Death on Tour - Janice Hamrick [46]
“Do you see the faces?” asked Lydia.
We might have been at a fireworks display. Everyone was pointing and asking each other if they could see the carving or the size or the broken figure. As though we could see anything else.
Behind us, Lake Nasser stretched to reach the horizon, a vast blue sea in the desert. Farther on, another temple waited, dwarfed by its neighbor. I scarcely took note of them. My whole attention was on the fabulous temple of Ramses II. How had people with little more than stone tools carved such enormous, breathtaking statues right into the side of a cliff? And how had they been moved, piece by piece, two millennium later? And more important, what kind of man thought it was a good idea to create four colossi in his own image? The sheer hubris of it was astounding to the western mind.
As we drew nearer to the monument, a photographer carrying a camera with a lens the size of a salami approached and spoke to Anni. She greeted him by name and told us that WorldPal had arranged for a group photo here.
“It’s the only place on the tour that we do this. You of course do not have to purchase a picture, but they will be available before we are ready to leave.”
No one protested, not even Jerry. Everyone was in a splendid mood and just being here seemed such an adventure. We lined up in three rows on the steps. Alan stood beside me and Kyla stood beside him, so it looked as though the three of us were together and happy. Fiona and Flora stood in the front row beside Kathy and Jerry, who kept trying to edge away from them. Kathy’s nose wrinkled as though she smelled something bad, but she looked that way so frequently it might not have meant anything. The photographer snapped twice, and we were done.
On the outside, the temple walls and even the surrounding rocks of the cliff had been sliced away from the original cliff wall and then put back together with astonishing precision. The effect was perfect from a distance, but from a little bit closer, it had the feel of a mosaic.
Anni spoke as she guided us to the feet of the colossal statues. “This complex was built in the thirteenth century BC, not only to honor the gods, but to remind Nubia of the might and power of Egypt. However, by the nineteenth century AD, the temples were forgotten and completely covered by sand. Legend has it that a young boy playing with a ball kicked it too high and it flew up the rock face and became stuck. When he climbed up the sand dune to retrieve it, he saw that it was lodged behind a giant carved head. He later showed his discovery to the Swiss explorer J. L. Burckhardt. The boy’s name was Abu Simbel, and the Europeans who followed to dig out the temples named the complex after him.”
We looked up and tried to imagine the sand so deep that only the top of the pharoahs’ heads protruded. Anni went on. “Ramses designed his temple so that twice a year, the sun would penetrate all the way to the back and illuminate the statues of Amun-Ra, Ra-Horakhty, and Ramses himself. The head of the god Ptah, ruler of the underworld, always remained in darkness, as is only right. Scientists believe that the day of the illumination is now one day later than it was originally, because the temple is now much higher on the cliff face.”
I looked up into the haughty, sightless eyes of Ramses and wondered what he would have thought of the change. He had created his temple high on a cliff surrounded by desert and sun, the Nile nothing but a ribbon of blue and a distant voice swirling over cataracts far below. Now, with the vast blue expanse of Lake Nasser twinkling in the sun, only slightly less featureless than the pale sky above, I decided that maybe even Ramses would have valued water above his own glory. Then again, maybe not.
Walking closer, we could see the finer details, carvings of baboons and small people, captives and crocodiles. And even though the site had been moved, it still retained the otherworldly atmosphere of an ancient kingdom despite the multitude of camera-wielding tourists. Anni negotiated with the guards