MADRID-EGYPT NOVEMBER 19, 2018 TO DECEMBER 11, 2018

NOVEMBER 19 AND 20, 2018 - MONDAY AND TUESDAY -- MIAMI TO MADRID

“Not with this".

The Iberia Airlines Check-in Lady holds up my blue, visa-plump, USA passport, head shaking definitively left to right.

 “US citizens can't check in for flights to Madrid unless you can prove that you also have a ticket leaving the European Union. “

Huh? This is a new blip. I show her my onward ticket from Madrid to Cairo. She shakes her head. “Not enough”. I must show a ticket back to the USA.

They don't want us hanging around.

“Aha", says I, whipping out a printout of our January ticket from Madrid via London and Charlotte back to Sarasota. Eyes roll. “Not enough”. She is kind…and a horde of other passengers has massed behind us. Magic fingers fly, cajole their system. It automagically disgorges a long printout of that same itinerary on American Airlines, cyber proof sufficient that we will return whence we came, are not illegal immigrant wannabes. She reads the print out, twice, tsk-tsks and shakes her head, repeating that butt-numbing roundabout of the Known World…Madrid-London-Charlotte-Sarasota---shrugs in sympathy and issues our boarding passes.

The horde unmasses and sighs.

We board. Surprise: our free Frequent Flyer seats really are inside the plane. Double surprise: we have exit row seats (so, actually close to not being inside). We stretch into the space and try to wrap our brains around the New Travel Rules which make us US citizens suspect and unwelcome, infected by tRump.

Madrid rises out of the morning clouds 9 hours later, way ahead of schedule.

We cross Madrid on two buses. Lovely Mia and fluffy Destiny welcome us with “Ola" and a deep purr into our elegant 2 level AirBnB way away from the touristy center of town. Our bedroom is down a spiral staircase from the entrance/kitchen/living room level and has its own bathroom and rooftop patio. It cost $57 for 2 nights, including the AirBnB service surcharge. With breakfast.

Lunch comes first in the only local eatery other than a raggedy pizza parlor. We’re early for the ‘menu de dia', daily special, and fill the time and our empty jet- lagged tummies with large tankards of cold beer. BIG mistake. The special is delicious. My stuffed green peppers and Den's soup segué into 2 plates of crisp fries and pancetta from some of Spain's famously delicious pigs. Included drink choices offer wine. BIGGER mistake. I think glass. The waiter delivers half a bottle. Three glasses later I am way more than three sheets to the wind. The desert is a blurry mound of flan running around the table, escaping my spoon.

I spend my first afternoon and night in Madrid snockered. I blame it on the jetlag.

Whatever.

NOVEMBER 21, 2018 - WEDNESDAY – MADRID

Chocolate is a known remedy for hangover.

I bow down before a cup of the stuff in one of MADRID famous chocolaterias. It's thick, warm, straddling the culinary universe between hot fudge sauce and chocolate pudding. Madrileños dip churros, warm fried twists of dough into the chocolate, glazing them with heaven. I go for it by the spoonful. I am, after all, in Hangover Extremis. This is medicine.

It works.

We wander under the eyebrow-thin balconies through the narrow streets and wide plazas of the old center of Madrid, happily lost. Our noses lead us into the Market de San Miguel, Paradise for Foodies. The temptations in this Eden for the taste buds go way beyond Eve's wormy apple. We pass up the paella (4 versions, plus black rice), the designer treats wrapped around mozzarella, the grilled sea things, the kebabs, fried calamari baguettes, potato pies (the real Spanish tortillas), the piles of porcine miracles wrought from Spain's famous hams, the sangria pitchers, and the beer and wine barrels (see yesterday), but stop dead and drooling at the silken slivers of salmon ahumato, smoked salmon. Dennis bagels his with the Spanish equivalent of a ‘shmear' of cream cheese. Mine nestles between baguettey crusts. Silence.

Afterwards we give in to the complaining feet, bundle streetside, sip coffee and watch the polyglot crowds that invade Madrid even in this chilly November weather. When we come back through in January we will forgo fluffy cat Destiny and find a place down here in the old center, sure to be warmth and gawker-free. On this last afternoon we take a photo of us, and the coffee, with the pennant of Gypsy Souls, our friends' coffee shop in Florida.

Madrid’s superb subway system gets us home for a late afternoon nap, prep for another foray into the offerings of the local bar, but without the wine chasers. Potato salad, just pure potato, olive oil and a bit of salt lead us to thin fillets of pork on baguettes, green olives…and a SMALL beer. Note that adjective.

Destiny sneaks onto our bed to schmooze. She's a Siberian Cat, a breed new to us, a fluffy combo of Maine Coon Cat and elegant Persian. “Hypoallergenic “ says Mai. She's adorable regardless of her religion. Destiny mumbles a complaint as we gently carry her out into the hall. Chocolate, salmon, coffee, pork, all that walking demand deep sleep. The beer refuses to comment.

NOVEMBER 22, 2018 - THURSDAY– MADRID TO EGYPT

“I am from Palestine".

We ooze and bump onto EGYPTAIR flight MS754, already late, thickly crowded, pyramid bound. My two seat mates, sandwiched between me and the fuselage, smile and wave. We were stacked in line waiting at check-in, no longer strangers. Sandwich neighbor reaches over the seat in front and delivers a pillow and blanket for me, while his wife, lovely face framed by her headscarf, waves. He dives into their wrinkling carry on and excavates a bag of cookies, offers them to me with an upward jerk of his hand and an explosion of smile. Five minutes on Egypt's airline and we are already in the Middle East, undone by the kindness, sweetness, and hospitality of its people.

“I am from Palestine". What can I say to someone who has lived that great injustice? “I hope you and your people have a better future.” The smile broadens and he grasps my hand. “Come to Palestine.” They will go home by a 6-hour car ride from Amman, Jordan. I say we would have to go via Israel, a journey that complicates my passport for future travel to other countries in the region. He shrugs, our eyes connect, sorrow intrudes.

Later he and his wife wave goodbye in the jumble of Cairo Airport, their other hands a linked clasp, new wedding rings still bright

Mohammed (of course), Ahdi, and Mahmoun spread us, Elfie, Renate, and bags, between two cars. An hour later, survivors once again of the voracious snarl of Cairo traffic, we cross the Nile, reach Giza, then pull up to Three Pyramids View Hotel. Host Mohammed (of course) leads us up five floors past our rooms to the roof.

For 4,500 years the pyramids have been waiting for us. Our gasps are not adequate thanks. They will have to do.

REALLY NOVEMBER 23, 2018- FRIDAY – GIZA

“Nice product"!

When Liz and…er, Cleo and Marc Antony sailed down the Nile 2,000 years ago, the 3 great pyramids at Giza were already 2,500 years old.

Today we visit pyramids that are even older, the lumpier first-tries at Saqqara and Dahrsur. The Step Pyramid at Saqqara was humankind's first known effort at building skyward, a simple solution of piling six stone platforms one atop the other, 60 meters (198 feet) closer to the gods. Imhotep, history's first known architect, got the commission in 2650 bce from King Djoser: build me a tomb above all others, to last all eternity. Imhotep delivered, using stone instead of mud brick, and imagination instead of tradition. It's still here.

