Odd Facts

What Do They Know
Makes Freedom of Information requests. The pay off is that the results are open to all.
Michael Foot, the historian tells us in the Memories of an SOE Historian at page 119 that Malinowski, the famous anthropologist was in the Trobriand Islands, where he is fondly remembered as the man who would believe anything. The women also fed him a lot of nonsense, which made the locals laugh even more. So modern social anthropology has shaky foundations. The same applies to Margaret Mead. She kept pestering young women about their sexual customs; they fobbed her off with nonsense, only discovering later that they had been believed.

Darwin
Is in Australia, in the Top end or just the Territory. Things happened there.

Tales Of A Colonial Policeman In Africa
You have seen what the Mainstream Media choose to tell us about Africa. Do you believe them? Maybe. Did an expensive education in an English university feed you a pack of lies? Or perhaps you should read what real people have to say. There are some sidelights regarding life in Singapore and the Northern Territory, the one in Oz. Or you can go to sweet_banana.html to hear the regimental song of the Rhodesian African Rifles. It is African, it is different and impressive.

This article claims that we originated in Australia. Is this possible/likely/reasonable? Improbable is perhaps the right word. Mr. Strong's background is not at all convincing. Read for yourself. Think for yourself. Decide for yourself.

Tank Hit
A guided missile attacks a tank. The result is not pretty. The crew's chances of getting out are zilch; it all happens much too fast.

Flash Floods
They don't happen that often. Getting caught by one is not a good idea.

Ancient Wisdom
Is highly valuable. We have lost out in a big way by not remembering it. It sounds plausible but ask why it was forgotten in the first place. Then ask who resurrected these stories and whence. It is not always an excuse for making up stories for credulous mug punters. It needs a calm look before being taken seriously.

Big Holes
Enormous holes might be a better title, but see for yourself and make sure you don't fall in.

Black invention myths
Are wishful thinking from men who know nothing about science and care less but do have a political agenda.

Britain's Secret Support For US Aggression In The Vietnam War
Some was known. Thompson was an expert on guerilla operations and advised them. This source does not approve of British [ minimal or non-existent ] brutality in Malaya. He seems to it think happened. The SAS were in Vietnam although not in great strength, I think. Heath, a left wing swine was for it. It wasn't really very secret though - see Richard Noone, Expedition to Vietnam to buy the book.

The Catacombs of Paris
QUOTE
The Catacombs of Paris is [ sic ] a famous burial place in Paris, France. It is a network of subterranean tunnels and rooms located in what were Roman-era limestone quarries. The quarries were converted into a mass tomb near the end of the 18^th century. It is most widely known as "the catacombs", but the official title is "les carrières de Paris" or "the quarries of Paris." Though the official tour only passes through the quarries in the 14th arrondissement, there are actually quarries in the 5th, 6th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th arrondissements (the municipal boroughs of Paris).
UNQUOTE
They had their own very private, nay, secret picture palace.

Circumcision
Is it a medical issue or a sociological issue? Jews do it which makes it a religious peculiarity. Does that make it desirable? Not a chance.

Peering down in 1881 from the, opening of the shaft, surrounded by, guards, Mohammed Abd el Rasul the tomb robber may have reflected that he was, after all, part of a fairly venerable tradition. On the theory that it takes, a thief to catch one, Mohammed was rewarded for his confession by being appointed chief guard of the necropolis.

The current head of the family—Sheik Ali Abd el Rasul—is the keeper of Hotel Marsam on the west bank. My wife and I are sitting under the palms of his courtyard watching his young daughter wobble around on one of our rented bikes, harrying the dogs who are trying to sleep in pockets of shade. On most maps of the area, the hotel is marked as a rest house, a place where tourists stop for a leisurely lunch of white cheese, olives, tomatoes, fried meat, rice and cold Egyptian beer. But one can stay there very cheaply as well, if spartan rooms and antiquated plumbing are no consideration; the advantages considerable.

Sheik Ali's buildings turn their backs to the desert, the courtyard opening out to the east toward the Nile and Luxor. Our view over miles of green fields is interrupted only by the backs of the Colossi of Memnon, the two gigantic seated figures of Amenhotep III, a few hundred yards away. Directly before us, two oxen are turning the geared water jars of a sakieh, a primitive wooden irrigation machine. At dusk thousands of swallows skim across the fields while black kites, their tails canted in the wind, wheel and hover overhead—a view calculated to make one forget about the desert at the back door, broiling across northern Africa to be brought up short here at this strip of green along the Nile.

