I could hardly believe it. We were travelling down the wrong side of a busy duel-carriageway, horns blaring as cars swerved to avoid us. But that wasn’t even the worst part: we were travelling down the wrong side of a duel-carriageway in a rickety horse-drawn cab, through the middle of down-town Luxor, a city bursting with history.
Driving anywhere is a hazardous activity in Egypt, even at the best of times. But in a carriage, with cars weaving around you from all directions, the dangers seem even greater – especially when the driver is only watching the road fifty per cent of the time. In Luxor, the opportunity to ride in a horse-drawn carriage (or ‘caleche’) is marketed at tourists as part of the ‘Luxor experience’. We had barely stepped outside our hotel before we were assayed from all sides by cab-drivers offering us their “special price” to take us to the Luxor Temple, Museum or even across the Nile to the Valley of the Kings. But our driver, Ahmed, had cornered us the day before, while we were buying bottled water from the shop, and so we were more or less tied to making our planned trip to Karnak with him and his cantankerous horse, Rambo. But ,for all of the distressing moments of our perilous journey, our fears were forgotten as soon as we arrived at Karnak.
This vast temple complex is the largest ancient religious site in the world, with the oldest parts having been dated from between 2055 BC and 1650 BC. Once one of the most impressive and important sites of the ancient Egyptian age, it lay close to the city of Thebes, with a sphinx-lined road built to directly connect it to the Luxor Temple three kilometres away.
In the middle of the complex stands the formidible Hypostyle Hall, a hall area of 50,000 square feet with 134 massive columns arranged in 16 rows, some almost 21 metres high, with a diameter of over three metres, covered from top to bottom in hieroglyphics.
We could only wonder what some of these hieroglyphs might mean, but in some of the reliefs it was possible to discern exactly what was happening: battle-scenes with the pharoh ordering the execution of slaves; the pharoh receiving the symbol of long life from the gods; the pharoh and his queen, ruling in harmony over a vast kingdom, and there were scenes from everyday life as well: farmers hearding their cattle, men catching fish in the river Nile, scribes and priests at work while Nubian slaves stand at the edges and fan them with palm leaves.
It was incredible – a whole civilisation preserved in the pictures they created; the details of their ordinary day-to-day living. In the early evening light (it had been too hot to even think about making our visit during the day), the Hall became more beautiful and more eerie, especially once we realised that we were the only visitors left in the complex. It was completely still and silent and as we stood there, we tried to imagine how spectacular it must have been, even more so than it appears now.
As we left through the visitors’ entrance, the blood-red sun was sunk low on the horizon, while to the east, the moon was rising rapidly in a dusty blue sky. Ahmed came running towards us, waving frantically. “Here, here – Rambo is waiting for you!” Rambo scowled at us with an expression that suggested we were the last people in the world he wanted to see at that moment.
It was going to be a long ride back to the hotel – hopefully on the right side of the dual-carriageway this time around.
