14 March 2000 (afternoon)

Admission to the Egyptian Museum is twenty pounds, with an extra forty pounds to see the royal mummies. We’ll pay for that but there’s a steep fee for cameras too. We decide it’s not worth it for the quality we’d be able to achieve and leave them on the bus. The museum closes at 4:30.

The Egyptian Museum. Photo courtesy of Christophe Badoux, Wikimedia Commons.

A ten-foot iron bar fence with star and spear-shaped finials surrounds the museum garden. Garden renovations are underway. The grass is brown and dotted with piles of rubble and the papyrus fountain is boarded up. We pass through security (bag x-ray and metal detector) at the outer gate and step down from street level onto a path to the entrance.

The museum is built of salmon-colored limestone blocks and is overwhelmingly big, even from the outside. An arch and flanking columns of white stone, perhaps limestone, frame the entry. There’s a carved Hathor head at the top of the arch and two queens or goddesses on either side. Their flowing robes and shapely bodies are decidedly non-Egyptian, but their headgear is traditional. More decorative iron grille work covers the windows.

Once inside we pause for another set of x-ray machines and metal detectors. The museum smells like creosote, paint, and sawdust. There’s a Tourist Police office on the right and two small gift shops on the left. There’s no information counter, no coat or package check, no brochure or map. Birds come and go through broken window panes.

Overwhelming scale of the Egyptian Museum. Photo courtesy of Kristoferb, Wikimedia Commons.

Moustafa takes us on a highlights tour and then turns us loose for a couple of hours. The highlights exhaust us, however, and we need something to drink, so before exploring on our own we head for the museum café, which requires exiting the museum and going up a set of stairs.

We sit at a table overlooking the park. The café menu is a miniature wooden obelisk with drink prices and images of Nefertiti and Tut printed on the sides.  We order the hibiscus tea called Karkady and they serve it hot. Not exactly what we had in mind since we were picturing the cold, sweet, red drink we were served upon our arrival at Mena House, but with plenty of sugar and a chance to cool off it’s still refreshing.

The Mugama’a. Photo courtesy of Vyacheslav Argenberg, Wikimedia Commons.

From our vantage point we can see Tahrir Square and, in the distance, the looming hulk of the Mugama’a, that infamous black hole of Egyptian bureaucracy. They must have finished the work on this side of the park because the grass below us is green and there are daisies mixed with agaves around the bases of the palms. The top of an obelisk marks the center of four converging granite pathways and statues of various gods — Horus, Sekhmet — are strategically placed on limestone pedestals.

Pectoral: Goddess Nut mounted on a gold plaque. Photo courtesy of Alice, Wikimedia Commons.

Back inside the museum, treasure lust draws us to King Tutankhamen’s jewelry. It’s in a special, vault-like room with yet another iron grille across the entrance and a guard at the door. The windows are closed and covered but the room smells of cooking oil and traffic fumes.

Next we visit the royal mummies. Guests are asked for silence but our fellow humans can’t resist the urge to comment and between the talkers and the shushers any hope of quiet contemplation is lost. The mummies are surprisingly small and delicate, like little dried birds. Rameses II is bald but there’s a fringe of wispy ginger-colored hair around the side of his head. Most of the mummies are lying on linen pads in hermetically sealed cases, not in coffins.

Our time is up and we’ve seen only a fraction of what we wanted to see. The closing bell is a persistent “brrrrrrrrring.” It follows us all the way out to the street.