pyramid skies

My dear friend,

This week marks the beginning of fall.

Halfway across the world, my mother is baking an apple pie. The renters have written to us with questions about how to use the fireplace. Friends send selfies while wearing sweaters. When I imagine you walking through the brisk and golden streets of Minneapolis, the wind is whipping off the lakes and rattling the oak and maple leaves.

Here in the desert, the sun blazes on.

The other day I had the thought that I’d like to learn a few more Arabic phrases to exchange with the woman who sits in front of the door downstairs. So far, C. and I can tell her “good morning” and “good evening” and “goodbye.” The first time I asked her “How are you?” she grinned and clapped her hands and exclaimed, “Praise Allah! Praise Allah!” Now she blows me kisses whenever I come or go.

The logical next step in our acquaintance would be to talk about the weather. If I were to run into a neighbor in Minneapolis this afternoon, or strike up a conversation with the mail carrier, we’d most likely exchange pleasantries about the changing seasons. We would talk about how delighted we are that fall has arrived; we’d evaluate the temperature, the cloud cover. We’d perhaps chuckle over the likelihood of snow within the next month, and we’d lament the darkening days.

But what is there to say about the weather here, where every day is the same? “It’s still hot,” I might point out to the woman in front of our door. “The sun still shines.” What could Um Mohamed (her name means “Mohamed’s mother”) do except nod?

At the pyramids yesterday morning, where we wandered and breakfasted with C.’s colleagues from the university, we were all startled enough by the cloud cover to remark on it. A sandy breeze flattened our hair and coated the lenses of our cameras, and so we remarked on that, too.

Nearby, camels blinked their long black lashes, bent their knobby knees, and dropped to the sand. I sidled up to one and took a quick, sly photo. (I knew that if the camel’s handler saw me, he’d likely want to charge me for it.) On the bus, our guide told us that camel’s eyes are concave, which makes humans appear much larger than they are. “That’s why camels are obedient to humans,” he explained. “It’s because they think we’re so big. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—the only dangerous camel is a blind camel!”

If a camel had followed us along the path that runs a short distance up the Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops), and had seen how tiny the tourists looked on the plateau below, he might have realized his mistake and decided to change his life. Maybe he would have sub-letted his little patch of sand and packed his saddle bags (is that what they’re called, for camels?) and set out for Minneapolis. I could see him setting up camp on the smaller of the two Lake Nokomis beaches: lapping up lake water, munching on ruffage, watching the seasons roll across the sky.

Of course, the seasons change in Egypt, too—even if the sun shines through all of them. Ancient life was centered on the yearly flooding of the Nile. The ancients’ word for the concept of cyclical time was neheh, which, according to Peter Hessler’s The Buried (Penguin 2019), “was associated with the movement of the sun, the passage of the seasons, and the annual flood of the Nile. It repeats; it recurs; it renews.” But the ancients also had a word for a different kind of time known as djet, or “time without motion.”

When a king dies, writes Hessler, he passes into djet, which is the time of the gods. Temples are in djet, as are pyramids, mummies, and royal art. The term is sometimes translated as “eternal,” but it also describes a state of completion and perfection. Something in djet time is finished but not past: it exists forever in the present.

The world that was created by the gods is not permanent. It’s an island, in the words of the Egyptologist Erik Hornung, “between nothingness and nothingness.” The place where we live will disappear. But ancient Egyptians weren’t obsessed with forecasting this future, just as they didn’t concern themselves with analyzing and replaying the past. Perhaps when time is nonlinear, it’s easier to focus on today.

“The place where we live will disappear.” It’s difficult to reconcile this truth with the fact of the pyramids, still standing, five thousand years later. Then again, five thousand years is nothing in desert-time, or in world-time. If you travel 100 miles southwest of Cairo, you’ll find yourself in Wadi El Hitan, or Whale Valley, which contains skeletons of the earliest suborder of whales. Other fossils in the area—crocodiles, turtles, fish—affirm that the Western Desert was once underwater. These ancient whales (archeoceti) swam (and began to develop legs) in the Sahara sometime between fifty and twenty-three million years ago.

I hope that we’ll be able to travel to Wadi El Hitan to see the whale skeletons for ourselves. If the pyramids (young as they are) compel me to rethink my relationship to time—who knows what the archeoceti will do? Maybe, the next time you see me, I’ll be as different as a camel who has looked down on humans from a very great height.

Are you worried that you won’t recognize me?

Yours—L.