standing in antiquity

Jerry and Judy Stone are lifetime travellers who have just returned from Egypt. With his permission, I am reprinting the following travelogue that Jerry sent me.

Our Egypt trip was perhaps the single most impressive of all our journeys. We were overwhelmed by the antiquity of the place. Standing in front of the Sphinx with the Cheops Pyramid in the background, the pyramid’s massive size and perfect triangularity seemed to possess a power and force as if it were pushed up from below by an underground god. It seems to suggest that all later architecture was born solely of fanciful human imagination. And to realize that these monuments of the third millenium B.C. stood centuries before our great Western literary tradition began to unfold with the Homeric and Hebrew texts. Even Herodotus, the 5th-century B.C. Greek historian, was describing ancient history when he wrote about Egypt!

Then the boat journey up the Nile to Karnak and Luxor and on to Aswan with the sights along the way--a history unfolding from the ancient through the Hellenistic, Ottoman, and modern worlds.

We gazed at massive statues and pillars. We saw carvings on tomb and temple walls that described so elegantly the daily lives of the people. They pictured how the royalty lived and died--one foot in everyday life and the other ritually stepping into the next world, a world inhabited by their real and/or imagined gods. We're still trying to digest the full meaning of ancient Egyptian art. We pondered the mythic step from Isis, Osiris, and Horus to Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, a move which seems only “one small step.”

We will always remember our one-hour camel ride that passed the 7th-century monastery St. Simeon. For a brief moment after St. Simeon, we were alone in the desert. Finally as our camels carried us up over a ridge, we saw the oasis-like greenery at the Nubian village below, nestled beside the Nile River. As we rode down to visit the village, Judy and I felt like ancient Bedouins coming in off the desert. We imagined ourselves as Peter O'Toole in his role as Lawrence of Arabia.

There was so much more. We walked through bustling bazaars and beheld manifold monuments. We witnessed peasant life in the midst of 21st century modernity. The juxtaposition created an almost surrealistic mix of past and present. We remember our excellent guide, Hani, our great group of 16, our sometimes surpisingly nice accommodations and good food, and Cairo’s automobile traffic which merrily and wackily rolled along.

And we, too, merrily rolled along.

Sphinx pyramid Egypt travel travelogue travel+horizons Cheops Nile Karnak Luxor Aswan Isis Osiris Horus St.+Simeon Numbia Lawrence+of+Arabia Cairo bazaar