"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Ramses II, represented by his giant statues, temples and carvings, is everywhere. He meant for himself to be remembered forever and so far, he has mostly succeeded. But not all of his monuments have endured in everlasting splendor.

The Ramesseum is his funerary temple. It was built for the sole purpose for him to be worshiped as a god for "millions and millions of years". But there is not much left here. Over the millennia, it has been taken apart, the stones of the walls, columns and statues stolen and used for other purposes. And there is not a greater example of this faded glory than the colossus statue of him seated on his throne, which once stood over 60 feet high, now lying forlornly on the ground. It was toppled by an earthquake over 2000 years ago. All that is left is his giant head and upper torso and his feet on the pedestal where he once stood.

Before Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs in the 1820s, this statue was known by its Greek name, Ozymandius. And it was this that inspired the great writer, Percy Bysshe Shelley, to compose this sonnet in 1818...

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Village near Ramesseum 

Cartouche of Ramses II

Something else that is everywhere here on the West Bank of Luxor is tombs. Hundreds and hundreds of them. And archaeologists say there are still many left to discover. The West Bank, where the sun sets, was the area of the dead. So you have the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens and the Valley of the Nobles, the last of which is not really in a valley, but is comprised of an area over several small hills.

We arrived here in search of a specific tomb where the carvings are magnificent. There isn't much signage, and although you can see the Temple of Hatshepsut from here, with her bus loads of tourists, very few visitors venture to this place. After wandering around for half an hour, we came upon a small hut with three men inside. They were very happy to see us, perhaps the first guests to come by in days. We were invited inside for a cup of tea and a shisha, known to us as a "bong", usually with an apple flavored tobacco. We gladly accepted the tea but declined the shisha.

Temple of Hatchepsut

Wandering...

One of them spoke pretty good english and we spoke of many things; where we are from, how many days we are here, etc.  Amy had her iPad, so we showed them pictures of where we lived, including pictures of Yosemite Valley covered in snow, as we had just been there at Christmas. Their eyes grew wide in astonishment at that most beautifully of places. The conversation then turned to politics, which it most often does here. "What about Trump?" they asked. Well, of course we gave them our opinion of our new president, in no uncertain terms. They nodded in agreement but let us know they were big supporters of Sisi, their president. In Egypt, there is as wide a rift between supporters and nonsupporters of Sisi as there is in America about our leader.

Then two of them led us to the tomb we had come to see. Indeed it was full of marvelously carved figures, some of the most beautiful we've ever scene. Carvings of pharaoh and his queen, dancing girls, and prisoners of war being led to their doom. There was no electric light, so one of the guards used a mirror to reflect sunlight into the dark tomb.

From here they led us to another tomb with a few carvings. Back into the tomb we went and it got very dark. "Slowly, slowly!", they kept telling us, as there were deep pits into which you wouldn't want to fall. "Watch head, watch head!", they said as we bent down in the low passageway. We had brought a headlamp, so we could see fine. Into an even lower passageway they took us, so low I had to crawl on my hands and knees through the dust. We passed baskets of pot shards, left here by archaeologists long ago. Then, deep inside the dark tomb, we came upon a basket full of bones...human bones!  On top of the basket was a long dark object: the leg of a mummy!  This had been excavated by archaeologists many years ago and left here in its burial chamber. On we went around corners and then up through a narrow hole, my large body just barely making it through. But then we could finally see light, sunlight from outside. We hugged and thanked our guides and rewarded them for our experience.

It was a grand, although small adventure that Indiana Jones would have been proud of.