Bits and pieces

I walked today down Bab El Qalk, and in towards Bab Zuweilah. This is the area where the Tentmakers work.

I was taking my time. Every walk at the moment has the weight and importance of a 'last time'.

An elderly man shuffled past, moving fast. His tracksuit drooped about his spindly thighs and hips, slung low enough to be dangerous. It was threadbare in places, with patches of beige showing through - which I hope was his underwear. The legs were too long and had frayed to a long and daggy fringe.

Across his bottom was one word.

JUICY.

.........................................

There is a white horse on the same walk. He (undoubtedly) is always parked in the same place, beside a man with a big fruit stand. He is a beautiful horse - in good condition, firmly muscled and rounded, and pulls a cart that is a patchwork of pattern and paint - bright triangled in red and white and black and green and yellow. Every day as I pass he is turned in his traces, untethered, and his fodder is piled high and bright green on the surface of the cart he pulls. He is always eating, and he never seems to try to wander away.

.........................................

We went out last night to a coffee shop with a singer. I love this place - and there will soon be a whole blog on it. Last night though, I was fascinated by the singer. The sound system must have been set to maximum echo - so the blasting words rang into the room long after he lowered the microphone from his mouth. "Habiby" - which roughly translates as 'my darling' and is the mainstay of all Arabic songs as far I I can see - became 'Hab b b biby y y by by by".

I realised how useful this was as he saw that we were there and rushed over to greet Ibrahim.
He was in the middle of a series of 'habibys' and one long note was sung straight into Ibrahim's ear as the singer wrapped the microphone around Ibrahim's neck to make sure the audience missed nothing. He lowered it with time to greet us with a few words before the last throbbing notes died away, and then took it up again. It is obviously useful to have echoes long enough to have twenty second conversations between them!

Farewell to my spinners

I went with my son Sam, to the Friday markets in the City of the Dead a few weeks back. It is a marvelous place - though unbelievably grungy. If you have watched the blog you will have seen several references to it. I took the usual photographs of lots of people. I love the way the faces of the older ones have so much history written into them. On the whole I have found people are happy to be photographed. Now and again I want a pose that the person is holding and take one without their knowledge with my "sneaky camera". Do not worry - I have never ever been abused for it when I take a photo back, though I occasionally worry about the ethics of it.

I went to the City of the Dead again yesterday.

I had a pile of photos to hand out. This is something I do often - copy images to CD, print them off at one of the local cheap photoshops, then take them back to the area where I took them where I hand them out. People are usually delighted and it means that the next time I want photographs of people they rarely refuse. I have almost been mobbed in some places by people hoping I have images for them.

One of the men I photographed with Sam on our first visit there was an elderly man in a long white galabeyiah. He had a marvelously bushy beard, and the beard was dyed bright scarlet-orange with henna. I have since found it can be of religious significance - at the time it was simply a wonderful splash of colour. My request for a photograph led to some catcalling from the men around him, but he smiled, composed himself on his chair with his hands on his knees, and I took four shots in quick succession - two close and two further back. At one point he turned his head to answer a friend's comment - rude, guessing from the laugh on his face - and the shot is side-on but really amused.

I had two of the four printed to give to him - both the more formal versions.

The following week Sam and I went back. I have been dithering for a long time about purchasing an old door. I cannot possibly claim to need it - but I wanted it. Bob had said that he didn't mind as long as I did something with it in Canberra. I had reluctantly come to the conclusion that it was just a silly 'want' but the day before I packed I realised that I might forever regret not buying one while I had the opportunity.

The doors are wonderful. They have that faded and streaked and worn look that can show the past seven coats of paint in wear and scratches on their surface. Palimpsest is a popular element in art and somehow these doors are art forms of their own. Some are carved, some have insets of wrought iron work - curved or art deco. The colours are marvelous - greens and blues and purples, and the occasional one which is just wood turned silver and umber with use and wear, with the oil from a thousand hands soaked into areas where people reach to push it open, or to turn a key. Some come complete with knockers shaped like a softly curled hand holding a ball, feminine fingers forever frozen, and often painted in the same colour as the door. I suspect sometimes, knowing Egyptian painters, because it was just too much trouble to go around the knocker with the paint. Like old men's faces, their history is written in their surfaces.

