Sunday, 29 November 2009
I stumbled out of our tent with the sun two fingers above the horizon and found the camp staff groggily moving about. The trash had been collected into large woven plastic bags and a couple of tents had already been collapsed. They were being folded and thrown atop one of the Toyotas where they were tied down for transport. I went to the water tank hoping to wash up before breakfast and found the reservoir empty. Not a good sign, but there would be running water soon enough. Jamie emerged soon after me and we were dunking tea bags in hot water when Ashari walked over and told us that we would be leaving for the highway and our ride back to Cairo in fifteen minutes. Jamie objected to the short notice and, with his superior Arabic skills, negotiated an extra quarter hour for us.
Neither Ginger nor Joelle had yet made an appearance and Zohair had just arisen, looking for some water so he could meet the day with a clean face. I roused Joelle, who immediately began packing up her bag. I called to Ginger and told her we needed to move and then set about stowing my own gear. Once I had completed that minor task, I went and had something to eat with Jamie and Zohair. When Ginger still had made no appearance, I went back to the tent and nudged her. She awoke with a start and I told her we were going to be on the move very shortly. She explained that she had had earplugs in and hadn’t heard a thing until that moment, but started gathering her stuff together.
Within half an hour, we were all packed up, bags stowed either on the Toyota’s roof rack or next to the seats in the back of the 4×4. We made one last check of the tent for wayward items and then mounted up. Ashari obviously had a schedule to keep, for we made a beeline for the road in complete disregard for established tracks. We rolled across the landscape for a short ten minutes or so and arrived at the appointed rendezvous in no time. There was the Badawiya van awaiting us with the computer projection team already ensconced in their seats and plugged into their various electronic devices. Abd Allah, the same driver who had driven us down from Cairo, waved a cheery greeting.
We packed our bags in the back and climbed in. With the four computer people, the five of us and our constant companion, Omar, (the quiet Egyptian who had accompanied us on every excursion with Ashari and was, in truth, our body guard, complete with nasty-looking automatic weapon discretely carried under his jacket), the van was full. We set off on the macadam, having expressed to Ashari our individual and collective (i.e. monetary) thanks to him. He and the Toyota disappeared across the desert in a cloud of sand. Our van climbed out of the depression that held Farafra and rolled over the desert toward the Bahriya Oasis. We passed the Crystal Mountain site and the now recognizable landscape that had captured our attention on the way out. Now, the prospect of returning to our routine lives directed my attention to other matters. I had promised Zohair that I would read his draft of an article on Egypt that he was planning to submit to the English language “al-Ahram” weekly and I worked on that for a while as we drove. The conversation among the passengers was desultory and intermittent; some people slept, others listened to their iPods or played cards.
In Bahriya, we stopped for a lunch of rice and vegetables. We dropped Omar off at the police station and thanked him for his service before resuming our journey. The trip back to Cairo seemed shorter than the trip out. We made the obligatory stop at the grungy rest area, tanked up and continued on our way. Before long, we were on the outskirts of Cairo, swinging around 6th of October City, the big new suburb of Cairo that nestles up against the pyramids. Traffic was light for a Sunday and it was not yet dark when we pulled up before the British Council building on the west bank of the Nile. The four Fulbrighters and Jamie got out and we said our goodbyes to the computer people who were driven away to their drop off. Zohair and I snagged a taxi and rode across the Nile to his apartment in Garden City.
We flipped a coin to see who would get to shower first and, in turn, we washed off the desert dust. Zohair cranked up the washing machine afterwards and washed the Sahara out of his clothes as well. I unpacked and crammed my dirty laundry into a plastic bag. My laundry would wait until Monday when I would move quarters. I called Belle Gironda, who was to be my host for the next few days, and we settled on a convenient time or me to make my appearance at her place. Dinner was a simple omelette and a cup of tea. The long drive and three nights under the desert sky had us longing for the comfort of a good mattress and clean sheets. I fell asleep to the whisper of traffic on the Corniche fourteen stories below.
There were a few high clouds in the sky but they weren’t thick enough to block the sunlight. The camp was still relatively quiet at this early hour. The music the previous evening had gone on until almost midnight and many people were sleeping in, if they could. The chef was up and slowly getting breakfast on the table. Someone was stirring a campfire to life. The campsite was beginning to look a little shopworn; bits of litter peeked from the sand here and there; the port-a-potty was filling up; the chef’s white jacket was smudged with grease and soot. Nonetheless, there was soon hot water for tea and Nescafe and the day looked a bit brighter after a cup or two.
