THE TM 911 Franklin Street Weekly Newspaper Michigan City, IN 46360 Volume 28, Number 23 Thursday, June 14, 2012 The Land of the Pharaohs Part 1: by Hal Higdon As we descended toward the Cairo Airport, I The nearly two weeks my wife Rose and I spent looked out the plane window for my fi rst view of in Egypt would be almost totally focused on art. We Egypt. But we were arriving near midnight. It was traveled as part of an Alumni Adventure. Like many dark. Nothing to see, but the lights of a large city. It colleges, Carleton organizes tours for its graduates. could be any large city, even Chicago. As the wheels Over the years, we have participated in Alumni of our airplane touched down on Egyptian soil, I Adventures to Santa Fe, Spring Green, Chicago, exalted at fi nally having arrived in the land of the Wyoming and Antarctica. It was hard to imagine Pharaohs. Finally, I would be able to see the Great that any trip could offer moments more spellbind- Pyramid and all the other works of art fi rst viewed ing than kayaking between ice fl ows at the bottom projected onto a screen in Miss Jean Vincent’s Art of the world, but cruising up the Nile would come History class my freshman year at Carleton Col- close. lege. Until this moment, my views on Egyptian art Soon after stepping off the plane, we paid $15 for had been colored by Miss Vincent. Now, fi nally, I a visa, grabbed our bags and climbed into a van for was about to see in person what previously I saw transport into town on an expressway jammed with only as black and white shadows on a silver screen. cars even after midnight. Cairo has a population of Our friends back in Long Beach worried about our 18 million, Egypt a population of 80 million, and traveling to what they considered a war zone. Egypt most citizens live in the narrow corridor of green a was suffering what politely might be described as few miles wide on both sides of the Nile River. “unrest,” an aftermath of the Arab Spring. Bravely, we refused to allow such worries to distract us. Land of the Pharaohs Continued on Page 2 Cairo is a crowded city with 18 million people Photo by Neil Boyer The Sphinx. Photo by Mike Thomas. THE Page 2 June 14, 2012 THE 911 Franklin Street • Michigan City, IN 46360 219/879-0088 • FAX 219/879-8070 In Case Of Emergency, Dial e-mail: News/Articles - [email protected] email: Classifieds - [email protected] http://www.thebeacher.com/ PRINTED WITH Published and Printed by TM Trademark of American Soybean Association THE BEACHER BUSINESS PRINTERS Delivered weekly, free of charge to Birch Tree Farms, Duneland Beach, Grand Beach, Hidden 911 Shores, Long Beach, Michiana Shores, Michiana MI and Shoreland Hills. The Beacher is also delivered to public places in Michigan City, New Buffalo, LaPorte and Sheridan Beach. Dig down through 4,500 years of sand and debris, and you come to the Sphinx. I wondered if the plas- tic bottles bobbing in the backwater today would survive 4,500 years. What will future archeologists learn about our era other than citizens drank Coca- Cola? Leading our tour was Robert A. Oden, Ph.D., a retired president of Carleton, a respected Egyptolo- gist and member of the Board of Trustees for Ameri- can University Cairo. “There is a lot about Egypt we do not know,” Rob claimed, “and perhaps that is good.” The vendors even sold from the water. Photo by Roy Finkelman. Land of the Pharaohs Continued from Page 1 We stayed at the Cairo Marriott, surrounding a palace built in the 19th century, once used for the world premiere of Aida, Giuseppe Verdi’s classic op- era. But looking back into the 19th century is not looking back far into the history of Egypt. One must look back millenniums rather than centuries, al- most to the dawn of history. The day after arriving, we went for a walk near our hotel, crossing a bridge over the Nile River. Gaz- ing down into the water, I saw an accumulation of plastic bottles fl oating in a backwash. Cairo is not the world’s cleanest city. Sand, blowing endlessly from the desert, settles on everything horizontal. Egyptian columns often showed the faces of their pharaohs. Many apartment buildings have debris piled on the Photo by Mike Thomas upper fl oors and roof, people often living in that de- Rob made the comment while we were at Mem- bris. phis, one of the old capitols of Egypt. We were star- In one respect Cairo is like one millennium’s ing down at a mammoth statue of Ramsses II: hori- garbage