The road from the ferry landing two miles away bends here and begins to skirt the cliffs and bays of the Libyan Hills. Just to the south is Medinet Habu, the mortuary temple of Ramses III; to the north, the Noble Tombs around Gourna, then the colonnaded temple of Hatshepsut. From Sheik Ali's a spur road leads west to the Valley of the Queens; another road farther north winds around to the Valley of the Kings. From where we sit, we can watch the setting sun redden the columns of the Ramesseum, the mortuary temple of Ramses II—within two square miles 1,000 ancient ideas embodied in rock and plaster. At Sheik Ali's this remote past and the more recent days of 19th‐century archeology somehow seem alive and recoverable.

Sheik Ali, for example, seems a figure from a different age; at least, he comes from an old school of hotel management. A powerful man of about 60, conscious, of his dignity, he is well known in the area and, in his own courtyard, a benign despot. He moves deliberately, shuffling around in faceless and broken‐backed black oxfords, long underwear protruding from the sleeves of his robe. He spends a good part of each day in a semi‐doze, lounging with his male friends on the mastabas, or benches, lining the courtyard.

Responding to Sheik Ali's mood, the hotel percolates for days in this laissez faire condition until, suddenly, he takes charge. He orders his guests to their places at dinner as if they were dawdling nephews. Waiters charge back and forth. The old man is effusive, boisterous, ribald. He grabs my wife by the hand saying, “You come with me. I have cadeau for you.” From a storeroom piled with crates of beer and overripe tomatoes, she reappears with a stone lamp or a string of beads. When we thank him, he replies gravely, “Thank Allah, not me.” Gracious and wolfish at the same time, he is allowed the liberties of a generous but entirely unpredictable uncle. He has two teeth and a stubble of beard, so when he laughs or rages it is something formidable to behold.

Most of the guests are Egyptian or European. Almost all have stayed at Sheik Ali's before and hive more, than a passing interest in Egyptology. They are an invaluable source of information —especially since attempting to see more than two or three famous tombs has become an exercise in patience and stamina. Permission must be obtained for each tomb, the proper guard must be rounded up, the key found and then, incredibly, sometimes the actual location of the, Tomb seems to have passed from living memory.

Most of the hundreds of tombs scattered around Gourna are incomplete or in ruins, and fewer than 20 are usually open to the public. The tombs are identified by their number in the official list of the necropolis, and these numbers appear in standard guidebooks.

Two that should not be missed are those of Menne (No. 69) and Nakht (No. 52), who were royal scribes under Thutmosis IV. Another important tomb is that of Relthmire (No. 100). It has unusually spirited representations of artisans and laborers on its walls and is considered one of the most valuable remains from the New Kingdom. The tomb of Ramose (No. 55) shows the transition from traditional forms to the freer style of the Amarna period, when the “heretic” pharaoh Ankhnaton encouraged a more realistic approach to art. Ramose was a vizier whose tenure overlapped the reigns of two pharaohs.

The tomb entrances are scattered and sometimes inconspicuous, but most villagers, even those who speak no English, can direct visitors to the better known tombs. Photographs are permitted, and the guards can angle sunlight into the dark interiors with foil reflectors, a service for which it is customary to give a small tip (baksheesh). It is preferable to visit the tombs in a small group. Armed with a good guidebook, even the traveler who speaks only English will have little trouble finding his way around the area and, in fact, will see the countryside and the tombs more thoroughly than he would in a larger

The objects of the search are not the tombs themselves, but the fragments of life on the walls. The cities of ancient Egypt have disappeared, virtually without a trace; only the tombs and temples were built to endure. The temples can be “read” as architecture or as a record in relief of official proclamations, religious festivals or political boasts. But, paradoxically, most of what is known about the felicity and color of the lives of the ancient Egyptians has come from the images in their tombs, and these in Gourna are among the most affecting—a child's hand steadying her father in their skittish hunting punt, a dancer's arm thrown negligently across the shoulders of another, a man and his wife plowing humbly in the fields of the hereafter spotted cow.

