Within 10 years of the last native Pharaoh, Alexander the Great arrived in Egypt and was welcomed as a liberator. He founded Alexandria in 331 B.C. as a point of contact with Greece to protect his flank in his Asiatic campaign. He marked out the plan of the city and ordered his architect Dinocrates to implement the work, but did not stay to see any of it executed. Instead he went to Siwa Oasis. At this most celebrated pilgrimage of antiquity he was proclaimed a Pharaoh by the priest of the Temple of Amun.
Alexandria became a great trading center and then a cultural center that made a permanent contribution to civilization. For more than a thousand years, Alexandria's universities, libraries, and museums drew scholars from every country in the East. According to legend, Alexander himself is buried there, wrapped in gold and enclosed in a coffin of glass under the Mosque of Nebi Daniel. The site of his tomb, however, has never been discovered, and only fantasies as to its location abound.
In the wake of Alexander the Great, I visited the Mosque of the Prophet Daniel in search of this famed but elusive tomb. I was led to a corner of the Mosque and invited to jump a wooden barricade. Despite the aged bawwab's kind encouragement, I declined the offer to risk life and limb by lowering myself down a ladder to a dark crypt below.
Instead I decided to follow the illustrious Philhellene to Siwa Oasis. The coastal road west follows the route taken by Alexander's camel caravan. On the way we passed through El-Alamein, where Rommel and his Afrika Corps clashed with the British 8th army led by Montgomery, in 1942. This battle proved to be the Waterloo of his North African campaign. The British War Cemetery holds 7,000 headstones; the German and Italian War Memorials, just a few kilometers out of town, are also grim testimonials to the ferocity of that battle.
Shortly before sunset I arrived at Mersa Matruh. Here the fleet of Antony and Cleopatra once put in after the battle of Actium, and it is here that the immortal couple parted. Legend has it that the famous lovers spent the last hours of their amorous reverie frolicking here. The sandy white beaches of the region are accordingly named the Beach of Lovers, Cleopatra's Beach, and Cleopatra's Bath. However, due to the meeting of the Egyptian and Libyan heads of state, Mubarak and Khaddafi, in Mersa Matruh while I was there, I was denied the pleasure of enjoying my own Cleopatra-esque frolic in the sea. For security reasons the beach was off-limits.
So I headed south for Siwa Oasis. A new asphalt road stretches through the monotonous stony Libyan Desert, a flat panorama interrupted only once or twice by the distant sight of camels grazing in herd. Siwa's isolation has made it legendary in Egyptian annals. My thoughts turned to Plutarch's description of Alexander's journey. "Besides the fatigue," he records, "there were two great dangers attending it. One was that their water might fail in a journey of many days' travel in a desert which afforded no supply; and the other, that they might be surprised by a violent south wind amidst the wastes of sand, as had happened long before to the army of Cambyses. The wind then had raised the sand and rolled in such waves that it devoured full fifty thousand men"!
Alexander journeyed to Siwa in the winter, accompanied by a few friends, and the court historian Callisthenes. According to his accounts, divine protection made their peregrination possible. A sudden rainfall enabled them to refill their empty water-skins. When a southern sand-storm came up and the caravan lost its way, two black crows were sighted, and Alexander gave orders to follow their flight. Callisthenes claims that the crows flew at the same speed as the caravan, and even at night, if the party took a wrong turn, these birds called to them by their croaking and set them right.
After eight days, the great Macedonian general and his caravan reached the Siwa oasis -- the enormous palm groves, the springs and the small pellucid ponds. I reached this lush green in only five hours. But as Forster wrote during World War 1, "The distance, the solitude of the desert, touch travelers even today, and sharpen the imagination of men who have crossed in armored cars, and whom no god awaits, only a tract of green." (Pharos and Pharillon)
The oasis covers 80 square kilometers, encompassing a vast network of date palm forests, olive groves and fruit orchards, all connected by bubbling springs and streams. This is mainly due to the presence of about 150 abundant subterranean springs; in ancient days these numbered about 1000.
