The Nameless Land: Into Egypt

Much of The Nameless Land takes place in Egypt and Sinai, but only a small section of my journals and idea books actually inspired the choice to put a story into Egypt and Sinai. As a matter of fact, when I joined a group of friends and took a trip with them to Cairo, I only stayed for one week. Still, one week proved to be more than enough to fill up some fifty pages of ideas and descriptions. And one week proved to be more than enough to convince me that no city could ever quite compare to the power and the glory of Cairo.  

            The first day there, the group went to the Egyptian National Museum—a collection like nothing any of us had ever seen. The corridors and rooms and exhibits seemed to be so endless, we would have had to spend the entire week there just to see a fraction of the antiquities. That would have been a waste, though. No matter how powerful and how fascinating the allure of Egyptology, a traveler to Cairo cannot afford to be exhausted by the end of the day. There is just so much to do at sunset.

            For our first sunset, we took a cab out to the Pyramids of Gizeh in order to view the obligatory sound and light show. How to resist the temptation? As predictable as the decision was, everyone feels rather obliged to do it. And it is an awesome experience; however, we quickly learned what makes Egypt truly great: Egypt by night.

In Cairo, the people go to the opera house or one of the many opulent revival houses to take in classic Egyptian and/or world cinema. But neither opera nor cinema can compare to the magic of Cairo in the dead of night. Honestly, I’ve never experienced anything as dreamlike as the fogbound streets and nighttime cityscapes of Cairo.

One night, a young lady and I hired out a horse and carriage and had the coachman take us all throughout the city. And even then, I knew that I would be jotting everything down in my idea book the next day. Even then, I knew that one day the carriage ride through the city would inspire a significant number of scenes in a fiction work. For one thing, the incomparable power of the Nile makes the fog move all so gracefully through the streets and trees. For another, the hoteliers wash the streets and hotel parking lots at that hour, all of which often creates the illusion that the streets of Cairo must be canals—something like the canals of Venice. Even during the found moments of that night, we felt like we were in a carriage that had the power to roll across water—and of course, the horse pulling us along commanded the power to walk on water. As did the Coptic Christian dustmen with their wheelbarrows collecting the refuse from this or that hotel.

At any rate, some twenty-four hours later, we all boarded the night train to Luxor. And even then, it was plain that the train journey must inspire a scene. The hypnotic rumble of the train commingled with the Egyptian landscapes to have, again, a dreamlike power.

In the morning, we all walked about Luxor Temple—and then most of the group went back to the train station to continue along to the Valley of the Kings. Imagine coming all that way and not going on to the Valley of the Kings. Instead, my lady friend and I hired a sailboat to take us along the Nile to Banana Island. And yes, it does exist. It’s a narrow island in the mighty river, and the people there have planted a massive banana tree grove. In addition, we could not resist visiting Mr. Lovely’s Lovely Antique Shop before sailing back to Luxor just at sunset.

My idea books came to contain so much more, too: detailed descriptions of the Suez Canal, Sinai, the quietude of the wasteland. How fascinating, too, the wreckage of tanks and war machines. From time to time, I wondered if some of the wreckage might even date back to the WW-I era—the time of British colonialism.

Perhaps nothing fascinated me more than the pyramidal-shaped dunes of Sinai. To someone else, they might  have suggested seascape. For me, the dunes looked like an infinite array of sand pyramids. And that is what triggered the whole idea of the story that follows from the idea book: how magnificent it would be to find some totally incongruous lost city, a ruined sanctuary, a cult pyramid out in the wilderness of Sinai. A place like that could metaphorically stand in for just about any place torn apart by sin, war, deceit—and a place like that would surely intrigue anyone.

M. Laszlo lives in Bath Township, Ohio. He is an aging recluse, rarely seen nor heard. The Nameless Land is his second release with Vine Leaves Press.