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A Sentimental Journey Across Egypt, Libya,
Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Italy XIII
Day Nine
(continued from ish 219, day nine, as well, in which we spent yet another day navigating the Nile)
That night, our last on the Nile, we pulled up on an island that had wonderfully sandy beaches and dogs that followed you when you went off to the toilet and scared the living daylights out of you as what you felt was going to be your last thought ran along the lines of, "Jesus, that's the biggest and furriest scorpion I've ever seen!" which an embarrassing enough last thought in and of itself without having it quickly displaced a a sharp bark and the furry thing slamming into your legs once and then running away. A behaviour which, I might add, I never encountered in all my reading about scorpions and their attacking patterns.
Settling my jangled nerves under the mosquito netting and buried down in depths of my sleeping bag, the drums played on into the night, the final night on the Nile, a night just barely after which, we were told, the crew would depart these sandy shores for the shores of Luxor. Luxor. That town whose name whispered magic in your ear, the town whose name summoned images of... well, to be honest, it didn't really summon images of anything, we hadn't really been there long enough the first time round to make any real lasting impressions, so it sort of summoned a great big blank, none of which was helped by looks at any of the guidebooks the previous so many days on the feluccas, as the guidebooks seemed to inspire a general sort of amnesia straight away after reading anything about any of the cities we'd yet to visit.
The magic it was whispering in your ear may have just been mosquitos, persistent Egyptian mosquitos that managed to circumvent the obviously Western-designed mosquito nets that could only catch Western mosquitos. These same mosquitos that also managed to squeak through clothes and bite people despite their best efforts with thick and meticulously placed clothes to cover every inch of the person's body, gallons of mosquito repellant, and constantly flapping hands (that caught more fellow travelers than they did mosquitos). They'd lie in wait, presumably much like their scorpion countrymen were doing during the course of our trip, waiting until one of the weaker members drifted off into the woods to collect firewood during a beach break, or perhaps simply rolled just that little bit too far away from the herd during the night, and they'd pounce! Sucking the blood and leaving their tell-tale marks... dot dot dot.
Luckily, not everyone in a group is due to suffer the slings and arrows of the hordes of Egyptian mosquitos. There are, in this world, a few different types of people, but there is a graduated scale amongst all of us as to whether a certain person is liable to be a prime mosquito target or not. You could have many good friends. Or a couple, at any rate. Imagine two. Now, say those two friends were quite prone to complaining of mosquito bites when you invite the two of them round for a barbecue on warm summer nights whereas you, yourself, never seem to incur a bite. These two would be somewhat higher on the scale of mosquito attractiveness than yourself. Now, say you had another friend, and when you invite them round, they're the ones sitting by looking quizzical at the three of you slapping your arms occasionally (you less so than the other two, naturally). These friends are not the sort you invite on camping trips as they're quite a good deal lower on the mosquito attractiveness scale than yourself, and so you're the one bound to receive all the bug attention for any given evening in that person's company.
Thankfully, we had quite a few people on the high end of the scale who were decidedly not myself, and so I can even consider calling the mosquitos' noise in your ear 'magic.'
So, one way or another, tomorrow, we were told: Luxor.
disclaimer:
The dinner this evening was gorgeous. All of it was...
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Yer Weekly Horoscopes.