Beautiful Habu Temple

It's about time I threw up a blog post. Sorry, all you avid fans!

My excuse is that I'm getting ready to move to Ramla, which is only 5 or 10 minutes down the road from here. [Here is Medinet Habu.] Ramla is much more convenient for getting into Luxor. Much less convenient for seeing all the beautiful ancient monuments on the west side of the river.

So this morning I finally visited beautiful Habu temple. How did I stay away for so long?

I visited the temple over a year ago, when I was in Egypt on a tourist visit. I was blown away by the relative peace, since most tourists don't make it over to this temple. And amazed by the remaining original paint and so much else.

I wrote a new chapter this morning. It comes in the opening section of the book. Revision is going slowly. Lots of re-evaluation.

Just letting my blog readers know that I'm still here!

Silence and Ghosts

It's quiet. I just realized that it's quiet.

It's mid-afternoon on the first day of Ramadan. [This post was written yesterday.]

We're in the country here on the west side of the river, among farms and also"villas" for foreigners. So the noise level is nothing like the loudness of Luxor, on the east side.

Farming is quiet here, because the farmers don't use machinery. Occasionally you see an antiquated tractor. I suppose farmers rent these as needed. But mostly farming is what it has been for thousands of years—backbreaking time-consuming labor.

But now I'm missing the background hum of voices. And animal noise. Bleating goats. Braying donkeys. Roosters proclaiming their authority. And the friendly horns of motorbikes and minibuses, from the road that parallels the canal, across the field from my apartment.

I opened the door to let the dog out, and heard the voices of neighbor children playing. And then there was the mid-afternoon call to prayer. And I let the dog back in, and the children's voices were silent again.

I suppose I should now talk about how, in our culture, we're uncomfortable with silence. And so on. Which is true, I guess.

But here, the silence is haunted.

When I first moved into this apartment, I was aware of rubbing elbows with ghosts. A vast crowd of them. The people that lived and worked here, millennia ago.

The Pharaoh's palace was here, in the 18^th dynasty, in an adjoining village. And so the west bank of the Nile was highly-populated and very busy, while the east bank was more rural. The opposite of the modern situation, and hard to imagine.

This afternoon, in the silence, the ghosts begin to crowd the edge of my consciousness. I saw one once, at night, from my bedroom, standing in the doorway. He was in the dark of the hall, so I couldn't really see him. But I knew he was there, watching, looking. Not in a threatening way. Just wondering what I was doing there, in his space, in his time, and with such unusual clothes and such a strange haircut.

This is what ghosts are, I think. (I'm not talking about malevolent entities, which are different.) They are the electromagnetic signature of people of another time. Their time and our time somehow intersect, and we have an anomalous situation.

Now that I've written my post, I think I'll turn on the TV and let noise and electronics dispel the ghostly silence.

For more on intersecting warps of time, read Louis Sachar's book Holes. Brilliant.

Hungry Hungry Geckos

I've heard that, in the southwestern U.S., many people think that it's good luck to have geckos in your house.

Well, don't say that to my Brazilian friend who lives here in Luxor. She recently killed a gecko. Her account of the killing was pretty gruesome.

She's obviously scared of them. She says that there are geckos in Brazil, and they're hungry and mean. They'll eat any food you leave lying around. They'll start gnawing on your arm, if you let them.

I have the impression that, in the Amazonian region, all the wildlife is nastier than wildlife anywhere else. Nevertheless, geckos are insectivores, not carnivores. So my Brazilian friend is safe. But she probably won't come to visit me anyway, knowing that I have geckos in my house.

My geckos stay away from me. I stay away from them. So we all stay happy.

The geckos eat flies and any other bugs that they find. (They even eat up dead flies. Geckos are more efficient than a vacuum cleaner.) So I have all-natural, chemical-free, pest control. At no cost to me except disposing of the occasional little dry dropping.

So we're all happy. But the geckos still give me the creeps.

I know why creepy aliens in science fiction are often reptiles. For one thing, they have no odor. This should be good, but it's weird. My dog doesn't react to them at all. For her, they don't exist.

My geckos are putty-colored, which is unpleasant, somehow. If they had any definite color--say, like the little green lizards you see around here--that would be slightly better.

But my geckos are remarkable. You'll find a congregation of them on the domed ceiling of my living room. I've spotted as many as 6 up there. But lately I think they've decimated the insects in my house to such an extent that many of them have gone elsewhere to forage. I'm left with a skeleton crew of 3, I think.

