A week in Egypt with Michael Jackson, the pyramids and unrelenting beauty

Here's the scene: I'm riding into the Sahara Desert, inhaling a dry wind that has remained unchanged for thousands of years. I'm on my way to run my fingertips over the last remaining Wonder of the World — the hulking and hauntingly beautiful Pyramids of Giza, silhouetted against a sky so bright it's white. And I'm on the back of a camel named Michael Jackson.

Hold the phone. Let's talk about temporal confusion.

I came to Egypt expecting, as I suppose everyone does, a nation steeped in antiquity. It is, after all, the seat of one of the oldest advanced human civilizations. As any sixth grader worth his salt will tell you, it's where writing was invented, where nomadic wandering became an agricultural bureaucracy, and where architectural feats impressive even to those equipped with modern technology were completed with a flourish of human willpower. Beyond all that, I'm beginning to discover that Egypt is a nation whose 5,000-year-old recorded history has been — and continues to be — profoundly molded by outsiders. In the last 2000 years alone, this place has been run by Persians, Romans, Turkish Mamluks, Arabs, the French (briefly under Napoleon), the Ottomans, and the British. And now, even an independent Egypt (since 1952) depends, as the cornerstone of its economy, on the droves of tourists who enter its borders each year, cameras and guidebooks and Euros and dollars in tow.

And this is precisely where Michael Jackson, the Pyramids, and I come into play. We are an anachronistic triumvirate and a perfect analogy for Modern Egypt. Let me break it down:

Ignoring for a moment the sordid press surrounding the real MJ, my Michael Jackson is a gentle camel of unquestionable intent. He is a wall-eyed, splay-legged grump of a six-year-old camel, whose neck and front legs share the dimpled texture of a 1970-era sofa. His ancestors arrived on Egyptian soil in the 6th century B.C. along with Persian rule, and have since become requisite fixtures in the Egyptian landscape. My particular camel is, at risk of confusing my pop-icons, the McJagger of desert beasts; his mouth is unnervingly enormous and his teeth — great, mossy green Chiclets — protrude from his lower lips, lending him a perpetually bemused expression.With each step, he makes a gurgling purr, precisely like that of an automatic coffee maker that's run out of water, and his gait of choice is a kind of undulating saunter.This last bit is important because it requires that I perform a scissor-legged death grip upon his sides whilst bouncing free from the saddle every second step and landing with full force upon my tailbone. This clenched-leg whiplash maneuver is made slightly less pleasant by the fact that Michael's saddle — three blankets of misleadingly cheerful colors — has all the charm of a porcupine pelt and has chafed off a hoagie-sized portion of skin on both of my inner thighs. Upon dismounting Michael at the end of the day, I walk away from the stable with an affected bow-legged swagger, leaving my dignity to fend for itself, among the chortling stable hands. When I arrive home, the man who runs my hostel laughs gently suggesting that perhaps I have a case of Camel Rump. When I look horrified, he assures me that people have suffered similarly since Alexander. Indeed, misery does take a certain pleasure from imagining some Turkish sultan discreetly limping away from a day spent upon MJ's distant relative.

The Pyramids of Giza, which arguably ought to take the starring role over both MJ and me in our little desert drama, are, needless to say, extraordinary. They are great, leviathan stone presences that stare down at us — ephemeral and relentless hordes of starry-eyed tourists perched atop our awkward steeds — and smirk with the self-satisfaction of immortality. In their heyday, they were covered in slabs of shimmering white limestone, all of which have been spirited away by years of raiding. Now they're deep sienna brown, naked and pock marked with the passage of time, but somehow no less grand. Forgive the analogy, but it's a bit like watching one of those toned, tan old men play tennis at the park. Their muscles, buried beneath a layer of wrinkles, are immune to atrophy, and although they're not quite the strapping Adonis's they used to be, you're still pretty sure they could school you at singles.

But the fact that the Pyramids are old is not exactly novel information. In fact, they're almost more extraordinary in how, over the course of 4,500 years, there are some things about them — and about those who created them — that don't seem very old at all. Consider this: that dramatic, smoky, cat-eyed look that we associate with Cleopatra (ahem, Liz Taylor) and that is immortalized in the wall paintings of every tomb in Egypt, actually has more in common with Monday Night Football than we may think. Evidently, nearly everyone back then — slaves and Ptolemaic queens alike — would have smeared black around their eyes to avoid the glare of the relentless desert sun. And speaking of slaves, most of us are taught that the Pyramids were built on the backs of shackled bondsmen, who were whipped and beaten into submission. But recently Egyptologists are beginning to claim that the labor was actually completed by farmers who were out of work in the off-season. The pharaoh would have commissioned them and, according to evidence of carefully bargained contracts, paid them quite well for their toils. They seem to have been a kind of 20th century Rooseveltian work project — the Really Old Deal.

