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TRAVEL BLOG ENTRY
from Pyramids and Temples
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“The beautiful but much smaller Temple of Isis” |
The dock at the Temple of Sobek was small and the landing is popular with cruise ships so that our boat left as soon as our tour of the temple was finished. The guides organized a sort of Egyptian "night" for us, with a whirling dervish (very impressive), a belly dancer (very disappointing) and an Egyptian banquet (good food).
Afterwards Angela and I went to the upper deck and sat at the front of the boat in the dark about 11:00 while the ship continued cruising upstream. Sirius, the "dog star," the brightest star in the sky, was directly ahead of us fairly low in the sky. The ancient Egyptians would watch for this star to appear in the early morning, for it signaled the start of the annual flooding of the Nile, when the waters of the river rose over the land, bringing silt to fertilize the land and water to the flooded fields to begin the new growing season. Orion, the constellation of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the afterlife, was below Sirius to the southwest.
The next morning at 6:24 the sun rose to the east of the river, pale yellow in the upper part of its globe, greyish where it was still low, appearing to touch the trees. The sky was a pale blue and small spots of cloud were scattered randomly.
After breakfast, we went to the upper deck and lay on deck chairs as the scenery slid by. As the boat got farther south, green banks more and more gave way to barren earth and sand as the desert closed in on both sides of the river.
Aswan, where the cruise ended, was where Agatha Christie used to stay, at the Old Cataract Hotel while her husband conducted archeaological digs on Elephantine Island across the river. He dug, and she wrote "Death on the Nile." When the movie was made in the seventies, scenes were filmed on the grounds of the hotel. The Old Cataract Hotel is the only hotel I have ever stayed where the public washroom was worth a photograph. Now that is a sophisticated hotel, even though its best days are clearly behind it! Visit, don't stay there.
We toured both Aswan Dams, which have been built across the river at this point to generate electricity and irrigate the land. The penalty for Egypt has been that the annual flood has ended and Egypt must now pay for the fertilizer that the Nile used to provide for free. The "High Dam" was a Russian-Egyptian project and a memorial to this cooperation has been built at the site.
We toured an ancient quarry, and then went to the Temple of Isis. The dams flooded the island where this temple was erected in ancient times and it has been transferred to an island nearby. Although it is much smaller than the other temples we had seen so far, it is attractive for that reason and quite beautiful in its setting and the goddess to which it is dedicated, Isis.
previous travel blog entry
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