Saqqara is astounding, but it's not a true flat- sloped pyramid. We stop at the Good First Try at a ‘real’ pyramid a few miles away at Dahrsur. It started out just fine back about 2600 years ago, but the slope was too steep and midway the architect flattened it a bit, and the matronly Bent Pyramid was born. (Note for accuracy buffs: they changed the angle from 54 to 43 degrees, the standard for the pyramids that followed). And, then, a few years later, they got it right. The Red Pyramid is the oldest true pyramid, red only because its original white limestone covering was removed in the 4,600 years since it was built.  Both of these pyramids are 346 feet tall. With this, the first true pyramid, as his legacy, I hope King Snefru forgave the architect for the Bent Pyramid.

Though almost as tall as their more famous descendants at Giza, these 2 immensities sit in unvisited flatness, free of tourists. So, of course we go.

Snefru's son, grandson, and great-grandson all inherited his Passion for Pyramids. They built the three world famous pyramids at Giza. The largest came first, in 2570 bce, and at 146 meters (482 feet) was the tallest structure in the world for 4,459 years until the Eiffel Tower topped it at 984 feet in 1889. We don't have to drive to see these three. They are angular mountains ruling the sky from our roof terrace.

For me, the self-centered, religion-driven megalomania that drove pharaohs to build pyramids is tempered by the appealing audacity of the architects who built mountains out of stone blocks just to see if they could do it. And got it right after only one slightly faulty try, the Bent Pyramid.

Our day winds on across the Giza Plateau and beyond. Bakr-Bakr, driver and guide, is knowledgeable and charming, and definitely ‘a nice product’, (the phrase works in both English and Austrian German, Elfie assures me), even if ‘not as a husband’ (also in English and German). We agree that while we may not be buying, we DO know how to shop.

The roasted pigeons stuffed with cinnamon-laced grains are only the royal centerpieces of our gorgiastic dinner down the street at Pyramids Restaurant. Supporting these scrumptious birds are bowls and plates of delectables: orzo in lamb and lemon broth, oven-crisped root vegetable stew, hummus, eggplant roasted into the epiphany of baba ganoush, tomato salad, thick yoghurt drenched in garlic…

Our meal for 4 costs a total of 450 Egyptian Pounds, or a slurp over $25, a lot for Egyptians, but within our budgets. Indeed.

Later the ‘mountains of pharaoh' are dark geometry against the night sky. Then the ‘Sound and Light Show’ begins, distance sparing us the babble of the narrative ‘Sound’ part, but delivering the ‘Light’, washes of color on stone too dignified---or bored--- to shrug. In 4588 years-plus one day- the pyramids have seen and heard it all, even Cleo and Liz.

We add our oohs and ahhs, also ignored.

NOVEMBER 24, 2018 - SATURDAY– GIZA

“He's crazy!!! Me, me, me”!!

We sit on the roof through the afternoon, watching the pyramids age, time slipping down their slopes and away. The clip-clop of horses, drawing carriages or desert-bound riders, is a staccato beat under the rumble of street life three stories below. Hours blur. Pyramid infected, we unshackle from time.

Earlier in the day, Elfie and Renate decide to get Up Close and Personal with the pyramids. We walk with them through the crowds of school kids to the gate. They follow the gentle slope up to the stark plateau. We stay down in the nether regions, further from the gods, embedded in the color of this town. Hawkers of horses, and camels, and tuk-tuks, and carriages don’t quite believe we just want to walk around town, leaving behind the sight of ‘Haram', the pyramids. Persistence is the key to their livelihood in the shadow of the mountains of pharaoh. We know the rules. Neither side is rude. “No, thank you” is “la, shukran" in Arabic. Add a smile and forward motion and it works, for a few steps anyway, as we move through territory carefully divided, rights to hawk respected, launched in the right sequence. We walk on, yield to camels and horses.

The oranges and pomegranates hang in sleeves at the juice shop. Juice Man takes our order, beams, chooses, squeezes, and delivers our tall glasses, pure juice, unsweetened. Our photo gets a bigger grin, sucks in two lanky teenagers who pose seriously one at a time, then want a photo with us. Boss Guy, shakes our hands and asks where we are from. “USA". “AMERICA!!!” And he squeezes harder, smiles broader still. “Ah, but tRump…” “He's crazy!!! Me, me, me”!! His eyes roll. Ours follow.

Lunch? Falafel!! Bouncy Ahdi, one of the several young guys who make Muhammad’s Three Pyramids Hotel sing so smoothely, knows a place. Of course. It’s right down the street. He takes us through the drill: tell Money Guy what we want, pay, hold onto the receipt. Show the Counter Guy. CG assembles a stack. The falafel are crispy miracles cozied up in a fresh pita with a handful of salad and enough tangy yoghurt sauce to tell the tongue We Have Arrived. We groan through three each. The Six cost 84 cents. Munch. Drool.

Elfie and Renate wander off for the ‘Sound and Light Show. We stay on the roof. Behind us and below, Giza Town breathes under the clip-clop of horse hooves. The day falls into the colors of dusk, soft behind the solid geometry of the pyramids. It’s show enough for us.

 Dinner is almost its equal, though, unfortunately, more caloric. It is once again at Pyramids Restaurant just down the street, and, once again, a sumptuous seduction.

Tomorrow we fly south for two weeks along, on, and in the Nile. Giza and the mountains of pharaoh will stay in our memories perhaps forever, as the pharaohs intended.

NOVEMBER 25, 2018 - SUNDAY– GIZA TO ASWAN

“We believed them before. We won't believe them again.”

The three white lane lines on the highway to Cairo’s space-age airport are purely decorative. Seven, eight, even nine abreast, Egypt's skillful drivers turn the 4-lane road into a dense metal mat with ten thousand wheels, a parking lot on the move. Motorcycles weave zippy threads thru the dense fabric, the basic laws of physics here wispy as their sky-dimming exhaust fumes Six camels ride by, folded into a truck bed, disdainful, snooty, above it all.

The sky way above the desert is much less crowded for Egyptair Flight MS395. We follow the Nile southward to Upper Egypt. The Nile flows from south to north, the only one of our planet's major rivers to do so. To go south is to go down the map, but up the river, thus to Upper Egypt. In the waters we would fight against the pressure of the river's two mile drop from the high mountains of Ethiopia and 4,000-mile flow north to the Mediterranean. In a few days we will sail with that flow, pushing us northward, huge sails tacking zig-zag against the winds that push southward. Up here it's a straight shot, clear ‘sailing’ southward to Upper Egypt, into ancient Nubia, the town of Aswan, and the great hugs of our friend Bassam.

We sit along a narrow canal that sluices water from the nearby Nile to water the small fields of Bassam's village. Bassam's people are Nubian, descendants of the great African kingdoms that provided Egypt's gold, many queens (including King Tut's grandmother and/or great-grandmother), and at least one of Egypt's dynasties. His country, Nubia, lies drowned under the waters of Lake Nasser, created to benefit Egypt, his people displaced to villages like this one. Bassam has adapted his grandmother's traditional domed house for guests. It will be our home for a few days.

Now, we sit by the canal, catching up. The desert begins just behind us. The Nile is a few dozen meters to the east. Across the Nile, the town of Aswan has added some white modern buildings, ugly glares, offensive against the mud-brown scrim of the old town.

