5-10-15. Cairo, Egypt
This morning, I spent more than an hour planning my day’s route, scrawling directions, sketching a map, and allowing for every contingency along the way. Within five minutes of leaving my hotel, I was irremediably lost. Cairo is a wretchedly difficult city to navigate, for several reasons. There are no street signs, virtually no obvious landmarks, and precious little in the way of local help, since the only Egyptians with English good enough to communicate directions are those who have devoted themselves to ripping off tourists.
It took me an hour of wandering to find my first target, the immense mosque constructed by the Mamluk sultan Hassan. The search, however, proved worthwhile. Seldom have I encountered a more impressive building. The central courtyard, perhaps fifty meters square, was bordered on each side by an immense vault, some thirty meters broad by forty tall. Although the southern vault, which contained the richly-decorated mihrab, was elaborately revetted with colored marbles, the prevailing note was one of massive dignity and simple strength – a tenor that suited the character of Sultan Hassan’s dynasty, comprised of slaves who had risen to become warrior-kings.
After wasting the better part of another hour trying to find another mosque in the area, I walked into the heart of Old Cairo, where the other medieval buildings on my agenda were located. Since most of the stalls are closed on Sundays (and I could thus count on being able to avoid the worst of the vendors), I cut through the bazaar. The sections devoted to spices and gold were a feast for the senses – but I found myself wondering about the economic sense of clustering together several dozen vendors selling the exact same product. My destination was the splendid tomb of the Mamluk sultan Qalawun, the centerpiece of an extensive complex that incorporated a madrasa (school), hospital, and shops. The sultan’s coffin was wood; but the walls, floor, columns, and ceiling of the great domed burial chamber were worked in marble, alabaster, and many colored stones. The cumulative effect was lavish but strikingly harmonious.
The neighboring Madrasa of the superbly named Sultan Barquq, basically a smaller version of the Mosque of Hassan, was a pleasantly sun-filled complement to the gloomy tomb.
After a brief visit to the shady campus of the American University in Cairo to buy a guidebook, I made my way at last to Cairo’s leading attraction: the vast, dusty, ill-managed warehouse of treasures that is the Egyptian Museum. I began with the highlights. My first stop was the famous room of the royal mummies, one of the very few places (besides, I suppose, the mausoleum of Lenin) where one can come face-to-face with famous historical figures. Although virtually all of the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings were systematically looted in antiquity, the priests of Amun at Thebes salvaged the royal mummies, hiding them in caches rediscovered at the end of the nineteenth century. Many of the greatest names from Egyptian history were thus recovered, and the best-preserved of them have lain in dusty display cases ever since. Ramses II, the pharaoh of Exodus, still shows the hook nose and fringe of white hair that framed his features when he died, at the age of 92, more than 3200 years ago. His father, Seti I, is even better preserved, his face resembling nothing so much as a beautifully carved wooden mask.
From this fascinating and macabre display, I turned to the treasures of Tutankhamen, which occupy a whole series of galleries along the museum’s second floor. I can only echo the famous words of Howard Carter, who, on opening the tomb for the first time, saw “everywhere the glimmer of gold.” It was all there: the golden throne, the four nested golden shrines, the gilded tomb furniture, the alabaster Canopic shrine, the hundreds of jeweled amulets and –finally – the beautifully crafted coffins of the king. Equally striking, if less dramatic, were the seemingly endless cases of Tut’s personal belongings; I was particularly taken with the jeweled toys he had played with as a young prince.
For much of the remainder of my time at the museum, I wandered the mostly-deserted upstairs galleries, most of which were arranged thematically. One haunting gallery contained dozens of the so-called Fayyum portraits, lifelike paintings attached to the heads of many mummies in the Roman era. Another contained literally thousands of figurines of the gods, stacked and piled in groaning wooden display cases. These rooms are desperately in need of refurbishment; but I rather liked the feeling of exploring some vast and disused attic. I had less time to explore the downstairs galleries, which follow the historical development of Egyptian art. I did linger, however, in the Amarna room to see the striking artistic products of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten’s reign, and again in the Greco-Roman gallery. Yet as I left, I felt that I could have easily spent hours more among that vast and ill-labelled collection – which, I suppose, is the mark of a great museum.