Luxor Temple

The sleeping train from Cairo arrives in Luxor before 7.00 AM. I stowed my bag in the left luggage office, smiled through the ambush of taxi drivers outside the station, and walked down Sharia al-Mahatta towards the Nile. Luxor's governor is cleaning up the town, aiming perhaps more for the comfort of tourists than of average locals: the street is like a sand-coloured shopping mall. Maputo streets would be bustling by that hour, but in Luxor things start more slowly. About five minutes into the walk, sniggering at the steadily declining fares offered by my remaining attendant taxi driver, I glanced up and saw the tallest lotus capitals of Luxor Temple between the shop-fronts.


It's humbling and deflating to meet them so unexpectedly, when a moment ago you were absorbed in your own fleeting concerns. I know the pharoahs built to make people like me feel small, but I'm amazed at how effective it still is, even for those of us who should be well and truly inoculated against the ideology.


Not everyone is so respectful, of course. The obelisk that belongs on the right side of the gate in the above photo is presently in the Place de la Concorde, Paris.

Of course the French were only the more recent of a succession of visitors who for whom the place was just a resource. The Arabs built a mosque atop the old temple walls:


That was long after the Romans had adapted it for use as a fortress, covering the heiroglyphs with their frescos.


Heiroglyphs that somehow never made it into the history books I read as a child: cattle ready for sacrifice at the temple.


More conventionally festive, acrobats doing backflips in the celebrations for the yearly Opet festival.


And that was just the morning in Luxor. I'll come back to the rest of the day, but I'd best post this before solid people get impatient.


(Photo actually taken at sunset the next day, but it seems to belong here.)