I had spent four days in a jeep driving through deserts of black rock, white rock, sand dunes and conical mounds. Our goal was to reach the cave which was a whole day's drive from Cairo. We left at 7am and arrived at the cave at 5pm just before it turned dark. When I first got out of the jeep after being bounced around on desert terrain since 10 that morning (when we had left the paved road) I was profoundly disappointed. I saw some of our group who had arrived first, standing next to a very unassuming hole. That's the cave?! I thought. We drove all this way to see this little hole in the ground?
But to my surprise, this little hole lead to an enormous cavern with shafts leading deep below the ground of the desert. Unfortunately these shafts have been filled with sand, so it's not possible to follow them, but the cavern itself reminded me of entering the dark space of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris on a hot summer day. It had that same sense of cool expanse of enormous space and of elegant grace. The stalactites and stalagmites stretched between the sand floor and ceiling creating the effect of columns. While we waited for the guides to bring lights, I explored the spaces with a flashlight accompanied by the two little boys on the trip. Occasionally we would find a left over candle from some other visitor. Fortunately it seems that anyone willing to make the trek out here, is the kind of person that respects the sanctity of a place like this. There was no other sign of mankind besides the candles except for at the entrance a bundle of notebooks with writings from the various people who have visited.
Later after we had left the area, our geologist mentioned that there are lots of Neolithic items to be found around the cave. He didn't want to tell us about these while we were there, for fear that we would remove them. He also said, that no one knows how large the cave actually is. The sand has filled up the shafts and it probably extends quite far under the desert floor. When I walked around on the surface of the desert the next day it sounded hollow in many places. I'm sure there is a lot to discover, if anyone had the desire and money to do it.
I had heard about this cave before from someone who had been on a trip looking for it and had driven around in the desert without ever arriving at the cave. I can definitely see how this could happen. When I took a walk in the morning after sleeping out under the stars, I realized that all the little mounds rising from the surface of the desert, looked exactly the same. How would one know that the cave was in the center of one group or the other? If I didn't retrace my footsteps back to the camp, I could easily have been lost myself. There was no marker, no point of reference, nothing that I could see which would indicate where to locate the exact spot of that unassuming hole in the ground.
The only marker I had seen along the way, was that about an hour before the cave a glass bottle was sitting in a pile of sand next to the tire tracks. Our driver noticed this and we got out and investigated and found a box hidden behind a mound of rocks with wires in it. I have no idea what that meant. Someone joked that maybe it was those WMDs!
On the trip back we stopped to look at a grave. The guides did not know whose grave it was. It was simply a mound of sand surrounded by a decoration of rocks left in the middle of nowhere. We were still a good three to four hour's drive away from any form of civilization.
Saad, our guide, had grown up in Farafra, one of the desert oases. When he was little what is now a couple of hours drive on an asphalt road from Farafra to Bahariya was a four day trek by camel. Bahariya was at that time connected by road to Cairo and by a train track that was put in for mining. Saad's mother used to go by camel to Bahariya, then travel by car three hours to Cairo just to make a phone call to her son who was in Europe. Now, of course mobile phones and the new road have changed all that. Saad's first trip to the cave was a four day trip by camel with his grandfather when he was fourteen.
Saad now keeps a place on a houseboat on the Nile in Cairo. He travels back and forth from Farafra where he and his brothers run a hotel from which they do these trips to the desert, to Cairo where he lives across the Nile from Zamalek which is one of the wealthiest parts of the city. What a contrast for him to go back and forth between desert life and the city! Sometimes he wears bedouin dress, other times modern. I also feel the contrast when I come back to the city from days of camping under the stars in the desert. I always feel like I am sleep walking my first day back. It is as if I'm not really there. The desert calm is still a part of me and finds no place in the rushing traffic of the city.