Opposite my lovely man with the red beard was the best stall for doors and it was in the process of going through the doors that I had spotted him.

We could not see him there so I approached a boy sitting in his rather sad and tatty stall. There were old bits of washing machines, lumps of unidentifiable metal, cardboard boxes flattened down but decidedly tired, and a smashed typewriter - so smashed that it looked as if it had been thrown through a third floor office window in a rage.

I showed the boy the photographs and his face froze, and he shot to his feet. He was muttering about the Sheik - and I realised that one of the men the week before had also called him a sheik. It started to dawn on me from the shock in his face that something was wrong. Then others started to crowd around including a neighbour from the drink stall opposite. I caught the word 'dead' in Arabic.

He had been hit by a boy on a motorbike only a few days after I had taken his photograph, and he had died.

By this stage a fair-sized crowd was gathering. I was still trying to control the photographs, but others were snatching at them, l0ooking, and handing them back. A tall girl in full black, headscarf and long sleeves and dress and coat, pushed through to the front of the crowd. She took one photograph then held it at full arms' length behind her - like a child refusing to return a toy to its rightful owner. Her face - I can only call it stricken!

I kept picking up odd words in the flood of Arabic - like "his daughter" and "no photos". As I realised that she wanted the photo for the family - and had no intention of giving it back anyway - I nodded and she shot away.

I was still numbly clutching the other photograph - but the neighbour from the drink stand begged and I gave it to him.

There was a group of Americans in the small and narrow 'door' shop and no hope that we could fit. Sam and I moved on. Looking back now I realise that I was utterly - quite out of proportion - shocked. I do not think I could have made a decision on a door even if we had been able to go there.

This was the second time in one week that I had tried to return a photograph and found the subject had died. Earlier in the same week I had visited the spinners with a friend and a set of shots taken around February - in a muddy and wet period in Winter. We had not found the men I hoped would be working, and in looking further afield had stopped and talked to a spinner I did not know who was working with his young son.I took some photographs, and they were in the pile I was sorting while talking to Ragab and Ali - two spinners who have become good friends. They had had a similar reaction, grabbing at the photos in shock. I had sent four good images, full face, off to the subject's home with assurances that they would be so welcome - "they will be shocked, and it will make them sad, but they did not have photographs of him except from his wedding."

Two in a week. Egypt has changed me in some ways. It is a country rife with superstition. It threads through the religion, and is interwoven through the folk lore, some beliefs are pharaonic, and some the most modern of conspiracy theories. The same lovely friend who had decried the sacrifice of a hedgehog to save a sister with cancer had calmly arranged to kill a sheep four weeks later when his taxi kept breaking down, despite the money he spent on repairs.

Perhaps I did not really believe that I had caused the deaths - that would be pushing too far when I have always believed myself without superstition - but as we walked away through the mud of the city of the dead, with a small crowd still following us entreating us to bring more photographs, I felt - guilty.

Two days ago I went back to the City of the Dead with Ibrahim again. It was time to say goodbye to my lovely spinners, Ragab and Ali, and to old Hamed, keeper of fifty three tombs, with the face like a kindly walnut.

We sat in a circle in one of the tombs, on chairs borrowed from homes nearby, and in the cool shade of the rooms. Outside Hamed's carefully tended pots of plants were in spring flower - and they had handed me a rose and a 'ful' a fragrant gardenia-like flower. The spinners had told us that the family of the dead spinner were happy to have my photographs, and in a lull in general conversation I mentioned my worry that I might be blamed if people realised that two that I had photographed recently had both died within the following week.

He explained seriously and carefully that every person's birth is a set and recorded date, and every death is the same. There is nothing that can be done to avoid death on that date, and nothing that can be done to die on a different day- as if it is not your time you will not die. I think it is the sort of fatalism that helps them to cope with the concept to death, and certainly there is a sense of closing the door and moving on.

He pulled others into the conversation and they reassured me - obviously amused that I should think I could have the power to change something so thoroughly controlled by God.

There is a story (in the Middle East there is always a story). Ali is walking in the Cairo market and he sees Death, who looks straight at him. He turns in panic and runs to his master's home.

"Master, I have seen Death in the market, and he was looking for me. I must leave and hide."