Scattered amid the palms are the twin mud villages of Siwa and Aghurmi, where the Temple of the Oracle and the Temple of Amun still exist. The ruins of Aghurmi consist of the now-deserted buildings of the mud village, perched one above the other on a single high rock. I passed through the lower gate of palm tree trunks, and made my way upwards through narrow passages and alley-ways, imagining the auspicious meeting that took place here. Alexander had come by mountain, valley and desert in search of the divine father who could sanctify his claim to universal dominion. The high priest of the deity Amun (an Egyptian deity whom the Greeks equated with Zeus) consented to recognize Alexander as his son, the hero who had cut the knot of Gordius, king of Phrygia, and had fulfilled the promise of the oracle by annexing Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt from the Persians. Forster recalls this meeting: "According to the official account the Priest came out of the temple and saluted the young tourist as the Son of God. Alexander acquiesced and asked whether he would become King of this World. The reply was in the affirmative. Then his friends asked whether they should worship him. They were told that they should, and the episode closed. Some say that it is to be explained by the Priest's bad Greek. He meant to say Paidion ("my child") and said Paidios ("O Son of God") instead."
Reluctant to ask questions in public, Alexander requested private audience. He never divulged which questions he asked, nor which answers the Oracle gave him. These secrets he took to his grave. In the Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria, the silver four-drachma of Alexander shows him with the ram's horns of the God Amun. He instructed his Viceroy to strike these coins once his divinity was confirmed by the oracle. From that time throughout the Moslem world, he has been known as "Alexander the Two Horned" (Iskander Dou al-Karnain).
I pondered these acts of the mighty as I stood on the cliff-edge of the acropolis at Aghurmi, looking beyond the thick groves of date trees to the large salt lakes glittering in the sunshine, to the hills, and to the surrounding desert sands. The Temple of the Oracle is comparatively well preserved, even though the voice of the Oracle waned many moons ago.
Not far from the Temple of the Oracle, I found the meager ruins of the second Temple of Amun. Only one inscribed wall remains standing amid the scattered blocks of stone. Bas-reliefs, hieroglyphics and a few parts of the paving show traces of its original blue coloring.
Returning to the town of Siwa, I took a late afternoon stroll through the uninhabited old fortress-town of Shali. It is impressive in its deserted, decayed state, dun-colored and silent but for the birds. I walked between alleys with geometric profiles of crumbling mud-brick walls, houses and mosques rearing their blank, windowless facades against the background of the desert. These remains were once a walled fortress that protected the Siwans from marauding Berbers and Bedouin.
The Siwan people now number around 6,000. They have been influenced by the Berbers in many ways over the centuries. Their language is a Berber dialect, and the Siwan women's attire resembles that of the Berbers of the Saharan plains. Traditional Siwan culture is rapidly disappearing as the outside world makes in-roads to the oasis, although women still completely cover their faces when they go out of doors. Only unmarried girls (up to 16 years of age) are free to venture out into the streets uncovered. But the only time I saw the distinctive jewelry, embroidered shawls, dresses, trousers and skirts for which Siwan women were once renowned was in the local Siwan Handicrafts store in the center of town.
But still, every October, the Siwans gather for a huge feast at the rocks of Dakrur, a village four kilometers out of Siwa. This is a harvest festival, beginning with the full moon, and continuing for three days. I arrived in time for the last day of the festival, where the men come into Siwa from Dakrur and stand in a large circle in front of the tomb of Sidi Suleiman, the local saint of Siwa. There they perform their dhikr. The sheikh stands at the entrance to the tomb, while the others repeat the name of Allah and sway in unison to their own chanting.
The next day I returned to Alexandria, to the "gaunt lounge, the dusty palms, the mirror, the wind and the sea" of that grand bastion of nostalgia, the Cecil Hotel.
In Egypt you always walk in someone's footsteps. Though the footsteps of Alexander the Great are invisible and inaudible, he haunts the city through intimation, the very existence of the city bearing testimony to his imprint.
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