Journal: Wednesday 1 December 2004
At breakfast today Sam & I decided to drive up to Esna as neither of us have visited the temple there for a few years. Because the tourists are all south of Esna (at least the ones on cruiseships) the police have temporarily stopped the convoy between Luxor and Esna for the duration and we could drive there at our leisure. It was a lovely drive along the east bank – hardly any other vehicles on the road. We passed el-Moalla tombs and also saw Gebelien Hill in the distance.
Sam only got a little lost in Esna but that was due to the one-way system – an unusual experience in Egypt. The entrance to the bazaar leading to the temple is not easy to find when you’re driving past as it’s a very narrow lane and the temple is not signposted. We eventually found it by parking on the Corniche and walking. Got a little side-tracked in the bazaar while Sam bought a lovely bright red scarf and I tried on a really nice linen galabeya. Unfortunately they only had the particular galabeya I liked in extra large which was much too big for me. I told myself I really didn’t need it – I’d already bought a beautiful and very expensive ‘suede-look’ galabeya in Cairo. I have a passion for galabeyas which I wear all the time at home and have several winter ones from Cairo which are velvet or linen and warm enough for England. I don’t like the tourist ones you see in Luxor with lots of garish embroidery. We also found a lovely wikala very close to the temple. This is a medieval trading post and a sort of inn where merchants would stay and trade their wares. This one, hidden behind a stall in the bazaar, was a bit derelict but had some lovely carved woodwork.
We managed about an hour and a half in Esna Temple before the first lot of boat people turned up and took over the temple. First we walked around the outside walls looking at the reliefs of Roman emperors before various gods. Kings named are Titus, Domitian, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius and Caracalla. They wear an amazing array of decorative crowns. Divinities include Neith, Sobek, Khnum & Menhyt.
Inside the temple there has been quite a lot of restoration and cleaning done since I was last here and although it was very dark many of the reliefs were quite easy to photograph. There is also much more colour showing in some parts than I remember seeing before. These weird and wonderful Roman hieroglyphs continue to defeat me and I find it almost impossible to recognise and identify the names of the deities. I’m always intrigued by the crocodile and ram ‘cryptograms’ (or calendars?).
There are some lovely temple ritual scenes with some unusual deities – mostly upper Egyptian gods and many of the Elephantine deities are depicted. On one pillar there is a relief of four Meskhenyts with the same headdress we found on a god in the Seti Temple at Qurna. Another column has a curious relief of a king in an odd pose which looks like he’s dancing. He wears a long diaphanous kilt. The astronomical ceiling and the column capitals are particularly beautiful, as is the relief on the north wall of the king, Commodus hunting with a clapnet in the marshes with Khnum, Horus, Thoth and Sefkhet-wert.
After leaving the temple we walked back down through the bazaar and went to a coffee shop we’d noticed near where we parked the car. All of the cruiseboats are lined up along the corniche and occasionally a group of brave tourists will venture off a boat for a short stroll. As we were sitting (among the men) drinking our ahwa and Sam was having her shoes polished by a little boy, we noticed one cheeky bunch of tourists taking our photograph and videoing us. Yes, we’re the floorshow yet again!
We had a lovely leisurely drive back to Luxor. Thought about stopping at el-Moalla but decided that we probably wouldn’t be able to visit Ankhtifi’s tomb as there has been a lot of excavation there recently. Last time we went there we had to wait hours for the gafir with the key and it was pitch dark by the time we got into the tombs. They were very helpful on that occasion as they dragged a generator up the hill and we saw the reliefs by torchlight. Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures then. Wish I had! We also stopped so that I could take a picture of the distant hill of Gebelein with it’s distinctive sheikh’s tomb on the top – a site I have yet to visit.
Arriving back in Luxor around 5.00pm, Sam and I later went out to eat at Farag’s (green) restaurant on Yussef Hassan St. This is an Egyptian restaurant and the only veggy food they had was a tuna pizza (which was horrible). I should have stuck to my usual rice and vegetables, but it gets a bit boring by the third week. After we had eaten, our friend Salah phoned and invited us to the Etap where a friend of his from Cairo was singing. Her name is Maha and she has a very good voice – especially when singing Arabic songs including some Omm Kulthoum numbers. Bed by 2.00am.
