Where Alexander had a date with destiny
Deep in the western Sahara lies an
oasis which has been green for thousands of years. Jeremy Atiyah celebrated the
return of tourism to Egypt by visiting the Spring of the Sun
IN EGYPT there is the river and there
is the desert. The Nile and the Sahara; water and rock; Osiris, who grows, and
Seth, who kills.
All tosh, of course. The desert west of
the Nile is certainly the largest area of arid land on earth. But it is not
dead. As the Roman geographer Strabo said, it is dotted with oases like the
spots on a leopard.
What makes an oasis? A geological
fluke. These are places where waters which have trickled for thousands of years
- and thousands of miles - through underground passages from the rainy
heartlands of central Africa, unexpectedly emerge, producing islands of trees
and grasses and insects and birds. And occasionally people.
Siwa has always seemed to me the most
miraculous of Strabo's leopard spots. From the Nile at Cairo, it goes over
500km in a straight line across waterless desert. From the nearest point on the
barren Mediterranean coast it is at least 300km, or a nine-day trek with
camels. Getting to or from Siwa has always been a monumental undertaking. But
there, lurking under the palm trees, this speck of desert has harboured a minor
civilisation of its own, unbroken for thousands of years.
Unlike the Egyptians of today's Nile
Valley, whose claims to pharaonic ancestry have always struck me as somewhat
dubious (after all, the Arabic language was imported a mere 13 centuries ago),
the Siwans can plausibly claim that the Berber tongue they still use has been
spoken in the area since before the dawn of history; since, in fact, that
not-so distant era, recorded in rock carvings discovered deep in the Libyan
desert, when rain still fell, and when the Sahara was a giant savannah
inhabited by giraffes, elephants and crocodiles.
These days it takes nine hours by bus
to Siwa from Alexandria, including a final four-hour stretch across a flat,
featureless desert, as eerily silent as it has been for 3,000 years. But unlike
most Egyptian buses, this one was not even crowded. My fellow travellers ate
sunflower seeds or slept with the curtains drawn. A 19th-century Englishman,
Bayle St John, on his descent into the valley of Siwa, spoke of "towers
and pyramids and crescents and domes and dizzy pinnacles and majestic
crenellated heights, all invested with unearthly grandeur but exhibiting that
they had been battered by the mighty artillery of time". Unfortunately
darkness had fallen when our bus began dropping through the folds of the
escarpment. Minutes later I was walking down an empty, sandy lane to a hotel
overhung by palm trees.
Siwa contains about 10,000 people,
scattered in villages through the oasis. It may be a small dot on the map, but
I was hardly the first to have found it. Herodotus himself, who knew Siwa as
the land of the Ammonians, visited in the middle of the fifth century BC. He
came investigating the mysterious story of Cambyses, the King of Persia, whose
huge army had vanished in the sands outside Siwa. To this day explorers still
look for their bones.
Herodotus went home to Greece spreading
tales of the miraculous Spring of the Sun (today known as Ayn El-Gubah, or
Cleopatra's bath), which bubbled ice-cold by day and boiling hot by night.
Then, one morning early in 331BC, the Siwans awoke to find that their
appointment with history had arrived. The most glamorous man of his time - of
all time, some whispered - had materialised out of the desert. His name was
Alexander.
My first morning in Siwa I walked along
paths lined by palm trees, listening to the pervasive sound of running water. I
agreed with Herodotus: the springs of Siwa were a kind of miracle. The whole
oasis contains at least 200, including a dozen or more major springs, which
suddenly appear as deep, turquoise pools bubbling through clearances in the
trees. And these were not the feeble, decorative palms you find in southern
Europe, but hardy creatures of the desert, jackhammered by sunshine. Enormous
spiky frondes dangled this way and that, like the taloned wings of some
prehistoric reptile. But down below, long grass grew, and labourers sat,
sorting the orange dates from the brown.
The story of Alexander's visit to Siwa
was no conjuring trick to attract tourists. It was simply one of the strangest
tales in world history. As the new pharoah of Egypt, he came for one reason: to
put questions to the ram-headed god, known to the Greeks as Zeus Ammon.
Alexander would never admit to the questions that he asked, nor to the answers
that he received. But it was this encounter at Siwa that convinced him of his
world-conquering destiny. Later he would even ask to be buried in Siwa. Despite
recent claims by a Greek archeologist to have discovered Alexander's tomb here
in a Greek doric temple, it seems that Alexander's last wish was ignored.
Donkeys scuttled past in fast motion,
pulling creaky carts. Thoughts of world conquest did not seem to be on the
agenda today. Siwa still runs on the brawn of donkeys. The smell of their
droppings fills the air. Their braying - rather than the noise of traffic, of
which there is none - woke me up on each morning of my stay.
