti praises the winners in chariot races.

Nearby is a vast complex of lecture halls that was in the centre of the ancient city. All the auditoria have tiers of benches lining three of the walls and an elevated seat for the lecturer at the rounded end. Absolutely unique in the Mediterranean world, they were part of an academy of learning for which Alexandria was renown 5-7 c AD.

Alexandrian lecture hall

We drive through cramped streets in standstill traffic, the seaside corniche (boulevard) completely in ruin, moldy, flapping with dirty cloths over hollow windows, relics of an intriguing Moorish-colonial architecture, in some places restored and elegant. There are shops of antiques and dusty memorabilia and exquisite mosques of lacey stone, where demonstrations are held Friday afternoons. In city squares people sit on grass beneath palm trees as garbage swirls in the air. On the outskirts are shallow waters of bullrushes, where men and boys maneuver their flat skiffs.

Fort Qaitbey

The rough pale blue-green Mediterranean beats against gold sand and sandstone jetties, and everywhere are cats, drenched by the pounding sea at the Fort Qaitbey (15th c.), or the Citadel, the perfect little fortress. They are mangy and wet but seem to survive. They jump on boats and boulders, rocking in the waters.

Along the corniche some of the buildings are so dilapidated and discolored and abandoned that the city can seem a tragic ode to our Faustian age. Still this is the seaside resort where one escapes the summer inferno of Cairo, elegance mingled with extreme disrepair, grand hotels on the sea, across from discolored, depressing concrete piles.

The Catacombs in 1902, Wikicommons

The next day we visit some late Roman era catacombs, that have been discovered in the most dilapidated, crumbling quartier where women nonetheless walk in pristine silky scarves, and brilliantly colored clothes hang from green shutters and paneless windows. These burial vaults are the Greco-Roman version of a decadent Egyptian art. In place of the jackal Anubis, the artist depicts a dog, in the place of the ancient venerable serpent, a worm. These underground warrens apparently belonged to wealthy families of Alexandria's slow decline. We wander through the passageways now empty of bodies, decorated in remnants of Roman art.

Funeral tent, set up in the streets

As we leave the catacombs, our huge bus in the narrowest of streets, we are blocked by a man walking a ten meter ladder side to side, to construct an outdoor tent for a mourning ceremony. We maneuver endlessly around the little market of dates and fruits under the mosque on muddy rutted roads where garbage is here and there piled up and pilfered. A young skinny man comes to the side of the bus, pantomimes lighting a bomb and slamming it into the bus and laughs, and repeats the act around the bus. Dogs and cats scramble through the muddy streets, where well-constructed apartments of brick and concrete are surrounded by discarded and gutted cars--a veritable salvage emporium left on the sides of the street, next to a schoolyard with kids in new basketball outfits. Men shuffle around in dusty jellabahs. It takes almost an hour to maneuver out of the quartier. A beautifully stone-lined canal is filled with garbage. As we circle we see the mourning tent erected--it is beautiful, embroidered silk panels creating a building in the open air.

Our final stop is the Library of Alexandria, a magnificent testimony to a past of great erudition, the 3rd c. BC library having been Alexandria's finest achievement, with its half million texts. This modern day version is high-tech, with museums and exhibitions, a vast reading room, and many ancient books available digitally.

And we are back on the desert road for Cairo.