They are hotels and flats (apartments) for “rich people from Cairo. They buy there so they can look across the river to us.” He laughs.

“They try to buy land here and say they will protect the village. We are Nubians. We believed them before. We won't believe them again.”

Five years ago, Bassam walked with us his through the levels and rooms of his grandmother's empty house, planning his guesthouse. We promised we would return and stay with him. Our room is up a level from the courtyard, spacious. The slats of the tall narrow louvered doors massage desert light into softness, gentle on the colorful rag rugs. The desert begins at our doorstep down a flight of pink, purple, turquoise, yellow, green steps. Nubian design is eruptively colorful and complex. House facades are canvasses of whimsy. Their roots are in the painted houses of places much further to the south in Africa.

And Nubians!! They are exuberant centerpieces in their colorful world, dark, handsome people, easy to welcome visitors, smile, laugh, dance, and make music.

And such music! A flotilla of Bassam's ‘cousins' sails up to the roof for a party. By universal acclaim of the cousins twenty-year old Mustafa is a twin to our photo of son Abel, smile included. He unwraps his oudh, a lute-relative, its shape carrying a message from a gourd ancestor, now speaking in deeply grained wood. Mustafa draws up his tunic, sits, and plays. His music is harmonic, the scale Western-like, as we heard in Sudan, also part of Ancient Nubia, but south of Lake Nasser and not drowned.

Mustafa sings. This is a voice! It is immediate, honest, truthful, inevitable to the music. It has the impact of a Maria Callas, Aretha Franklin, Frank Sinatra, Patsy Cline, Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf. He is 20 years old. Nubian. A child of refugees from a genocidal drowning. He lives cooking and serving food in his cousin's place in a village on the west bank of the Nile.

We are beyond privileged to hear him.

How many like him worldwide will never be heard, silenced by the violence of our age that drowns homelands, murders high school students, gasses babies, and drop bombs?

What have we lost?

NOVEMBER 26, 2018 - MONDAY – ASWAN

We spend the day with Bassam putt-putting down the Nile, in the shade of the boat's awning, gangly Sala silent at the motor, steering us between the islands and rocks that create the First Cataract.

This is the first place. sailing southward a thousand miles from the Mediterranean, where geology intrudes into the southward flow of the Nile, creating rapids and eddies during high water season, enough to make river navigation tricky. All southward river traffic stops here now at the face of the great dam. Egypt ends here. South is Lake Nasser, flooded Nubia, then Sudan.

There are five more cataracts, all of them south of the lake, in Sudan. We traversed all of them when we followed the Nile across Sudan. On three separate trips we have watched the Blue Nile flow out of its source in Lake Tana, Ethiopia, and the White Nile squeeze out of Lake Victoria in Uganda, then meet in Khartoum, Sudan. There they flow side by side, different in color, though neither lives up to its name, going more for different shades of murky brown, the color of the dissolved mountains, the fertile silt that makes life possible along the river and created Egypt. The encounter is brief. In a few hundred yards, the separate streams disappear and spawn THE Nile

Here, thousands of miles downstream on the unhurrying river, we float, anchor mid river, still shallow in winter low water season, climb on top of the boat, eat lunch, watch feluccas sail by, silent under their huge triangular sails, then, rocked by the gentle current, fall asleep. On the Nile.

Liz…er, uh Cleo, and her Roman Stud Muffin might have filled their hours on the Nile differently, but this suits us just fine.

Their days didn’t end so well.

Ours are stupendous.

NOVEMBER 27, 2018 - TUESDAY – ASWAN TO ELEPHANTINE ISLAND

“You always make me feel power"

These goodbyes are harder than most. We have known Bassam 6 or 7 years since he worked at the hotel run by his ‘cousin’, Abdullah and Abdullah’s wife, Ellen, and have been Skypers ever since. We want his guesthouse to succeed. He laughs his rumbly laugh and hugs me when he reads my recommendation on Trip Advisor. We agree I'll help when he gets his Website up. I try to smoothly transition my name from ‘Mr. Bob’ to ‘Bob’, but those 3 syllables have become one word, my name, and stick.

Bassam's bright chartreuse hat cries for a companion so my chartreuse travel shirt journeys from backpack to Nubian shoulders and is much happier under that handsome face, perfect ebony, than under my pale one, upon which it casts a lurid party-zombie light. Dennis adds a deep green bandana. Nothing can quite match Bassam in his white Nubian head wrap, but this new outfit delivers. Ladies of the world, you may now thank me.

He hugs me again as we load onto Sala’s boat for the short trip to Elephantine Island. “You always make me feel power"

I’m already planning a return in 2020.

NOVEMBER 28, 2018 – WEDNESDAY -- ELEPHANTINE ISLAND

Osama leans over the small table and helps his smaller son, Tarik, with his French lessons. Tarik also speaks English, Italian (his mother, Marta, is Italian), Arabic, and his father's mother tongue, Nubian. That's five, just shy of ONE for each of his SEVEN years. Tarik looks like a curly-headed Caravaggio cherub, if Caravaggio had the copper, bronze, gold to immortalize this burnished skin. Smarts, and looks. It's not fair, thinks I, but am glad humankind's future will include people like him, who break down the artificial barriers we hide behind to deny our shared humanity. Then, maybe, tear gassing babies will be seen for the abomination it is.

Yesterday afternoon…..

We sit on the terrace of Osama’s and Marta's Nubian Lotus guesthouse/ restaurant as our first day on Elephantine Island slips into night. Feluccas sail down the Nile on their reflections, grace on deep green against mountains of sand gilding under the departing sun. Thomas, German co-resident of Animalia, our AirBnB, found Nubian Lotus yesterday, nearby, out the gate made of date palm fronds, across the ditch, through the mango trees. Bouncy, glossy black Mama Dog and her three healthy, ecumenically conceived babies wiggle us into the guesthouse garden.

Marta cooks pastas, Osama does Nubian delights. My genes win. Everyone follows. We wallow in 4 different pastas, worship-worthy, some with fresh veggies grown in Osama's garden. I take mine with olive oil, garlic, and chili pepper, a lifetime favorite. It deserves my worship.

Today…

I return by myself today for spaghetti arrabiatta, more heat on perfect pasta. The gang has crossed the river to the superb Nubia Museum. I stay back, to catch up on blogs and to walk around this quiet island. Elephantine is the length of a leisurely stroll, narrower than even that. I get happily lost in narrow alleys, welcomed to Egypt by dozens of passersby, and invited for tea by guys washing the hull of a beached and upended felucca, (named `Michael Palin`, after the world traveler). Mama Dog tail-wags the news that I am close to home. She would never stray far from her babies (though from the disparate looks of her adorable kiddies, she strayed a lot further in their conception.)

Later, Elfie, Renate, Thomas, Dennis, and I sit on the roof deck as the day slips into twilight, then night.  It’s our last night in Aswan. Tomorrow Ramdan picks us up for ten days sailing on his tiny felucca northward towards Luxor. But now this is Aswan, one of our very favorite towns on the planet. We stay well into the dark over pizza and sipping cool hibiscus tea.

NOVEMBER 29, 2018 - THURSDAY – ELEPHANTINE ISLAND TO FELUCCA NIGHT 1

“Are you happy, MisterBob"?