The master decided to send Ali to relative in Aleppo, in Syria. He put him on a plane that afternoon. Then because the shopping had been forgotten he went late to the market.

He saw Death, but was unafraid, as he felt it was not his time, so he approached him.

"My servant Ali was very surprised to see you in the market here in Cairo this morning."

Death said, "I was very surprised to see Ali here too. I have an appointment to meet him in Aleppo in only four hours."

After fizzy orange with Hamed we walked to Ali's home. He is probably seventy. His face is think and lined but full of laughter. He had a dark ring around his head, as if he has been wearing a hat with black dye that ran into his skin. His hands and arms are stained indigo from the dark silks he has been spinning. He has four teeth, but they are crooked and catty-cornered, like stained old pegs left in the earth for seventy years too long. He wears an old white business shirt, with a double sided razor blade attached to his collar for cutting his threads. Years of loping up and down long alleys beside the threads on his loom have left him as lean as a piece of dried sinew, lanky and fit, despite his age. I have never heard him use even one word of English.

He stopped in the doorway as we slipped off our shoes, and took my right hand in both of his.

"I love you," he said, and tears filled his eyes.

I had a lump in my throat I could hardly speak through.

I love this country, and my Egyptian friends.

Farewells and photos and the best of drivers

I am on a slow sad series of 'last days'.

I have been putting off blogging. I have been so busy and so scatterbrained. I have taken cameras full of photographs and keep thinking I must send them to Flickr to start the process of putting them on the blog.

But I have just decided that if I do that you will get nothing, as I will never do it.

We drove through a shadowed street yesterday and a ray of light slanting between tall dark trees and buildings picked up the brilliance of a tumble of oranges in the cart of an orange seller. In a fragment of light and time it gilded the faces of three ladies in black and the orange seller himself. I will always wonder if he wore a deep blue galabeyiah because he knew it would look spectacular against the colour of his cartful of fruit.

We stopped in the City of the Dead. Poor Ibrahim patiently stopped and reversed, and parked and stopped again while waiting for photographs. All those images I have seen flash past while driving - and I have thought "One day I will get out and photograph that" - well, today was that one day.

We stopped first at a point where you suddenly see a huge panorama of the City of the Dead looking back towards the Citadel and the low squat dome and fine minarets of the Mohamed Ali Mosque. It is breathtaking. Long low walls, lots of yellow ochre, warm terracotta, pale bleached green domes in the marvelous blue-green of tombs and the sacred sites of Islam, concrete and mud brick and every shade of grey and dust, and an occasional brilliant yellow. There are sculptured domes and white domes and green domes and domes just like the best of old jelly moulds. There are crenellations against the sky. There are tombstones - long and narrow and also gold and green and white.

Then a funeral went past and a short hoot from Ibrahim warned us to fold down the cameras and show respect to the truck with its simply draped body, and the following trucks of mourners. Women in black turned sober suffering faces towards us and I realised that no matter how much I think I know and love this city there will always be things I can never be a part of.

I visited my lovely spinners - Regab and Ali and Sayed, and Regab's son Khaled who has now taken over Regab's own old wheel while Regab struggles with a new and ungainly one in dark green. I love the way their faces light when they see us. It feels as if they have become freinds regardless of a common language and time to know them. Old Hamed who tends fifty three tombs showed his keys to the friends who were with me on this trip. His face is enchanting - it is full of life, vivid and bright and fun, but so lined and he is small and thin in repose.

We drove from the areas I know into some I do not know and walked a little. We found a wonderful tomb, fret-worked and painted in strong colours and patterns inside. Apparently it is the tomb of the family of a famous footballer. The caretaker wore a spotless and obviously newly laundered white galabeyiah. He had two teeth, on on each side of the front of his mouth, and must have been seventy. He was entertaining Ibrahim with stories of his travels when he was young.

"I have visas in my passport that you woudl not believe" translated Ibrahim. "I was in France when I was thirty five. I wish I had never left." We all laughed, the caretaker included. It was so silent in his area. There were no famous mosques, no people moving around carrying bread, not even enough plants to have birdsong. The long narrow streets stretched off into the distance. Harsh sunlight lit the golden walls of his tomb and cast black shadows inside, making the paintwork dark and indistinct. The streets were just packed earth, and the earth seemed to colour the walls around. Doors studded the long walls, each leading to another tomb with its packed earth floor, or grey concrete, with its few potted plants and small tidy room for mourners. It was hard to see it and imagine the green fields of France as he obviously did so often.

