SAHARAN RAIN, Don Meredith [parable of the sower read online txt] 📗

cave. The inevitable mustache, soiled djellaba, dark-eyed smile of welcome. In his callused hands, the old man brandished a ring of rusting antique keys. For an hour, I circled the crest of the hill, dutifully trailing the shambling guide down narrow staircases where he unlocked corroded doors and led me underground into Greco-Egyptian tombs. Bird and star motifs decorated walls. Here lay Si-Amun, a third-century B.C. businessman, there Niperpathot, a 26th Dynasty prophet of Osiris. Across the length of a ceiling stretched the nude figure of Isis, powerful goddess of sexuality, motherhood, and women. Deep colors, vivid reds and intense greens as fresh as if painted yesterday. In each tomb, I found the painted figure of Anubis, the jackal-headed god of embalming and the dead.
Anubis trotted beside me as I went downhill, finding pieces of mummies and mummy cloth as I went. Bone fragments and bits of discolored gauze littered the dusty hillside. Lying across my path, as if left by a cemetery dog, I stumbled on a bone the size and shape of a human femur. On the hillside above, my mustachioed guide, an aged jackal if ever there was one, vanished into a gapping tomb.
* * *
Audn drove me to a salt lake where I dozed for an hour on a beach of golden sand, the Great Sand Sea like surf swelling against the opposite shore. When I woke the sky was darker, the smell of rain stronger. Back at the village, Ali looked doubtful when he served a lunch of chicken and rice, refusing to consider the possibility of rain.
On our way out of town, we stopped at Audn’s house to admire a young camel fattening for a wedding feast, the appealing creature blithely ignorant of his fate. When I said farewell to the camel and to Audn’s mother and sisters peering shyly from a shadowy doorway, we continued east another mile to Aghurmi.
Once the capital of the oasis, Aghurmi was a cluster of mud-brick houses along a single street where chickens scratched and children played among windrows of ripening dates. To the north, above the village, rose a hill topped by eroded battlements. While Audn and the donkey stayed below, I climbed to the abandoned city, the stillness broken only by wind sighing through the ruins. I went through a low opening to stand in a dusty bowl banked by rubble and great mounds of broken bricks. Around the rim stood the city walls: crumbling parapets and bastions, roofless tenements, tall, bone-thin towers. On the heights to the north, built of pale stone, rose the building that drew Alexander here over two thousand years ago: the Temple of Amun.
Dedicated to Ammon, a ram-headed Libyan deity associated with Egypt’s sun god Amun and the king of the Greek gods, Zeus, the Ammonians built the temple in the time of the Kings of Sais, about 600 B.C. When Alexander arrived, the acropolis must have been a hive of priests, their families, servants and a rag-tag army of hangers-on. Now only the wind blows. Shale and broken bricks clattered underfoot as I climbed the curving path to stand beneath the temple’s great stone lintel.
I saw remnants of fluted columns, beams of carved stone, and signs of recent mortaring as if someone had half-heartedly attempted restoration. This was no Notre Dame or Hagia Sophia. Though a poor relation to that greatest of all religious edifices, the Temple of Amun at Karnak, its impact was nearly as great, possibly because of its isolation, the silence broken only by the soughing wind. As I stepped into the temple’s dim interior, I no longer felt myself in a way station of the Saharan void, but at the profound center of something.
One small room led into another and yet another until I reached the inner sanctum, the oracle’s abode. The floor was earthen, the sky visible between stone beams. No hieroglyphics, bas-reliefs or wall paintings. Not a statue, obelisk or sarcophagus. Yet, I stood enthralled. Gazing through shadowy rooms to the entrance, I expected to hear voices in the silence. Alexander, whose megalomania by the time of his death in Babylon eleven years after his Siwa visit led him to believe in his own divinity, asking: “Am I the son of Ammon? Of Zeus?” Awed by the young conqueror’s military successes, the oracle responded with an answer that perhaps changed history: “You are the son of Ammon and of Zeus.”
Outside, as the sun knifed through cloud cover, I felt the sudden force of the ram-headed Amun-Ra. Below, the oasis shimmered in intense light and, to the east, beyond palms, sunlight blazed on the solitary violet butte of Dakhour Mountain. In a great honeyed arc to the south and west spread the Great Sand Sea. The clouds abruptly closed and the sun vanished. The god pulled in his horns and wind slashed through breaks in the mud-brick walls, cutting to the bone.
We galloped into the village as the lights flickered and the first drops of rain pocked the dust. When I reached the Bride of the Oasis the skies opened and the lights blinked out for the duration. I tried for Ali’s Café through the downpour but got no farther than the hotel’s terrace before discovering the dirt streets already knee-deep rivers.
Around a lantern in the lobby, I joined a dozen Egyptians on an assortment of couches and overstuffed chairs. It seemed a Middle Easterner’s idea of a hurricane party. Cigarettes appeared, lighters flared. As laughter echoed through the high room, stories unfolded in Arabic, Siwi, and English.
A lone Norwegian wandered in to inform us he was leaving in the morning for Bangkok. Using the hotel’s only phone, a Hungarian on the line home, his voice a rush of Ugric consonants shouting over the deluge.
Before going to my room to dine on a chocolate bar and a tangerine, I took a final turn on the terrace. The wind screamed and rain hammered. A military truck splashed by through axle-deep mud, its dim headlights the only illumination in a world of astonishing blackness. Behind me the Egyptians laughed, as the Hungarian barked over the wire to Budapest.


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Publication Date: 11-26-2009

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