Siwa Oasis, Egypt
by Robin Graham
I am at the temple of the Oracle of Amon, fabled throughout the ancient world. Alexander the Great stood here, so for once I’m in good company.
This is where he came to seek legitimacy for his rule over Egypt. The Oracle confirmed his divinity, although exactly what was said to him he took to his grave eight years later. He did well to get here, to Siwa Oasis in Egypt’s Western Desert. Others had disappeared in the attempt.
The floor plan of the temple reveals a hidden passage and chamber from which it would have been possible for a concealed priest to simulate the voice of the oracle. I think we can assume that had Alexander known about this he wouldn’t have bothered making the trip.
The temple is perched, precariously, on the edge of an inselberg -a rock hill- which would have given him, as it now gives me, an unhindered view in all directions, the lush canopy of Siwa’s date palms like a green carpet. The young Greek king must have felt that the world was at his feet.
Beyond the palms to the north, in all honesty, there is not a lot. Desert stretches between here and Marsah Matrouh on the Meditteranean coast three hundred kilometres away, and not the alluring kind – all silky dune and camel train. Sandy gravel would be an apt description, just about featureless to our eyes as we made our way here; sensory deprivation on a ramrod straight road, the empty space sweeping past us hypnotically in our shabby little car.
To the south it’s a different story. Close by the foot of the inselberg, just metres away, stands the last remaining wall of another temple to Amon, replete with hieroglyphics. Both temples would originally have been part of a larger complex. This second temple fragment can be found where the date palms form a clearing, visible from here. It’s in a sorry state, having been dynamited in the 19th century by a local police chief to build his station. Oops.
Another clearing, just a little further away, is perfectly circular as is the fresh spring that is to be found there. Tourists are told that this is Cleopatra’s Bath, but that’s a conceit of the local tourist board. Actually it’s the Spring of Juba, the ancient Spring of the Sun about which Herodotus wrote in the 5th century BC.
Herodotus thought this spring boiled at midnight and cooled at noon. In fact the warm temperature is constant; it just doesn’t feel that way to a cold hand at night, or to a hot one in the afternoon. Alexander and his entourage cannot have failed to linger here. Beyond the date gardens, the Sahara begins. A few miles south you can sit in the fresh water of a hot spring, surrounded by fifty-metre dunes on all sides and listen to birds sing in the small garden that the spring irrigates. Beyond that, nothing but more dunes and rocky crags till you reach Sudan.
To the east Al Zaytun – one of Siwa’s vast salt lakes – glimmers. In the late autumn a salt layer covers it’s surface and from a distance the lake appears to have frozen over; a bizarre sight when the daily temperature can hit thirty-five degrees celsius. At roughly twenty metres below sea level, even the water from the many springs here is salty and so of course is the soil, which the Siwans call kershef. A mixture of salt, rock and mud, it made an excellent building material, or so they thought.
Beyond the lake’s shimmering far shore, nothing but desert all the way to Cairo. It was in those sands, in stark contrast to Alexander’s successful journey, that fifty thousand of Persian King Cambyses’ men, on their way to destroy the Oracle, were swallowed up by a sandstorm.
Looking west across that green carpet, about four kilometres away, Siwa’s largest structure towers above the swathe of date palms. Though magnificent, the Shali is an object lesson in why kershef may not be your preferred building material the next time you erect a fortified city. Crumbled and in a ruinous state it still looms over the modern town, a victim of infrequent but, very occasionally, heavy rainfall.
Alexander won’t have seen this – it wasn’t built till the thirteenth century, not abandoned till the twentieth – and difficult as it is to imagine anyone saying no to him, he wouldn’t have been let in anyway; this was a forbidden city, home to Siwa’s families and closed to all others. That would be one up to me then, since they’ve moved out now and I will have the run of the place tomorrow, and will climb to its highest point, the world at my feet once again.
Budget Travel Package to Siwa Oasis from Cairo or Giza
If You Go:
Getting There: Fly into Cairo or Alexandria with one of the many international carriers, for example www.egyptair.com. From both cities the West and Middle Delta Bus Company offers services to Siwa via Marsah Matrouh on the coast. See www.bus.com For example, expect to be on the road for nine or ten hours if you start from Cairo, and around six hours if your journey begins in Alexandria.
Staying There: Visit www.siwa.com for details on the insanely exclusive Adrere Amellal (www.siwa.com/AdereAmellal.html ) out of town or the two more affordable alternatives in the centre, Ababenshal (www.siwa.com/AlbabenShal.html) and my favourite, Shali Lodge (www.siwa.com/ShaliLodge.html). All three are run by an organisation which aims to promote sustainable ecotourism in the oasis.
