Passage through antiquity

The ancient and the modern on the Nile's ebb and flow

September 25, 2005|Joan Lukey, Globe Correspondent

CAIRO -- A ribbon of butterscotch shimmered across the horizon, the final remnant of a glorious setting sun. Nightfall comes rapidly on the Nile, and the remaining feluccas hurried past, seeking anchorage before darkness. In three millennia, the single-sail, gaff-rigged vessels have not changed. Today, as in 1000 BC, they skim the water with seamless grace, still devoid of running lights.

From the pool deck of Abercrombie & Kent's 18-stateroom Sun Boat III, we gazed west across the Nile at a scene unchanged since the feluccas first sailed. Yet behind us, where our boat was berthed, sprawled the metropolis of Aswan, with 1 million residents and home of Egypt's technological marvel, the Aswan High Dam. It is the departure point for an equally compelling marvel: the transplanted temples of Philae, now enshrined on higher ground on the tiny island of Agilkia on the Nile. The setting epitomized what we had come to expect in seven nights on this river: extraordinary antiquities quietly coexisting in the shadows of an encroaching modern world.

We were in a land of paradoxes. That much we certainly knew. What we could not possibly know was that, in just a few weeks' time, the landscape of Egypt would figuratively change in tragic fashion. In July, a series of explosions would kill 88 people, mostly tourists, in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik. A destination that had come to be considered relatively safe for Westerners, in an instant, was no longer so.

I am thankful that my daughter experienced this wonderful country with us, and sorry that others will now hesitate to do the same. Few locales in the world can reach into one's soul as deeply as does Egypt. None of us can make such a decision for others; but, I, for one, would make the journey again.

The mind-boggling juxtaposition of the old and the new is apparent to any visitor from the moment she or he sets foot on Egyptian soil. For those who are not feeling skittish, the logical start point is Cairo, in part because the Giza Plateau lies just across the Nile. No Egyptian landmarks are more famous than the Sphinx and the pyramids, those ancient tombs of megalomaniacal pharaohs who had yet to discover that the more ostentatious their burial sites, the less likely their treasures would be available to them in the afterlife.

Tomb-raiding became a veritable sport in ancient Egypt, contributing to the later practice of laying pharaohs to rest in hidden underground tombs at the Valley of the Kings. Even the smooth outer layer of stones has been carted away from all but the highest levels of one pyramid, leaving the visitor to imagine the luster that the polished surfaces must once have known.