Mummy DEAREST
NICK WEBSTER IS BLOWN AWAY BY GIZA AND ITS MONUMENTAL TRIO OF PYRAMIDS
WHEN it comes down to it, the Grand Canyon is just a very big hole in the ground.
And the Great Wall of China is just a massive barrier. OK, it’s over 13,000 miles long and cost hundreds of thousands of lives – many bodies are interred in its walls – but still, when you visit, it’s like a great big castle wall.
Maybe you need to see it from space, from where it is visible, to truly appreciate it?
I’ve seen both – the Big Ditch and the Long Graveyard (I refer to that death toll) – and I sound a little flippant. But neither of these wonders come anywhere near to inspiring the kind of awe that seeing the Pyramids of Giza does.
As we drove towards them from the desert they rose up in an almost unearthly manner. So monumentally huge, so unique, they look alien. No wonder there are so many wacky theories about how they were built.
We had lunch at 9 Pyramids Lounge, on the Giza plateau overlooking the last of the surviving original seven wonders of the world and it seemed a crime to look at the food instead of the wondrous sights.
Up close they’re equally overwhelming, huge blocks each almost the size of a person, stepped and soaring upwards.
How on earth were they made then? Still nobody knows.
There are three pyramids at Giza, the biggest being the Great Pyramid and tomb of Pharaoh Khufu.
The pyramid where his father Sneferu is believed to have been buried is visible in the distance, and much smaller, in a clear act of one-upmanship.
We had flown to Cairo with easyJet from Luton to Sphinx Airport to dip our toes into an ancient world of jackal-headed gods, hieroglyphics, tombs and mummies.
The Egyptians scornfully say, “call that history?” to our Norman churches, in the same way we laugh at Americans treasuring a 150-year-old plantation house.
Our guide in Egypt, Dr Tarek Sarhan, said: “We never count in hundreds of years but in thousands.”
The Great Pyramid of Giza was built 4,500 years ago, while the Brits were still playing Jenga with standing stones at Stonehenge.
Meanwhile Egypt’s kings and queens were conniving and conquering in such a complicated way it makes Game Of Thrones seem like child’s play. There were at least 31 dynasties before the Greeks and Romans came along, and experts have now worked out that before them came the Scorpion Kings.
Our first taste of all this came at the Egyptian Museum, near Tahrir Square, the site of the 2011 Arab Spring demonstrations.
It’s mind-blowing to see the giant statues and priceless sarcoph
agi which are works of art in themselves, but the real treasure is the stories that go with them.
Thanks to Dr Tarek, we learned that pyramids were named after a triangular Greek bread; the blue eyeshadow seen on some statues would have been made with malachite which acted as fly repellent, and the ancient Egyptians never thought of burial places as tombs, simply houses for the afterlife – hence why they were filled with everything needed in that next life.
If the deceased were not rich enough to bury everything with them, it was all – food, drink, servants – depicted on the tomb wall.
The Egyptian Museum is where visitors will find the most famous object in the country… the gold funerary mask of (18th dynasty!) boy pharaoh Tutankhamun.
Despite the queues and “hurry up” cries of “Go please, no photo,” from museum officials, it is possible to have an unforgettable moment, mesmerised eye to eye with this icon of the past.
Tutankhamun’s mummy remains on display in the tomb in the Valley of the Kings where Howard Carter famously found him in 1922.
There are other mummies at the Egyptian Museum, wrapped and unwrapped, but three years ago 18 kings and four queen mummies, including the remains of Ramesses the Great, were moved from here and paraded three miles with great ceremony to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization.
The subterranean gallery where the mummies are now on display, with heads uncovered, and in one case, with claw-like arms in the air, was full of curious visitors but I found it a little creepy.
With so much to Cairo, ancient and modern, it’s easy to forget there were millennia in the middle where stuff also happened.
Our tour saw us overlooking Cairo, with a view from the Citadel of Sultan Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi. This is who Cru
sader histories – and Hollywood – call Saladin, leaving out that he was also the first Sultan of Egypt and Syria. Also here is the Mosque of Muhammad Ali, named not after the boxer but the Pasha who ruled the country 200 years ago and is considered the founder of modern Egypt.
We also looked around the Coptic Christian Saints Sergius and Bacchus Church, in Old Cairo, which dates back to the 4th century and was built on the site where Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the wee donkey are said to have rested and possibly even lived, when they fled King Herod.
Nearby is the Ben Ezra Synagogue, said to be close to where – depending on who you believe – Moses was found in the bulrushes
or where he prayed to God for the Israelites to leave Egypt.
We also called at the Khan elKhalili bazaar, where the game was to work out if the souvenirs were local or made in China. Either way, it’s all about the haggling.
Our easyJet rep warned us: “Every Egyptian mother is a supreme haggler” and passes it on to their children, which must make bedtime a challenge for all concerned.
We stayed at the lavish Waldorf Astoria Cairo Heliopolis, which is decked out in fabulously art-deco fashion, and 20 minutes from the city centre.
Remember what I said about time being a different concept in Egypt… it certainly is in the capital if you are travelling around rush hour. It’s a city of 25 million people, I just didn’t expect them all to take to the roads at once.
As we left Cairo for the airport, we caught sight of the Pyramids. Just as breathtaking as the first time I saw them two days earlier.
Up close they’re equally overwhelming, huge blocks each almost the size of a person, stepped and soaring upwards Nick on the Pyramids of Giza
THERE is one thing you need more than any other at this time of year in a garden and that is somewhere to sit. Oh, I know if you’re a keen gardener then you’ll never have time for that, and I am as guilty as the next at not being able to perch for long before I see a faded flower that needs dead-heading.
But when you walk out into the spring sunshine with your cup of tea or coffee, it’s nice to have somewhere to plonk your bottom, and you really will be able to drink in the view at mealtimes if you have chairs and a table.
So, if you have always promised yourself a decent set of patio furniture, get down to the garden centre – it’s a great time to invest, since there are lots of offers and the summer is all ahead of you.
The first thing to do is to measure up your space. It is no use thinking that a 4ft table and four chairs will fit on a 6ft square patio. They will when you put them down, but as soon as someone pulls a chair out, they will fall over the edge.
It follows that, if you are making a patio or terraced sitting area, you should bear this in mind.
Tables and chairs take up more room than you think. In our house (and garden) I always go for shapely and well-designed furniture, and while Mrs T and I have similar tastes in that respect, she sensibly sets comfort on an equal footing.
For this reason, by far the best bet is all-weather wicker. This is not natural wicker, but a synthetic product that looks like woven wicker and can be left
out in all weathers – even in winter.
The great delight is it almost always comes with soft cushions (Mrs T’s particular pleasure) and it is only these that need to be taken in and sheltered from rain at the end of each day.
Cleaning is simply a matter of going over furniture with a hosepipe and scrubbing brush once a year, to remove green algae, and you’ll occasionally have to sponge off the odd bit of bird mess.
You can find a range of ultra-modern cubic designs and softer, more rounded forms to suit any garden, and once you have flopped down in your new chair, you will wonder why you did not invest sooner.
I always go for shapely and well-designed furniture