Shendi General Tips
Tips and photos for Shendi vacations and tourism, posted by real travelers and Shendi locals.
Local Time 1:49 pm Saturday, July 26, 2008
Shendi Map
Shendi Map
on August 8, 2007Vivid blood-red sun peeks over the horizon
Turns the desert Gold,
Pale lemon, grey.
Flat topped massifs, pink and violet
Ranges, heaps of heat-eroded stone
Hills float on a sea of mirage.
Umbrella trees in rows and rows
Lemon-frosted grasses at their feet.
And trails of 'hundel', bitterest of fruits
No use except to fix the drifting sand.
Infertile desert, this? No way.
At last, dark masses, mesas, buttes
And on the edge, like rotten teeth they stand
Sand gums encroaching.
Closer now, like dunces' caps, the reconstructed.
Indestructible, for twenty centuries
Wind-eroded, man-graffitied
(Thank God for sand; to bury and protect
Our heritage, till we appreciate,
Restore and cherish it)
Truncated pyramids, if such they be.
Look at the pylons, columns, entrances
And see the traces
Etchings of the past
Look, see!
Row upon row of figures, shapes
Discernable? Soldiers, cows being led,
Proud majesties striding out
Benecklaced and betassled
Towering over forelocked princes, obese queens,
Lions, lionesses, and an ass.
And who are these, what strange entities?
Not minotaur, but Anubis with jackal head,
Cow-headed Hathor,hawk-head Horus
Serpents climbing up the jambs, lion heads
Winged uraeus, Isis, Apedemak:
Symbols or symbolic myths?
Such things bad dreams are made of.
Fill the mind with questions.
Why here, ? From whence the stone?
For what strategic purpose?
Carrying the breath of life, the key, the ankh.
Heaps of pineapples, mundane things,
Food, libations, hand-tied prisoners.
Fancy soars, imagination too
Runs riot;
Eyes close to the falling rubble.
And man:Osman Mahdi 1936
Fantini 1874,;Greek, English, curlicues
Of Arabic vie with crosses, camels and their like,
The curse of literate man.
Now sinks the sun. Colour spent,
Bleeds into the western sky
The desert now darkening, indigo.
We bounce on rutted tracks.
Meroe unbound