Spice-spiked and thick, Turkish coffee carries cardamom and sugar over my startled tongue, delivery as smooth as our silent slide over the surface of the Nile, flat, green glass in the noon sun. Guests now of Ramdan on ‘RENDEZ-VOUS , his felucca, 12 meters (40 feet) of silent grace, we sip and sprawl on thick mattresses under the cloth sun shade, yellow roses floating in the red sky on our side of the cloth. The sides, open from roof to mattress, frame changing views of Egypt as Ramdan, Moussa, and Khalid, take turns tacking our ‘RENDEZ-VOUS in its zig-zag dance, sidling, side to side across the Nile. The south-sighing winds from the Mediterranean a thousand kilometers to the north are stronger than the north-seeking current, tired after its 5000-kilometer journey from Ethiopia and Uganda across the flats of Sudan. The breeze pushes us south when we want to go north. The zig-zag dance captures the wind in the hundred-foot sails, on the sly, to push us at a slight diagonal across the river, but ever so slightly northward.

The Nile is rarely wide or deep, fame coming from its length. It wrests Egypt from the desert, divides it. Few bridges cross it. We zig quickly to the west. Sand dunes, dry tsunamis, crest above the narrow strip of green where the Nile brings Egypt to meet the Sahara, but on the desert’s terms. Then RENDEZ-VOUS zags to the east. It's flat, the green wider, Egypt thicker, the desert at bay. Then back, sewing our journey slowly northward, silent except for the creak of the wooden rudder.

This 12-foot by 12-foot cushy space on the Nile is home for 10 days. It's open on all sides, but low, four feet high, like blanket tents when I was a kid. Life is horizontal or bounced through on knees. Right Knee, semi-neatly bandaged and taped over two oozing scrapes from a bad choice wandering on Elephantine Island, rarely cooperates happily in this activity. It's still nagging over past locomotion transgressions, like my Italian relatives endlessly misremembering a gastronomic ‘insult’ decades ago. (“HER lasagne you eat. MINE, you say you’re full”!!) The mattresses are soft, forgiving, deaf, and absorb Knee's complaints.

The Nile carries the chill of Ethiopia's mountains. The Sun warms us. Gravity and silence conspire. Three hours on the Nile and we are already sucked flat by the rhythm of the zig-zag dance. And doze, our heads four feet above the ripples.

Night comes early and fast. By 5:30 we are tied up at a sandy beach, day already dimming in the dusk. There is no electricity. By 7, Moussa’s two burner gas ‘kitchen’, in a well by the prow, crackles under the only light, two candles. That double burner stove produces crisp fried chicken (thus, the crackles), real, not siliconed into flavorless and bloated Dolly Parts, potato chunks with onions and tomatoes, savory rice, soup. We eat, lounging, backpacks as pillows, sybarites murmuring appreciation. Cleo would have approved.

“Are you happy, MisterBob" asks Ramdan, knowing the answer.

NOVEMBER 30, 2018 - FRIDAY – VILLAGE NIGHT 1

“You are family.”

The Nile is a soft mattress under RENDEZ-VOUS. Sleep slipped in easily last night, stayed undisturbed, and retreats now with grace at first light.

Brain, Heart and Soul are up for a morning stroll along the Nile. The Kidney Twins have other activities in mind.

Right Knee mumbles protest.

Left Knee: ‘Do ya want some cheese with that whine"? Get over yourself. That's sunrise over the Nile out there. Can't get us there by myself. Move! Now!

Kidneys, Left and Right: “Gotta go. Gotta go.” Then together: “Really Gotta go”!

The Knees, one Rambo, one Richard Simmons in Major Flutter, bobble Body et al across the mattress plateau, down the narrow gangplank and onto the sand of the beach. Feet, Hands, and Face reach the clear water... before The Kidneys...approve their first quick baptism with Nile water. Kidneys add sighs--- plus--to the flow. Eyes report untrammeled beauty. Brain succumbs to an overload of pleasure, leaving Face a bit smug. MisterBob is indeed happy.

Back on RENDEZ-VOUS, Tongue gets equal time, slurps approval of Moussa’s breakfast: parchment-thin crêpes, ‘fuul' (fava beans in tomato sauce), omelets, cheese, fig preserves.

Ramdan’s village, Kopanya, bears his surname (Kopany). We will stay here for 2 nights, and rendez-vous with RENDEZ-VOUS, Khalid and Moussa in 2 days, but we won't be lonely. All six thousand people of Kopanya can trace some connection by birth or marriage back to “my grandfather”. Five thousand must be kids under ten. Half of those greet and follow us through the village to the guest house.

We are the first ever guests. It's a bright blue cube, spacious, the thick walls and high ceilings hedges against the 110-degree broil of high summer, months away. In December it is cool, the tile floors almost cold on our bare feet. The bathrooms are huge, almost as big as the room, with the usual modern convenience, lovely… but there is no water. The pumping station on the shore a bit up river isn’t cooperating. No water flows uphill from the Nile to Kopanya. “We will get big---his arms sweep wide, providing what his tongue cannot--- on roof and keep water.”

We make do. There are compensations.

Mats beneath, cushions behind, we sit on the sand of the guest house terrace in the shade of the blue walls. The Nile has captured the other blue, of the sky, distilled it to a deeply sapphired ribbon here, a faded thread on the northern and southern horizons. Closer in on this shore, and again on the East Bank waves of grey-green date palms tickle the sky. The view is a haiku for the eyes.

At dusk, Ramdan leads us through the narrow lanes between mud-brick houses up a slope, through a wooden door to his family. Ramdan's parents, sister, and brother welcome us with handshakes, each with a smile as horizon-wide as Ramdan's. The dog barks “Me, too, me, too.” Dogs don't count for much in Egypt, tools, not playmates, so he is shushed, not introduced or petted.

Mama Kopany has cooked a feast. The food is luscious. I doubt Cleo feasted on anything as good as Mama Kopany’s sweet green peppers stuffed with rice barely dusted with a breath of cinnamon and cardamom.

There are beautiful children, cousins by the dozen, the basic unit. Wrapped in kiddy laughs, Dennis does his photo printer magic. Moustaffa, aged 9, dimpled and deep chocolate, is a camera-natural, and already a flirt. Get ready, World.

We feel, and are, genuinely welcomed, try to thank Ramdan.

He shrugs. “You are family.”

DECEMBER 1, 2018 - SATURDAY – VILLAGE NIGHT 2

“Hallo, hallo"!!

The sun clears the ridge on the east bank across the Nile, glare swallowing the final remnants of dawn, bleaching the horizon hot white, and reducing the date palms along the river in front of me to black silhouette. It does not yet wipe the fields of their green. The sky ahead of it is still deep blue. To the west, the desert sweeps, tan, to the horizon, oblivious. The light hardens the colors. I ‘get’ the palette of Egyptian art, seized from the morning sun.

I lean back against the sun-grabbing blue wall of the guest house in Ramdan’s village, warming to the day, cooled by the breeze, zig-zag maestro from the north. Later, we walk in the desert. Propelled and surrounded by laughing cousins 9, 10, 11, and 13 years old, we rise west from the village into the sands. There is no trail. We wander at will, zigging and zagging through the sand and black stones. The pile of rocks on a hill is the rubble of a Christian monastery, scattered by time. Nubia was Christian for 600 years. This monastery has been empty far longer. Desert Christianity was often monastic, isolated, celibate. Islam must have seemed a livelier choice.