"Why are you sorry to have left France?" I asked and in fact as it left my lips it felt like the stupid question of the year.

"In France I could eat - how we ate and ate," - and what a silencer that was. Ibrahim made a quick comment about pretty French girls and we all laughed again.

As we walked away I commented to Ibrahim that I was saddened by his comment. Ibrahim said that he thought in many ways it was a true thing to say, but there was no doubt that he could eat something in Egypt. Perhaps, thought Ibrahim, he remembered most that he was young in France, and that all good memories came with youth.

It was a comment that struck so true that I felt silenced again. A crow flew overhead and perched on the minaret of a small mosque. A women in black appeared on a long cross street, and though she was walking quickly it seemed to take a long time for her to reach and pass us. I wanted a photograph but was caught between lethargy, indecision and tact. There was a strange echo between the appearance of the tall slim and quite beautiful woman and the arrival of the crow. She was not actually all in black, as the scarf that bound her head was edged in glittering beads in blues and greens. As she left the bird left his place on the minaret.

And last - all the pretty little horses. We had rounded a corner just after the panorama and the funeral. Against a blank concrete wall was some children's play equipment. We were stopped at first by the gaudy netting that enclosed a trampoline. It was rainbowed, and so the tomb behind it took on a magical misty 'lit in colour' look. Opposite and against a curved wall was a skipper - like a metal rubbish skip, or a scoop from a bulldozer. It was full of horses. They were obviously from a merry-go-round, brightly painted. Their long bodies arched and leapt, and in places the paint was completely gone, so the wood looked as old and worn and polished as driftwood. They were bright and gaudy, and quite incongruous against the City of the Dead.

Then I realised how appropriate they were. They were for the young and the living .. all through this area people live and work. Some are just poor and have found the area suitable for housing, some service the tombs and the necessary services for the dead. Some just sell food, or spin in the long alleys, or use the areas as they are quiet and cheap. The Cairo City of the Dead is also a city for the living, and even the children are not forgotten. I tried to buy a horse - and I am ashamed of that now - but it suddenly seemed so strong a symbol of life going on regardless of death.

This is a pragmatic country.

• I have had many asking about how to buy stitcheries in Cairo. If you ring Amal on 25898364 or 25882484 - the Association of Upper Egypt for Education and Development headquarters they have a lot of embroideries left but will send them back as unsold soon. Amal has lovely English. Ring quickly - I almost bought a stack more - but Bob was with me urging caution!

I think they would alwys be able to teel you where they can be bought.

I am in Spain and life is good.

The Stitcheries of Akmeem

I have been so busy - and away too - over the last few months. No apologies really, but I am sad about so much that I have not blogged including my textile tour of Egypt and Syria.

Now another textile related subject - the enchanting embroideries of Akmeem. Women are beingtaught some basic stitching and let go with threads and fabric to stitch what they see in these areas to make a little extra money for the household. The work is beautiful, bright and colourful, and full of fascinating glimpses into life in Upper Egypt (which always confuses me as it is south!).


Water Carriers by Eqbal Tewfic



The Lake by Naanaa Adib



The Pigeonhouse by Naanaa Adib



Summer Holidays by Awatef Sabet
I love the obvious observation of the way people appear when swimming in this one - bits and pieces just appear above the water.



My Life in the House by Sanaa Sabet
My favourite - and the smallest.

Taxis and Tea

My beautiful daughter left tonight. I am feeling decidedly flat and a bit miserable.

We have had an unbelievably hectic week.

The household is shrinking fast. From eleven - actually no - one expected guest did not come so we had ten in the house - and now we are down to only four. Our house guests are aging now as the young ones leave and older ones replace them. It has just been delightful having our young ones here - Sam and Tabbi and my grandson Michael were all here through Christmas and Tabbi has just left.

More than two hundred were at the house Sunday night for a huge Australia Week launch.We have had the the Archaeology conference - Corroboree - and a museum party for the launch of the co-ordinating exhibition tonight. With my other hat on I also walked the board and friends and some staff of the American University of Cairo through Tentmakers to talk to them about the art and its makers.

