Horses under the Stars

Desert sand at Giza, by day, is much like beach sand in the Mid-Atlantic. It’s finer, blows much more easily, and is approximately one part dirt to two parts sand, but is generally a similar color. Minus the waves.

But I’ve never seen the desert at five a.m.

We get up early, meeting in the lobby at four thirty. We’re all a bit dazed and move slowly. We hail one of the lone cabs still out on the streets (his comrades will be out en force in an hour or so), and ride to a stable at the edge of the desert.

Giza (real Giza, not the urban area to the north) exists solely for tourist purposes. As Matt guides the cab driver to M.G. Stable (they all use two letters for their stables…never sure whether they were initials or just random alphabet soup), men in the street jump in front of our cab. The driver squeals to a halt each time (the Cleopatra cigarette in his mouth never wavers) as the men open the doors on our cab, assuring us that they have horses. We ride horses? Oh yes they have good horses, best price. No, no, we say. We are going to another stable. We begin driving with them still running after our cab. One chases us for almost two blocks. The driver seems amused by the whole deal.

M.G. Stable is at the end of one of many unpaved roads. Across the street is a concrete wall eight feet high topped by a fence another twelve feet high. On the other side is sand. Tethered to the graffitied wall are camels. Lots of camels. I hate camels. A one-eyed man in a dirty gelabiyya and turban is seated outside smoking a hookah with a young boy, maybe four, sitting next to him. A young man in western dress greets us, and shows us one of the stables. The horses do not seem to appreciate the sudden awakening that comes when he flicks on the overhead lights, but they soon calm and seem both friendly and relatively well-cared for. Relatively is, of course, the key phrase. The horses’ condition was something unseen in America (not like I’m an equestrian or anything, but the number of sores on these horses was a good indicator. As was the fact that the last time I saw hip bones that jutted out that much I was looking at a BBC article on Milan’s Fashion Week.), but better than some of the animals I’ve seen reluctantly toting fat American men in shorts and calf-high socks around the Pyramids. We say we’re all four qwayyis, which means okay, riders. Please recall that I’ve never actually ridden a horse. But it’s better than getting stuck with the donkey lying on its side in the dirt courtyard.

We mount our trusty steeds (mine is gray and named Loof) and ride south along dark, silent streets towards the desert. It’s about ten minutes of some of the poorest homes I’ve seen in Cairo. As the one street ends, we make a right at the mosque (similar to turning right at the Crown station for Baltimore natives), ride past a home with two camels tethered in the tiny front courtyard (the camels don’t quite fit in the courtyard), and a cemetery. After another few minutes, everything disappears from our left side. We’ve hit desert.

Desert sand at five in the morning is silver. Pure silver. The navy blue sky above is lavishly full of stars, which rain more silver down on the dunes which roll out in front of us. “Lavishly full,” of course, is another relative statement. On any given night, I don’t see stars in Cairo. One if I’m lucky, but the light pollution, air pollution, and general smog/dust/sand combination make celestial observation something reserved for trips far from the city lights. But this early morning we are far enough from the city lights and surprisingly without haze (for the moment), letting us drink in silver overhead and silver below the hooves that move with grace and a solid certainty across the sand.

We start to ride up a wide, steep path between dunes. It’s not easy. If you’ve never ridden before (really ridden), there are four horse phases: walk, trot, canter, and gallop. Walk is easy. Trotting is a quicker walking with the feet picked up higher, while cantering is like a jog. Trot and canter are ridiculously hard to seat without looking like a complete idiot. You can grip the horse with your thighs and pray to stay seated. You can “post,” which is pretty much anticipating the horse’s up-and-down and overcompensating by standing and sitting ahead of the game. Alternately, you can just bounce like an idiot. I’ll give you three guesses which one I did. (Although in my defense I got much better at the first two in the course of two hours.)

Then, there’s galloping. We have a general handle on my equestrian skills, so there’s little surprise that I managed to look like a fool on Loof’s back. But I did manage to hang on. You can tell when a horse moves from a canter to a gallop because cantering is rough. The horse does it because it’s an easy pace, but the style is unnatural. When a horse moves out of a canter into a gallop there’s a lot less bone-jarring going on (for you and the animal). The strides become fluid and natural, the legs stretch out and the jarring becomes more of a rocking. Horses have no feeling in the hair in their mane and tail. So I hold the reins with one hand and weave the fingers of the other through Loof’s mane, twisting my hand into the thick hair, more to reassure myself than to truly prevent being thrown.

