Risen from the deep

Sunday Times ^ | June 23, 2002 | Tony Perrottet

[Korth]

There was a time when the excitement of sailing into Alexandria began 30 miles out to sea, when sailors first glimpsed the burning lamps of the Pharos — the three-tiered lighthouse clad in white limestone, soaring as high as the Statue of Liberty and regarded as one of the seven wonders of the world.

In Roman times, it was as dominant a landmark as the Eiffel Tower in fin-de-siècle Paris; souvenir glass vials engraved with its likeness have been found as far away as Afghanistan. Alexandria’s Eastern Harbour was then the Mediterranean’s busiest: a continuous wall of columns lined the waterfront, with palaces and statues crowding down to the shore — “temples pompous with lofty roofs”, as the soldier-historian Ammianus Marcellinus described it.

Wealthy travellers flocked to the city, creating the first Egyptian tourism industry, complete with hotels, multilingual guides and souvenir vendors. They saw it as part of their cultural education to marvel at Alex, the crossroads of Europe, Africa and Asia, a clearing house for astronomical theories and philosophical principles no less than for spices, glass, papyrus and Nubian slaves. To the folks back home, it must have sounded as exotic as Atlantis.

SINCE THOSE halcyon days, not many cities have been so saturated in myth with so little to actually show for it. Flaubert, Rimbaud and EM Forster all raved about Alexandria. But it was Lawrence Durrell, a resident during the second world war, who conjured up the city most preposterously — as a steamy, rather sinister entrepôt, an Arabic version of Shanghai or Havana. The image provoked two American tourists to write to the author, angrily demanding a refund for their trip. Instead of a “winepress of love ... seductive and divine”, they found a neglected provincial port, its cosmopolitan decadence bleached away by the Egyptian revolution of 1952.

In truth, Alexandria had long been a disappointment to literal-minded westerners. In the late 19th century, the first archeologists were appalled at how little had survived of the wondrous city founded by Alexander the Great: no sign of the Pharos, or the library, or Cleopatra’s palaces.

Archeology was left to half-demented amateurs. By the 1970s, searching for Alexander’s tomb had become a fetish, inspiring local eccentrics to come forward with secret hunches. Yet Alexandria never quite shook off its aura of dazzling exoticism and ancient mystery. Then, unexpectedly, the lost city began to re-emerge.

In 1994, an Egyptian film-maker noticed hieroglyphic-covered shapes in the sea near Fort Qaitbey. It seemed that, thanks to earthquakes, tidal waves and erosion, the shoreline of Alexandria had been pushed back by up to 100 yards. Much of the ancient city lay beneath the waves.

Soon, archeologists from France were raising boatloads of artefacts from the splendid, though prodigiously polluted, Eastern Harbour. The site off Fort Qaitbey turned out to contain the ruins of the Pharos, along with hundreds of marble columns and fragments of giant statues made of pink Aswan granite. The most famous image of Alexandria was now a marine archeologist face to face with an underwater sphinx — Indiana Jones with a waterproof note pad.

ARRIVING IN Alexandria today is not quite the glamorous experience it must have been in antiquity. The Misr railway station offered me the traditional third-world welcome, from its cavernous cast-iron terminus to the gauntlet of hotel touts and a ritual fleecing by a taxi-driver named Ahmed, who charged a small fortune for a hair-raising three-minute drive. Already, I was communing with the ancients: Alexandrians were notorious throughout the Roman Empire for their financial acumen.

Ahmed deposited me at the centre of the brandy-glass harbourfront, overlooked by Alexandria’s most famous British colonial hotels. The Cecil — wartime HQ for Monty and love nest for Durrell, its rooms now gaudily restored in pastel orange, lime and purple — squats above the Emporium, the great exchange house where Indonesian spices, African perfumes and Chinese silks were once traded. Across the plaza’s green lawns, the Metropole Hotel occupies the site of the Caesarium, the temple begun by Cleopatra for Mark Antony in the course of their made-for-Hollywood romance. A British Airways office rises where the Temple of Neptune once stood.

The plaza is dotted with cafes that feel like relics from the 1930s — places such as the New Imperial and Les Délices, where men (always men) lounge in the sun, sipping potent mint tea and blissfully puffing on their water pipes. Palm trees sway in the humid sea breeze; shrouded Muslim women scurry by; shoeshine boys brawl for attention; businessmen plot obscure deals.

From here, I could trace the ancient grid of Alexandria, 30ft beneath my feet. The Canopic Way, Alexandria’s busiest thoroughfare, lies beneath an avenue now called Sharia al-Horreya, where Egyptian vendors sell bootleg videos and perfume. Here, 2,000 years ago, the Alexandrians sold Indian spices, Ethiopian amethysts and emeralds as big as olives, according to Heliodorus. The avenue still leads out towards a monument called Pompey’s Pillar, a towering column that was actually dedicated to the Emperor Diocletian.

The Heptastadion, Alexandria’s great ancient causeway, lies buried under a central neighbourhood near the Eastern Harbour — archeologists plan to use seismic instruments to retrace its route — but the stroll along the arcing waterfront of the Corniche is still compulsory. At my every step, the past re-emerged in strange, distorted echoes. Out at Fort Qaitbey, where Alexandria’s young lovers come to self-consciously hold hands, I could glimpse some of the 3,000 giant blocks of the Pharos that lie scattered offshore, 25ft beneath the waves. Three scuba-divers were setting up on the rocks, getting ready to survey the hallowed wreckage.

I took a taxi ride out to Stanley Bay, one of Alex’s seaside resort suburbs. The Romans loved the sea and built villas by these calm shores; these days, they are sprinkled with Egyptian resorts where women are expected to bathe dressed from head to toe, Victorian-style. The ancients also had raucous taverns and brothels on the outskirts of town. Drunken revellers would cruise in gondolas across petal-scattered waves, competing in the volume of their singing. The seafront is still home to Alexandria’s nightclubs, where belly dancers bump and grind — albeit in nylon body stockings, to appease the Muslim faithful.

Before long, the trail became shadowy, and I had to admit that the Greco-Roman city still lives more vividly in the imagination than in the sum of its ancient relics. Many of Alexandria’s most potent emblems remain lost: Alexander’s tomb, for example, or the House of the Muses, whose Great Library housed 500,000 papyrus manuscripts. Its spirit has been reborn on the eastern rim of the harbour, where Unesco has raised a new library — with ancient texts on microfiche.

These ghostly absences didn’t bother me. Alexandria has been through so many booms and busts over the centuries that finding all its relics intact would be too much to ask. The palace where Cleopatra bore Julius Caesar a son, and Mark Antony twins; the library where ancient Greek scholars came to debate; the spot where Alexander himself was embalmed in myrrh and honey, his corpse on display beneath glass for the perusal of visiting emperors — history has kicked over their traces, but it is a sign of Alexandria’s power that they endure so vividly in its myth.

[Free the USA]

fyi

[DoughtyOne]

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[blam]

Thanks for the ping. I'm beginning to think that there is more to be found underwater than on land.

[Free the USA]

Considering that early civilization was mostly coastal and that the sea level has risen since the last ice age it makes since to find a lot of it just off our present shores.