The City of the Dead – sounds awful but isn’t – bodies are laid to rest in underground tombs and the caretakers of these tombs live on site, and since they like all people have married and produced families down the years, a whole city, town, has built up of people living here. Some of the tombs display faded grandeur from centuries back and are in a state of decay and are overgrown…. We went into one courtyard behind one of these walls -and although it looked like anyone else’s courtyard anywhere else in the world – paved with tiles of granito, several plants in pots arranged around, and one or two plastic chairs, there was one freshly cemented area of tiles that Jenny pointed out. These would have been lifted, the underlying panel taken out and the steps going dosn into the tombs were then ready to admit an incoming body, which is laid there on the earth, wrapped in it shroud and left to decompose. It is a quiet place with very little traffic, a sound refuge from the greater city of Cairo itself, let me tell you!

By the time of our visit, mid morning, anyone who could do so was seeking shade, and I suspect this spinner packed it in for a few hours after we left, too -he would have resumed in the evening to work several hours after sundown. People who live there or go into that part of the city know of the work which requires lengths of the silk thread to be run out back and forth between the spinner’s stand ULpic, and a T-shaped stand you can’t see under the distant tree in the LR pic; and they know to be on the lookout for these strands crossing through an intersection or two – they duck under – and for vehicles the whole array is lifted up to allow them to pass under without breaking the strands of the cord in progress – see the control wires in LR pic. I have often made small lengths of customised cord to trim a project, looping threads over something stable and unyeilding like a door handle or my sewing machine, and this is exactly the same principle but on a much larger scale.

What a marvel of recycling the spinners’ stands are. We saw lots of them around the streets here, each a little different but all the same principle and all cleverly constructed from discarded timber and metal.

When the strands are all laid out, they are then twisted together by the spinner turning the bicycle wheel. As the cord twists it becomes tighter and shorter, and the spinner deftly ‘walks’ his 3-legged stand forward along the sandy street until it reaches the predermined point where he stops – the twist will be correct at this point. It looks easy as he does it, LL, but as you might sense from my pic UR, I found it wasn’t. The end product is firmly twisted cord, probably about 250m, perhaps 300m length, and these cords are deftly wound off using the X-shaped wooden structure in UL, and tied into the hanks you see hanging off the equipment in LL. The hanks then go on to clothing manufacturers to be couched onto and decorate clothing and household items, sometimes simply other times quite elaborately.

Heat, dust, an incredible sense of length of history, phases of building and destruction, renewal and decay, these cliches don’t come anywhere close to giving you an idea of my first and ongoing impressions of this country. I suspect it will be quite a while before it gets into some kind of perspective. Jenny Bowker and her husband Bob are doing their best to ensure we come away with a lot of varied experiences to help that perspective crystallise. Just outside our hotel is this ivy encrusted building… I wonder what is holding which up ….

At the museum in front of the fabuous gold jewellery and other artefacts from Tutenkhamon’s tomb I had another watery knee, emotional experience in the vicinity of the magnificent outermost death mask, the one everyone has seen and which has become a an icon for the fabulous wealth of Egypt’s past – in itself it is 11kg of gold inlaid with finely crafted lapis…. the craftmanship on this ancient stuff is breathtaking, literally. We have had our first wander down a small part of the khan or market, but will be going back in the company of some other textile people, quilters, yet to arrive, and then we’ll focus on the tentmakers district. ( see Jenny Bowker’s blog for fabulous pictures and information on these textile workers) Last evening we had a lovely sunset felucca ride on the Nile observing the many faceted city from the water. We visited a glassblowing business where Jenny is clearly a frequent visitor and found ourselves at a project among the Zebelin, the garbage sorters, where the innate sorting skills of the young girls in that part of the community alongside the City of the Dead are being chanelled and educated into literacy at the same time they learn/hone weaving, papermaking and other productive skills to improve earning capacity in ways that are comfortable and acceptable to husbands and families. It has been clearly illustrated how well-meaning aid or assistance from outsiders can be anything but helpful without these factors being taken into full account: and this project is totally locally generated and run. We were so impressed – and happened along just as a local TV crew were doing a segment there – and Jenny found herself unexpectedly being pressed into being filmed as part of this doco. What a trouper – in a small crowded room with the outside temperature somewhere way over 100F, and one ineffective fan bravely churning on, wiping her sweaty brow and gathering a few well chosen words together, Jenny gave an excellent impromptu endorsement of the value of the work being done in this project, one in which she herself has given teaching time, sharing and passing on some of her textile skills to be absorbed and used by the organisers and participants as the range of skills and products grows and widen. Among other things I bought some wonderful little stitched note cards, and have ordered a wallhanging in a tufted weave using offcuts from textile manufacturing processes; it will be ready before we leave, taking only a couple of days.

While en route to several very interesting mosques we visited the City of the Dead and found it to be a fascinating, very positive place; not at all macabre. There we spent some time with several other of Jenny’s extensive network of friends around the city, the spinners, a little appreciated group of men who spin together single loosely plied threads of silk that comes to them on cones, producing fine silk cords. These are then passed on to garment makers and couched in lively swirling patterns onto blouses shirts and the long loose kaftans called gebalayahs that many wear. Early in the day and in the evening they spread out the threads in long arrays between the houses in the dusty streets of this city within a city, and using marvellous recycling of cycle wheels, pieces of timber, wire and all manner of other simple equipment, spin the cords together. Photos and descriptions of this craft will form the subject of another post when I can get some blog time together in this crowded amazing trip, or maybe not until after it.

We strolled along the Seine to visit Notre Dame and passed numerous shops opening up and in one particular zone they seemed to be all either pet shops or plant shops. We wandered in and out of some of them; some specialised in fish and aquariums, others with pretty standard but generally pure-bred 4-legged pets, and some offered exotic birds like parrots bizarre fancy pigeons and a myriad of finches; and budgies were everywhere. We saw lots of wonderful plants, many of which we knew, and other different ones like this one, a Tacca, caught our imaginiation and attention. The aubergine-like colour was real – nothing plastic about this beauty. If it can be grown in Paris we are sure it can be in Uruguay and will try to get something like it there.

This textile noted on a rather smart looking canal boat owned by a couple from UK who come and go from France in their semi retired lifestyle. There was a similar one at the back, too. On the deck at the stern there was a little matching dark green car, which is lifted off the deck with a mobile crane, giving the flexibility that complements one’s own travelling accomodation of this kind. As the lady I spoke to said, the deck is a little crowded, their immediate outdoor living area reduced when they are on the move, but we agreed there is nothing perfect in this life, something always has to be compromised – way to go, Poms – a nice set-up.