Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Pyramid Scheme
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
If you want to feel young again, Egypt has good news for you. Sightseeing here is an elixir.
Egypt’s timeline is packed with eras, epochs, dynasties and centuries of pharaonic traditions. By comparison, the whole of my forty-eight years is but a speck of Saharan sand.
It’s as if Egypt has gifted me a case of its patented Pyramid-of-Youth potion. The crumbling pyramids, the weathered temples, are a lesson in taking the long view. No one here is measuring me for a sarcophagus.
Ancient Egyptians did not grow old or accept death gracefully. Egypt is a camel caravan of chicanery designed to cheat death with afterlife rituals and superstitions.
History’s archaeologies, ancient monuments and antiquity museums are my weakness—a reason for traveling. In their presence, my younger persona is resurrected—given an afterlife.
On the outskirts of Cairo, the Great Sphinx and the Pyramids of Giza were built 5,000 years ago. They have the wrinkles and wear to prove it.
At the base of the largest pyramid, a young woman about the same age as my teenage daughter is talking on her cellphone. She’s treating a two-and-half ton, rough-hewn building block as a sofa chair. Measured in pyramid time, she and I belong to the same generation.
In the heart of Cairo’s oldest neighborhood, on the twisty alleyways, the Coptic Orthodox Church was founded in 50 A.D. Between then and now, a godawful lot of sinning and praying has happened. My own sins are still multiplying, my infrequent prayers far in arrears. Fortunately, at my age I have time to catch up.
The medieval Alabaster Mosque is inside the Citadel built by Salah El-Din. His sultanate erected this never-conquered military fortress to fend off Christian Crusaders. The mosque’s ornate interior, calming courtyard, suspended oil lamps, decorated walls and ceilings seem ageless. In contrast, my decorating is more like the IKEA bookshelves near the entryway that are jammed with shoes left by their praying owners. With a lot of my future still ahead of me, I can do better.
Egyptian inventors place my short high school teaching career in perspective. To end an endless war with the Hittites, in 1269 B.C., an Egyptian devised the first peace treaty. Scissors first appeared in Egypt around 1500 B.C. causing, I’m sure, an Egyptian mom to warn her children about running with them.
Wandering in the Khan el-Khalili Bazaar—walking where Egyptian shoppers have walked since the 13th century—I pass an old man sporting shaggy white hair. Sitting on a stoop, he looks at me through watery eyes. Like two miniature dragonfly wings, clumps of untrimmed ear hair cantilever outward. His faded clothes are old and sagging. To avoid his stink, I don’t move closer.
He badly wants to be seen, to be recognized as a fellow human being. He unfailingly addresses every passerby reporting on the state of Egyptian politics, the day’s weather or what he ate for lunch,
Sizing me up, he says, “It’s sunny. Have a great day.” Or maybe he said, “You look great, sonny.”
Hearing what I want to hear, my body treats me to a small, care-free shimmy.
I smile, then laugh.
