The Land Where Up Is Down

It’s after lunch our sixth day out. To our left the yellow sands reach within a quarter-mile of the wide brown waters of the river, separated from it by a patchwork of bright green alfalfa and musky-jade wheat: a few mud-brick huts, a cemetery of raised beehive graves, some graceful date palms. Two men sitting well back on the rumps of their donkeys trot past, brown legs dangling from beneath their flowing blue gallabiyehs. Natalie Lewis looks up from her guide book. “It was somewhere just about here,” she says (we are about two hundred miles south of Cairo), “that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph lived.” Not much about the Egyptian countryside has changed in the intervening two thousand years; not much had changed between the building of Cheops’ Great Pyramid at Giza, nearly three thousand years earlier, and the day Joseph decided he had brought his family far enough into Egypt to be safe from Herod’s sword.

We no longer find this in the least astonishing. Interesting yes, indeed fascinating: astonishing no. In traveling through Egypt we’ve seen men plowing with wooden plows, women washing their clothes in the rivers and canals, children shaping mud patties into bricks and stacking them to bake in the sun, water buffalo walking mile after mile in tight circles, turning the wheels that bring up water to irrigate the fields.

PL

About the Author

Priscilla L. Buckley

It’s after lunch our sixth day out. To our left the yellow sands reach within a quarter-mile of the wide brown waters of the river, separated from it by a patchwork of bright green alfalfa and musky-jade wheat: a few mud-brick huts, a cemetery of raised beehive graves, some graceful date palms. Two men sitting well back on the rumps of their donkeys trot past, brown legs dangling from beneath their flowing blue gallabiyehs. Natalie Lewis looks up from her guide book. “It was somewhere just about here,” she says (we are about two hundred miles south of Cairo), “that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph lived.” Not much about the Egyptian countryside has changed in the intervening two thousand years; not much had changed between the building of Cheops’ Great Pyramid at Giza, nearly three thousand years earlier, and the day Joseph decided he had brought his family far enough into Egypt to be safe from Herod’s sword.

We no longer find this in the least astonishing. Interesting yes, indeed fascinating: astonishing no. In traveling through Egypt we’ve seen men plowing with wooden plows, women washing their clothes in the rivers and canals, children shaping mud patties into bricks and stacking them to bake in the sun, water buffalo walking mile after mile in tight circles, turning the wheels that bring up water to irrigate the fields.