Three Days Across Egypt: A Geography Teacher's Travel Log
1Day 1, Kharga Oasis. We begin in Egypt's Western Desert. No river flows here. The town's water comes from underground, from springs and deep wells. Date palms and small green fields crowd around the water, and a short walk away the sand and bare rock begin again. Traders' caravans have stopped at this oasis for water for thousands of years.
2Day 1, afternoon. Driving east, we climb onto a high, flat plateau of limestone. For about three hours we pass no fields, no trees and no towns.
3Day 2, Thebes. At the plateau's edge the road drops down a cliff, and the Nile Valley opens below us like a green ribbon laid across brown paper. In many places the strip of farmland is only a few miles wide. Ancient Egyptians called its dark, silty soil Kemet, "the black land," and the desert around it Deshret, "the red land." For thousands of years the Nile rose each summer and spread water and fresh silt over the valley floor. Farmers built low earth walls to hold the floodwater in large basins. When the water drained away in the fall, they sowed wheat and barley in the wet mud. A field could reach only as far as the floodwater did. In the New Kingdom, about 1550 to 1070 BCE, Thebes was one of Egypt's greatest cities and often its capital.
4Day 2, evening. Where did all that water come from? Our guide points south. More than 1,000 miles away, in the Ethiopian Highlands, heavy rains fall from about June to September, and the hills turn green. Swollen streams rush down the slopes into rivers that join the Nile and carry its flood north into Egypt. Today a large dam at Aswan holds back the flood, and canals water the fields around Luxor all year.
5Day 3, Wadi Hammamat and Quseir. We leave the river and drive east through Wadi Hammamat. Ancient Egyptian expeditions came here to cut a hard, dark stone for statues, and travelers carved their names and prayers into the rocks. At the end of the road lies Quseir. A sea breeze keeps it cooler than Thebes, but almost no rain falls and no river reaches it. Egyptians sent ships from harbors on this coast to trade along the Red Sea, but much of the food their crews ate was grown in the Nile Valley and carried across the desert.
6Tonight I looked at my map again. Kharga, Thebes and Quseir lie at almost the same latitude, in one of the driest belts on Earth. Yet only one of them became the heart of a great civilization.