But perhaps FDR isn't the best example to use here. In the South Court of the Step Pyramid in Saqqara there is an ancient race track — a replica of the course the pharaoh would have had to complete after reigning for 30 years in order to prove to the people that he was, quite literally, "fit to rule." I'm not sure if ESPN or CSPAN would be the network covering Newt Gingrich's 400 meter sprint — "and he's coming in, folks, 'rounding that bend, full-tilt!" — to earn his rank in Congress, but I like the idea nonetheless. At this same site, a tomb called the House of the South, which was only discovered in 1924, stands sentry to the rest of the necropolis. Walking around the site, the first thing you notice is the fact that tourists are idiotic and have, for the last 70 years, been scrawling their names in the columns and walls of the ancient tombs. "Samantha wuz here, 9/3/87," one etching reads. Initially, I was, like anyone with a semblance of historical reverence, utterly dismayed by ignorance of our temporal brethren. But then I noticed a piece of graffiti under exhibit by the entrance of the tomb. It seems that a treasury scribe visiting the tomb 1,500 years after Zoser's death and 3,100 years before Samantha's visit, had also felt the need to scrawl out evidence of his presence here.

And that's just the thing: if there's one thing about this crazy country, it's that new and old are entwined and concomitant, and the contradictions are ultimately redeemed in the flux and fervency of each generation of life.In one moment, I stare out over the Nile, contemplating the bushels of bulrushes that line the banks — Moses' first and reeded savior. And then, looking up, my face is aglow with an enormous florescent-yellow TGIFriday's sign, which is itself flanked on both sides by Pepsi-Cola billboards and advertisements beseeching tourists to participate in "belly dancing aerobics." In one moment I'm awed by the Sphinx, its paws shiny with the erosion of thousands of years, and the next I'm seated in a 5th-floor Pizza Hut — the best and cheapest view of the nightly light show upon the Sphinx's famous visage. The light show, by the way, is narrated by the Sphinx himself, who sounds a bit like James Earl Jones might, if English were his second language.

In a nation where 95 percent of the population live on percent of the inhabitable land, I guess I shouldn't be too surprised in the way that old and new pile atop one another. Space is a luxury here. All the ancient ruins are hemmed in by the teeming bustle of Cairo and Giza. A child flies a kite in the shadow of Cheops. A modern Muslim graveyard encroaches on an archaeological dig. Street merchants, food vendors, mules, and trucks all coexist, narrowly missing one another in the upstream salmon swim of Cairo's traffic. Fiats and rickety hatchbacks hit the streets at 40 mph alongside a limping fleet of camels. Cars do not have side view mirrors (an extra 6 inches on either side is comically extravagant here) and they do not slow for the packs of women, hustling down the street with 4-foot platters of flat bread balanced on their heads. Burka-clad women sell their wares on the sidewalks in front of lingerie shops and the daily calls to prayer are sometimes drowned out by the hawkers and the boom boxes that line the streets.

After several days in Cairo, I need a break. It's hot and everyone wants to sell you something and my case of Camel Rump is simply not going away. More than that though, I desperately want to reconcile my image of the pure past, of antiquity in how I conceived of it once. So I decide to appeal to the desert — that vast immutable expanse of barren, hostile land. I choose, as it seems is only appropriate, two Bedouin guides. The Bedouins have, after all, been living in the desert for thousands of years; who better to show me a world unchanged by corporate conglomerates and MTV? This time, instead of camels, our motley crew of tourists (two French kids, two Aussies, and two Americans) opt for a Cold War-era four-wheel-drive Jeep that, in addition to lacking air-conditioning, seat cushions, and seat belts, runs with all the grace of a rideable lawnmower. Every mile or so, the rickety old thing begins to hack and smoke, producing a noise not altogether unlike the percolating hiccups of my former steed. With all our camping stuff piled on top, it looks like the jalopy the Joads unhappily piloted across a different barren land.

