‘Only twenty for the horse — you come, my fren’. You see Safinkees! I take you into a pyramid and you see the rooms and touch the moomiya.’
I fished for my twenty Egyptian pounds. We mounted the horses and were off, trotting through garbage beside ancient walls.
‘You pay later. Hey, how many wives you got? I got four — two Egyptian, two English. I keep them very busy!’
‘Of course.’
‘You are a gentleman. I can see in your face.’
‘Twenty pounds, right?’
‘No, no — twenty American dollars. See Safinkees. You touch the moomiya! My fren’ he let me. He know me. Maybe you buy picture. Papyrus. Mother-of-pearl box.’
‘You said twenty pounds.’
‘I say “twenty.” You hear me say “twenty”? Use Visa card!’ He leaned over and whipped my pony. ‘Make the horse gallop. I see you next week. Ha!’
He took out a mobile phone and stabbed the buttons with his stubby fingers and shouted into it and then, ‘This my phone. “Hello, hello!” Cost 2000. Horse is 5000. Arabian is 20,000 — maybe 30,000. Money! You give me baksheesh.’
‘Money, money.’
‘America — best country! America money — best money!’
We were still jogging along, up one muddy littered alley, down another, as dusk fell, as men in gowns and women in robes walked in a stately way, in spite of the puddles, and children shrieked at me on my pony.
‘You give me America money. I take you inside pyramid!’
‘Money, money, money, money. Please stop saying money.’
Mohammed howled into his mobile phone and dug his heels into his horse’s belly and slapped the reins against his horse’s flanks. And he led me past the wall, which was the perimeter of the enclosure of the Gizeh pyramids, a tumbledown neighborhood of squatters and slum-dwellers attached to the wall. In Egypt every wall attracts dumpers, litterers, shitters and pissers, dogs and cats, and the noisiest children.
Mohammed was manic in his banter: ‘America — strong country. Number one country. My fren,’ baksheesh! You buy papyrus … You touch moomiya … You take picture in pyramid … See Safinkees.’
Yakkety-yak, all for money.
And yet, in spite of his banter and his pestering and his deceits, the jaunt on horseback that early evening in Gizeh was gorgeous. Trotting through the back alleys that were stinking with garbage and litter in the mud, the basins of dirty water and buckets of garbage and chamber pots that were being thrown from upper balconies, with a squawk that might have meant ‘gardy loo.’ The smoke from the fires lit in braziers, the stink of the pissed-on walls, the graffiti, the dust piles, the brick shards, the baked mud, the neighborhood so decrepit and worn, so pulverized, it looked as though it had been made out of wholewheat flour and baked five thousand years ago and was now turning back into little crumbs. And yet I loved riding through the crepuscular dusk, parting the air that was penetrated with food smells and smoke and garbage, jogging through the puddles, with the muezzin howling, the dogs barking, the children chasing my sorry pony — the lovely evening sky showing through the dust cloud and striped bright yellow and cobalt blue. And then the pyramid, smaller than I had expected, so brown and corrugated and geometric it looked like giant origami folded from cardboard.
‘Safinkees,’ he said and waved his arms.
The Greek word ‘sphinx’ is unpronounceable to Egyptians, and also inaccurate — the fanciful Greeks associated it with their own mythical creature, appropriated it, much as the Arabs have done.
‘What do you call it?’ I asked.
‘His name Abu-el-Houl,’ Mohammed said.
But that is no more than an Arab nickname meaning the Father of Terror. The enigmatic creature is Ra-Herakhti, manifestation of the sun rising, with a lion’s body and the facial features of Khafre, who was King of Egypt at the time of its construction, 4500 years ago. Sesheb ankh or ‘living image’ is the ancient Egyptian term for such a statue.
Holding on to my saddle I peered into the dusk at the worn down and noseless face resting on crumbly forepaws, like a sand sculpture that had been rained on.
Because the Sphinx is the embodiment of dawn, it faces east, and so the sun was setting in the dust cloud directly behind it. You would not know that from some of the paintings that have been done of it. But Egyptian ruins are so atmospheric they tend to inspire the watcher into blurring reality, the over-excited traveler into seeing much more than is there. Hardly a painting depicts the Sphinx as it is, and even the stickler for Middle Eastern detail, David Roberts, gives it a yearning expression and, for effect, makes it face the wrong way. Earlier painters gave it thick lips and big staring eyes, the painter-traveler Vivant Denon gave it a Negroid face and a wondering gaze.
‘No drawing that I have seen conveys a proper idea of it,’ Flaubert wrote, which is probably true. But when he rode out to it in 1849 he repeated the name the Arabs had told him, Abu el-Houl, the Father of Terror, and noted in his diary, ‘We stop before the Sphinx; it fixes us with a terrifying stare.’ But he also said it seemed to him dog-like, ‘pug-nosed and tattered,’ and Flaubert’s friend Maxime Du Camp claimed that it looked ‘like an enormous mushroom when viewed from behind.’ The Sphinx was the one sight on his Grand Tour that Mark Twain did not mock. The pages in The Innocents Abroad that concern the Sphinx are unique in that breezy book and rare in Twain’s work for his descriptive flights, as he rhapsodizes, even gushes, studying the thing. ‘So sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient … It was MEMORY-RETROSPECTION wrought into visible tangible form … [and] … reveals to one something of what he shall feel when he shall stand in the presence of God.’
This is travelers’ invention — I saw it, you didn’t, therefore I am licensed to exaggerate. Twain tells us how he had longed to see the Sphinx, but he at least had seen a photo of it. Flaubert had seen drawings of the Sphinx but never a photograph — there were none. In fact, Maxime Du Camp claimed to be the first to take a picture of it. In his life of Flaubert, Geoffrey Wall noted that these men were probably the last Europeans to see it in this way, afresh. But photography’s spoiling the visual pleasure of places is nothing compared to the way the Internet and our age of information have destroyed the pleasure of discovery in travel.
Invention in travel accords with Jorge Luis Borges’s view, floated beautifully through his poem ‘Happiness’ (La Dicha), that in our encounters with the world, ‘everything happens for the first time.’ Just as ‘whoever embraces a woman is Adam,’ and ‘whoever lights a match in the dark is inventing fire,’ anyone’s first view of the Sphinx sees it new: ‘In the desert I saw the young Sphinx, which has just been sculpted … Everything happens for the first time but in a way that is eternal.’
Ruins especially lend themselves to invention; because they are incomplete, we finish them in our imagination. And although later that evening I ran into a beaky-faced man, in wilting clothes, thirtyish, fogeyish, frumpish, one of those pale bosomy academics you could easily mistake for a senile old woman, who waved his art history degree at me and said with slushy pedantry, ‘The Sphinx is vastly overrated,’ the Sphinx is a perfect object to turn into something of your very own, something grand, or in Nigel’s case, something negligible.
Mohammed said, ‘You give me money. I show you moomiya. You touch!’
‘Please stop saying money.’
He laughed, he gabbled, I was not listening, I didn’t really care, I was laughing myself. I felt a great happiness — the horse, the light, the decay, the ancient shapes, the children’s laughter — and it became one of the epiphanies of my traveling life.