SOMEWHERE between the First and Second Cataracts of the Nile, in an area now covered by the vast Russsian-built lake, it occurred to me that if you want to do well in life, you ought to spend a lot more time thinking about death. (On Lake Nasser, of course, death has come to the Nile itself. Its grandiloquent monuments, such as Ramases II’s colossi, have had to be ... well . . . resurrected.)
Contemplation of death provides one with long-term perspectives - but that hackneyed observation is quite beside the point. The point is that thinking about death is good for morale, good for your morals, good for your health, good for business - and marvellous for empire-building. You learn, too, that concepts like gender equality, and like non-racism among ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’ in Africa, can work. For a brief period in an enlightened civilisation more than 3000 years ago non-racism and gender equality were genuinely and naturally practised - probably for the first and as yet only time in recorded human history.
There are many unexpected and even brand new things to learn if you open your mind in a journey through Ancient Egypt. This was apparent during what was meant to be ‘a well-deserved rest’ and sightseeing tour through the pyramids, mortuary temples and tombs of the Nile. We intended, of course, to do what many tourists do these days: check out the theory postulated in Graham Hancock’s book, Fingerprints of the Gods that the pyramids were built by some mysterious political power about 10,000 years before the ancient Pharoahs
But mainly we were bent on pleasure. . .Travellers on an otoise odyssey.
