Late afternoon gradually slipped into an apricot-coloured sunset that took fire. The Mediterranean lay mirrored below, awash in orange and pink ribbons of light. The faint, recumbent outline of Malta emerged on the horizon, its western end bathed in gold from the setting sun. I entered a left-hand downwind visual approach for Luka Airport, touching down as nightfall blanketed the island in darkness.
I had one more flight to reach Africa. The next morning I clambered into the cockpit and set about the familiar routines for the twelve-hour flight to Luxor, Egypt. The sun rose rapidly over the table-flat horizon of the Mediterranean as I started the long slow climb to ten thousand feet. A slight headwind added an hour to my estimated time of arrival in Luxor. I had fuel for over seventeen hours of flying time, easily enough for this leg of the flight. Dependent on winds, travelling at approximately 120 knots, I could fly nearly three thousand miles without stopping.
I was now more than halfway to Nairobi from Toronto; the navigation and flying had become routine. Although exhausted by three consecutive long-distance flights, I was increasingly familiar with the workings of the cockpit and excited by the slow countdown of the instruments, drawing me closer and closer to the African continent.
Gazing through the pilot’s-side window I sighted an old freighter bucking a stiff sea, ten thousand feet below on a southwesterly heading—probably making for Alexandria. My thoughts drifted into every pilot’s nightmare: what to do in the event of an engine failure over water. Procedures unfold according to a prescribed order: reconfigure the flight controls; trim the plane for a glide; circle the freighter several times; lose altitude while not losing sight of the chance for rescue; cross the freighter’s bow fifty feet above the water; contact control by radio and transmit my latitude and longitude; prepare to ditch into the sea—one has to get it right.
Suddenly, the controller’s voice from far off sifted into my consciousness, momentarily confusing me. He repeated instructions to switch over to Cairo control. I was approaching the coast of Africa, entering Egyptian airspace. The hours had slipped by unnoticed and the freighter, my one chance of rescue in the event of a crash, was plunging through mountainous seas now four hundred miles behind me.
A reddish haze lay indistinct, barely discernible below. I was flying over Africa at last. The ancient city of Alexandria emerged through the liquid haze of noon. The languid, flowing Nile meandered through its enormous delta, disgorging silt and history into the Mediterranean.
I flew due south over the undulating desert to the sprawl of Cairo which sat like an enormous blister enveloping the smoky haze of the slums, industrial plants, warehouses, and railways. The green Nile twisted like a serpent over the sand to the desert city of Luxor where I needed to refuel.
Luxor sat, desiccated by the sun, enveloped in the stink of dust. I shut down the engine and heard the muezzin’s wailing call to prayer. In the town the chaotic clatter of buses belched diesel fumes into the air, mixed with the smells of urine and rotting garbage. Men in white flowing djellabas gathered in the cool doorways, women in black bui-buis scuttled like crows through the narrow streets; electrical wires and lines of laundry looped overhead; donkeys, carts, and street urchins pushed between the sweet-smelling spices, ochre, green, and blood-red mounds piled in woven baskets; vendors cried out for buyers, voices ululating over the din; the daily commerce of the Nile remained timeless and unchanging.
I walked along the riverbank. Flotillas of “bateaux-mouche,” garishly lit, poorly maintained, lay moored alongside the quay, muscling aside the elegant Nile feluccas, older than history. Luxor, it seemed, had embraced the shoddy commerce of mass tourism. Only in the back alleys, beyond the street vendors and the neon-lit food stalls, into the Moslem quarter, where the dilapidated multi-storeyed buildings pressed against the narrow streets, did one discover the human cry of that impoverished city.
I crossed to the west side of the Nile: the Valley of the Kings and the smaller Valley of the Queens, where the hills shimmered in the translucent heat of the desert, magnificently still. There, the dead haunt the living. Only time bore witness to the passage of civilizations: the Phoenicians, the Syrians, the Greeks, the Romans under Caesar, the Turks, the Mamelukes, the French under Napoleon, the English under Kitchener; they all came and fell under the spell of this royal burial ground.
On the east side of the Nile stood the temples of Luxor, ancient city of Thebes: Karnak, Dendora, and Kom Ombo. Enormous blocks of pink granite, exquisite, massive in stature and grace, towered above the tourists, guides, and beggars. Statues of Hatshepsut and Ramses gaze across the river; seamless links to the past. Ancient Egypt remains eternal.
And yet, even more impressive is the night sky over the desert at Luxor. It fires the imagination. The sun sinks below the western hills of the city in a conflagration of red and orange, painting the desert. Suddenly, a fall of midnight-blue ushers in the first magnitude stars—the early arrivals. A curtain of darkness spreads over the sky, hosting a crowd of lesser stars, the smaller stitches of heaven. One by one the constellations rise over the horizon, tracing their arcs across the heavens, a nightly procession across the firmament.
The desert cools. The camels are fresh, capable of great distances at night. Tents are folded and the barking and mewling of departure signals the start of the caravans on their long trek across the sand. Nomadic tribes, wanderers of the desert, depart on well-footed tracks over an ocean of undulating dunes. Overhead, the stars serve as way stations, constant companions, intensely personal, guiding the camel drivers through the darkness. The telling of stories passes from father to son, generation to generation. Under a starlit vault these wanderers of the desert grow older, edging closer and closer to God.
Shortly after dawn, I got into a clapped-out old Ford taxi, which inched its way out of town, passing donkeys, camels, and buses bound for the chaotic bustle of the market. I had hoped to be airborne within three hours of waking—too optimistic a goal for Egypt. Interminable delays plagued my departure; officials thumped their stamps on my passport, exit visa, declaration of entry, landing and navigation clearances. Two hours of painstaking procedures led me through the depressing halls of the airport. Authorities sat like spiders spinning their bureaucratic web of ordinances, waiting for under-the-table payments.
By nine in the morning, the sun was burning the desert. High above the hills east of Luxor the cyanic blue of a cloudless sky beckoned. I was late, and a long flight remained ahead of me. I had decided to avoid flying over Sudan, the largest country in Africa, because of the ongoing civil war in the south and the extortionate overflight fees demanded by Khartoum. Instead, I would fly across Egypt’s eastern desert and south along the Red Sea to Djibouti.
The temperature had climbed to forty-nine degrees centigrade on the ground. My electronics, rated for temperatures far lower, were inoperative, leaving me without navigational instruments or communications. I climbed for one and a half hours after takeoff, dead reckoning on the compass, before reaching a cruising altitude of eleven thousand feet—and cooler temperatures which revived the instruments.
The plane’s controls felt unresponsive with the weight of full tanks in the thin hot air. I was buffeted by hot-air thermals rising eighteen thousand feet above the desert. I flew out of Luxor’s airspace without communication. Only the drone of the engine and the occasional bang of the ferry tank expanding under altitude pressure punctuated my progress over hundreds of miles of empty desert.
I watched the plane trace its shadow on the sand below. Slowly a few scattered veins of black and red lava rock coursed their way into the eastern foothills of Kosseir. There was no sign of human existence anywhere.
In the distance, dark, threatening clouds walled the western banks of the Red Sea. Electrical discharges sprouted tiny crosses