The Trek to Abu Simbel: A Monument to the Heat

Our wake-up call came at 3 a.m. Our bags were packed and in the hall by 3:30. We had breakfast and boarded our bus for the Cairo airport at 4:30.

Our plane left at 6 for Aswan, an hour’s flight south. Our destination had been Abu Simbel, the early start being meant to get us to that monument in the cool of the morning. Why we landed instead at Aswan we weren’t told. That’s the way it is in Egypt.

Our leader, the Music Center’s Marlene Billington, explained only that we were at the mercy of the airline. We would land at Aswan instead of Abu Simbel, visit the Temple of Isis that morning and go to Abu Simbel the next day.

On the way to the temple our bus stopped at a quarry and our tour guide, a young and pretty Egyptian woman, told us to go look at an enormous slab of granite or limestone that had been cut for an obelisk, but had cracked and been abandoned. We got out and walked over the slab in the desert heat. It indeed had a crack in it.

I said to one of the women in our group, “I’d rather see the obelisk in Paris.”

“Yes,” she said, “there’s more ambience.”

We took water taxis to the Temple of Isis. It was built on the island of Philae when Rome was young. Egyptian priests were still worshiping their gods in it when Rome was in decay. This magnificent ruin, with its beautiful bas reliefs and splendid columns, each topped by a different floral capital, was built by the Ptolemies on Philae, but when the lake created by the Aswan High Dam threatened to flood that island, the entire temple was moved, stone by stone, to the higher island of Algikia, a modern engineering feat as awesome as the original construction. A small Christian altar below a niche for the Virgin Mary testified to the eventual triumph of Christianity over the ancient gods.

When we boarded our boats for the return to our buses, Billington told us the plan had been changed again. An EgyptAir jet was waiting for us at the Aswan airport to take us to Abu Simbel. Now. As we boarded the plane we were handed sack lunches containing a bun, cheese, a banana and an orange. It was the safest lunch we had had.

It was only a 17-minute flight. Our buses took us to the back side of the mountain in which the Abu Simbel monument is embedded. We had to walk half a mile through stony sand before we stood finally before what is perhaps Egypt’s finest temple. The temperature was well above 100.

I forgot my swelling feet as I contemplated the four seated statues of Ramses II, ancient Egypt’s most prodigious builder. Each figure is 65 feet high. The Pharaoh’s wives and daughters stand at his knees, barely larger than life. Other statues of the great one stand in an inner court. Oddly, the builder’s faces have an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile. Egyptologists believe he was the Pharaoh who enslaved the Israelites.

I dreaded the trek back to the bus, but my comrades discovered that there was a shortcut through the temple and the great cavity carved behind it in the mountain. I was annoyed that they hadn’t told us about it in the first place. Evidently they wanted us to come upon the monument from the sand, for greater emotional effect. One of the women in our group was overcome by heat exhaustion in the temple. She was the first.

We were bused back to the waiting plane and flown to Aswan, where we boarded our river boat, the Queen Nabili I. In the lounge I had a bottle of Egyptian beer and had reason to thank Prof. Weeks for his excellent advice. It is a yeasty lager beer called Stella, and comes in enormous bottles. I have no doubt that it saved my life.

That evening after dinner on board we were entertained in the lounge by Nubian dancers, including a belly dancer of remarkable talents. With dinner we had a bottle of Egyptian white wine. It was called Cru de Ptolemees, a product of the Egyptian Vineyards Co. It tasted slightly of vinegar, but it was all there was. With a French flourish, the waiter poured a sip for me to taste and approve. I sipped it, shuddered, and said the ritualistic “Fine.” We drank it every evening.