Sailing between Edfu and Esna is always a joy. It is a peaceful countryside where little mud brick hamlets crouch beside the river, hardly changed since pharaonic times. Straw or fodder for animals is stacked on the roofs, along with peppers or whatever herbs and vegetables are suitable for drying. Most of these tiny villages belong to extended families which portion the cultivated strips of land between them, sharing the produce so that they are fairly self-sufficient. The only sign of a modern world is the occasional roof-top satellite dish sparkling in the sun. Some villages have no running water and still use the Nile for many of their daily tasks. Children are naked or bare-footed as they scamper between the houses and old ladies look after babies in the shade of the courtyards. It could be almost anywhere in Africa.
minutes a kind of hurricane had blown up. Palm trees on the opposite bank were bent double and quickly the dust and sand blew so high into the air so that I could see nothing beyond the boat decks. Everyone on our boat was cowering in the main salon for cover as, on deck, it was impossible to stand up straight. Within minutes the conditions had worsened and a fierce electrical storm blew in from nowhere, with huge bullets of rain lashing the windows. These storms seem to be following me around on this trip! It was gone as quickly as it had arrived and within half an hour of it beginning, the storm had passed over and all was calm again. We sailed into the lock and were lowered down into the next level of the river. Onwards to Luxor. It was not until later in the evening that I learned that a cruise boat in the queue behind us had overturned in the storm, with twenty passengers killed as well as four crew members. It was a terrible thing to happen and everyone was very sad for the families of those who had been killed. Cruise boats have flat bottoms and must carry a certain amount of ballast to balance the heavy upper decks. Apparently the boat that sank had insufficient weight at the bottom, and it was unfortunate that this freak weather had caught it. That evening we were all very anxious to telephone home to reassure our families that we were OK, but luckily the news hadn’t reached there yet.
As soon as we arrived we left the boat for the short walk through the bazaar to Esna Temple, which stands today in its excavation pit in the centre of town, 9m below the modern ground level. The temple, dating to the Ptolemaic and Roman Period and one of the last temples to be built in Egypt, was dedicated to the god Khnum and several other deities, including the goddesses Neith, and Menheyet. It is thought that the structure would once have been built to a plan similar to the temple at Edfu but all that now remains is the hypostyle hall that was built by the Roman Emperor Claudius who extended earlier buildings. The remaining part of the temple is around a quarter of the size of the original building, and the oldest part of the structure still standing is the back wall which would have been the facade of the original temple. The roof of the hypostyle hall is still intact, supported by 24 columns each with varied floral capitals. They are decorated with texts describing the religious festivals of the town and several Roman emperors before the gods. The age-blackened ceiling is decorated with Egyptian astronomical figures and Roman signs of the zodiac. The dark single hall reminded me of old engravings I had seen in books and in the open space in front of the temple I was captivated by a lovely statue of Menheyet who was a little known lion-headed goddess named at this temple as the consort of Khnum.
Then the months of waiting, anticipating, dreading disappointment and the packing and re-packing of my suitcase were over; in the departure lounge at the airport, the waiting still seemed an eternity. At last the plane took off and Christmas card scenes of a snowy English countryside slid below me, a misty winter sky reflecting a pale full moon setting over a gold-washed landscape. A perfect morning to begin an adventure. In five hours the flight over Switzerland’s deep gorges and glittering mountain peaks, the sparkling blue of the Italian coastline, Corfu and the Greek Islands (can there really be so many?) and a short hop across the Mediterranean Sea, brought us to the long empty stretch of African coastline and then Egypt. Egypt at last. I could see nothing but an infinity of deep golden sand patterned with waves, from above, an ancient sea long forgotten, a clear barren emptiness, peppered with giant paw prints of wind-sculpted rock and interspersed with deep dried-up valleys. And I fell in love. Suddenly we were flying along the Nile, a bright silver-blue ribbon of life twisting and turning on its never-ending journey from the Highlands of Africa down to its wide green Delta. Narrow strips of cultivated land on either side of the river were bordered east and west by vast stretches of mountains, linen folds rising to the high flat desert plateau. The foothills, a neat patchwork of tiny brown or green fields and villages of dun-coloured brick and thatch basked in the warm glow of a low sun. The occasional glint of a moving car or truck or a crooked row of telegraph poles would pick out a road alongside the straight line of a canal as we began to descend. In the midst of my reveries the pilot said we would soon be landing, ‘Seats upright and seatbelts fastened please’ and after a sudden acceleration and one or two bumps we were cruising down the runway of Luxor airport past ancient remains, not of huge stone monuments but the burnt-out corpses of Egypt’s martial past. Luxor was a military airport and its sinister bunkers and scattered remains of drab-coloured warplanes were a reminder of the country’s troubled times of a few decades ago.