The first time a horse breaks into a gallop, you stop breathing. Terror grips your chest so tight you forget everything but the certainty that you are looking at the last things you will ever see. Moving so fast on something to which you are only tenuously attached directly contradicts several self-preservation instincts. After a few seconds, you become aware of your knees around the horse’s middle, your hands (which are freezing. The desert at night is very cold, even in May.) holding ancient, cracking leather reins and woven through coarse hair, and you manage to breathe a little. Then, due to the combined effects of speed and the dust/dirt/sand kicked up by Loof and the horse no more than six feet in front of him, your eyes stream tears as the wind whips hair all around your face. And slowly, you realize that you are smiling. Not only that, you are grinning like an idiot. Galloping through the desert before the sun even hints that it will rise, you smile up at the stars and laugh.

After an hour of riding around the dunes, exploring down and across a wide, unpaved access road and power lines that stretch endlessly through the desert, you ride up a hill to Medinat al-Sahara, Desert City. It’s quite a city, really. A three-sided structure of concrete blocks about four feet tall is the size of a full bed. Two blankets are across the top, and two men lay on a pile off quilts inside, slightly curled. Just outside this little “tent” are a fire pit and a man with no upper teeth, who asks how many teas we will have. We each have a cup of tea. He grabs four glasses, about the size and shape of juice glasses, and puts two scoops of loose ground tea and five scoops of white sugar into each glass, then pours hot water over it.

The desert is still cold, even though the sky is turning orange, and the too-hot glass feels good on stiff fingers. The horses, too, appreciate standing still. Young Egyptian men break the silence by tearing up this dune and zooming around on ATVs that were once shiny silver but have been dulled to a flat gray. One almost runs me over. Three times. Of all the dunes in the Sahara…. The cloyingly sweet tea tastes good as the sky turns even more orange, and the east turns rosy red. The haze is too thick to see the actual sunrise (this happens a lot in Egypt), so we watch the sky light up as if on fire for a few minutes.

We ride back around the desert for a while, before the two hours we negotiated with our guide (the man in western clothes) are up. We turn north, back towards Cairo, and find ourselves in what can only be described as a narrow, shallow canyon between dunes. The horses take a hint and flick through the trot and canter, wasting little time in getting to a gallop. We race, the horses enjoying the pace just as much as we are. The four horses weave in and out of each other, refusing to back off the pace. And we begin to yell, out of the sheer fact that moving that fast on an animal that powerful is something so beautiful that you can’t use words. Luke, who owns horses of his own, yee-haws. I ululate (although badly), which is a tribal sound women make to express extreme emotion—sorrow or joy. Matt “ya”s to his horse, which is going the fastest of any. Even Mary whoops.

The horses take the roads—now moving with early risers (it’s seven a.m. on a Sunday)—slowly, and we get a little separated. I greet an old, old woman, all in black with deeply creased skin, who returns my greeting and blesses my beauty. I’m flattered in a way that I never am when men on the street whisper unsolicited comments about my beauty.

As we get closer to M.G. Stable, more camels appear. A car (a new-looking Audi, who knows how it got to Egypt, let alone Giza) has bottomed out on an unpaved road. A crowd of about fifteen stands gawking. Including a man in a suit I can only assume is the owner and his well-dressed wife. Why they were driving like this at the edge of the desert in a dirt-poor neighborhood I don’t know. Another woman, all in black, walks along the road alone, carrying on her head a huge metal bin of food ends and other waste. She sees an empty spot on the road, takes the bin off of her head, dumps it in the road, and turns around to walk home.

We return the horses. Loof seems ready to eat. Or sleep. Or do something that doesn’t involve a girl bouncing around on his back while he’s trying to run.

As we walk to get a cab, a boy of about six, his sister who looks eleven, and their mother walk alongside us. I start talking to the boy. His name is Abdelrahman and his mother is taking them both to school this morning. The sister, she whispers to me that her name is Salma, is lucky. In poverty a girl’s education is often low-priority, but she is still going to school. I wish them luck as they walk towards another small mosque that doubles as a primary school.

We fight rush hours traffic taking the cab back, and celebrate a morning among the dunes with a ridiculously large breakfast at Café Tabasco—real American pancakes (you can taste the Bisquik).

Ride in the desert under the stars. Gallop. Yell. I promise you’ll feel alive.