Free Beneath the Sands of Egypt by PhD Donald P. Ryan Page B

distribution among his friends. When we approached him, however, he refused the money. Despite our insistence, he and his fellow villagers would not accept any money for their services. They were neither exploitive pyramid “guides” nor manipulative camel men; they were extremely hospitable, everyday people who were simply looking to be helpful, even to mysterious strangers.
    Over the summer I learned many more lessons from my friends in the village. Most thought-provoking was an incident thatoccurred one day during a lunch break in the desert. As was my custom, I sat on the shady side of the vehicles with the guards and gulped down my food. The men would usually show me something that they had brought from home, or on occasion we would have an impromptu puppet show with our hats or cleverly folded pieces of clothing as we passed our break time. This particular day I was chewing a piece of the local bread, called aish baladi, roughly meaning “peasant bread.” It is made by threshing wheat on the ground to be turned into flour and then baked into flat, circular pieces. After a few bites, I painfully bit into a stray bit of gravel. I angrily spit out the bread, stood up, and spun the remainder like a Frisbee into the desert. As I sat back down, disgruntled, one of the guards stood up and strolled slowly out into the sand. Retrieving the bread, he walked back toward me and knelt down facing me. He slowly waved the partially eaten bread before me and gently stated, “Bread is a gift of God.” He handed the piece of bread to me, and we continued lunch. This poor, humble man provided me with a powerful lesson about wastefulness and how important it is to appreciate one’s blessings.
    During our expedition the vehicles were a constant source of concern. The trip to and from the desert each day could be relatively pleasant or a bone-rattling torture, depending upon who might be driving. One of our crew was notorious for accidentally hitting every pothole and dune in the relative vicinity. My personal record for consecutive bounces off the ceiling in the back of the jeep was three, and that’s not counting the many throws from side to side. Not only could the vehicles beat us up, but the heat and the dubious sanitary conditions took their toll as well. Most of us were sick, sometimes for weeks, and when it was all over, even the skinny people had lost at least twenty pounds.
    With each day I became increasingly struck by the marvelof my surroundings as the arid wilderness seemed ever friendlier and my appreciation for its many subtle wonders grew. A distinct environmental personality became evident, and the desert began to reveal itself gradually as much more beautiful and complex than I initially perceived. The surface, for example, possesses a tremendous amount of diversity, with its subtle variation in sand color and pebbles of different shapes and sizes. The wind also sculpts the sand in a myriad of ways; a few golden waves and ripples in one spot might merge into a smooth trackless arena, or some stubborn sedimentary crusts might suddenly come to dominate the desert floor. And little resilient towers of hardened sediment, called yardangs, occasionally interrupt the undulating white horizon.
    The desert certainly seems to have its own agenda and is an environment in constant motion, whether it’s due to dunes slowly shifting or flash floods that can violently and instantly alter the landscape. It exercises a relentless power that humans can attempt to control, but time and again the desert will reclaim its own. The ancient Greek town of Dionysias, for example, just adjacent to the Qasr Qarun temple, was excavated by the French and Swiss fifty years ago. When the digging stopped, nature took over, and the town is once again well on its way to obliteration beneath the sands.
    From my own frame of reference, I was surprised by how the desert’s expansiveness brought constant comparisons in my