“On the evening of 20 June 1949, at Qena in the Nile Valley, I hired a donkey cart for my luggage and walked up with it to the Desert Outpost, a mile or two northwards across the low desert in the mouth of Wadi Qena. Three Arab guides who had come down from the mountains were waiting for me there…”
-from The Red Sea Mountains of Egypt, Leo Tregenza
In 1997 I traveled in Egypt for a week with 72 year old Salama Mir’i and his nephew Soliman along the Via Porphyrites, connecting the Roman imperial porphyry quarry at Jebel Abu Dukhan in the Red Sea Mountains with the Nile River port of Qena.
I was following the footsteps of Leo Tregenza, a teacher in Egypt after WW2 who spent his summer vacations not back in his native Wales but rather bashing up and down the wadis between the Red Sea and the Nile River, seeking out the secrets of Mons Porphyrites, the world’s only known source of that rare white crystal-speckled, deep purple stone, and Mons Claudianus, a granodiorate (a stone similar to granite) quarry from where came the cool white monolithic columns in Rome’s Pantheon, Santa Maria in Trastevere, and Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli.
Joe Hobbs insisted that I read Leo’s book before setting out, just as I had read Joe’s Bedouin Life in the Egyptian Wilderness, an ethnobotanical study of the Ma’aza bedouin in whose territory these quarries are located. Leo’s book was a delightful account of desert walking and discovery from a man who evidently needed to escape from the classroom as far as possible during his off hours.
Joe also put me in contact with a Ma’aza man named Salih, who had organized his own travels several years earlier. I wrote to Salih in care of a petrol station outside Hurghada, there being no other way, and told him that I would need his help in outfitting a camel excursion through the wadi system. Joe told me not to expect an answer but I might count on Salih being ready to help whenever I did arrive. And sure enough, Salih was waiting with a pickup truck when I arrived, and drove me a few miles out in the wadi to meet Salama and Soliman and their camels and readied provisions.
My trip with the two was very pleasant, we covered a lot of ground, shared many stories at night, and because of my snoring I was banished by my cousin-cum-traveling companion to sleep far from the campfire. No need for that, said Salama, because “al-nayyim huwa al-sultan”- he who sleeps is the sultan. Several times we ran out of supplies- macaroni, water, and ghee- and my cousin and I howled plaintively but also as a running joke shouted into the wind at any given moment, “Fayn Salih?”, Where is Salih?, who had promised to check in with us from time to time but always ran late.
One of Salama’s stories involved an Englishman he called ‘Genza, with whom he when younger had traveled through these same parts, who always slept and ate apart from the fire, opening cold cans of bully beef instead of sharing bedouin bread and porridge. ‘Genza, I thought, he must have been Leo. But Salama could not remember much more than that.
When I returned home, Joe gave me Leo’s telephone number for his cottage in Wales. He was hard of hearing and slow to move, so let the phone ring a long time, advised Joe. I would tell Leo about meeting Salama, and Salama’s memories of the old days, and how Soliman might remember me for the same strange ways- for my snoring, for my shouting into the wind- fifty years on.
The phone rang, Leo picked up, it was true he was hard of hearing, and when I finally made it understood that I had met one of his traveling companions from fifty years back, he said, “Next time you see those men, tell them that I think of them every day.”
I tried to imagine what Leo’s retirement years were like, living under a damp cottage’s low ceiling far from the starry canopy and bone dry air of the Egyptian Red Sea hills. And I thought then, how sad that after fifty years this is what he thinks about every day. But now that I am closer to Leo’s age in retirement than I am to what had been my own age with Salama and Soliman in the wadis, I catch myself likewise thinking of those men almost every day, and being happy and lucky to do so.