Military Escort

We travel fast in the middle of the road. All other traffic is brushed aside into the cane fields or stopped at the regular checkpoints, where conscript police in Reebok beanie hats slouch behind free standing metal shields. Heavily armed farmers guard every crossroads, scouring the fields for sign of terrorists, aiming pump action shotguns at all suspicious-looking goats. Villagers lean on their ancient farm tools, smile widely and wave at us.

Inside my vehicle I suffer the isolating loneliness of the living dead.

Approaching Abydos…paintings of President Mubarak preside over boys busy catching fish and bilharzia in a canal heavy with discarded junk and tyres, some on fire. Girls play on a rope swing above them, smiling and blowing kisses at us through the billowing black smoke. Then there are women carrying pails of water on their heads, men on donkeys and rusty bikes, soldiers, more soldiers, more Mubarak portraits, more kids saluting at our escorts, fire blackened patches of dirt, beggars collecting things - what they’re collecting I can’t see - rubbish, more soldiers, and us, driving at top speed, sirens wailing, traffic backed up on the side roads, onlookers peering. I think of those people, no particular thought, just thoughts. I wave out of the window, just to let them know that they exist in my eyes, and that I wish to exist in theirs.

I’m embarrassed by the gulf created between us, the haves-nots, and them, the haves. They’re saints to put up with us and our fear.

We eat up the tarmac. The road is life. She believes in this notion more fully than I ever did, despite my arguments to the contrary.

‘Movement’s a gift,’ she says, ‘an antidote to the human propensity towards misery. Stay with the present at all times. It keeps the solitude at bay.’

Aswan

I lie belly down on a smooth boulder and dip my hand into the Nile’s current. The cool water envelopes my fingers, giggling, comforting and hypnotising like a hoard of drunken schoolgirls.

‘D’you want to sail over to the West Bank?’ shouts a Felucca sailboat captain who’s re-touching paintwork in the shade of his billowing canvas. ‘You can visit the monastery, the tomb of the Aga Khan, and the desert.’ I squint westwards. The sun’s high and the washed-out sky floods my aching eyes. Through the fierce glare the opposite bank, a hazy beige escarpment, appears desolate and rugged. Inviting. I clamber aboard and we push off.

A scrum of camel owners loll below St Simeon’s Monastery, seething lethargy and low season boredom. After twenty paces their beast’s gargling and spitting is swallowed by the desert’s velvet silence. I scramble up white scree hills, legs trembling with the effort. Six months stuck under a desk has softened me to the point of embarrassment. Crows eye my progress warily and hop away cawing with irritation as I near their rocky perch.

I breathe deeply, sit bolt upright, let my insides sink into the sand and relax into a few moments of enlightenment. Not the enlightenment of the career Buddhists - that permanent state of being that many work towards and few, if any, actually achieve - but the enlightenment that comes in frequent short bursts and which is attainable by everybody without the help of either training or human mentor. The desert closes in. I experience a complete, if temporary, understanding of everything that surrounds me. For two or three minutes I feel at home, in a way that I never actually do whilst enclosed by four English walls. The excited cries of tourists shatter my relaxed state. They’re two hundred metres below me, being herded across a plank onto an officially sanctioned Felucca moored next to a village where all the houses are painted purple. It’s the same village where four years ago I drank tea at the end of a week long Luxor to Aswan hike, except that now it’s three times the size I remember it being. The tourists are shepherded rapidly by their tour guide, kept tight together for ‘protection’. They’re issued with bright red lifejackets as they settle into the boat. One day terrorist snipers will applaud this act, I’m certain, like Boer commandos offering thanks for scarlet tunics.

West Bank

Luxor, a nest of desperation, deprivation, disrespect and despair. Each day here is a petty battle against being cheated too much. Be it on the ferry, in the supermarket, the train station, the hotel, anywhere.

I hire a bike from Mr Magdy for the day. We agree on a price of ten pounds. I’ve got no change so I pass him a twenty. He gives me a five back.

‘I’ll be needing a ten,’ I say.

‘Well, you’ve got the bike all day,’ he shrugs, ‘ask anybody the price.’

‘But we agreed on ten.’

‘Ask anybody the price…’ As far as humans go he’s decent enough, yet there’s no hint of shame on his face as he cheats me. He believes that he’s just a badly paid servant trying to survive by constantly getting one over on the master’s household. Filching the family silver piece by piece.

I chain the bike up and walk back to my hotel room. I look around for something to steal, to even the score with Magdy, but there’s nothing apart from the towels, and they’re little more than ragged dishcloths. I consider lifting some extra cheese triangles from the breakfast fridge…

I cycle past paradisiacal squalor, verdant paddy fields studded with fishing egrets, and kids playing hide and seek among ancient blocks of tumbled masonry. Then thick grey stone columns rise above a dirt mound and men in white turbans and dark blue robes fill the road, jostling each other to be the first to greet and point out the obvious to me,

‘The foot of Ramses!’

‘The carved name of Belzoni!’ and then follow with palms outstretched and hushed requests for,

‘Baksheesh? You enjoy? Good? Baksheesh? I have children, very expensive…baksheesh?’ 