At each stop we competed with each other in discovering the most unusual example. Ginger returned to Cairo with a pack weighing twice what it did when she set out. There were places where the black rocks stuck up out of the white stone like mails in a piece of wood; frequently, on exposed rock faces, the black stones were visible, embedded in the chalk. This material must have rained down on the ancient sea and, cooling as it sank, stuck into the still soft sediment at the sea bottom where it was eventually covered by eons of crustaceous carcasses. Elsewhere, we found the remnants of ancient seashells embedded in the chalk as well. Some of the black stones even bore the impressions of seashells. Glad I wasn’t around for that “weather event.”
We continued driving through the depression, entering a flat area with row upon row of white stone pillars which we had to slalom our way through. At times I doubted Ashari’s sense of distances as we squeezed through gaps that I feared would leave us jammed between two walls of rock, but he piloted us through without so much as a scratch on the doors. t a relatively open space, he stopped and let us out to take some photos and explore a bit. Within minutes, Jamie had disappeared and I saw how easily one could become disoriented and lost in this place. The rock formations were ever-changing; there were several in this spot that looked like nothing so much as a piece of mille feuille pastry drizzled with a sugary icing. More wondering about what sort of geological process had created such masterpieces. Every turn revealed something new and surprising.
Our penultimate stop was in a canyon surrounded by towering white cliffs. To one side was a jagged pillar of white rock easily 200 feet high; at its base was a hole that allowed us to crawl through from one side to the other. I tried to keep from my consciousness the fact that several hundreds of thousands of tons of rock sat above us. The final leg of our journey brought us up out of the basin and across the paved road to another area where white rock pillars dominated the landscape. There was again a myriad of shapes and forms stretching away, but in truth this dimmed in comparison to what we had seen earlier in the day. Still, it was an impressive way to end our tour.
From the backs of two of the expedition vehicles snowboards were produced and everyone headed up the slope of the dune for some sand skiing. The kids, of course were the most enthusiastic and adventurous. The bottoms of the boards were coated with formica, which was meant to make them slippery on the sand. They worked reasonably well, but except for the most precipitous slope near the end of the dune, no breathtaking speeds were achieved. We spent a good hour during which everyone had at least one ride down the dune. I felt like a real Americano tourist, but really, how many chances does one get to do that? Of course there was one testosterone powered idiot who had to prove his car was the most powerful machine ever built and he drove to the crest of the dune, receiving the cheers of his fellow SUV owners. The cheers quickly died however, when the car sank into the sand. He and his friends spent forty-five minutes digging and shifting a pair of sand sheets under various wheels until he finally managed to get free. Sometimes guys are SO predictable.
The sun was settling toward the horizon as we reached our last stop of the day. One of the most famous areas of the White Desert contains chalk formations shaped by the winds into marvelous figures. This particular location was known as the Mushrooms and there were indeed several that looked for all the world like fungi, but the variety of shapes was endless. One was also struck by the fragility of these monuments, for everywhere one could see where huge chunks of rock had recently fallen away, splitting along fracture lines and shattering into smaller pieces as they struck the ground. I realized that what we were seeing was a snapshot of what was and what would be. Visitors to this same place in two years time—perhaps less—would see something quite different.
After about two hours, the road dropped into a major depression in the earth; we descended several hundred feet over several miles on a graded roadbed. The escarpment of the depression was visible as a series of cliffs off to the north. These depressions were where we would find the oases that provided small groups of people with a tenuous grip on life here amidst all this aridity. There is a string of such depressions across the desert here that hold what are called the “Inner Oases,” Bahriya, Farafra, Dakhla, and Siwa a bit to the north. Our first stop was Bahriya, where we had to pass through a checkpoint manned by the police. We stopped and our driver was asked how many foreigners he had with him and what our nationalities were. One of the Egyptian women translated and we relayed the requested information to the cops. Our driver, Abd Allah, was obviously known to them because there was a lengthy conversation, an exchange of news, before we resumed our travel.
The Bahriya Oasis is the “gateway” to the desert, as it were, and the road here was lined with trees that looked like poplars. Behind them were fields and groves of what looked like tropical fruit trees. Mud brick and stone houses began to appear. Within five miles, we were in the oasis proper and we had to make another stop. Here, in front of the main police station, our passports were collected and we were then transported about five hundred yards down the road and dumped off at a restaurant where several locals sat drinking tea and smoking shishas in the shade of an aluminum awning. Thankfully, the comfort facilities here were respectable and the restaurant itself clean and quiet. We ordered tea and sat at a table.
