08 July 2007

Walk Like and Egyptian



OFF TO THE PYRAMIDS - THE BESIEGED TOURIST. A SKETCH BEFORE SHEPHERD'S HOTEL.
March 6th,1875. ARTIST: Hennessey.

The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of The Peabody Hotel and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg. The Peabody is the Paris Ritz, the Cairo Shepherd's, the London Savoy of this section.   If you stand near its fountain in the middle of the lobby... ultimately you will see everybody who is anybody in the Delta..."
                                             -- David Cohn, 1935.

“Crowds and heat,” wrote an old friend, speaking of the real Ozymandias, though he could have been talking of any of the cities on the big river deltas. His recollection was of a trip to the Egyptian Museum. He had been attempting to show his family something of reign of Ramses II, who would have answered to the Pharonic throne name User-maat-Re in the New Kingdom's 19th Dynasty.

As he pointed out, "New" is entirely relative: Ramses the Great reigned 3,000 years ago.

It is going to be hot here at Big Pink today; it is July and I am ready for a day under the awning at the pool. But it got me to thinking about delta towns, and the places to stay when you are in them. Water and lodging are connected for me, and I am an aficionado of the old great Hotels of the world. Of course, like the term “New Kingdom,” it is a subjective definition.

My fascination may be derived from an acquired aversion to sleeping in my car in the days after college, or it may come from spending too much time on the road for reasons associated with the trade.

Some of the hotels are right here in America, like the Peabody in Memphis where the ducks march across the lobby at tea-time, or the Maxwell House, which was a place of lodging long before it was a cup of coffee. Others are more exotic, or at least they seem that way from here. Actually, they were created to be a little bit of someone else's home, and they did quite a job.

I try to visit them, when I have the opportunity. The stately Empress in Victoria, BC, for example. Or the Savoy in London.

Once I had a chance to arrange a world tour, and pick the hotels. I chose the Peninsular in Hong Kong, the Rex in Saigon, the Oriental in Bangkok, and the Strand in Rangoon. I will never get back to them on my nickel, so it was in the manner of a valedictory tour courtesy of the American taxpayer. I never did get to call at the Raffles in Singapore, though I glimpsed it once from a distance.

The Crescent in Aden was another, which I located on a satellite picture one time when informed of its curious role in a problem I was investigating. Visiting in person was quite out of the question. It is still there, I understand, and the unpleasantness of 1994 has passed over it and left it standing with no rocket marks. Once it stood next to the biggest duty-free shopping area in the world, with every liner stopping to call. Now the SUVs whiz through from Sana'a, and after the bombing of the USS Cole in the harbor, few ships will stop for any reason.

And Shepherd's of course, the grand hotel in Cairo, the gateway to the Suez and points east in the old Empire.

I was torn on my last visit to Egypt in 1990. So much to do, and so little time.

Inclement weather had precluded getting ashore for the one day that a tour to the more modern shrines of the desert war to the west was available, and I was afraid the whole port visit past the low brown view of Al Iskandria was going to go a glimmering. Pompey's grand Pillar was there, and the strange waterlogged Roman tombs. But the library was long burned, and no longer on the tourist itinerary, and the city was depressing.

The buses were fine, though, and somehow we managed the one day visit to ancient Cairo; no stop for tea at Shepherd's, the fine old Swiss hotel that catered to foreigners, and brought a little Europe to the greatest city of the Islamic world, starting in 1841.

General Irwin Rommel knew about the hotel- it really was the only decent place to stay. After the defeat of British forces at Tobruk, meticulous in planning, he had made arrangements to reserve one of the grand suites at Shepherds for the 27th of July, 1942. He could not keep them to due to some unpleasantness at el Alamain, which will be a place I never see. Montgomery's forces stopped the drive to the Suez Canal about 100 miles short of Alexandria Egypt. The Swiss management phlegmatically accept the cancellation and moved on.

Shepherds was long gone, burned down in the last days of the reign of Farouk, just at the time I was born. I looked for it anyway, from the windows of the bus as we swept into town, past the sprawling City of the Dead, where so many of the impoverished living had set up housekeeping in the forecourts of the elaborate tombs.

Our guide was one of the first Arabs I had heard describe the Six Day War as a victory; it was said without guile and as a fact. It was the first time I actually internalized the fact that there were going to be real problems in communication, regardless of what language we were speaking.

I cannot recall the logistics of that trip. We must have stayed overnight somewhere, though for the life of me I cannot recall. Perhaps we did not sleep; I remember contacting a cousin in the oil business on the phone who lived in an exclusive enclave, and being at the Pyramids, and even down the tunnel that led to a chamber in the Great One, and the Hey-Joes from Hell who work the tourists outside it.

I cannot believe that I hunched my way down there in the oppressive silence, or the cool stillness in the crypt, with all that stone around. The Museum rests in the morning of my memory, floating without context. We were there early, and the group tours in all the languages of the world were happening around us, a Babel of voices that drowned out thought, until I turned and unexpectedly came face to face with Nefertiti, her delicate features and cafe au alit complexion transcending the millennia.

The Boy King was there, too, and Howard Carter and the Great Hunt in the Valley of the Kings.

We wound up in the beer tent, which had been established outside the eyes of the devout in the confines of the container zone at the port. The crew was dressed in motley Arab garb, and a band played a hypnotic song by the Girl Group The Bangles endlessly: “Walk like an Egyptian.” The entire tent was filled with Pharoah wannbies, with arms jerking akimbo.

It was more than a little intoxicating. A comrade from Midway days in Japan had risen to become CO of the mighty Forrestall, and he offered us a ride back in his gig. We took him up on it, since who needed to stand with the troops in the ship's Mike Boats, wary of who had way too much to drink and might hurl at any moment.

The fog cloaked the harbor in oppressive moist gray wool. We could not see the bow from the cockpit, and after pulling away from the landing, discovered ourselves suddenly in limbo. I have to admire those who assume great authority and commensurate responsibility. The Captain took command of his little boat, looking for his larger one, and thankfully there were communications through the walky-talky.

After drifting along for a while, he directed the OOD on the Forrestall to commence sounding the ship's foghorn. It was a clarion call when it began, giving form and direction to the waves. The cox'n was able to navigate to the mournful sound, and navigating to the boom, eventually spots of brightness appeared in the clouds around us, and presently, the vertical bulk of the aircraft carrier came into view.

From there it was uneventful, Captain out first, and then the scramble over the gunwale and over the platform that rested on the shrugging waves and up the long ladder and eventually into the rack at the end of a long day of touring was comfortable enough, even if it was not a suite at Shepherd's.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com


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