The cousins are bouncing, laughing, ebony specks against the blue sky, way at the top of the hill on the monastery’s ruin, irresistible life in this vast aged dryness. They wave and send their “Hallo, hallo” down over the shards of the monastery.

All ruins whisper to me. This one has been waiting too long to tell its story. It barely whispers, of loneliness. Maybe, like me, it is glad the cousins are along.

DECEMBER 2, 2018 - SUNDAY – FELUCCA NIGHT 2

“Welcome” “Welcome to my country”

The only light is from flame-lit branches on the small fire and from Moussad's captured embers, barbecuing our dinner on the sand. We are guests under the tree of Abdulatty, the only person wise enough to make Balooly Island his home. He has no house, roof, shelter, lives ‘rough’ under date palms and mango trees. Elegant, clean-shaven, intelligent, he ‘relies on the kindness of strangers’ who pull up on Balooly and of the farmers who come over from the West Bank to tend their crops. Charity is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, Abdulatty receives and gives. He shares what he has, tea in 3 glasses.

Abdulatty is a coda to a day of kindness. “He is my brother" introduces us to Bassam. He and Ramdan were born in the same hospital on the same day 28 years ago. Bassams mother had no milk, so Ramdan's mother, a stranger, nursed him. They are now ‘brothers’. “I can’t marry his sister, and he can't marry mine". The ‘brothers are equally jolly guys, hand-slapping, hugging, laughing, great company. Color them Nubian.

We rattle over dusty roads in the back of Bassam's hard seat pickup to the ferry that will take it and us us over to the Daraw camel market. The chaos of the crowded ferry landing is visual cacaphony, Pure Theater of the Absurd, presided over from the back of a large truck by a larger black and white cow, who Is Not Convinced that the abrogation of the laws of physics should apply to her. People, trucks, cars, motorcycled...we all squeeze on, claiming space ignored by those pesky laws. There is barely room for her “Mooooo" of protest. We pop out on the other side, far too big a jumble to have ever fit on the ferry, and squeeze through an even bigger crowd, pushing on and slicing at those laws of physics.

The camel market is not for the squeamish. The camels stand quietly, one leg tied up as a hobble, hopping when prodded so prospective buyers---some butchers---can Inspect the goods. Like all members of the camel tribe, these are dignified, and myopically supercilious, spot-on doppelgangers of some near-sighted Parisian ladies of ‘a certain age’, and many yellow-haired twinky waiters in pretentious third- rate restaurants in New York’s Greenwich Village who think they ARE in Paris.,

It's market day for us, too. Ramdan buys food. I find a deep blue galabeya for Dennis to lounge in. Elfie cannot find an undecorated ankle-length abaya to replace the one she forgot in Elephantine, Egyptian ladies preferring a bit of gilding on these lovely lilies of the wardrobe. We buy small plastic bins to corral our stuff, easy to wander off on the mattress plateau of RENDEZ-VOUS .

A back-packed ten year old runs and jumps onto the bumper of the bouncing truck, hangs on with one hand, waves with the other and delivers his "Welcome" up close and personal. Maybe this is just homework for Tourism 101. If so, the country is filled with star graduates. On the road, in the market, and through the towns and villages people wave and yell “Welcome”, “Welcome to my country”. We love it.

Night falls under Abdulatty's tree. Nubians are always on the edge of a party, pushed there by any excuse. Good food, good people, stars…what better excuse? Ramdan and Abdulatty finger and palm slap rhythms on skin drums, sing of, love, happiness, life on the river.

MisterBob is happy. ‘Miamia’, one hundred percent.

DECEMBER 3, 2018 - MONDAY – FELUCCA NIGHT 3

It is 6:58. The pink of sunrise is long gone before I unwrap from thick blankets, knee-bounce down the felucca, cross the five foot strip of water---the Nile!---under the gang strip and step onto the cold sand of the beach. For the second night this trip, the river that rocked Cleo, and carried the stones to build the Mountains of pharaoh, has rocked and carried me into sleep.

The morning is grays, blacks and white. Fish-scale clouds in the east filter sunlight, bleaching it, white, behind the black jumble of date palms on the East Bank. The Nike is a flat mirror, loyal to the grey of the sky this morning as it was to its deep blue yesterday.

Surely not, say The Ears, as a snippet of the Grand March from Aida, bounces off the river from morning reveillee at a school across on the East Bank. Schools start at 6 or 7 am and end early, a schedule dictated by the tyranny of the sun much of the year. I wonder if the kids shiver in the chill air this winter morning or in response to music that creates an Egypt that never existed.

We zag to Kom Ombo to wallow a bit in an Egypt that did exist, though an Egypt diluted by Greek culture. Alexander the Great’s Greek general, Ptolemy got Egypt for services rendered in three hundred something bc. Ptolemy dispatched Egypt's final truly Egyptian dynasty to its eternal reward and declared himself pharaoh. (Note: Egypt did not have another Egyptian ruler for 2300 years until Nasser came to power in 1952). Greek Egypt lasted 300 years until its last ruler, THE Cleopatra, ‘asped’ her last breath and turned Egypt over to Rome.

Be warned: the following may contain details too upsetting for people who do not get their dates at family reunions, or do not claim on national TV that they would date their daughter.

The Ptolemies ‘went native’ with over-heated enthusiasm. Whatever pharaohs did, Ptolemies copied, including brother-sister marriage to solidify the royal line. Democratic to fault, the Ptolemies included just about every relative in a rambunctious connubial free for all. Our Cleo was the result of 13 generations of such close family ties, including uncle-niece, father-daughter, and grandfather- granddaughter marriages. Her family tree was a bramble bush.

While all this made it pretty easy to figure out who to invite to the latest wedding, the downside soon became pretty obvious. Just look around at the fruit hanging off that bush. The last few Ptolemies were several stones short of a pyramid, definitely not a gifted bunch. Then came the last, our Cleo (Cleopatra the Seventh, in fact), by all accounts brilliant, a linguist, accomplished diplomat, charismatic and she looked good wrapped a rug. Her first husband was her brother (who was quite possibly also her uncle, nephew, and cousin as well). No wonder she locked onto those sexy Romans. They didn't drool.

Those Ptolemies also mucked about with Egyptian art and temples. To my eye they just made everything, especially the human and religious figures, too fussy, rounded, soft, double-chinned even. Egyptian figures are angular, strong. They grow out of angular, strong buildings, like skin. Ptolemaic figures seem grafted on, extraneous decoration, obvious as a bad face-lift.

Kom combo is monumental, and that works for me. In Egypt Size Does Matter. There is a section with images of what look like medical instruments, including something that could be a stethoscope. The hieroglyphs aren't telling.

Kom Ombo is way behind us, lunch right in front. The warm potatoes mashed with onion is new on the menu, and quite sexy.

Once again, we anchor to sleep at a green farm island. Nobody lives here on Bashir island “except us dogs”, wag three friendly, husky pooches, all lined up on shore, a whiff away from Moussad's kitchen . Farmers commute from the West Bank to tend their crops, so it’s just the 7 of us, the pooches, the sunset, and The Nile. From way across the water, the Muslim call to prayer ends our day.

