My Aunt and Uncle (two of them actually) went to Cairo a few years ago, and they came back telling me that I could never handle going there myself. They warned me that it was rugged and horrible and a city that teetered at the height of dichotomy. The Art Historian in me didn’t want to believe them. I mean look at what’s IN Cairo! How could it be possible that a city, that a country, could hold such amazing things and be anything other than amazing. As it turns out, such a thing is more than possible.
We docked at Port Said, some hours distance from the main city. I could barely bring myself to look out the window during the two and a half hour bus ride from the dock into Cairo, as we got closer and closer to the city things started looking more and more dilapidated.
There are two cities in the world that spring to mind when one is thinking of the desert, of eeking out and clinging to an existence in a climate where there really shouldn’t much more life than scorpions and date trees. One is Las Vegas. The other is Cairo. But whereas Las Vegas has emerged a flashy, multi-billion dollar monument to luxurious success – Cairo just…is. One can’t help but think that it reached its peak many years ago, and now it sits there on the banks of the Nile, all browns and greys without a single splash of green, or colour of any kind for that matter, with trash middins on every side walk because the people paid to clean it up don’t do their jobs, a class structure that everyone adheres to because they don’t know any different. The people there claim to be happy that way…but one has to wonder.
The buildings, interestingly enough, are all unfinished. Steel structural supports stab at the grey sky, like imploring fingers to lost lives. They build their whole lives for the future generations, each story being constructed for a son or daughter who may not even exist yet. They have no life for themselves.
And here I was worried about not being able to pay off my overdraft…
Looking at all this, as it flashed by outside my bus window, I couldn’t help but feel a little sick. Sitting as I was on a bus containing 34 pampered rich Europeans and North Americans on their way to one of the greatest ancient wonders in the world (and I had to wonder, at this point, if they really were going to understand the significance of what they were seeing), who had no idea what it was like to live like that. Who had no idea what it was like to not know where your next meal is coming from, to not know if this week was going to be the last one you had with a roof over your head.
Do we have any concept of how lucky we are? And yet, who are we to judge? There are some people out there, who have so much less than we, that if asked, would consider themselves in the better position.
In short, Cairo disgusted me, frightened me, and enlightened me, all at once.
When we reached the Pyramids themselves, I found my eyes opened once again. Flocking around the Pyramids were hundreds of local hawkers, determinedly trying to sell you whatever it was they had to hand. Yes it was aggravating, because it distracted you from seeing what you came for, but at the same time, I remembered that it was important to consider that this was how these people made their living. Every child that tugs your sleeve and tries to sell you a postcard is supporting someone, most likely someone other than themselves. That child may be the family’s only source of income. Yes, you can’t give something to all of them, but let’s just say I didn’t begrudge the kid who took my pictures on camelback the $15 it shouldn’t have cost me.
The pyramids themselves, oversee all of this, in silent splendor, as they have for thousands of years, as they will for thousands of years after we’re gone, after Cairo and all cities like it have been reclaimed by an Earth that can only put up with us for so long after all. They stand there, towering over everyone and everything, and they watch.
One of the pictures I took shows me leaning up against the exposed stone surrounding the bottom, where they’ve excavated around the edges, that I could touch, and from that I got a sense of …age…just age…like an elderly person who’s seen too much and is now too weary to pass on their wisdom.
That kind of age.
The day was truly a study of opposites, from the bustling poor of the base of the pyramids, we lunched in one of the most luxurious hotels in the city, where there wasn’t a single face that wasn’t pale except the occasional waiter, and where the amount of food thrown out probably would have fed an entire family for a week and a half. And still, the guests complained, not enough time, not enough selection. All dutifully noted on my escort sheet, all with me shaking my head internally.
Last but not least, we rocketed through the Cairo museum of Antiquities. If there was anywhere during the whole day that I would have wanted to spend more time, it was there. I first heard about the Museum when I was in first year university. It houses some of the most fabulous Egyptian finds in the world, things that so rarely leave Egypt, that seeing them is sometimes the entire purpose of a visit to the country. We barely scratched the surface, the crowds were harrowing and the heat intense, but we did see the important things.
For, as for so many, the highlight of the day, was the mask. THE mask. Representative of so much, of a time that no longer is, that possibly never was, we’ve romanticized it so much over the years. But something I never, ever, though I would see. That sight alone, of that calm boy’s face, layered as it is with blue and gold and eyes that seem to follow you wherever you go, that was worth it. Standing stock still in front of the glass case, while people pushed and buffeted around me, and other passengers walked right by with barely a glance for one of the most famous treasures in the world, that’s when the tears started to come, but they weren’t tears, not really, I suspect if you’d looked at me you just would have noticed this very strange shine to my eyes, that you couldn’t really explain, couldn’t really place.
That alone was worth it, worth all the difficulties of this contract, worth the pressure and the lack of sleep and the 12 hour plane ride. Worth the pain of homesickness that always races through me half-way through a contract. Worth everything.
Moments like that, remind me why it is I do what I do.
Onward, and upward,
Bright Blessings,
Shaughnessy