Egypt

In Egypt I camped in the Western Desert, saw the Great Pyramids at Giza, and went around Cairo & Alexandria. It was a relief to step out into the dry heat of Egypt, after the tropical humidity we’d experienced since Japan.

We took a desert safari from a local guide to the White Desert, camping out for two nights. It was fun to see the interesting geological formations, but the best part was the vast silence of the desert, a void that swallowed up the small sounds we made. For the first few hours in the desert your ears ring with the unaccustomed absence of white noise. You don’t realize how much the hum of lighting, air conditioning, machinery, and distant voices fill the “quiet” in civilization. I stayed up after everyone else had gone to sleep and sat in the sand, looking at the stars and listening to the silence. It was absolutely intoxicating – I didn’t want to go to bed. Both days that we camped out I woke up before anyone else, just before the sun came over the horizon. I slipped out of camp to watch the sunrise in the quiet of the predawn desert. The whole experience was incredibly powerful. Strangely, after I got back into civilization I could close my eyes and recall the silence – the way you recall a favorite song.

In Alexandria I spent half the day in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a beautiful modern library built on the site of the legendary Library of Alexandria, one of the Wonders of the Ancient World. It has the world’s largest open reading room, capable of serving 2000 readers at a time. The library is beautifully laid out, with generously sized desks everywhere, elegant stacks, and lovely soft lighting. The library was built by the Arabs during the rise of the Islamic empire, and grew in fame to the point that scholars came from all the over to consult its impressive archives. The original Library suffered from a series of fires, some of them politically linked, and fell into disuse and disrepair. The modern library was constructed in the 70s, to a design chosen through an international architectural competition. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina really captured my imagination as a center of knowledge, freely accessible to all who wish to learn. Sitting down at a reading table, I could imagine scholars over the centuries doing the same thing, drawn to this place from all over the ancient world.