DECEMBER 4, 2018 - TUESDAY - FELUCCA NIGHT 4

“My father. He die.”

Ramdan has a friend, an Army buddy, who lives in Farsi village, just a few steps from the Nile. We can visit, walk around the village, and charge our electronic stuff at his house. (We don’t ask about internet, even for us a distant notion after 5 days free of it.) And, coffee would be good, no? It's a great plan, but…. buddy isn't home. Ramdan is never without a Plan B. Farsi Plan B starts with a tuk-tuk ride through the village, “welcomes” strewn wherever we pass. We sit for an hour watching a guy make crates for mangoes out of the ribs of palm fronds. His garden is cool and quiet except for the whack of his knife turning palm ribs into sticks and the basso thwock-thwock of wood on metal as he cuts holes along the ribs. Then with a ‘here a thwock, there a thwock, everywhere a thwock, thwock, thwock’ he drives sticks through the holes and builds the baskets. He makes me a sturdy cane in about ten thwocks of his curved knife. It immediately demotes my expandable metal Barcelona Special Cane to, runner-up, an Also Limped. He gives us all an ‘ankh', made of palm rib, and Phaoronic symbol and grantor of eternal life, a best gift. I board our tuk-tuks, protected in body and spirit.

The village coffee shop is wide open to the sky and Nile. The guys sprawling over wooden divans and tables “Welcome!” us in. At the back, the Barista Guy One brews coffee, thick Turkish coffee, so rich with grounds the bottom fourth is grainy coffee pudding, stupendous stuff for the tongue, major jolts to everything else. Ramdan does his magic and BG One waves us behind the counter, backstage, and to electric outlets. Our phones, Tablets, Kindles, chargers get their jolts., equally appreciated, but less tasty. Of course, he and Barista Guy Two get a photo, with and without our friends’ Florida coffee shop banner, printed on the spot, an instant crowd stopper, upstager even of Turkish coffee.

BG Two beckons Ramdan into a close-headed, whispered confab, slips something into his hand. They walk over into our Photo Crowd. Ramdan slips the 'something’ to me. It’s an old photo, greyed by years, hands, and eyes. The young man could be BG Two. The older man?…”My father. He die.” Ramdan helps. “He has only this picture. Can you make a big one?” I yank and pull on the possibilities of my Samsung phone’s limited photo editor, cropping, increasing contrast, brightening, until BG Two exhales and smiles. He has his portrait of Dad, only 2 inches by 3, a bit sharper through the greyed scrim of years. But, Dad. I promise to work more on it when we get home.

He refuses payment for our coffee. We insist. It is a gift to him. He thanks us in the Islamic way, with “shukran", a slight dip of his handsome face, his right hand open-palm over his heart. It is one of humankind’s most graceful and moving gestures.

And they ask us why we travel.

DECEMBER 5, 2018 - WEDNESDAY - FELUCCA NIGHT 5

We awake again away from villages, date palms and mango trees a green buffer behind us, holding the sands away from the Nile. The days melt together. Yesterday lies to the south, up river. Egypt absorbs time, gifts us with an eternal today, floating on an endless river under an endless blue sky.

In the ancient sandstone quarry of Gebel Silsila, I climb back through time in the remains of the temple to Pharaoh Horemheb. This guy lived through one of Egypt's most convoluted soap operas.

These stones whisper the story.

The cast is huge. Egyptians do huge very well. (See: Pyramids)

Between 1300 and 1350 bc, Egypt is roiling.

Pharaoh Akhenaten is an odd-looking dude, pot-bellied, broad-hipped, and with floppy Hapsburg lips 3,000 years before they became the must-have look for Europe’s inbred royals. He revamps the polytheistic culture of Egypt in favor of one god, Aten, becoming history’s first known monotheist. He bans the old gods, strips the priests of power and wealth, builds a new capital, and may have elevated his main wife, the glorious Nefertiti, to co-Pharaoh. The priests, long spoiled by two thousand years of pharaonic indulgence, are Not Happy.

Akhenaten's son is Little Tut, born to another wife, maybe one of Nefertiti's sisters. Nefertiti has only daughters, six of them, by Akhenaten. Tut marries one, his half- sister, making his father also his father-in- law, and Nefertiti---wait for it---both his step-mother AND his mother-in-law. Little Tut, tiny, and with a bum leg, just can’t catch a break!

I am not making this up.

Akhenaten dies. Some say Nefertiti succeeds him, Pharaoh in her own right.

Now, the priests are Really Not Happy. They aren’t so hot on the idea of a female Pharaoh even though---or because--- a hundred years earlier, Hatshepsut, the only other woman to take the job, was an able, productive ruler. True, she got the job through some shady dealings, the suspicious death of her brother-husband, and took a non-royal but brilliant architect as boy-toy lover (who built for her Egypt's most magnificent temple). True, she never quite pulled off looking good with that beard that came with the job, but, Her Majesty, The King was good at the job. Priests are rarely impressed with female competence. Hatshepsut was an unfortunate mistake, say they, never to be repeated, even her name erased from history. They are not on Nefertiti's side.

If she does become Pharaoh, Nefertiti does not hold the job long and slips beneath the sands of history …until that exquisite bust of her is discovered in those sands over 3 thousand years later. Her tomb has never been found. We all know about Tut's.

Little Tut becomes King Tut, but dies before age 20 (accident? murder?), leaving a widow, childless after two still births, (she's his half- sister, remember, and they are both children of close relatives so healthy offspring are a genetic crapshoot with the dice loaded against them). There is no likely candidate for pharaoh. As daughter of a pharaoh, Widow Tut carries the divine right to confer pharaoh-hood. The grieving widow sends a letter north to another kingdom asking for a royal prince to fill the throne and her bed. Who could resist the throne of wealthy and mighty Egypt? Alas, the poor ambitious prince never gets to his bride and Egypt. He dies of ‘unknown causes’ enroute. Suspicious, that.

A shadowy figure named Aiy, who was probably Nefertiti's father marries the Widow Tut himself, and claims the throne. She is his grand-daughter. The widow Tut is now both her dead father’s daughter and his mother-in-law. She is both Nefertiti's daughter and step-mother. And she is Tut's widow, half-sister, cousin, and grandmother. Finally, and follow me on this…she is her own grandmother.

Even in Egypt's Murky Marital Merry Go Round that is a bit much. Enough, says General Horemheb. He seizes power. Aiy scoots off the stage, probably with help. But Horemheb needs a royal princess to claim the throne. He proposes to the Widow, sure avenue to the royal seat. Probably still a teen-ager, with two dead children, two dead husbands and one dead fiancé, the Widow has had her fill of marriage, or, maybe she has another prince on the horizon. She refuses. Exit Widow Tut, daughter, wife, sister, cousin, mother-in-law, step-mother, grand-mother, and grand-daughter of pharaohs.

Courtesy of her father Aiy's short reign as pharaoh (itself courtesy of his marriage to his granddaughter, herself daughter of a pharaoh) Nefertiti’s sister is now a royal princess, The Go To Girl for the upwardly mobile general. Horemheb proposes. He is a commoner, and not a relative, so not some low-hanging fruit drooping off that bramble bush of her scrambled mess of a family tree, maybe he looks good in that military outfit, and maybe she is tired of the Eighteenth Dynasty Merry Marry-go-Round, or maybe she likes a Bit of Rough. She agrees, he marries her, takes the throne.

