You are awake before the call to prayer, which is earlier than you have risen in a long time.
The east bank is still grey when the car crosses the bridge. The Nile lies flat and metallic, and a single felucca is already out on it, its sail slack, waiting for a wind that has not yet arrived. On the far side the land changes at once: the green ribbon of cultivation ends, the fields give way to pale rock, and the road begins to climb toward the cliffs where the kings were buried. This is the hour the west bank belongs to almost no one.
Above you, if the wind allows, the balloons are up. They go at first light, a dozen of them, drifting low over the sugarcane and the mortuary temples. From the ground they are silent — too high to hear the burner, low enough that you can see the colour come into each one as the sun finds the canvas. Some mornings the wind keeps them down. On the ones it does not, they are the first thing the day shows you.
Hatshepsut's temple is the first stone the light touches. Its three terraces run straight out of the base of the cliff, and at this hour the rock behind them turns the colour of a ripe apricot, then of sand, then — within twenty minutes — of nothing in particular, just stone in full sun. You have perhaps half an hour of that light. It is worth arranging the whole morning around it.
By the time you reach the Valley of the Kings the gates are open and the valley is nearly empty. This matters more than it sounds. A royal tomb is a narrow thing — a corridor, a stair, a single painted chamber — and it holds a dozen people before it holds too many. Arrive at eight and you have Seti I almost to yourself: the long descent, the ceiling of stars, the colours still somehow wet-looking after three thousand years. Arrive at eleven and you have the same tomb, forty strangers, and a guard waving you along.
The tomb has not changed. The morning has.
Between the tombs the valley is bare and bright and entirely quiet — the kind of quiet that has a texture to it. Your own feet on the grit. A kite turning somewhere overhead. A guard's radio, far off and then gone. The hills are the colour of a lion, and nothing grows on them. It is not a comfortable place, and it was never meant to be. It was meant to be hidden, and hard to reach, and permanent.
Then, around nine, the day turns. You feel it before you see it: the air loses its edge, the shadows pull in, and the first coaches come over the rise from the river. The valley that was yours fills, politely and completely, and the heat begins its long climb toward forty degrees. This is not a complaint. It is the reason we wake you so early, and the reason we are firm about it even when you would rather sleep. The west bank rewards the early riser, and quietly punishes the late one.
By the time the day is properly hot you are already coming down off the hill, a little stunned, having earned your breakfast. You will see other great things in Egypt. But the memory that tends to outlast the rest is this one — the cool, the grey river, the apricot light on Hatshepsut's cliff, and a painted tomb with no one in it but you.
The monuments are open all day. The morning is the part you cannot buy twice.
Sillage Égypte