Byramids

Ali, the short, pudgy, turbaned local astride the grunting camel, had never heard of Dr. Dre.

Five minutes earlier, Ali had trotted up to me on his beast, whom he’d introduced as Charlie Brown. Charlie was decked out in a colorfully embroidered saddle blanket, had tinkling bells on his reins, and smelled like the green turds he casually splattered on the desert sands as he plodded placidly alongside me.

“My friend!” He had shouted. “Come ride my camel! Very cheab, go round desert! See banoramic view of byramids…”

If I had allowed Ali to complete his well-rehearsed monologue, with his crocodilian smile and his “Ps” pronounced as “Bs”, it would have continued- and ended- like this:

“Where you from, my friend? Canada? I like Canada! I like you! For you only, cheab brice! Very cheab! 150 bound only!” “Come,” he would have said in response to my polite refusals, nudging Charlie Brown into a kneeling position. “Come,” he would have shouted, all genial enthusiasm, leaping nimbly off the camel, brandishing his riding stick. “No ride, no broblem! Take bicture only! Come!”

He would have pulled his turban off his head, wrapping it around mine, shoved the stick in my hands, and pulled me towards Charlie. With forceful motions belied by an endless flood of friendly words, he would have grabbed my camera and guided me onto Charlie’s saddle. A deft command later, Charlie would have swayed upright before I’d have the opportunity to think, let alone protest. I’d pose for a pair of pictures, and only because the shutter would have already been flashing. “Okay!” Ali would have bellowed merrily. “Now ride around desert! Very nice, banoramic view of byramids!”

But no, I might have protested. I don’t want a ride around the damned pyramids. I didn’t even want to sit on your blessed camel- Charlie Brown, his hide so alive with fleas that it looked like there was a biblical plague nesting in his flesh. Can you please let me off this camel, sir.

“Ride around desert now!” Ali would have said. He would already have been seated on another camel that would have materialized out of nowhere, summoned with an unseen hand gesture by a waiting colleague while I’d been posing for pictures. Sleight of hand, like a magician. Distract the audience, pull the trick, and wait for the stunned confusion. He’d have cantered off into the sands, Charlie in tow- my protests growing quieter as I realized that they were being drowned by Ali’s methodic recitations of the histories, dimensions, and splendor of the pyramids- the mighty, ruined tombs of the pharaohs Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure.

What the hell, I’d have thought, resigned. Maybe this’ll be fun. And up ahead, Ali would have been hiding a smile behind his bushy handlebar. Egypt 1, Canada 0.

One part of me, somehow detached and dispassionate like a soul hovering over the corpse, would have watched this drama unfold, smirked, and known that I was getting worked. Yet Ali would have talked circles around me with such practiced ease that I would have stood there like Odysseus tied to the mast, mute and spellbound- and I would have been halfway around the desert on Charlie Brown before I’d have been willing to admit to myself that I’d been played like a harp.

Of course, none of this happened.

I’d seen camels like Charlie before- and I’d met touts like Ali before. These chaps have spent their lives- decades since childhood- plying the tourist trade. Some of them pimp out Pharaonic civilization in the form of souvenirs… papyrus scrolls mass printed with hieroglyphics, or little stone models of pyramids, sphinxes, and busts of Tutankhamen and Akhenaton, or jackal-headed Anubis and the osprey of Osiris. Some, like Ali, lead camels and horses around the base of the pyramids, sweet-tonguing foreigners into a ride around the surrounding desert for some exorbitant sum. One chap has a most creative schtick: he’ll conspiratorially tell you that for a small sum, he’ll help you climb one of the smaller pyramids by distracting the guards. But if you try to climb it yourself, he’ll gesture frantically to the guards instead, alerting them to your attempts.

This pack of thieves has one thing in common. The set of skills that the school of life has forced each of them to master consists SOLELY of ways to part tourists from their cash. It’s social conditioning at its most bewildering and amusing.

Each man can speak from four to six languages, but not fully. Whether in Spanish, English, Russian, French, Italian, or Arabic, each has mastered only a collection of phrases designed to begin, guide, and end a conversation that will eventually put your money in his pocket. It’s a play in which all the actors have their lines- and what most first-time visitors don’t realize is that the Egyptians write the script. It’s like those branching option trees: if whitey says A, say B. If he says C, say D. Every response has a creative counter-response, calculated for maximum wit and selling power over years of trial and error. If you tell a souvenir-hawker: “I want nothing, thanks,” he will respond: “I have ‘nothing’! What color you want?” Each man has developed the patience of a priest and the persistence of a paparazzo… if he can’t fast-talk his way into the white man’s wallet, he will instead grovel so shamelessly for his scraps that I’m glad they haven’t instituted a “Take Your Kids To Work” Day in Giza.

I stared at Ali yammering away on his camel, and a hundred thoughts raced through my head.

I tried to register the unbelievable idea that the entire experience of this man’s life had taught him little more than how to beg for my change. I wondered if these touts saw their working lives as one constant indignity after another, having to hassle and debase themselves before indignant foreigners- or if they recognized that sometimes, you’ve just “gotta do what you gotta do” to put shoes on your feet. I wondered if they resented the casual arrogance of these sweating white people with their sunburned bare arms and legs, bulging pockets, invincible economy, and overwhelming culture… and secretly longed to Columbine us all. Or if we tourists were just resources to be dispassionately mined, like wallets with legs.

I tried to reconcile the distaste I felt towards Ali’s greedy eyes and grasping hands with the understanding that this was how he brought bread home to his family, that he was only supplying a demand created by the all-knowing global market, and that if my presence dehumanized him, it also fed him.

And Hell, locals in foreign lands have been taking a cut from Western travelers since before the days of Marco Polo, before Vasco de Gama, Henry Stanley and Dr Livingston, and Freya Stark.

But still. It all felt wrong.

I recalled the earlier part of the afternoon- Kieran and I scampering across the foundation stones of the Great Pyramid of Khufu and lying on the casing stones of Menkaure’s smaller tomb, musing on the engineering genius of their architects and the Herculean feats of their laborers. Together, we had tried to imagine the pyramids cased in white granite with golden capstones, banded in hieroglyphics, populated only by the spirits of kings and robed priests burning incense, and we had laughed at our own romanticism.

There was nothing to romanticize. The glory and mystique of an earlier age had been cheapened by hectic, commercialized modernity, with its sweating throngs of tourists retreating to the comfort of their air-conditioned buses, and Arab touts who littered cigarette butts on the tombs of their forefathers and used a heritage they didn’t understand as a cash cow for their tourist economy.

Fuck it. Ali still sat there with his mouth open, a flood of words on the tip of his tongue. The musing was over.

“Ya’ll know me, still same ol’ G.” I began solemnly, looking up at Ali. The poor man looked confused. There was no prescribed response to Dr Dre. He was still searching his verbal arsenal when I broadsided him with gangsta rap. “But I’ve been low-key! Hated on by all these niggers, with no cheese, no deals and no Gs; no wheels and no keys; no boats, no snowmobiles and no skis.”

Ali stared blankly at me. Nothing came out when he moved his lips, just a bunch of gibberish. Slowly, he wheeled Charlie Brown around and headed off in the direction of a knot of Germans posing with stoic Aryan smiles.

“Mad at me,” I shouted after him. “that I can finally afford to provide my family with groceries!”

Ali did not look back, and I felt a small smirk spread across my face. Canada 1, Egypt 0.