Horemheb sort of melts away after that, a lower case name in the UPPER CASE list of the pharaohs above and below him in the List of Kings. His great achievement is to appoint his successor as Pharaoh, thus establishing the next dynasty, the 19th. It returns to conservatism, but produces some of Egypt's greatest art and monuments, including Abydos, the Sistine Chapel of Egyptian art , and the spectacular temple at Abu Simbel, defining ‘huge’ for the ages.

For the mini-series, (Throne of Dames? Tut, Tut, Tutsy Goodbye? Kissin' Cousins? ) a young Jack Nicholson, in Full Deranged Mode, is a shoo-in as the Mad Pharaoh. Ditto Meryl Streep, triple-cast as Nefertiti, Little Tut, and Horemheb.

This temple I am scrambling through on this quiet morning 3,000 years later is dedicated to Horemheb. It's a bit scruffy, a minute speck compared to the colossi erected by his successors, but it has a story to tell. And tells it. Most people probably don't hear ruins speak. Am I lucky?

DECEMBER 6, 2018 - THURSDAY - FELUCCA NIGHT 6

Last night the sun sets over the West Bank and drags another perfect day into the desert. The south-blowing winds follow, deserting us. The north-flowing current now controls RENDEZ-VOUS, our immense sail useless. This night's mooring is slightly south. Ramdan, Khalid, and Moussad struggle to keep us from moving north. The night is deep black before the breeze revives, barely a zephyr, but strong enough to move us to shore. We tie up on the rocks south of Edfu. Only then do the guys smile.

Captain Cheeky is Ramdan's buddy. His empty felucca rocks on ripples just down the shore. His van is ours for the morning and the drive through fields, then date palms, then the narrow streets of Edfu to the Temple of Horus.

This is the most completely preserved of all the temples in Egypt, and one of the last to be built in the monumental style of the pharaohs. Started on August 23 in 237bc by one pharaoh, it was finally finished in 57bc by the next to last pharaoh, Cleopatra's father. That last gasp of phaoronic style was a huge one: the stone entrance gates are 130 feet high. Even that succumbed to the sands. By 200 years ago the temple was beneath the town of Edfu, which had spread over the massive stones of the roof.

It's old, in great shape, and filled with details about how it was built and used (unusual, and important info, including recipes for perfumes and incense used in the rituals). The dark spaces under that stone roof—back then colorful, forbidden to all but the priests and pharaohs—are now dimly atmospheric, and intimidating to us mere mortals, as I suspect they were intended to be even to the pharaohs, only in here subservient, and only to the gods.

But…bigger is not better and the style of those last Greek pharaohs is fussy marzipan layered on and aggressively distracting from the simplicity of classic Egyptian forms. We don’t linger.

We do with Ramdan and Captain Cheeky, over the grainy purity of fresh decanted Turkish coffee in an ‘ahwa' (coffee house), awning and tables spreading across a narrow alley outside the walls of the temple. I wonder what friends drank when they gathered back then 2,000 years ago, when the Temple of Horus was new. Today’s favorites, ‘ahwa’ and ‘shai’ (coffee and tea) came much later. Maybe they sipped ‘karkade’ (karkaDAY), Egypt's delicious tea made from the flowers of a plant called ‘hibiscus’, though not the hibiscus we know in Florida. Deep, clear red, astringent, but not sour, its tartness scours the tongue. I take mine ‘wa-hid su-kah’, one sugar, hot or cold. Several times a day. Egyptians like a good time with friends. Their ancestors would have found a solvent. Perhaps karkade.

DECEMBER 7, 2018 - FRIDAY - FELUCCA NIGHT 7

“I am sorry teacher”.

Ramdan left us for a night yesterday, returning to Aswan with Captain Cheeky…something to do with permits for the extra days we are on the river. Khalid and Moussad slide easily into a two-man team, Moussad is quiet, moves from his burners back aft to helm the rudder. Khalid takes over the sails and the two-burner galley, and happily trots out his choppy but effective English, honed daily with ‘Teacher’, aka MisterDennis.

We are traveling back south for the day, up river, the brisk north wind our ally, easy victor over the weak north-sloughing current. We eschew any hint of a zig, sail straight, close to the East Bank or along sand bar islands. Both banks are lush with date palms and mango trees. Our felucca world is flat, cushioned 4 feet above the ripples, the blue Nile ahead, behind, below, the blue sky above. Then we stand up. To the west sand dunes rise above the palms and trees, dessication across Africa to the Atlantic. Here Egypt on the west side of the Nile is 100 steps wide.

We beach for lunch on a long strand, sharing it with wary cows tethered just above the sands on pasture munch-manicured to crew cut. Back behind the palms a village buzzes, then calls the faithful to prayer. The Nile is cool, the sharp drop off from the beach clear, the soft current swimmable. Only the Feet dip.

The afternoon slips away over ripples, washed into memory over red karkade. I'm getting the knack of eating and drinking Roman-style, reclined on our mattress plateau, languishing against our backpacks-cum-pillows. It's not Cecil B. DeMille biblical costume epic---harem girls flaunting belly buttons being scarce on the plateau---but that is the Nile out there, and on the shore farmers on donkeys flop along the shore as they have for thousands of years in their real epic of continuity and endurance. There is no bloated musical score dripping pseudo-'Orientalisms’ over the landscape. Our music is true to the wind, to the slip of RENDEZ-VOUS through the willing water, to the bray of mules along the shore, hidden in the reeds.

With Ramdan gone, Khalid and Moussad are busy, at the sails, and on the rudder.

In the late afternoon light we pull onto the sand of Harbiab Island. The guys tie up the sail, throw anchors to beach, lay down the narrow gang plank, start up the two-burners. “Shai? Karkade? Coffee?”

Khalid slips the tray of 4 glasses of tea across the plateau, smiles, as always, then to, Dennis: “I am sorry teacher”. He has been too busy for his daily English lesson and there are no new words, but he shows off yesterday’s old ones, scribbled in his notebook then, fluent off his tongue now: “cover, under, Jerry can, metal, wood", all felucca-useful, and well done. We applaud. He bows. We laugh.

Dinner is delicious: veggie stew, rice, hand-thrown wheat frisbees of Egyptian bread, hot tea. Dark now, the sun has sucked the day and warmth westward over the horizon. Moussad runs along the gunwales and unties the cloth drapes that seal out the breeze if not the chill. That we fend off under thick blankets, each to our own cocoon in the candle light.

DECEMBER 8, 2018 - SATURDAY - FELUCCA NIGHT 8

“Easy".

The sun is a blurred light through clouds more mica than mist. Thick edges are opal, pale rainbows, shimmered. The river is mercury, lapping, shot with silver, shape-shifting.

On the beach, five puppies, the color of sand, yip-yap after their mother, bigger, but the same color. Way behind, Puppy Six, the family Goof Ball, chases stuff only puppies see. The pups are enchanting. Mama is not so sure of this. She nips when they try to nurse, folds up, closing the milk bar, Mama Dog for ‘You're on your own now, kiddies". But, she is Mama and hovers, alert, when Mama Dog 2 and her mud-colored brood of 2 run up.