Hardly more than a thirty-foot mound with a small person-sized rock arch to one side, the formation is composed of quartz crystals and probably would be quite a sight in the sun after a good rain shower to wash the dust off. We wandered around the site for a few minutes, looked for crystals in the dirt of the parking area and then climbed back into the car.
The Toyota pulled up adjacent to the tents and we unfolded ourselves from the back. A long arcade of shelters made of dark woolen or camel hair rugs stretched along the sand on one side of the site. There was a cook tent, a couple of old wooden tables standing front it and a second arcade of open shelters beyond it. At either end of the row of tents was a tall pillar of white rock, scoured by wind and blown sand into fantastic shapes. To the west, a low white ridge of the same rock glowed in the sun. Smaller bleached formations stood all around on the horizon. In between the white rocks were expanses of sand, some deep and soft, others rippled by the wind and packed hard.
We set off through Cairo traffic, which was beginning to build at that hour. It took us a good hour to clear Cairo and then we were on the four-lane headed south toward the Fayyoum. I had ridden this same road earlier in the month when I visited Karanis so I busied myself with breakfast and chatting with my travel mates: Virginia da Costa, Dominique Ellis, Breonna Arder, and Joe Yackley, our newest member who is pursuing dissertation research in Egypt and Turkey later on. The Toyota we were in was not the newest ride on the road and had obviously seen some rough cross country travel. The suspension was stiff and that, combined with a short wheel base, made for a rough journey, even on the paved road. To add to our discomfort, Dominique and Breonna, who had chosen to ride in the rear seats, had to deal with gasoline fumes. For this reason as well as to give people different conversation partners, we switched seats occasionally.
Before long, we were nearing the turnoff for the Fayyoum oasis. I saw the Karanis excavation off to the left of the road and knew we were getting near. 
We made a brief stop so that people could take photos and then continued our journey. Our destination was an archeological excavation in a geographical feature called Wadi al-Hitan or the Valley of the Whales. Yes, in the desert, there is a place where one can see what’s left of whales. Of course they are forty-million-year-old whales but they are (or were) whales. One species in particular, the Basilosaurus, is found only here and its importance to paleontologists and those who study evolution lies in the fact that they had vestigial feet. In other words, whales were once land dwellers who decided that the ocean offered a better living and returned to the primordial soup as it were.
We arrived at the visitors’ center and alighted from the trucks. We walked about for a few minutes to work the kinks out and take in the landscape. The area reminded me of the desert southwest in the States, but without the variety of colors. Still, the rock formations were impressive, having been sculpted by the sand and the wind over untold millennia. We gathered at one of the buildings and received a brief orientation from the head paleontologist who explained the geology of the region and the importance of the site. He explained that there were there distinct geological layers found here representing a cross-section of several tens of millions of years. Whales continued to live here during all of that time until the Earth’s climate began to cool and the polar ice caps formed, pulling liquid water away from the planet’s girth. Now it looks as though we’re reversing course once again. The paleontologist also showed us some fossilized remains of the whales and explained how they came to be preserved. The remains were covered quickly by silt or sand and the soft tissues decayed quickly. That allowed the minerals in the water and earth to replace the organic material of the skeletons and fossilize them.
The paleontologist soon led us off on a tour of the area. The path through the site was marked by stones and clay pots. At various locations, examples of the skeletons were on display. Some of the exhibits were clearly staged and the scientist acknowledged this. He said that one species in particular had a tendency to curl in death—probably due to contractions in the heavy muscles—and the scientists had straightened out the display skeletons so that people could get a clearer idea of the scale and composition of the bones. The exhibits are scattered over quite a wide area and an hour’s walk didn’t bring us anywhere near the end of the trail. In addition to animal fossils, there were interesting examples of fossilized plant remains as well. Near the mouth of an ancient river, in brackish water was a mangrove swamp; some of the tree roots had been fossilized and are now preserved in stone. 
A little distance away we saw the petrified trunk of a tree that had fallen into the ancient river and had been colonized by some sort of worm and the hole they left were then inhabited by a pencil-shaped bi-valve and their remains were fossilized also.
After fruit and tea, we saddled up again and left the area, driving back on the same dirt track. On the way back, we stopped at another geologically important area dominated by two round mountains rising against an artificial lake in the background. Here we stopped for a brief photo opportunity and a chance to pick up some fossils. The ground was covered by small disc-shaped stones ranging from dime to quarter size and varying in color from sand to light pink. These are the fossilized remains of a forty-million year-old single-cell animal from the order foraminifera. The locals call them “ancient coins.”