When to go: The oasis bakes in the summer as well as enjoying a thriving mosquito population, and in winter the nights can be cold enough to prohibit those desert camp outs, so go in Spring or Autumn to get some more temperate weather.
About the author:
Robin Graham is a writer and photographer. His articles have appeared on Gonomad, Matador Nights, Literary Traveler and Bootsnall and his photography has been featured in the Telegraph online. He formerly blogged at www.alotofwind.com.
Photo credits:
First Siwa Oasis photo by: Vincent Battesti / CC BY-SA
All other photos are by Robin Graham.
My Moroccan trekking adventure had begun from the beautiful city of Marrakech that nestles like a rose-quartz gemstone near the foothills of the snow-capped High Atlas Mountains. Our first trekking destination was the Ourika Valley. When we arrived at the starting point, we were forced to leave the van walk to the meeting point as the roads were impassable. We had to teeter across foot-wide Berber bridges fashioned out of sticks, suspended over the rushing white water and squeeze behind houses on uneven slippery pathways meant only for goats. In places where the road had washed away the mud-brick houses overhung precariously over the river bed .
The circle trip up the Ourika Valley took six hours, a total of just over seven kilometers. By the time we arrived back to where we had started, some of the road had been cleared. A van waited for us to take us back to the restaurant where our driver would be waiting. It was a ramshackle vehicle, the cabin gutted, with wooden benches along each side. Our group of fifteen trekkers and the tour leader crammed into the back. The driver, his companion and the Berber guides sat in the front and one other man stood on the back bumper. Amazingly, twenty people scrunched into a space that was meant for ten. In places, there was barely enough road left for the van to manoeuvre by. Miraculously we made it to the end of the road construction where our mini-van was waiting to take us back to Marrakech.
Early the next morning, we set off for a visit to the Berber market at the town of Amizmiz. A Moroccan souq is a total sensory experience. We were greeted by a cacophony of sounds: goat bells, braying donkeys, merchants calling out their wares and shoppers haggling, coppersmiths and blacksmiths hammering. The souq is comprised of very small shops and canopied stalls selling fish, meat, poultry, and locally grown fruit and vegetables, sacks of mint tea, nuts and dates. Spices such as saffron, cumin, ginger and cinnamon are displayed in colourful cone-shaped piles. The smells of mint, spices and baking foods fill the air with a mouth-watering fragrance. In one lane the barber shops were doing a brisk business. Men can get a shave and haircut while their wives bargain in the market. In another lane a man tends the barbecue coals under a dozen cone-shaped clay tajine pots containing chicken or lamb stewed with eggplant, carrots, onions and raisins in savory spices, to be served over steaming plates of couscous. Dinner’s ready when your shopping’s done!
The next morning we set off for another trek to inspect a higher route along the ravine above the River Ourigane. Instead of attempting the more difficult climb up into the mountains with the rest of the group, I opted to cross the valley on the Berber trails instead and was provided with my own personal guide, Mabourak.
Striking out with English, the tout follows us onto the bus as it pulls out of the lot. He sits down opposite Simon and jabbers away in French. Simon translates for me. “He’s offering us a trek via camel and four wheel drive, plus two nights in a hotel.” I start talking to the tout, with Simon serving as translator.
The region’s inhabitants mostly belong to the Dogon and Peul ethnic groups, but is identified exclusively with the Dogon, who began arriving from elsewhere in the 15th century. Before the Dogon, the Tellem lived in the Bandiagara cliffs from the 11th century, constructing the top line of shelters bored into the cliffs. In Dogon stories, Tellem may figure in, sneaking back to the Bandiagara escarpment, though no one sees them. A thorough archaeological exploration from the years 1964 to 1971 definitively found evidence of the presence of this Dogon myth.
The temple was mostly constructed during the reign of the pharaoh Ptolemy II Philadelphus (284-246 BC) and his son, Ptolemy III Euergetes (246-222 BC). Despite being constructed at a relatively late stage in ancient Egypt’s history, the temple follows a very classical layout. Moving inside, we entered another courtyard, which lies before a second, smaller pylon sitting at a slight angle to the first. To the right of this inner courtyard lie the remains of rooms that used to house the temple priests and guards. To the left is a mamissi, or birth-house. This type of small building became popular after the reign of the female pharaoh, Hatshepsut (1479-58 BC), and was designed to prove a pharaoh’s supposed descent from the god Horus.
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