Egypt: Day Eleven, Part One

We wake up at the ungodly hour of 4 am, then, as we stumble toward the gangplank, we’re given a Doggy Bag and a pillow, because it’s going to be a long bus trip to Abu Simbel - three and a half hours across the desert.  To those who complain, Ahmed says, “Tell Ramses.  He’s the one who built it all the way out there in the desert away from anything.”
       I must admit that I avail myself of the pillow, if only because it’s still dark so we can’t see anything along the road... not that there’s much to see.  When the sun comes up and people are stirring again, Ahmed tells us about “The Project of the Century”.  Evidently ex-President Mubarak decided to build an irrigation canal from the Nile to the Western Desert.  It cost billions and was never finished.  It simply peters out somewhere out there to the West, beyond the horizon.

       The flatness goes on for miles and miles and miles in all directions, either flat desert or pebbly reg-like darker terrain.  There’s a high voltage line that runs parallel to the road all the way. We also cross the second of the great spillways Ahmed told us about yesterday, to draw off water from Lake Nasser if it fills up too much.  But basically the ride is pretty monotonous.  At various intervals I notice the highway has three successive sets of rumble strips, probably to wake drivers who are falling asleep from boredom.
       Finally there’s a big new village project on the left, complete with mosque.  And then a few more.  El Mostakbal Village and its ocher mosque with pistachio dome stands out against the overcast sky that looks like it’s going to rain... but doesn’t.  That’s followed by Abd Elkader Village with its public garden.  Finally Abu Simbel Village, and beyond it...  the temple that I’ve dreamed about for most of my life.


We walk down to the bluff overlooking Lake Nasser.  Somewhere below, under the water but not that far away, lies the original location of the Temple of Abu Simbel.  Like Machu Picchu in the Andes, the temple, built in the 13th century BCE, was unknown to the outside world.  Then in 1817 it was rediscovered by a Swiss researcher.  I remember marveling over it when I studied geography as a child.  I promised myself I’d go see it one day.  And now here I am.
       That promise could have gone unfulfilled after the Aswan High Dam was built because it created a lake whose rising waters would engulf the site.  That’s when UNESCO stepped in and funded a project that had to race against time in order to save the temple.  The work took from 1963 to 1968.   It involved cutting up the two temples into 1,036 pieces, most weighing an average of 20 tons but some as much as 30   The pieces were stored out of reach of the rising waters.  A backdrop “mountain” was created 70 feet inland and 215 feet higher.  To be as true to the old temple as possible, the pieces of one of Ramses’s statues, which broke off in an earthquake, were placed in the exact position where they were found at the foot of the statue.
       There were major problems to be overcome.  The main problem was that the statues had been carved into one piece of sandstone.  Cutting them up meant creating junctures where none existed before, not to mention the problem of their alignment.  (The faces were cut vertically in order to leave them as one piece visually.)  To that first problem was added the fact that ambient temperatures vary from  85°F to 130°F in a day.  To solve the problems heat stress would create on the jigsaw puzzle this once-solid monument had become, it was necessary to build a concrete dome over the entire complex, and to provide heat and humidity control within that dome.  (Although that’s a technological marvel, I chose not to visit it in order to keep the mystery of the place intact.)
       When all was said and done, this project cost a total of $40-50 million.

Our artist-in-residence sketching the Abu Simbel statues