Bahariya

Leaving the pleasant green ribbon of the Nile you will understand by way of a sharp contrast the force of the ancient Egyptian civilization. The hostility of the territory that frames the passage of the river is of an unsurpassable hardness. The inhabitants of that fertile and prodigious corridor were aware since their childhood that they lived in the best of all possible worlds surrounded by the chaos, and this surely must have helped them in developing the cohesion they maintained for thousands of years. This feeling gets even stronger when you leave Cairo for the oases of the Western Desert, the place where the ancient priests saw the sun dying every night. And it overcomes you again when you arrive to the first of them, Bahariya. If the Nile Valley is a blessing with its cycle of fertility, its flow and its continuous renewal, the oases are islands, small splashes of living water which does not flow but springs from the sand and remains there, and whose precarious presence has to be guarded and maintained. Delicate jewels, objects of greed and necessity, whose only protection is the very hardness of their environment and the enormous distances.

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