Yesterday we had a visit to Sakkara for the archaeologists to see what Professor Naguib Kanawaty has been doing in Mereruka's tomb. More on that later. It means I saw the burial chamber again - a wonderful low point!! Then we hosted a dinner with a celebrity Aussie chef out at the Intercontinental at City Stars.

We had a function today at the house - a wine tasting for one hundred - in the evening.

Busy busy week!

This morning Tabbi and I took a taxi to my dentist - the last visit for a while - and as we got in the taxi pulled out then asked if we wanted tea. It turned out that he had a mug of tea held between his knees and was happy for us to swig from it. We managed to resist. I think the last thing I would want between my knees in Cairo traffic is a cup of boiling water!

Friday Markets

In Cairo, in the City of the Dead, there are markets. On Fridays they are huge - long streets packed with structures patchworked from bits and pieces and all manner of goods laid out for sale. Some have bits of everything, but most specialise.

Some items are just bizarre. In the poorest area of all - between the railway lines - there are bags of things like hotel soaps - somewhat used - and very badly ragged toothbrushes, crusted urinals and disposable dental mirrors. These are objects that I cannot imagine ever wanting to buy. In the better areas are cages of cats, birds - budgies and parrots, overcrowded but looking pretty healthy, and the odder items, like snakes, hedgehogs, birds of prey and hoopoes - I just wanted to buy them and open the cages as I love these beautiful birds.

I have just realised that I could go on and on describing but it is better perhaps to just let you look - through two pairs of eyes. I went with my daughter Tabbi - and she is a brilliant photographer. She is better than I am so I am both proud and daunted looking at her work. Even better - she has a little camera that I lust after - a bendy twisty thing that takes images from unexpected sides and has a 10 X optical zoom - so she can take lots of portraits of people who do not realise they are being taken. While I deplore the sneakiness of this with very politically correct sensitivity I also envy the capability and the images she collects.

So - walk the Friday markets with us! Lots of photos - so be warned - but it is so hard to edit these out.


Fish - smoked and alive


Fish - sunlit and backlit




My leaping horse - and Tabbi's


One shop - two great objects - I loved the old chair with its splitting textile and gleaming gold, and the beautiful bronze lady was being used as an incense holder.


Tabbi's shoe man and a sales table complete with palm tree


Tabbi's portrait - and mine


Old typewriter - with Arabic keyboard including a single key for "God is Great"


A wonderful Circassian face, my image, then Tabbi's


His Master's Voice - mine then Tabbi's


Old machines, probably almost rusted solid, with carved marble


Old photos on a stunning wall


Same shop as the last two - the marvelous orange and blue shot from Tabbi - how did I miss that one?


Tabbi's angel - and to think I didn't bother as I didn't like it!


Rugs and the man who made them


Mannequins - Tabs, then mine


Screens and Vespa parts


shower heads and computer parts


Brushes




Hanging objects


Plates and cutlery


It is always the people that light up the City of the Dead for me - we have so many marvelous portraits. These two are mine.


And Tabbi's


Tabbi's


Tabbi's then mine (without 10x optical zoom)


Mine, then Tabbi's


Two Tabbi shots


Gas bottles and bikes


Toilets and grilles


Doors, mine then Tabbi's


Iron in the sky




Loved the kitchen sinks and the amazing thirties look of the lush mannequin


Chandelier for sale in front, open tomb behind






Chandelier specialty shop - which has bags and bags of crystal jewels


Bikes and Turkish tombstones






Tabbi's


Tabbi's




Tabbi's


Tabbi's

I thought the last shot was just spectacular. The morning left me with an sense of how hard life must be for Egyptians at the lower end of the social scale - and the huge gap between those at the top and those at the bottom. The faces though, show acceptance of what life gives them - and this is for me an overwhelming factor in Egypt - that whatever is in the bag is accepted without rancor or complaint.

I loved my morning. I almost apologise for the huge flood of photographs - but they were so wonderful. You cannot take a bad photo in Cairo.

Day Nine and Wadi Sura

We woke early and packed the camp. We are getting better at this. I was cold and had not slept well - so was quite content to hear that we had a day with a lot of driving.

