Egypt is scary

Not the vendors, though Egyptian souvenir vendors make the Chinese seem shy.

Not even the gun-toting jelabia-clad young men I spotted out of the bus windows as we drove through the Nile valley to Luxor. They weren't pointing their guns at anyone, the orange street lighting would have made the Easter Bunny look sinister, even without the Pavlovian conditioning of the past ten years of TV coverage of terrorism, and it was the end of a four hour bus ride that had left me somewhat loopy. Actual Egyptians I met were gracious and handsome people, except maybe for the hotel personnel who were clearly condescending to have to deal with non-millionaires.

No, it's Egypt itself that scares the bejesus out of me.

I thought I knew what a desert is. I've driven through Nevada and Arizona, I grew up in eastern Montana, which is always described as high desert. But the sere golden cliffs that loom over the Nile Valley to the west and the emptiness that separates it from the Red Sea take the concept of desolation to a whole new level.

Maybe it's the contrast with the Nile Valley in spring, where life is everywhere. Flowering bushes, probably azaleas, line the roads with color, and small fields (Nasser's revolution gave individual farmers plots of only five acres each) are dense with grains, vegetables, herbs, and sugar cane that are sown, tended, and harvested by hand using techniques and tools that would seem familiar to Egyptians of the time of the Pharaohs.

But this vitality occurs only where the millennia of Nile floods have piled up rich silt. Particularly on the west, you can almost draw a pencil line where life stops and the desert starts. And what a desert! No fooling around with cactus and sagebrush. The mountains that house the Valley of the Kings and keep Sahara sand from burying the river seem as sterile as the Moon. Clearly people can survive here -- the steep slopes above the Valley of the Kings are criss-crossed with foot trails probably left by hearty young archaeologists (more likely in baseball caps than pith helmets, alas!) digging for the 64th or 65th New Kingdom burial crypt.

But I am neither hearty nor young (nor, for that matter, an archaeologist), and when I got dizzy in the sun and stumbled walking from one tomb to another, I was grateful for the assistance of one of the vendors, even if, a few minutes later, he came over to sell me a souvenir book ("This is not because I helped you, I did that because we are both human beings, but... "). It made me realize that, if I stayed out in that sun for very long, even under my floppy purple straw hat and protected by the long-sleeved cotton shirt a friend had lent me, I would pass out and, without aid, would die of heat stroke. Right there, mortality, my own personal mortality, inherent in the place, which has been as it is for millennia.

So Egypt freaks me out a bit. Doesn't seem to bother the Egyptians, who turn out new citizens, according to our guide Abdul, at the rate of one every 26 seconds. Does anybody know whether Israel is like this? I know Arabia is. Maybe imminent death concentrates the mind such that religions germinate more readily. I think there's a good analogy with the Nile Valley in there somewhere, I just can't tease it out at the moment.