a response to a luxor post
……….
me! me! I’ve been to Luxor, Thebes, Phoebe.
I’d just reccomend what all the guide books will say.
Get up before dawn, hire a bike, then pedal along the banks of the Nile, Water Buffalo and Fallukahs, as the huge red sun rises.
Head along the road to teh desert and pedal along to the Valley of The Kings.
It’s fantastic, before the heat of the day and the plague of tour buses, a genuine spook creepy powerful place.
Perfect for all your Indianna Jones needs!
Or just sit ina cafe with the old men, a strong coffee and try one of the Shishkas, a Hubbly Bubbly, where you balance your burning charcoals on the Honey roasted tobacco, then serpent suck, huge plumes of smoke and smoke rings. a condor/hamlet cheap cigar moment
oh, Cleopatras needle in London is from the temple of Karnak, it’s a really fascinating tale, what happened was…. achhh
ancient email hieroglyphs…
once, when i was about 22, i was in the kings burial chamber of the great pyramid of cheops (an important giza geezer)
you follow a stone lined corridor, deep, deep into the heart of the thing.
For about 5 minutes I was totally alone in the central chamber, there I had one of those fairly typical, bogus travellers moments, you know when your thinking ‘wow here i am alone in the 4000 year old heart of the most sacred hugest stone tomb ever’ and kind of willing yourself to spiritually commune with them long dead incest interesting pharaohs, but in reality you just feel totally knackered, from not having slept properly for days and the whole place smells of camel dribble!
The central chamber is totally plain and unadorned, not like those in the valley of the kings, where it’s wonderfully ornate, crammed full of hieroglyphics, sarcophagi and just baroque over the top, kinda Las Vegas Liberace Tutankhamoon. King of Bling.
the pyramid chamber may well be sacred pscho geomacy alligned with Orion and Sirius, but didn’t do it for me.
..Anyway i’m meditating merrily away, when a cold breeze blows through, we are buried in the middle of a squillion tons of stone… then i hear the clump, clump of boots approaching…. a huge looming shadow is thrown forwards and into the chamber.
Goosebumps, curse of the mummy, Scooby dooby doo!. Yikes!
in comes… Cleopatra!
Heavens to Betsy.
Cleo, dark dark eyes, black hair, breaks into a big smile, opens her gob and says ‘ciao’
ciao bella!
She was actually a very friendly 17 year old Italian, lovely, she kindly squired me around old Cairo for the next 2 days.
from Milan, very swish, high fashion type, some kind of heiress, in Cairo for a year with only her parents for company.
we were both dreadful lonely, but also just got on like a house on fire… she was a hoot!
heres an egyptian joke i made up,
My Sphinx has got no nose
How does he smell?
bloody awful!
