The Quest For the Tomb of the Aga Khan

The stranger, staring with bloodshot eyes, clawed with failing strength at my collar. Black nails raked my flesh, and he pressed his mouth, rimmed with yellow teeth, to my face. His breath was stale with decay and his voice a rattling whisper, and with the fevered urgency of the doomed, he gasped his last words to my unwilling and horrified ears:

"Seek out the tomb! The tomb of the Aga Khan!"

This didn't really happen. But I did read in the Lonely Planet about a mausoleum on the other side of the Nile that contains the bones of Muhammad Shah, the 48th Aga Khan, descendant of the Prophet (Peace be upon him!), and former head of the obscure but wealthy Ismaili sect of Shi'ite Islam.

He died in 1957, and was interred in a stern-looking tomb on the rocky heights peering down on the Nile and the green riverlands of Aswan, where the old man had spent all his winters. His wife outlived him by more than four decades, passing away in 2000. Every morning until the day of her death, she climbed the hill to the sarcophagus of her husband, and there placed a red rose.

C'est l'amour, non?

This isn't what made me decide to take up the Quest for the Tomb of the Aga Khan. I just really wanted to go to a place that sounds like the "boss" dungeon of a video game.

I took the ferry across the Nile early the next morning. On the other side, a whole caravan of camel drivers bargained for my patronage, offering to deposit me at the tomb's doorstep for 20 pounds after a half hour ride through the desert.

This confused me. According to the Lying Planet's attached map, the tomb was 30m from the riverbank, 400m down the Nile from the ferry drop off. All I had to do was walk along the shore till I stubbed my toe on the front gate, right?

The camel drivers disagreed vigorously. It's too hot! There is no path! There are swamps! The police will stop you! They swore by the beard of Allah and the wounds of Christ that it would be easier to rent a camel and take a roundabout 2-3km jaunt through the desert before coming up behind the tomb.

Nubians. As it turned out, there was a shit-littered path (certainly one less traveled), there were no swamps, and there were no police. But they did tell the truth about one thing.

It was very, very, very hot.

I passed the Tombs of the Nobles along the way. But at that point I was undergoing severe Pharaonic overload and just wasn't up for more hieroglyphery/mummery. I was also rather daunted by the fence- though not half as much as I was by the admission price.

I guess this is the "swamp". Some small stretches of the shore were cultivated. Once or twice I passed tiny plots of land; long and thin, and a Nubian bent over in the dry heat checking on his crops.

The shore was a schizoid hiking trail. On one side, the crystalline Nile, with stretches of golden-tufted reeds and tall, grassy groves. Further out was a large island converted by a former British governor into a botanical garden, ringing with the shouts of visiting schoolchildren, as lateen-sailed feluccas drifted idly by.

On the other side (I literally took this shot by twisting my body from left to right 180 degrees) were the rocky wastes of the western desert.

Thar she blows! Only a little further...

But first, I had to run a gauntlet of camel-mounted Nubians- all of whom wanted to take me back to the ferry for 20 pounds, and none of whom seemed capable of understanding that I had just come from there and had no intention of returning without seeing the tomb of the Aga Khan.

So I ran the black blockade into the tomb compound. The Nubians followed with a shout, clawing at my shoulders and arms and dragging me backwards, and this was the closest I've ever come to punching someone on my travels.

As it turns out, non-Ismailis are barred from entering the compound, which the Nubians were trying to warn me about (so that I would decide to go back to the ferry... on one of their camels.)

I was pissed. Did I just trek through the burning sands- and get sunburned for the first time since I was a 7 year old snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef- to get turned away at the gate?

You know what? I think Muslims should be banned from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and all the Christian holy sites that are also open as tourist attraction to people of all faiths. You heard me. If Christians aren't allowed to enter the Dome of the Rock or the city of Mecca or the Tomb of the Aga Khan, then let's have some tit for tat.

As Kieran says: "It's Notre Dame, not Votre Dame." If I can't go into your mosque or your tomb, stay the fuck out of my church. Jesus!

I gave some serious thought to jumping the wall. Kieran and I have an old tradition of doing this: whenever we see a sign saying we shouldn't do something- pass a certain barrier, or climb a certain monument/ruin- we say: "That sign's in Italian", and then proceed to ignore its warnings. (This started on our first trip to southern Europe a few years ago, when, on the banks of some Italian coastal town, a sign warned us not to pass a metal chain- in Italian. One of us turned to the other and pronounced: "I can't read this sign. It's in Italian." Then we hopped the chain.)

I did not jump the wall this time. The sign isn't always in Italian.

All this way for nuthin'.

The sands beyond the tomb were littered with shards of red pottery. I have no idea where they came from.

Off in the distance, you can see a small line of camels convoying some sweating whiteys back to the ferry. This is the route I would have taken had I rented a camel-ride. The tourists are returning from St. Michael's Monastery, a brick-walled, Coptic monastery a few hundred meters away, long destroyed or abandoned. You can see it to the left of the stone hut in the foreground, off in the distance at the top of the black, pebbly slope.

For lack of anything better to do, I took a jaunt up to the monastery. By this point, I was about as Christianed out as I was Pharaohed out, but anything was better than having to head down that hill and tax my patience (and my wallet) by haggling over the price of a camel-ride with some slack-jawed Nubian.

Ho! The gatekeepers were slumbering. I tried to tiptoe past them, and got about as far as the door on the opposite side before the guy on the left jerked awake- and from the commotion he then made, you'd think I'd raped his mother.

Faced with the choice of (1) a dignified retreat without gaining access to the monastery, and (2) paying an exorbitant admission fee while enduring a self-righteous dressing-down by some sour-mouthed Nubian... wait, that's not much of a choice at all.

So I tried to sneak around the back and jump the wall. There, I encountered a policeman, dressed in a slouch-shouldered, ill-fitting uniform, barefoot, and groggy from the heat. He was huddling unseen in the shadows under a shack made from stones and driftwood, where a coffee pot and a kerosene lamp hung from haywire hooks. I'd thought it was an abandoned bumshack, and was halfway up the wall, when this disheveled figure barreled out of his one-man slum and scared me half to death. I took off down the road, stopping only to wave at him and take a photo.

At least I got a nice view of Aswan from the high dunes.

As I descended the slope to the camel camp, another dozen camel drivers drove their beasts out to greet me, and in a fit of disgust, I hustled away so quickly and instinctively that I plain forgot that I'd intended to ride a camel back to the ferry.