It's Saturday. The big Nile cruise ships are ending their trips from Luxor, chugging past to Aswan, where we started, and just south of us now. They are ugly things, huge, multi-storied milk cartons, bloated, grunting, angular sumo wrestlers spawning waves upon which our felucca dances, a ballerina. Most are almost empty, hollow proof of Egypt's tourist bleed.

This is our last day and night on the felucca, days since it seduced us into its silent rhythm, and coming too soon. Elfie and Renate are memorable travel buddies, now friends. Irresistibly cheery Ramdan, and his crew, Moussad, our quiet, Magician of the Two-Burner, and handsome Khalid, always smiling and curious are the best travel companions. I hope they feel the same about ‘MisterBob & Company', insatiable slurpers of tea, ahwa, karkade on board, (and of Turkish coffee on land).

Ramdan detours further south to Elephantine Island to retrieve a favorite Egyptian robe Elfie forgot there. Sailing back north is slow-going, but the guys pull off a major sailing feat. In the dark, they insert RENDEZ-VOUS between two feluccas, so close we easily step into them…and ‘park’ RENDEZ-VOUS perpendicular to the shore, the current, the wind. It looks like magic to us. Ramdan shrugs it off. “Easy".

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DECEMBER 9, 2018 - SUNDAY - ASWAN TO ESNA TO LUXOR

We hug Khalid and Moussad, slip them a gift, climb out of RENDEZ-VOUS, across two feluccas, up the rocks that keep the Nile at bay, and load into our 4-wheeled transport for the day. It's 6am. The goodbyes are hurried. We want to descend to the temple at Esna, and be in Luxor by 11, to give Renate an extra afternoon in ‘the world's largest open-air museum' before she flies back to Vienna in 2 days.

Ramdan's friend, driver Hassan, promises us breakfast on the way, and does he deliver. Plates of hot, crispy falafel, omelets, fresh, REAL tomatoes, fuul (beans and tomatoes), bread, Turkish coffee cover the table, slip over our tongues, past our ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs'.

The temple at Esna was once at ground level 2,000 years ago, presence of the gods and stone dominating the mud brick houses of the town. Christianity came early to Egypt, chasing the gods of the Egyptians, defacing the stone. Islam followed with yet a new take on God, more austere, completing the rout of the old. Now the temple, stripped of purpose, sits in a pit 30 feet below the town that has risen around it on the collapsed debris of 100 generations of those mud brick houses and sand blown in from the desert. It's a mummy, preserved beyond all expectation, but deprived of life.

We're the only visitors today. We pass a line of horse drawn carriages waiting for the few tourists who get to Esna, turn from the wide street overlooking the Nile into a narrow alley of souvenir sellers desperate to make a sale. The gods may be gone, but the temple has a presence, even if it dominates only its deep pit, at the bottom of narrow, rusted metal stairs.

By noon we're showering in our room at Nefertiti Hotel. By 3, we sip tea on the roof terrace overlooking the Luxor Temple and the Nile. By 10, we’re in bed. I miss the lap of the waves. Next year??

DECEMBER 10, 2018 – MONDAY --  LUXOR TO ABYDOS AND DENDARA

“There is something in this place.”

It's 6:30. The rising sun has burned the night away, lights the sands on both sides of the West Bank desert road. They glow.

Ancient Egyptians lived between two worlds: the ‘Black Land’ of the Nile mud and this, the ‘Red Land’ of the sun-struck sands. The Black Land gave life. The Red Land took it. In the generous morning light we see only the beauty of the Red Land.

Three hours later we're in the dark of the temple at Abydos. The beauty here is from human inspiration and genius, supported and encouraged by one man, pharaoh Seti the First. Seti came to the throne soon after the Akhenaten-Nefertiti-Tut-Aiy-Horemheb ‘Woes of the Widow Tut' soap opera that closed the 18^th dynasty. His reign is a return to tradition and to the old gods who had steered Egypt through the Two Lands for millennia. The reliefs he commissioned for the dark walls of the many chambers of Abydos bring the gods back to Egypt, triumphant in beauty. They are the finest reliefs in Egypt, individually exquisite, collectively among the greatest works of art of all civilizations. Only…We call them art, but they were not art per se, created to be beautiful, but images created to be powerful, bringing the gods to life. They succeed. These gods leap off the walls, dynamic, eloquent, comforting, chastising, bristling with motion, and emotion. We are moved.

No one knows the names of the many artists who worked by torchlight here 3,000 years ago, but I thank them, and I thank Seti, a leader who chose to make his gods great again by calling on his people to give the best they had to offer, not the worst.

“There is something in this place...” says Elfie.

Yes.

We don't feel that in the temple at Dendara, halfway back to Luxor.

We feel anger. The friezes here have been defaced, chipped away, pock-marked out of history by Christianity and Islam, but now with a new meaning, defiant of the defilers. They are monuments to intolerance.

On the back corner is one of the very few images of Cleopatra, here with her son, Caesarion, child of Julius Caesar. It's not a portrait, of course. She is pharaoh, not person. But chipped away, probably by Romans, victors over her in that game 2,000 years ago, writers of her history. She, however, has triumphed over the chippers, reigns above them in humankind's imagination, legendary in her death for love, triumphant over hate.

These buildings may seem piles of stones to some. Not to me.

 DECEMBER 11, 2018 –TUESDAY -- LUXOR DAY 3

Renate leaves at dawn. She and Elfie have been a great travel companions. There are murmurings of Mozambique, Malawi, a return to southern Ethiopia.

This is the day we leave Egypt…and Ramdan. He has stayed on with us in Luxor, taking care of his ‘family’. The zipper that converts my trousers to shorts quits the job. Ramdan fixes it. Teeth may have been involved. Five zipper pulls on my cheesy Chinese-made multi-pocket fishing vest cum extra suitcase jump ship, too, but Ramdan finds a tailor in the souk to find replacements and rebuild the zips. That costs under $3.

Food? No problem! We’ll go back to last night's place of feasts. He takes us back thru the souk, across a road, past the horse drawn carriages, under awnings, and once again to great handshakes and hugs, up the stairs, and that huge menu in Arabic…and English. I am sure a cousin is involved. The food is superb, the baba ganoush alone worthy of Cleo Herself. The food of Egypt never gets much attention. It may not have the glamour and variety of sister cuisines in Lebanon and Turkey, but it has Its beauty, quieter and straightforward, and need not be a wall flower.

Ramdan limps more and more each day, his ankle broken and warped seven years in a fall from the mast of the felucca. It can be fixed, in Cairo, for about $2000, far more than he will ever have at once. He says it doesn't hurt. I don't believe him. He does walk more quickly through these streets than we so, so…maybe. We walk past Luxor Temple, one of the few in Egypt lit at night, a shimmer of history and a gauzy valedictory.

Ramdan has been a thoroughly delightful companion, a guide to new earth and river-tied experiences, all doorways to the Egypt behind the stones. Our ride to the airport falls through. Ramdan is on the ramparts, scaring up a substitute. Of course, it's a cousin, or a friend, or a neighbor of the friend of a cousin. The cab shakes and rattles, but it does roll at least as far as Luxor International. Hugs convey only part of the message. Doubled is better. A few looks back, a few waves and he is gone.

We will miss him. And his Egypt, now also a bit ours.

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