Reflections on an Ancient Land 

                                                                            Carolyn McPherson

 The blue-green waters of the Nile are calm, 

        As reluctant to yield up their ancient visions to we who come in modern times as are the 

        sand and rocky hills that stand like sentinels on the horizon.

White ibis stand in the sunken marsh and vie with small rowboats for a meal of fish.

Donkey and cattle graze in the alfalfa, 

        occasionally lifting their heads as an Egyptian in a galabeya steers his felluca along the

         river paths.  Both seem caught in time. 

The scenes along the river are those of a land that time has not touched, 

        yet we have just visited the excavated temples that this same Nile has covered for more 

        than forty centuries with sand and silt, mountains of it, a hundred feet high.

Modern buildings split the sky back downriver in Cairo, 

        and overlapping, unfinished edifices and crowded bazaars fill the air with noise

        and pollution.

Cell phones, roof satellite dishes, and Arabic graffiti are everywhere. 

Tourists pack into hotels, then re-emerge to motor to the feet of the Giza Pyramids. 

Giza --- her three, towering, ancient monuments stand silent and unyielding in the relentless   

        Sahara sun, still holding their secrets after 4.500 years, and even modern science cannot

        reveal them all.

What other glimpses of the past does the desert yet conceal? 

With the boat still gently floating, I close my eyes and take in the sounds and smells of the

         river --- smells from the kitchens near the riverbank, the water itself, and the mixed

         vegetation on the shore, mingled with the far-off sweet smell of drying grasses, and the 

         sunbaked sand and rock with its age and permanency. 

The steady, slow throb of the ship's engine. 

Breezes whistling softly through the banana trees, and the sudden braying of an unseen 

        donkey that sounds to my ears like the honk of a Canada goose.

Opening my eyes, I see fields of golden grain almost down to the edge of the water 

        and broken by stretches of green alfalfa and papyrus, all bending gently to the south.

White seabirds rise in small clouds above them. 

Workers row along the river's edge in low, flat boats, pulling weeds in the midst of the grain.  

Little straw hats pop into view now and then, some leaning precariously toward the water. 

         There are no Nile Crocodiles to fear now, since the new High Dam was built.

What must it be like to live on the edge of this ancient river, glimpsing thousands of years?

Our New World experience is so new compared to the history of these people ---

        how can we appreciate their changes, their heritage, 

        and their wealth in what was as well as what is and what needs to be? 

Our cultural accumulations seem so fleeting in comparison with their rich past, their

         willingness to endure. 

And yet the real wealth here is not in the tombs, or the golden artifacts, or in the statues found        

         in the temples. It is in the Nile --- in the life-blood it provides to this country. 

         Without it, the Sahara sand would creep over this land, swallowing everything the 

         blazing sun did not first kill.

Without the Nile, both east and west banks would become lands of the dead. 

We have so much to learn from and about one another, we humans.  We grow up in a single culture, most of us, knowing little else.  We may have been put on this planet to learn about each other and to make a better world for the children and grandchildren who will follow us.

And yet we start from an early age playing up our differences rather than our commonalities, and end up destroying some parts of the earth for the benefit of other parts.

What wonders or horrors will we leave in the next forty centuries for those who come after us?