I have been enchanted with my traveling companions. Marita and Jean-Daniel are a delight and talk about as much as I would want, but not all the time. Both have excellent and fluent English - and their French, which they use when together is so clear that I follow it easily if I bother to concentrate. We have discussed everything - both are thinkers and sharply intelligent and humorous. They even forgive my occasional Aussie crudeness when comments just slip out.

We had come to this side of Gilf Kebir so fast yesterday - approaching from the desert and running up the edge so I really did not have time to take it in. Leaving today we are hugging close to the high escarpments and can see the amazing stacked sandstone formations.



Occasionally I took a shot straight through the windscreen from the backseat. I like the juxtaposition of Hani's strong hands, the rear view mirror, and the view in front. The small dot low in the middle is the lead car.



We pulled in to see the Swimmers' Cave. This was featured in the movie The English Patient - and I loved the movie. I had always been enchanted by that cave - the deep slit that the shepherd edged into, down and around tight bends, with his flaming torch lighting stunning paintings on the walls. I thought the swimming figures beautiful and it was such an odd combination, swimmers in the middle of the desert. It implied a long time passing from then till now, and since 'now' cannot be shifted 'then' must be a very long time ago - a time when the climate was completely different, not just wet enough to sustain people but wet enough to swim.

I had been warned. Heide had mentioned that it was a shame that people had damaged it, wetting the images - which might not have seen water for centuries - for better photos. Darkening seemed to imply that some had used oil. Apparently some images were actually missing.

The cave was the greatest disappointment of the trip. For a start, the film lied. It was a shallow, low, shelter - curved and only slightly overhung like the other caves we have seen. There were no deep slits to climb through, no suggestion of darkness that might need a torch. I almost did not believe they had the right place. The paintings copied from these walls that now decorate the stunning foyer in the International Hot Springs Hotel in Bahariya are a great advance on anything left here - and in a way will remain the memorial for the Cave of the Swimmers.

Worse - there is hardly anything left. The way the rock has formed left it cracked and flaky - though hard enough to last for centuries - as long as no-one tries to lever pieces off with tyre irons. It looks as if that has happened here again and again. It was devastating to see it and I wanted to avert my eyes and cry. There are great light scars in the wall of the rock, and shattered edges of figures swimming now into nowhere.





And a view of the cave.


I have no idea what might be done to protect other caves from similar damage. While tourism to these areas is difficult, it is also sought after by those who want to join an increasing movement to go to places others have not been. Tourism does marvelous things to increase awareness of what is of value on this earth of ours, but it also allows people to access things that are so precious and fragile. Our guides were wonderful. Mahmoud spoke with passion about guides 'from Cairo' who turn a blind eye to damage done - but he sees the existence of things like the caves which are the treasures of Gilf Kebir as essential to his continuing tours. The flower stones of the White Desert are disappearing (and I have some in a bowl in my lounge room, and each time I go back now I take a handful home). The silica glass which was formed over a huge area of Egyptian Desert in one extraordinary meteor strike, which shattered into shards which were worn silken and pitted by wind and sand, to glow like greenish and golden translucent jewels on the sands of the Great Sand Sea - most has been collected by tourists. I saw whole big monuments built in this natural glass in Tripoli, the capital city of Libya.

I am now so afraid for places like the fairly recently found Fugini Cave - so stunning and haunting and beautiful. Special places in isolated areas afford unusual opportunities for plunder as there is unlikely to be an interruption. I would hate to see tourism banned as I found my whole trip so magical and it would be churlish to assume that all other tourists are worse than I am.

We left the cave, all a bit quiet and distressed.

Next stop was a camp used by the British - called the British Camp - funny about that! We had hooked out towards the desert (and Libya) again and the stacks of sandstone looked designed to be pigeon houses, pitted and worn and sculptured.





The sky was deep ultramarine, and the sun was impossible to avoid with shadows sitting like tight puddles under the rocks. Stones in this area are like jewels - not silica glass, but softly translucent, white like thinned milk, cool apricot and cream colours, all etched by sand and wind so that if you lift them from the firmed-down gravel which embeds them they spread wider and rougher below the ground level, and are smooth and polished above. You hold them in you hand like eggs, and the polished side lets you look into the stones, the dull side below stops you seeing your own palm straight through them.