dump built on top of the previous millen- zontal, the pharaoh lying on his back, every feature nium’s garbage dump built on a dump before that. well-formed, beautifully sculpted, perfectly pre- served. But the only question I wanted to ask was: Brave tourists ride camels Photo by Richard Dawson Ramesses II (Memphis) THE June 14, 2012 Page 3 The step pyramid at Saqarra Photo by Richard Banyard “Is this the same Ramesses, who starred in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat?” Since there were 14 pharaohs named Ramsses (and seven Cleopatras), remembering which one was which can be daunting. You can become confused dealing with several hundred pharaohs in 31 dynasties, divided into an Old Kingdom, a Middle Kingdom and a New Kingdom, each of those separated by so-called In- termediate Periods, when several pharaohs ruled from separate capitols. Rob’s advice: “Ignore the way Egyptologists orga- nize kingdoms and dynasties. Enjoy what you see with your eyes.” Egyptian landscape What struck my eyes on a day we went from Giza to Memphis to Saqqara was the line separating city and desert. Almost everyone has seen pictures of the Great Pyramids, three of them: huge, over- whelming, but amazingly close to downtown Cairo. Apartment buildings come almost to the edge of the pyramids and Sphinx, and everything beyond is desert—all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, 4,000 miles to the west. Until the French constructed the Eiffel Tower in 1889, the Great Pyramid of Khufu, the largest of the three, was the world’s tallest man-made struc- ture: 450 feet high, constructed of 2,300,000 blocks of stone, averaging two-and-a-half tons in weight. Land of the Pharaohs Continued on Page 4 Sunset on the Nile THE Page 4 June 14, 2012 Land of the Pharaohs Continued from Page 3 What struck me about the Pyramids was not merely their size, but how 4,500 years ago the an- cients fi gured out how to build them: fl oating stone blocks downriver from Thebes in the Upper King- dom, then pushing those blocks up to levels where workers laid them in place, each block fi tting pre- cisely atop each other. After our several days in Cairo, we fl ew to Lux- or and switched to a boat for a week cruise on the Nile. Our boat was the “Misr,” that being the actual Horus, the falcon god name Egyptians use for their country. Misr is about the size of New Mexico, 30th largest country in the world in area, but while Egypt is wide, much of its population lives in the narrow Nile valley. The rest is rock and sand. Egypt is a very rich and a very poor nation. The top source of income is tolls from the Suez Canal, textiles and hydrocarbons next. Tourism ranks fourth, but tourism has taken a ma- jor hit because of nervousness among travelers fol- lowing the January 25 revolution. Camel Sketches by Meals on the Misr were served Hal Higdon luxuriously Photo by Neil Boyer During a week on the Nile, most of our party would enjoy moments spent on the top deck, doing nothing, just watching farmland pass before our eyes, bare mountains forming a background land- scape. It amazed me how the captain navigated on a river where there were no red- or green-lit buoys to Temple at Ednu guide his choice of channel. Sometimes we skimmed so close past low-lying islands with livestock graz- ing in the grass, that I marveled at our not going aground, especially during nights lit only by the stars and Moon. As we cruised southward, we would come to villages, untouched by tourists, probably not that much different in purpose from those you might encounter cruising the Mississippi River. Tired from the almost non-stop schedule of sight- seeing, I went to bed early our fi rst night on the water, but awoke around 12:30 and realized that we were in a lock, being lifted up to a higher level of the river. This was the Esna Lock. I parted the curtain of the glass door leading to the balcony and looked out at vendors stalking the sides of the lock, carrying items—scarves, dresses, blankets—that they hoped to sell to money-rich tourists. But all the tourists on board, perhaps except me, were sleeping. Akhnaten, the heretic king Egyptian gods had style Land of the Pharaohs Continued on Page 6 THE June 14, 2012 Page 5 4121 S. Franklin St. next to Rodini’s Restaurant 219-874-2121 BEACH OFFICE 2146 N. Karwick Rd. next to Hacienda Restaurant Rick Remijas GRI, CRS Cell 773-908-1969 UNIQUE HOMES by THE LAKE in LONG BEACH 3015 Northmoor Trl.