ra

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When I was five years old, my parents and I were in the throes of moving and my father placed me infront of the ole' black and white Zenith television set and turned-on THE MILLION DOLLAR MOVIE, out of New York City. At the same time each day, for one week, they showed the same movie. The movie I viewed was "The Land of the Pharaohs" with a young irtually unknown American actress named Joan Collins. I loved the movie so much, I watched it for the entire seven viewings. I often told my husband Gregory about it and had not seen it again, until he taped it for me one evening after we had visited MISR, Egypt for my 40th Birthday Present (November 24th) to Greg November/December of 1995, for ten fabulous days! Greg was amazed how vivid my memory had been, viewing the said movie at such a young age, recalling it some four decades later. The ending was so "awesome" and vivid leaving a lasting impression! I would NEVER be able to forget THE LAND OF THE PHARAOHS!

The is NO rest for the weary... In all my lives, I always wind-up being an Archivist. (This time I had to go through the perils of being CERTIFIED by The State of New York.) I am of two professions**. I am also a Bibliothequaire (Master of Library and Information Science)! If asked whether I ever want to return to earth another time around, the answer is "no way"... have already been to the underworld of HADES, here on earth in a particular library of which I was enslaved for twenty-six ions. I applied to The Great Library at Alexandria (in real life as well as the virtual realm). Greg is an electrician and by the looks of the wiring around the banks of the Nile, they sure could use him and he was willing to go!(If you are planning to visit-- the electricity is 240 volt-- you need adapters to use anything American and THAT tidbit of information is coming from THE ELECTRICIAN! Greg was so "shocked" pardon the pun, with the said wiring along the waters edge being accessible to the elements, including the river water itself, that he has a picture album of just the wiring! With its proximity to the water, it is amazing that there seems to be no electrocutions!)

To all those who dare enter my realm and my "digs" within, I bid you ENJOY! Those who do NOT... contemplate the immortal echos of "la-la-shucron", (excuse the spelling sil vous plait!) "no, no thankyou"... I bid you a fond adiu...

We flew to Cairo on EGYPTAIR. We viewed the Giza Plateau, the bazaar, Saqquara (their spelling) before flying off to ABU SIMBEL with a stop-over at ASWAN. We spent a couple of hours at ABU SIMBEL marveling over the UNESCO project and the rotunda/false mountain that was created to support the collosius statues. Then we flew to Aswan and began our Nile cruise aboard The Sheraton Nile Cruise ship "THE ANNI." Prior thereto, we visited The Mosque of The Aga Khan, and we saw beneath the moutain which houses the aforementioned structure, the home of the famous American actress, Rita Hayworth, the residence they shared together. We enjoyed the felluca ride, save it got stuck on a sand bar. We visited the old Aswan dam, and the new hydropowered high dam. No, there were no crocodiles. The Egyptian government erected wooden boxes in which the beast swim and become trapped and relocate them, which are strategically placed a couple of thousand yards from the dam. They had to do this intervention as the poor creatures would be "ground up" and meet this horrific demise. Greg and I went to the Island of Philae, the Temple of the Godess of fertility, ISIS, depicted in my "Courtyard" scene. We saw Esna, (the hieroglyphs you will note behind me in "The Library"), Edfu, (which was their ELECTION day and an interesting note being contrary to "the Press": they show up before sunrise, in droves, to partake of the election thereby necessitating our horse-drawn carriage to take a detour.) Then, we sail on to Kom Ombo, where Nefertiti ws purported to have had cateract surgery... I was in awe of the PHARAOH'S ECHO CHAMBER... the acoustics I am sure would instill fear in anyone! In order to reach this temple, a human chain of Nubian men "lifted" us up an enscarpment into a sugar-cane field. (Many senior citizens, as well as a few handicapped persons, were angered by this methodology but, that is where our Sheraton Cruise ship, "parked" as all the other "spaces" had been in use. If they wanted to stay with the group and not miss any of the sites, the poor parties had to suffer the inconvenience, and not a one of them stayed behind..."Where there is a will, there is a way" and there was!) It was interesting to go through a "lock" on The Nile River. Greg was privileged to "man the helm" of the boat. One evening the American group of our tour presented the play, "The Story of ISIS" at the Galibaia party. I was assigned the job of the "belly dancer" and my husband was that of "The High Priest"! The last evening the ship was docked outside of Luxor, with the view of the West Bank and the famous natural pyramid-shaped moutain where THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS sleeps beneath, it was a thrill to sleep parallel to the great Pharaohs. People have inquired of me about the air-quality inside the tombs. It is no different from most places! I did not experience any unpleasantness nor odor of any kind. We were there in 125 degree weather. It was cool inside and no visible signs of "closeness". The paintings looked as if they were created just yesterday, unbelievable! (Yes, we did visit our RAMESES FAMILY PLOT!) We went to the alabaster factory and Hatshepsut's Mortuary Temple. After viewing this, we can see the huge multi-football field (void of everything) where the tourists met their horrible deaths, in 1997 and can appreciate their predicament of having no where to "run", no where to "hide!" We can fathom why there was nowhere for them to escape their assassins! Kent Weeks in his epic The Lost Tomb was moved enough to write about this attack in his chapter Engineering and Terrorism, page 289 when he states: “...The walkie-talkie reports described people not only shot but nearly decapitated. Some victims had had their throats slashed or been disemboweled. These stories – which later proved true – grew increasingly sickening and terrifying. All of us were in a state of shock...” and so was the rest of the “civilized” world! No one is allowed in the upper portion of this temple due to the "pornographic" descriptions on the walls. Our tour guide was one of the few permitted under the guise he "needed to be there" due to preparations for his doctoral thesis in Egyptology or so he said. In the morning of our last day of our Nile exploration, we studied Karnak and Luxor temples. Unfortunately, a member of our group got hurt and "experienced" the Egyptian medical society procedures, policies, and hospitalization. Very interesting, according to her telling! Let us examine what Weeks also had to say about the Egyptian medical profession, with regard to leaving a “newer” clinic on the West Bank...”...I packed up the two students and drove them across the river to Luxor, where there is a hospital with basic amenities and doctors who, though only slightly better equipped, do care...” (page 186). We then flew back to CAIRO for a couple of days, and then home. Weatherwise, while we were there, in Cairo we had to wear winter clothing. As you can see, at Philae (Upper Egypt), we were running around in summer clothing. During the evening of the light-show at Karnak, none of us could wait for it to be over. The desert cold and winds (blowing across the artificial lake created for the Festival of Opet) chilled us to thee bone and our winter coats were not enough to keep us warm, we huddled together.

Hope you enjoyed this rather lengthy Epistle, but since many people were just DYING TO KNOW...!!!

** re.: "professions"... one of the most MISUSED words. The original definition was "that of the learned: physicians, lawyers and The Clergy." But because of constant mis-use of these words and others...such as "AIN'T", which is now in the dictionary... the misused word becomes in our culture, "socially exceptable." Yield not! A-men!