We did not stay long - all of us needed toilet stops and we had bolted for varying degrees of cover. There was one track through the rocks and it is surprisingly hard to get away from twelve people all demanding a space of their own while pretending to search for pretty pebbles.



Now we swung south again. We ran parallel and fast through red sand with the Gilf in the distance. Further away the sand is firmer and less likely to trap Alberto's car. Fingers of the soft stuff work like speed humps and are surprisingly hard to see in mid-day sun with no shadows.



It is amazingly beautiful.

Now the real fun starts. We were to cross the Gilf at the Aqaba Pass and this meant we had to climb to the top of the Gilf. I had asked rather tentatively about this. I was told it used to be very difficult but now the sand had filled the rocky places it was not so bad, but very soft.

We went up, and up, and up, sand dune after sand dune. I lost count of how often we had to run back - not me actually if I am honest - but the other drivers and Mohamed the Captain - to dig out Alberto from soft sand. Going up with only two wheel drive was so difficult - lose speed even a little - and it was very steep and inevitable - and the back wheels simply drove the front wheels into the sand, then dug themselves in.

I wish I had photos but it was impossible to hold on and use an SLR from the back seat with images that were even half way reasonable.

At the top the world flattened out. The plateau was rimmed with black ridges and high black peaks, but the sand between shifted and drifted in the keening wind that swept across it and swung at the cars, snatching especially at the higher and heavily laden kitchen car. It felt uneasily as if we were driving on a treadmill that just moved under the wheels so we went nowhere, and the scenery hardly changed.



Up one side, and down the other.

We dropped only one more dune.


We threaded our way down through the sand, and came to a high ridge with a long sand slope below and wave after wave the Great Sand Sea stretched out pale red and gold before us.


We swung around to face one of the most amazing views I will ever see. Without a wide angle lens I can give you only one direction, but it wrapped almost around us. The sand glowed golden as the sun when down, and ridges dropped and seemed to change shape as shadows shifted and sharpened - from the softest wash of grey-lilac to mauve to red-violet and finally deep grapey purples. The light cooled on the sand as the heat sank from the air and the cold slammed down on us.



I did not put up a tent. I was so enthralled by the colours that I refused to take my eyes off the sand dunes, even when my friend Mohamed, and then Mahmoud, came up to tentatively offer to help.

I put my tent straight on the sand, to sleep near the men around the campfire. I had mentioned that I had my Ipod and could put on some music to play through the car speakers if people wanted. I had hardly used it. I had brought it as an isolating device if there should be people who want ed to talk all the time - but the whole group has been delightful and talking has been a pleasure. Even more, the places have demanded silence to fall between the gaps left by voices, so the stillness can feed in and around us and the silence is so total that it almost leaves you straining to hear anything at all. Heide had asked about Abba, and I assured her that I had an eclectic collection which did indeed include Abba.

We ate, then I put on music. I had decided that Abba did not entirely suit the place, and instead chose the sound track of 1492, The Conquest of Paradise by Vangelis. It is currently almost my favourite piece of music. The choral voices - only men, floated out across the sand and the whole group fell into unusual silence until the whole CD was over. "That," said Jean-Daniel. "was absolutely beautiful - what was it."

Then we put on Abba and some danced. It was a lovely night, cold and icy but so utterly still and beautiful. The moon was out over the sand and you could almost read by it, even though it was not the full moon we had had earlier in the trip.

The men cosseted me. I know they had been so concerned about the coughing. Now Mohamed, the driver of the kitchen car set up my bed. I had dropped the mattress and rolled out my sleeping bag and the tiny feather cushion filler I was using as a pillow. Mohammed lifted the pillow, folded a camel blanket to a thick ridge and put it underneath - which both extended the length of the mattress and lifted my head higher. Another camel blanket was carefully folded around the whole bed. I drifted straight off to sleep with not one cough. As I sank into that warm and comfortable state that knows you are awake but could not be bothered moving I felt Mohamed beside me stand and move around the circle to check all of us. One after another he adjusted our blankets, Mahmoud's had shifted sideways, and he tucked it in. The captain's had slid back and he pulled it up over his shoulder. I was aware of gentle hands adjusting the heavy rug around my shoulders and weighting the sides with sand so it could not move. Nor could I, but then I didn't really want to.

I slept like a log and did not use a tent again.