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We went to Nubia to see a miracle, and were astounded. In Aswan, Gamel Abdel Nasser’s High Dam towered 40 metres out of the fox-pelt dunes of the desert. At its base, the growling complex of hydroelectric generators pumped uninterrupted power into Egypt. On the other side, the great reservoir called Lake Nasser stretched for 500 km into the Nile valley. But, as the dam grew, its waters began to lap at the feet of magnificent Pharaonic temples, thousands of years old, threatening to submerge them forever. Egypt sent a frantic appeal to Unesco, and many nations pooled their resources to save the 14 great temples from certain destruction.
These great miracles of conservation are now a major tourist attraction. A guarded caravan of tourist vehicles speeds 280 km down a desert road to Abu Simbel. It was guarded because Egypt had just begun to feel the beginnings of unrest that would, later, rock the Arab world in the Jasmine Revolution. An armoured vehicle led it, another drove in the middle of the motorcade, a third brought up the rear. Beyond the windows, the landscape unreeled, dun-coloured, sere and monotonous. The only unusual thing to be seen on this glare-filled road were curious hillocks shaped like well-defined pyramids. This was Nubia, whose people differed markedly from the ancient Egyptians and stoutly resisted the take over of their Nile-enriched lands by the armies of the Pharaohs. In fact, the monuments in Abu Simbel had been created to awe Nubians with the power and majesty of the great Egyptian monarch and his beautiful queen. At the end of the long journey, the convoy drove into a hamlet green with palm trees and Nile-nurtured foliage. Yellow and pink flowers blossomed extravagantly, pollen drifted like living dust from feathery thorn trees. The tourists were shepherded into a modern reception centre with scale models of the Great Rescue, a coffee shop with hookahs on demand, and stacks of attractive souvenirs many of which were, unashamedly, "Made in China." But the tawdriness of the trinkets did nothing to diminish the magnificence of Abu Simbel. The trudge to a hulking rocky hillock, was long, but rewarding. There, in an amphitheatre of rock-cut cliffs facing the azure waters of Lake Nasser, were the unforgettable monuments that Pharaoh Rameses II had built for himself and his beloved principal wife, Nefertari. They were overpowering, unreal: four seated figures of the god-king towered 20 meters high, flanking the entrance to his temple, dwarfing visitors to ant-size.
Like many rulers he believed in his own divinity and deified himself in monuments. Inside the entrance, it was cool, as it is inside the mountain, but even here tall statues of the king rose depicting him as the god Osiris. The floor sloped gently up, the size of the chambers deceased resembling the dark garba grihas, the womb-like sanctums of southern temples. There is reason to believe that our Dravidians are of the same ethnic stock as the Pharaonic people. As you emerge into the sunlight again, the sudden glare is blinding. A little further to the north is a smaller rock-cut temple dedicated to Hathor, the goddess of love, and to the pharaoh’s favourite wife, the elegant Nefertari. As one looks back at the great cliff into which these temples had been carved, one realises, then, that all this had been done in that distant age when the nomadic Indo-Iranians were establishing their society in northern India and the first permanent temples had not been built in our land. In fact, even these temples had not been carved here. Their original location has been submerged. Before that had happened, however, conservationists had cut the original monuments into blocks, raised them up, fitted them together, and then built two artificial mountains around them to replicate their original ambiance. All this had been done with such meticulous precision that at the two solstices, when the sun crosses the Tropic of Cancer, its light shafts in through 65 metres, into the heart of the mountains, and illuminates three of the four figures in the sanctum for five minutes. The fourth figure, Ptah, remains in shadow: he was the god of darkness. That was also how it had been in the original temple, now just a flooded cavern under the blue waters of Lake Nasser.
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GETTING
THERE:
Air: Gulf Air has flights from Delhi to Cairo via Bahrain.
From Cairo there are local flights to Aswan.