A quiet place.
I’ve looked at a lot of photos of mosques in the Western Desert – the expansive desert in Libya, just over Egypt’s western border – where I suspect this photo was taken, but couldn’t see one that matched this mosque. The wall seems to have had its window blown out, and as sometimes happens in photography, something damaged and ugly can be used to make a beautiful image. A photo of the mosque on its own would not tell as good a story as it does framed by this arched gap.
Death is something I hate thinking about, let alone writing about. But when choosing photos from Egypt in 1942, there are so many whose subject is death that I will inevitably have to consider them. I selected this image which, since my childhood, has always turned me cold but curious, simply because of the caption my father wrote beneath it: Dead City, Cairo. Until last week when I was researching the cemetery near the pyramids (see my entry for the ‘Contrast’ challenge), I never knew that Dead City was a cemetery.
Today there are about half a million people living in the City of the Dead due to Cairo’s exploding population. They live in the tomb buildings as slum-dwellers and have no electricity or sanitation. However, some good people are growing micro-gardens in the Dead City complex which give the residents a way to produce some food for themselves and sell the surplus at the markets. Tomatoes and strawberries, mint, aubergines and peppers are popular and grow well because of their shallow roots, not in soil but in a layer of minerals laid on top of the sand. Read more about the project here: http://www.abitare.it/en/liveinslums/the-microjardins-in-the-city-of-the-dead/
The building in the foreground is in the Mamluk cemetery. It’s the mausoleum of Sultan Al-Ashraf Barsbay, built in 1432 AD.
So through blogging I’ve learnt of three unusual things: Dead City is actually a city built for the dead; half a million people are living amongst the dead; a few others care enough to start vegetable gardens here and improve the lives of poor cemetery dwellers.
‘Egyptian graves’ is the caption below this photo in the album my father brought back from Cairo in 1942. There is a contrast between grave styles: some like theirs pyramidal and reaching up to the sky from the open desert, others prefer to stay close to the ground, in the shade of a tree.
P.S. After submitting this photo for the ‘contrast’ challenge, I did some research about the graves in the foreground and responded to Laura’s comment below. I learned that they are in a modern Muslim cemetery built over the site of the quarry where some of the pyramid blocks came from. Since the time of this photo, 70 years ago, a wall has been built around the cemetery, hiding it from pyramid tourists.
I also discovered that the structure on the left of the photo is the pyramid tomb of Queen Khentkawes (c 4th Dynasty) built on top of a cube of rock which remained after blocks had been cut for the larger pyramids.
4th Mar – I read on my father’s army service form that he had blue eyes, a revelation to me; I never looked him in the eye. My mother and three siblings have brown or grey eyes. I have blue eyes.
5th Mar – A rural commentator on ABC Radio today said he wants ‘action, not just antidotal stories’.
6th Mar – Just heard Cupid by Sam Cooke. Sam asks Cupid: ‘Draw back your bow and let your arrow go straight to my lover’s heart’. But Sam loves a girl who doesn’t know he exists. She can’t be his lover then, since a lover loves.
7th Mar – Thought about a mentor’s advice to use ‘perhaps’, not ‘maybe’. Saw ‘maybe’ in an article and found myself mouthing ‘perhaps’, which purses the mouth with its two p’s and a sibilant s and a breathy h in the middle. The song Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps just wouldn’t work as Maybe, Maybe, Maybe.
8th Mar – In a bookshop, I searched for the translators’ names in three editions of Madame Bovary. The most expensive, a Penguin edition, gave a translator’s name; a cheaper Penguin and the Collins edition made no mention of translators. Perhaps Flaubert wrote them in English.
28th Feb: I felt the pressure of words when I read, across the rear window of a ute in front of me, in large white Gothic lettering, ‘Justify your existence’.
29th Feb: When I go into homes to tutor, some people tell me to leave my shoes on, even on rainy days on fully carpeted floors. I never see them barefoot. Others won’t let me step inside until I’ve removed my shoes, even when they have tiled floors and the day is icy. I never see them shod.
1st Mar: Tonight when I was in the shower, a police car gave its siren a short sharp burst right outside my bathroom window.
2nd Mar: All this rain (4th day) is bringing out garden weirdness. Today my foot just missed a 7-inch long leopard slug; a large caterpillar crossed my undrying washing like an omega Ω; water-retaining crystals used in the drought have jellified and are oozing up out of pot plants and creeping over the sides.
3rd Mar: My son said to his boss today: ‘I’ll just take this back out the back then I’ll be back.’
Several photos in the war album were taken in India, and while there is no caption accompanying this one, I suspect it was in India because bamboo scaffolding is still used there. Would you climb on it? Clearly, it’s flexible.
Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo was apparently the first hotel of the kind that become fashionable and famous for their opulence, like Raffles of Singapore. It was built and owned by Samuel Shepheard, an Englishman, and was the place to stay for European travellers to Egypt or to India and the east. It was built in the 1840s, replaced at the turn of the century with the structure you see in the photo, and destroyed by fire and riots against the British in 1952. During the war, British Officers on leave (including Australians) could relax in the wicker chairs on the terrace, though I’ve read that ordinary troops would not have been welcome. In the film The English Patient, the hotel was the setting in some scenes, but since it no longer existed, another hotel (in Venice) and a set were used. While some early 20th-century travellers boasted of staying there, a few writers complained of mosquitoes, lice, and other unpleasantness. Edward Lear said it was like a ‘horribly noisy railway station’.
In 1957, a new Shepheard’s Hotel was built a short distance from this one.
In this photo, the car amuses me, the driver out in the weather while the passengers are covered, imitating a horse and carriage arrangement.
I looked through the album for anything that triggered the thought ‘down’. There are resting camels, soldiers downing grog, sinking ships, broken planes, a fallen propeller, and this one, a skeleton picked clean. The seat can still hold a pilot!
The caption in the album is ‘Wrecked Bomber’.
This week’s theme has me questioning what are appropriate photos for a blog. My submissions for this weekly photo challenge are all coming from my father’s war album, and this morning I had to choose between a number of photos that tell a story of regret. In the end, I couldn’t put them on my blog. It’s enough to say that my father regretted volunteering to defend Australia in the Middle East. It’s also true, though, that those who were defended didn’t regret his contribution and were very thankful for the servicemen and women of the AIF (Australian Imperial Forces).
This photo, however, makes me wonder what the driver was thinking.
It was a toss-up tonight between two photos that suited the theme of ‘ready’. One was of my father and his mates in the training camp, ready and waiting to be sent to the Middle East. And there was this one of an Egyptian kitchen hand bearing about 50 plates with more behind him, ready to serve all the extra patrons. His hands have a firm grip on his load…
