Tarmackanaka

The next morning, Tuesday, we saw Karnak temple (which Helen has pronounced Canook, Tamarakanina, and other butchered versions), which sprawls over several acres and includes a gigantic water feature reminiscent of the reflecting pool on the mall in Washington D.C. It contains dozens of obelisks, and the broken foundations of obelisks that have since been moved to Paris, Italy, and Washington, among other locations around the world, as well as many statues of the Gods and paintings and sculptures throughout. The scenes on the walls are depicted both as friezes and bas reliefs, which I think differ in the fact that in one the figures stand out from the wall (meaning the layer of the wall was chiseled away from the figure in a more difficult to execute art-form), and in the other, the figures are carved into the wall (easier to do since there is less chiseling to be done and also harder to destroy by later Christian chiseling). Don’t ask me which is which. Karnak’s most incredible feature in my mind, though, was the long corridor checked on the sides by smaller rooms, that runs the length of the temple and was, in its time, entirely roofed in stone supported by the massive columns. Tall, narrow slitted windows, almost like arrow slits in medieval castles, were built in rows into the top and sides of the roof stone to permit light to illuminate the corridor and the floor of the entire complex was once covered in gold and silver so the light reflected on the precious metals and glowed like the sun, which was worshipped as the god Ra by Ancient Egyptians.

We zipped over to finish our morning of touring at Luxor Temple, which was built several kilometers from Karnak temple and connected on a straight line by two rows of hundreds of sphinx statues, only about eighty or so of which have been uncovered. The government recently cleared the houses and other buildings between the two sites and has begun excavating the rest of the corridor between Karnak and Luxor temples so that eventually the entire complex will be united as a complete whole. An old mosque overlooks Luxor temple and although the mosque was built on the ground above the temple long before anyone even knew the temple was there, when it was still buried, undiscovered, beneath the sand (am I getting really redundant all of a sudden?!), the Muslim clergy agreed to move a Muslim cemetery and some shrines to clear the way for excavations once it became clear what lay below. Juxtaposed to this generosity, early Christian inhabitants, forced by persecution to worship in secret, used Luxor temple as a church (I didn’t mention before but some of Karnak’s statues were also cut into the shapes of crosses by Christians who turned part of that temple into a church as well), and desecrated many of the faces, hands, and feet of the Egyptian god’s carved therein. The Christians believed that the power and the soul of the pagan gods could be destroyed by destroying their statues, which I find ironic since the Christians aren’t supposed to believe the pagan god statues had any power or souls to begin with, what with the whole not-worshipping-false-idols thing.

We said goodbye to our Luxor guide, Tamer, and spent the rest of the day and night on the boat, sailing peacefully up the Nile (as in upstream, against the current) toward our final destination of Aswan. We spent most of our time on the sundeck reading and being harassed by the sleazy massage guy who walks around asking women (it was all women on the sundeck, us, and about ten Spanish ladies) intrusive questions, making creepy conversation, listing his many massage services and promising not to touch ladies inappropriately, and insisting on giving free trials. Twice I saw him force free trials on ladies who expressly told him no repeatedly until he just grabbed an arm or a foot and started going at it. When he told Helen for the third time he was going to give her a free trial massage (he said it like that, like it was inevitable), and she refused politely, and thanked him anyway, for the third time, and he persisted, I snapped at him in Arabic, “Enough, she said no thank you!” At first he tried to make a joke of it, then he tried to apologize for upsetting me like it wasn’t his behavior that was out of line, but rather the impact it had on my emotions. Then he tried to explain that this was his job and I was like “No, your job is to give massages to people who WANT massages.” He was upset enough to talk to Sarah about how outrageous I was being and how innocent he was once I walked away but he didn’t bother us anymore. We’ll see if he revisits us when we go up to the deck again today. I think he’ll have to since after a group of around forty Americans from Missouri disembarked yesterday afternoon there are only like 20 people on our cruise ship, which is built for about 200. We are his only potential clients so I doubt we’ve seen the last of him. I figure I can always threaten to report him to the management of the boat, which is I think what he was afraid of yesterday when he apologized, because I am quite sure there’s a large employment pool of other smarmy young guys willing to grope swimsuit-clad foreign women for a living ready to jump in if this one racks up some complaints.