A fallen colossus, a thousand tonnes or more the guidebook says, too big for the pinhole to capture, lies before the twenty nine columns of the Great Hypostyle Hall. High on the lintels that top the columns are beautifully fine carvings that, when the temple still had a roof and was lit only by torchlight, wouldn’t even have been visible to the eyes of the few allowed to worship here. Imagine, somebody carving this stone with such great care, even though they probably believed that, once in place, their work would never again be seen by a human eye.

I can relate to this, this belief that the satisfaction earned from creativity lies primarily in the actual creation, not in the exhibition. Knowing that the journey is the aim, not the destination. I feel this way about my pinhole photographs. It’d be nice to make a book from them, even have a gallery exhibition maybe, but the main joy to be found in this project is occurring here, right now. This, wandering around the ruins all day, enjoying the sun and the people and the many feelings that wash over me, this is my Ithaka.

The Sahara

Her eyes are ice blue, lost, spiky, somewhere else, smothered by her intellect. They say – you’re the wrong bloke after the wrong girl at the wrong time in the wrong place. Maybe in the next dimension, or another life, okay?

Lizards hop across the sand, dancing around the minute scampering tracks of birds. I should give this serenade up for lost. Nothing comes from desperation save rejection, warns my brain. But dreams bind my wrists and blinker me, and no doubt my tongue will trick me into more humiliation before long. As it should do. Rivers are for swimming across and mountains for climbing. My heart retreats temporarily into empty darkness, crushing butterflies and craving dead shadows as it tumbles. It’s aware only of that beyond sensation. A gloomy enlightenment descends.

At midday the searing deep heat attacks like armies of mischievous silver pinpricks. The sweat trickling down my bare torso sounds like veils and finger-bells and promises made forever.

I savour the sand beneath me and look over at our camp. She sits sunbathing with her back against the rock. Scattered between us is our meagre collection of gear. Any modern explorer would laugh at our ill-prepared expedition. It’s how I like it though. These journeys I make are not really about adventure as defined by current standards, and therefore not about equipment. The main aim is to get to the very essence of life, to taste the present, to think as little as possible about the past or future, if they exist at all, and to remove the walls that separate us, which are actually only strengthened by adding technical equipment to our armour. Touch the sand, sleep on it, loose myself in an open fire, sleep with it’s heat on my face, savour every mouthful of food that wouldn’t past muster back home in my insulated everyday existence, shiver with cold, drink in her skin, every strand of her hair, as I do a deep, scarlet sunset…

In the late afternoon, when the shadows are long and the landscape at its most beautiful, we are far from camp taking photographs, when we hear a car engine.

Minutes later, from a hiding place behind a dune, we watch three tourist jeeps ride the horizon about half a mile away. Through my zoom lens I can see the lead driver in charge at the wheel, his face full of the phoney joy that comes with concluding a successful business deal, which in this case has involved snaring tourists. Ugliness has encroached on our world.

‘It’s not until you see cars here,’ I say, ‘in this natural place, that you really comprehend just how evil they are when they’re let loose willy nilly.’

‘Same with that,’ she replies, pointing at a cellophane cigarette wrapper blowing past us, ‘doesn’t it look ugly, much more ugly than I’ve ever seen it looking before.’

We jog double time back to camp after the jeeps disappear, as dusk approaches, like characters in ‘Tremors’, fearful of the in-coming cold, or encountering quicksand, or any small accident that could occur in the dark which in town would mean nothing but here could be very serious. A twisted ankle is the pits if you’ve twenty miles to walk for help.

It’s been the most exceptional day, with no part of it wished away. Not the deep shadows of dawn and dusk. Nor the light shades of midday. Not the breezy afternoon. And not, now, a candle burning beside the simmering embers of our camel thorn fire, its light bouncing off the fossil walls of our little half cave, as we recline beside it with the taste of hot pitta bread, feta, tomato and honey on our lips. There’s been no more perfect day in the history of mankind, or any kind of life, up there in the stars. I can’t believe my luck, to be here. I always feel that way when I’m with her.

‘This has been my best day ever,’ I say.

‘There’ll be others like this,’ she says, sympathetically. I believe that moments like this come around infrequently in life. Yet she dispenses with it casually, as though she can touch paradise at will. Perhaps she can.

‘Yeah,’ I agree, ‘there’s always tomorrow.’

Then she sleeps, and I’m alone with the low evening drone, like a wall of buzzy humming, the individual buzzing lost in the whole. A hail of asteroids flash like tracer bullets. The stars are out hunting again.

I throw scraps of pitta far out into the darkness. A libation and a prayer asking for forgiveness from all the good that’s here. Call them spirits if you will. I’m too embarrassed to do this in daylight, what would she think? Perhaps she’d understand but I’m unsure. Neither of us has seen the ones we knew as kids, the shadows, for too many years. The act of growing up banished them from under our beds and the human urge to rape and destroy finished the job, forcing them to flee our towns and seek their final earthy refuge in wilderness’ like this.

I stoke the fire up, wriggle into my sleeping bag and settle, gazing out over the silver sea of sand. I feel that this is where I come from; this is the place that my ancestors called home. The sand says it. The rocks say it. The sky says it. And I feel it.

All writing and pinhole photos are taken from the book 'A Velvet Silence', which is available from the online shop by clicking Here.

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