They walk around up there on the domed roof as if they're on a floor. They run around. They move incredibly fast. This speed, combined with a long tongue, helps them catch flies. But I think they also must have some way of actually attracting the flies. Although I can't imagine how they could attract flies, since geckos have no odor.

The most amazing thing is their communication. Geckos use clicking noises, a bit like dolphin noises only at a lower pitch. Sort of "tut-tut" noises. Sometimes it's just the gecko in the kitchen telling the one or two geckos in the living room, "I'm here, if you're looking for me." But sometimes they're milling around together on the domed ceiling and clicking away, and I wonder what they have to communicate to one another.

I suspect that Mr. Samuel Morse heard geckos communicating. And that this may have helped give him the inspiration for Morse Code. Even if he was unaware of the source of his inspiration.

Not so windy after all

Well, the khamsin wind was still blowing on Friday morning. But the farmer women were out in the fields, gathering hay or straw. And the donkey carts were going up and down the road. Business as usual, because the work has to get done or perhaps you don’t eat. This is life for many people in Egypt. The life of farmers everywhere.

I decided to try wrapping a cloth around my head, Bedouin style. The scarves I tried weren’t right, but a voile curtain was. I got it fixed perfectly, with the ends anchored. I had the long end pulled across my face, covering nose and mouth. And then I pulled the long end loose and let it hang free. I thought I looked quite fetching. Though maybe not quite Gertrude Bell (T.E. Lawrence’s contemporary, whose bio. I haven’t read yet.)

Now I was ready for anything! Blow, khamsin, blow!

And then I saw the news videos on the internet, about the tornadoes in Alabama & elsewhere. Suddenly, my little romantic khamsin excitement seemed insignificant and silly.

I’m writing this sitting under my grape arbor, now and then glancing across at friendly Qurna Mountain. The breeze is blowing strong and warm, hot even. It’s a scorcher today in Luxor--106 degrees Fahrenheit/41 Celsius. A heat wave all this week. But on the west bank we have fields and trees and breezes.

Now that I’m living around the corner from one of the great temples of ancient Egypt, in my delightful little/roomy house/apartment, I feel like on of those eccentric foreigners of the old days. Well, eccentric at least! Hopefully not as eccentric as Om Sety, who lived for decades by the temple in Abydos. I might do a post on her. We’ll see.

Medinet Habu

 Dateline: Thurs., April 28th

This morning I moved out of Luxor. Across the river, to Medinet Habu. And this afternoon the temperature in Luxor hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 Celsius). In breezy Habu, it must have been at least 10 degrees cooler.

And my house is remarkably cool. It's an apartment really, but it feels like a house. The building has a Nubian-style brickwork dome as the ceiling of each room. And the floor tiles are not modern ceramic, but traditional hand-made tiles, with geometric designs in earth-tone colors. (The tiles could have come straight out of the Pharaoh’s palace, in nearby Malqata! But they didn’t, of course.) The point is that these domes and unglazed ceramic tiles are thermally efficient, as well as beautiful.

Later in the afternoon, my landlord kindly drove me to the main road to do some shopping. As we drove back up the road, he observed that Qurna Mountain had disappeared. Qurna Mountain is the hiding place of the tombs of the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens. Medinet Habu is almost in the mountain's shadow, which sounds ominous. But the mountain is like a friendly and protective presence—which I can see as I look out of my bedroom window or relax under the grape arbor at the side of the house.

The khamsin had kicked up. A strong wind straight from the Western Desert and, beyond that, the Sahara. And so the mountain was hidden by a shining invisibility of sun and sand. Although, as we approached, the mountain re-appeared.

This evening I walked around the corner in search of food at one of the many nearby restaurants. These restaurants, and a hotel, are ready to serve visitors to the temple of Ramses III, which is just opposite the restaurants—or rather, the restaurants are opposite the temple, since the temple was here first, of course!

The wind was really kicking up, so, reluctantly, I ate in the dining room, instead of on the terrace with a full view of the temple. The wind was warm. Not warm, but hot, as if someone had opened an oven door.

In the small hours, I woke up. Because I was a little cold, I think. The wind was now blowing almost chilly through my open window.

What I haven’t mentioned is the exhilarating quality of the wind. Disquieting, energizing, almost electric.

To be continued.