One of the guests is dressed to out-sheik even Ali: He has a full black beard and impenetrable sunglasses and is wearing a long white robe, a shawl and cowboy boots. For a few months each year he comes from Cairo to work in Gourtria with a family of Coptic weavers, making tapestries of his own design. He would like to establish a weaving cooperative in the village to prevent the craft's dying out and to forestall the substitution of analine dyes and synthetic materials for the brown goat hair fabric the Copts have traditionally woven. A Dutch astronomer and his girl friend have been working for years in their spare time on a method of programming a computer to “read” hieroglyphs. At night they labor over a sprawl of print‐out sheets on the dining room tables, mumbling syllables to each other until the houseboys, who sleep an the mastabas in out.

Hassanin and Gamail, two older artists from Cairo, have become our closest friends. Gainal is tall, thin and serious; he wears a baseball jacket zippered up to the neck and has a slight stoop, perhaps from bending over to listen to Hassanin, who is half his height, fat and irrepressible. They are staying at Sheik Ali's for a month, wandering around the desert by day and wrangling about art at night. Hassanin has collected a box of reddish brown rocks, veined with a gritty blue‐black. Upstairs in a dingy common room late at night, like the ancient draughtsmen and painters, he is trying to grind them into pigment. So far he has made a muddy brown soup. Gamal is soaking sheets of cardboard in water and pulling the layers apart to use as drawing paper. In another corner, a young tour guide from France is bent over a hieroglyphic grammar, listening to Joan Baez on a cassette player. Each of us is intent, listening in different ways to the echoes of this strange valley.

During the day, we have been Puzzling our way through the ruins, poking around tin the temples, lying in the fine choking dust of the tombs to photograph ceilings of painted grapes or, in the little visited tomb of Semnut, of rare and elegant astronomical designs —a stellar bull is harpooned by falcon‐headed spearman while the polar constellations chase each other around a frieze of stars. In the tomb of Iby, a German scholar on a scaffold is copying an inscription in one room while in another, lying unattended in the corner, is Iby himself, a long pile linen and

Or we walk a half mile or so through the desert to the Valley of the Kings, over cliffs that form the bay of Deir el Bahri, the footpaths snaking along the spines of the eroded red mountains. Behind this first range of hills the Nile is hidden and nothing grows in the glare and the heat. The only signs of life are a few swallows and wheatears, an occasional raven and some circling, scavenging kites. Seen against this barren landscape, a single bird seems to have a clarity as intense and separate as a hieroglyph bitten into a rock wall. Higher up on the ridge, blinking and stupefied in the heat, we prospect for fossils, our pockets heavy with limestone clams and

Unexpectedly, the people of Gourna have begun to seem as important to us as the tombs and temples. Like other unaccompanied travelers in Egypt, we have been harried, tugged at, importuned and hustled, and it seems as if half our Arabic vocabulary consists of phrases for saying, “No, no, NO! I don't want any.” So by the time we reach Gourna, we have become so wary that simple, impulsive gestures of friendship disarm us completely. A young cab driver insists we share glass of hot tea with him and his friends in a thatched shelter by the Nile; someone else invites us for tea, and “tea” turns out to be a four‐course meal. Looking for tombs, we wander into a courtyard, and before we have a chance to ask a question, a woman smooths her dress, shoos a donkey out of the sitting room and sends off for hot water, shaking, her head as if we have arrived a few minutes earlier than she expected us.

At the mouth of a tomb, one of the dozens of young men selling antiquities is pestering me with a handful of “genuine antique scarabs,” which he, of course, has fabricated himself. We both seem to realize that his insistence and my refusals are part of a necessary ritual, so we are surprised when a middle‐age woman tourist, clambering up the slope beyond us, calls back in a hard voice, “Don't buy anything! That stuff is all junk, and these people are thieves.” The young man stares after her, visibly shocked. I shake my head and say, “That was a very bad thing to say: that woman is a fool.” For a moment he, looks hard at me, then, suddenly, embraces me. He forces me to accept as a gift all he trying to sell.

Throughout the 13th century the Gournis not only sold objects from the tombs but lived in them as well. An entire town of tomb robbers, dynasties of thieves—that was the official view of the Gournis when Egypt realized how much of her heritage was slipping out of the country. In the nineteen‐fifties the Government attempted to move the people to a new town on a site closer to the Nile. The young architect, Hassan Fathy, understood the complex fabric that held together the courtyards, pigeon towers sand water jars of a poor Egyptian village, and his project might have revitalized the lives of the local peasants. But the project for New Gourna stalled and died halfway to completion, in part because the Gournis would not leave their lucrative, tomb‐riddled hillside.