The Jeep, however, turns out to be the only part of my desert adventure that adheres to my expectations. All told, it breaks down 21 times, not including the time the left front wheel explodes and unravels as we careen over a dune, leaving the six of us in a heap in the backseat, limbs and water bottles protruding from the laughing mess. But somehow, each time the old goat of a car threatened to die completely, our interminably good-natured guides would climb into the desert sun, re-tie their head wraps, and coax the thing back to life. Over the course of three days, the jeep had become an anthropomorphized member of our team. Moody and obstinate, its favorite afternoon activity was lurching over a dune and launching its charges into the air, then slamming them back onto the wood-paneled seats, their tailbones reverberating with the impact. Needless to say, Camel Rump was quickly replaced by Jeep Rump which, although decidedly more modern, also makes it hard to walk normally.

The desert, as should be quite evident at this point, is not the theatre for a barren, unchanged past as I'd hoped. First of all, it is not barren at all. Our first stop was the Bahariyya Oasis — a small, densely populated city of 30,000. From a distance, it appears as if a few shrubs had gotten lost and wandered into the monotony of uninterrupted sand. As we get closer, we see that the oasis isn't a few bushes, huddled around a small spring of opalescent water (as oases are always portrayed in cartoons), but instead a thick forest of palm trees, every bit as dense as the forests outside of Seattle, only not quite so tall. Small shacks pepper the perimeter and a bustling downtown strip of two-story houses offers produce stands and fresh-baked bread. The oasis ends as quickly as it begins and, driving out of it, it takes only five minutes before, looking in every direction, you see nothing at all besides an endless horizon of sand and rock.

Our second stop is a place called the White Desert, which rises from the sloping planes of gravely-beige sand in huge, pillars of white stone, hardened and chalky against the sky. It is the Camelot of desert topography. A few kilometers down the road, the Flowered Desert is black with baby-fist-sized clumps of igneous rock, which have hardened in such a way as to appear precisely like perfect carnations. We camp below a third wonder of the natural world — these enormous towers of rock, painted stripes of orange, peach, and white by the desert minerals, and mottled like ripples of wind on the water. We light a fire and our Bedouin guides began to sing. Before the night is over, about 15 other Bedouins and a few of their tourist charges, amble out of the darkness and join our fire. The music does not stop. Everyone is clapping or banging gas cans or humming backup to a song they've all obviously heard a thousand times before. Old men and 14-year-old boys sang together, utterly unselfconscious. Wrong notes and cracked voices and skipped beats don't exist in the desert. One old Bedouin who is sitting next to me (and wearing a Hooter's T-shirt, just to remind me of the date), danced with his arms in the air, as if about to take flight. His belly, unabashedly distended, led the riot of a dance and the rest of his body followed its lead.

A few days later, we coax our jeep back to the oasis, all of us sandy, sweaty, exhausted, and nursing our backsides. On our way back, our guides tell us about a site nearby, where a band of archaeologists from Penn have recently discovered the fossilized remains of a dinosaur (the Paralititan Stromeri), who, 94 million years ago, spent a fateful afternoon admiring the view of his swampy tidal basin, when he was hit by a tsunami and buried in the mud.

Ah, yes. Ninety-four millions years. Nothing like a discussion of the dinosaurs to demand perspective on our own recorded history. No wonder that treasury scribe and Samantha both wanted to leave something — anything — to mark that they had once been.

We return to Cairo, to the heat and the flux and the horns and the hawkers, just as the news of the recent bombings in the Sinai are whispered through the streets. Reports are sparse and varied, but the attack was allegedly committed by an Islamist Fundamentalist Bedouin group hoping to shake the resolve of international tourists destined for Egypt. It is weird returning to that news.It all feels so far away, so short-sighted, so thoroughly unoriginal. Strangers on the street offer their condolences and express hope that we'll tell our friends to come to Egypt anyway. I am reminded that this is, after all, a nation that loves, thrives upon, and indeed requires the seasonal flux of outsiders. We nod in unison; they don't have to convince us of the virtues of the place.

Walking home through a closing bazaar, a vendor calls out to me. "Hey America!" he shouts.

"Yes?" I call back, unthinkingly answering for 350 million people.

"You want a rich husband?"

I laugh despite myself, then shake my head quickly.

"No? How about a rug. Pepsi? a necklace?"

I walk away, smiling to myself. Egypt is a deeply beautiful nation, fundamentally wracked by poverty, extremism, and a sham democracy. I've been here for just a week and there's so much more to see, but the only thing in the world I want right now is two ibuprofen and a rump-shaped ice pack.

Haley Edwards, 23, lives in Seattle and is a senior writer for Internationalist Magazine, published in the city. She is on a solo, four-month, round-the-world journey and will be filing occasional reports for us from the road.