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In the 1850s, a wave of English adventure tourists followed the lead of their upper class and crossed the Mediterranean — drawn by reports of lost civilizations, strange peoples and even stranger customs in North Africa and the Middle East. And it is for these same compelling reasons that travellers today depart Europe for the lands of myth and mystery that lie beyond — the final destinations on the 19th-century Grand Tour
Leg One: Eygpt
From this vantage point atop the Giza Plateau, the past intrudes on the present in countless ways. Below, the Nile Valley stretches to the horizon, encompassing the modern towers of Cairo in the hazy distance and the sprawl of flat-roofed suburbs that crowd nearby bluffs. To my left, the river runs north to the Mediterranean. Exactly 140 years ago, two southbound steamships, hired by British travel entrepreneur Thomas Cook, appeared at Cairo, carrying a contingent of Grand Tour adventurers looking for exoticism here on the edge of the Sahara. Their arrival marked an important watershed. For Cook was the inventor of tourism – the world’s largest industry today; and the 1869 Egyptian journey was the first exotic, packaged tour in history. To my right – 500 kilometres down the Nile – lie the pharaonic ruins of Luxor and the Valley of the Kings, once home to Tut and his funeral entourage. Further south along the Nile: Aswan’s evocative Temple of Isis. Beyond that: Nubian Africa. And if I turn around the Sphinx rises directly above me – with the three pyramids of Giza just beyond.
Armed with a note, scribbled in Arabic by Egypt’s secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Hawi Zawass, I approach two guards standing beside a metal gate at the base of the 137-metre-high Great Pyramid of Cheops. They scan the message, unlock the gate and gesture myself and photographer Ron Watts inside. A low-ceilinged, upward-sloping tunnel – lit by the dimmest of light bulbs – marks the claustrophobia inducing route to the pyramid’s deep interior, and the chamber where Cheops himself was entombed 4,569 years ago. Giddy with a sort of Indiana Jones apprehension, we creep along the steep passageway, up and up, left, right, across – as the labyrinth meant to deter grave robbers narrows into an airless crawlway. I half-await the rumble of some intruder-repelling mega-bowling ball descending from the darkness ahead. But instead: a cavernous, dim chamber with Cheops’s empty granite sarcophagus in the middle. I can hardly resist the temptation to climb inside, cross my arms over my chest, and try to imagine myself as Cheops, wrapped in linen and launched on a precarious transit to the Afterworld.
Some modern travellers choose to head south from Cairo along the Nile on Mississippi-style riverboats or – more authentically – by lateen-sailed feluccas. We drive. The temperature climbs toward 40°C, and the wind off the Sahara turns the air opaque with dust. The Nile runs like a great greyblue vein through the early spring Egyptian farmland where tractors turn the soil, donkeys pass bearing tottering loads of fodder and kerchiefed women sell oranges and figs from roadside stalls.
The city of Luxor (population 150,000) and its nearby pharaonic ruins is one of those places that is (or should be) on all lists of “100 Things To See Before You Die.” Every superlative is an understatement. To walk through the 4,000-year-old Temple of Karnak with its massive columns covered in hieroglyphics is to glimpse the enormity of what Egyptian civilization had already achieved at the time early occupants of Britain were painting their bottoms blue. To sit, as I did, on the gargantuan feet of the broken statue of Ramesses (a.k.a. Ozymandias), knowing 19th-century poet Percy Bysshe Shelley had utilized it in his famous, ironic poem “Ozymandias” – “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my work, ye Mighty, and Despair!” – is to confront the vicissitudes of time. To descend into