The temple of the oracle of Zeus Ammon
has never been buried or lost. It is simply there, 20 minutes' walk from the
main market-place. It occupies the highest point of the now abandoned hamlet of
Aghurmi. I pushed open an ancient wooden door and clambered up the dissolving
alleys, beside tottering walls and conical minarets. The temple is the only
building of cut stone, as opposed to mud. I entered the back chamber, where
Alexander put his questions to the god; the view through the high doors was
unbeatable. Over glinting water and an ocean of palm-tree tops, I saw as far as
the craggy escarpments and silver dunes lining the edge of the oasis.
What happened to the oracle of Zeus
Ammon? It certainly survived into the Christian era. The Greek traveller
Pausanias came to Siwa in 160 and found the temple alive and well, with priests
still officiating over its rites. But the next time Siwa appears in history -
1,000 years later - it had been thoroughly Islamised.
Today, Siwa is one of the most
traditional, Islamic corners of north Africa. It is run by the nine sheikhs of
nine tribes. Alcohol is forbidden, even in the secluded Safari Paradise Hotel
where tour groups stay. Local women do not show their faces. Tourists are
politely asked to cover their arms and legs in public. But when I mentioned to
an educated Siwan my concerns about the threat to local customs posed by
increasing numbers of tourists I was told in the sweetest way: "But we
need tourists. It is our problem, not yours." In fact tourists are
received with great kindness.
And despite Islamic strictures, the
olive groves and palmeries still rustle to rumours of the old days, when local
farm workers,
known as the zaggalah, famously got
drunk each night on a liquor called labgi extracted from the crown of the palm
tree, and made homosexual love to the sound of music outside the walls of the
old town.
"Yes, old Siwa lives on,"
Mahdi Hweity, who runs the tourist office, told me the next day, "but it
is disappearing fast. The old city is falling to bits. Camel caravans stopped
coming through around the time that the old city began to be abandoned, in the
1920s. But until 1982 there was no macadamised road and it took 18 hours in a
truck convoy from the coast. You slept on the roof of the truck. When you
arrived you had two kilos of dust in your clothes."
Talk of change in Siwa sounded
ludicrous when I stood in the centre of town amid the few vendors selling
aubergines and onions and squawking chickens in cages. I saw backpackers step
awkwardly aside as a queue of veiled women was carried past on donkey carts
driven by men in jelabbiyas and skull-caps. Behind my head, the abandoned
fortress citadel of Shali - a jagged silhouette against the sky - may have been
slowly reverting to its original mud, but in the tomb of Sidi Suleiman by the
mosque, I found a group of old men on a rug, tapping drums and singing like
monks. The Siwan who led me there later asked if I wanted some labgi. Old Siwa
has not yet gone.
But tourism and population growth do
threaten Siwa with meteoric change in the coming years. On my bus home I met a
young Siwan who was studying for a masters degree in agriculture. "My
thesis concerns irrigation in Siwa," he explained. "My teachers in
Alexandria told me it was a bad idea because there was no information, and it
was difficult to research. But I had to do it. They are risking the water
supplies of Siwa by introducing chemical fertilisers and causing the fresh
wells to be flooded by the salty ones." He did not quite say what I was
thinking, that Siwa without fresh water would be worse than a leopard without
its spots.
FACT FILE
siwa
Getting there
The arrangements for Jeremy Atiyah's
trip were made with the assistance of El-Sawy Travel, 80 Park Rd, London NW1
4SH (tel: 0171-258 1901), which can provide tailor-made tours to any part of
Egypt or the Middle East. A sample one-week tour, including the first night in
the Ramses Hilton in Cairo, two nights in the Montazah Sheraton in Alexandria
and four nights' half-board in the Siwa Safari Paradise (tel: 00 20 46
4602289), plus all internal transfers and return flights, currently costs
pounds 796.
If travelling independently, Egypt can
be even cheaper. Adequate accommodation in Siwa can be found for pounds 5 a
night. The bus from Alexandria to Siwa (twice daily) also costs pounds 5.
Flights to Cairo before 13 December or after 1 January cost pounds 186 plus
pounds 29.40 tax with Lufthansa; the Christmas period costs about pounds 40
more. Trailfinders (tel: 0121-2361234).
Further information
You can get Egyptian visas on arrival
at the airport, though it is more relaxing to get them in advance. Contact the
Egyptian Consulate, 2 Lowndes St, London SW1X 9ET (tel: 0891 887 777, calls
cost 50p per minute). Egyptian State Tourist Office, 170 Piccadilly London W1V
9DD (tel: 0171-493 5282).
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