I’ve little energy after a ten hour saddle trip to Saqqara, beautiful desert at sunset past Abu Sir Pyramids, later smoking in a date grove with friendly folk sharing tangerines, three hours back after much hash along a canal path, lovely night sky and quarter crescent. We’d started out that morning by wandering near a missile battery, taken to tea with the commander, finally freed but so delayed we had to race to Saqqara, the horse saw the pyramid and thought he was in Giza but couldn’t find his stable. Wrong pyramid! Rode over the 5,000 year old stone floor of the Royal Gallery and I talked the watchman out of shooting us, and we galloped home wide open across the sand following the edge of the sown.
-Letter Home, December 6, 1978
Rereading that letter forty two years later, sounding as I did like some colonial ass in a Flashman novel, I admit I really should have been shot that day, either by a SAM-7 or the antiquities guard, for treading so blithely and so stoned on both Egyptian national security and world cultural heritage.