Nowadays many Gournis work at service jobs in the hotels across the Nile; those who stay behind as unskilled laborers in the necropolis, where most of the digging and hauling is still done by hand, make about 80 cents a day. A few local boys are unofficially licensed to manufacture “genuine antique” artifacts in backyard kilns. In an area as poor as this, it is hardly surprising that Gourna families still work fitfully at kehitas, their “private” excavations.

A friend leads us behind his house to a small courtyard, hard up against the hillside. Running back into the rock are two bare tombs, each about 30 feet long, storehouses for fodder, old cans and a family of geese. “But under here,” he says, scuffing the dirt with his toe, “two other tombs. My grandfather tells me about them and nobody knows but me. When I get time to dig....”

The relationship of the people of Gourna to the necropolis is complex and rich. Thousands of fragile, elegant, precious objects have been destroyed there through centuries of looting. Yet we felt drawn to the villagers and that stubborn independence they represented. Somehow, they had survived, burrowing and scrabbling into the ruins of an empire, while the bodies of the pharaohs—the god‐kings who had (if one believed the temple inscriptions) smitten their enemies grievous blows and whose names had made men tremble up and down the Nile Valley—were stacked like so much cordwood in the bare shaft where the Abd el Rasuls found them. Slowly we begin to see the people of Gourna as a link to the past of the west bank, a connection we have been looking for in stone and paint. For us, the City of the Dead lives.

If You Go . . . . . . to the west bank of the Nile opposite Luxor, the best time for a trip is the winter and early spring. During April it is already extremely hot in Upper Egypt.

For help in planning a visit inquire at the Luxor office of the Ministry of Tourism near the Winter Palace Hotel (tel.: 2215) or arrange for tours or guides through your hotel or the local office of Thomas Cook. Weekly admission tickets to all the monuments in the area may he purchased at the Luxor headquarters of the Department of Antiquities; otherwise you must buy tickets each day for the west bank areas being visited (approximately 50 cents each) at the tourist ferry landing across the Nile from Luxor. Reduced price student tickets are available at the west bank office of the Department of Antiquities near the turnoff to Medi net Habu. If you wish to tour the area independently, bicycles can be rented from one of a half dozen agencies in Luxor far less than $1 a day. If that seems too strenuous, a taxi ride from the ferry landing to the Noble Tombs and back costs $2 or

Besides Sheik Ales Hotel Marsam, there is one other hotel on the west bank: Habu Hotel, directly across from the entrance to the temple of Medinet Habu. While the courtyard is not so spacious nor the atmosphere so boisterous as at Hotel Maisam, Habu Hotel has a roof terrace with a view of the temple complex. Rates at both places are approximately equal: double rooms about $2 a night and meals about $1 each. Addresses: Hotel Marsam/Luxor, Gourna; Habu Hotel/Luxor, Deir el Medina. Bath hotels are relatively isolated and primitive; it is wise to make reservations in Luxor for at least the first night's stay, then stop off at one of the two west bank hotels during a day of sightseeing and decide whether to change your accommodations. Rooms in Luxor should be reserved as early as possible. Luxor hotels are notorious for overbooking, and travelers not connected with a tour can be M a disadvantage.

As for guidebooks to the Luxor region, Nagel's Guide to Egypt is currently the best, but it is expensive. The Blue Guide to Egypt is also good, and the classic 1929 edition of Baedeker has recently been reprinted. Jill Kamil's “Luxor: A Guide to Ancient Thebes,” published by Longman, is inexpensive, excellent and widely available in Egypt.

Some books worth reading for background information are “Architecture for the Poor,” by Hassan Fathy, published by the University of Chicago, which contains Fathy's account of the New Gourna project, and “X‐Raying the Pharaohs” by James Harris and Kent Weeks, published by Scribner's, which is a discussion of the results of an X‐ray examination of the royal mummies in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, most of which came from the shaft at Deir el Bahri discovered by the Abd el Rasuls in the eighteen‐seventies.—F.M. Jr.
UNQUOTE
The BBC is claiming that Howard Carter robbed Tutankhamen's grave - see https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11369219/BBC-documentary-claims-Howard-Carters-celebrated-discovery-Tutankhamun-1922-blighted.html. One knowledgeable reader, mentions the el Rasuls. The BBC will not; lies and hate are their forte.