Sand and Unknowing

1.V.24

On a spring day in Essen, I sit down at a Kaiserpanorama. It turns out to be one of the few intact stereoscopic devices preserved. At regular intervals the slide show shifts, and I witness a new scene from history. The postcard-sized images in 3D avant la lettre were all taken toward the end of the nineteenth century. A backyard in Marseille. The market in Marrakech on an early spring morning. Waves lapping along the promenade in an anonymous town on the Lebanese coast. The images are backlit, causing them to shimmer in a thousand shades of amber. Carelessly, I fail to commit the photographer’s name to memory; perhaps there were several. Suddenly, however, with my eyes pressed against two bronze peepholes, I witness a scene I cannot tear my gaze away from. As the slideshow changes, I move to the next chair so I can continue to contemplate the same image. Some of the chairs turn out to be occupied by other visitors, but at least seven of the panorama’s twelve pairs of peepholes are vacant. Only when the carousel has made a full rotation and I am once again sitting in the chair where I discovered the Sphinx at Giza do I leave the hall. My knees tremble slightly, as if I have been thrown off balance.

I have not. After all, I have seen pictures of the weathered stone statue countless times in my life. Moreover, for many years now, a photo from roughly the same period has hung in front of my desk. If I look up from the computer, my gaze automatically falls on the sepia – or rather, sand-colored – print. For a long time, the picture hung in the bedroom. After various rearrangements, I hammered a nail into one of the bookshelves; since then, it has obscured some of the books by authors whose last names begin with S. The photo must be one of the first of the monument. The Sphinx rests on sand dunes; who knows what it is brooding over, paws inert, surrounded by desert and silence? In the distance, pyramids stand out against the sky. Here, time seems to be measured not in days or years but in centuries. Sand as far as the eye can see.

Around 1880, Pascal Sebah, a Syrian Catholic, documented life in the eastern Mediterranean region – including that of Cairo and its surroundings. Ottomans, Kurds, Greeks, Jews, Copts … Somehow, people seem to have relaxed and become »themselves« in front of his camera. Twenty years earlier, he had begun his career in Constantinople; in 1873, he opened a photography studio in the Egyptian capital that would eventually become famous. Online, I read that he not only published Les Costumes Populaires de la Turquie in connection with the World’s Fair in Vienna in 1873 (where he was in charge of the Turkish pavilion), but was also one of the first to capitalize on people’s desire for souvenirs from trips to foreign countries.

I do not know if the photo I bought at an auction many years ago was originally such a memento. Probably not. The format is a bit too large, though perhaps it was shrunk and reproduced in postcard size. On Wikipedia, I find similar images from the same period. One was taken by a certain Henri Béchard. The angle is virtually the same as Sebah’s, as are the lighting conditions. While only one person – presumably a guide – stands in front of the monumental statue in the Syrian’s photo, several men are visible in the Frenchman’s. I count them. Five in total. Two are sitting on what remains of the left paw, two others are conversing while standing in the sand in front of the statue; the fifth appears to be sitting in a depression a few meters away.

Judging by their attire, one of the men at the Sphinx could be identical to the lone figure in Sebah’s photo. The clothing and body language are strikingly similar. I lift my gaze to the photo in front of my desk. The longer I look at the man in the warm caftan, holding a staff in one hand, the clearer it seems he is not a guide accompanying visitors to the enigmatic intersection of animal, human, and stone, but rather its protector. »This far and no further«, his posture seems to say. Or: »Look, but do not touch.«As I dig out the cell phone photos I took through the peepholes of the Kaiserpanorama, I realize that the amber-colored photo in the slideshow must have been taken after Sebah’s visit. A pit has formed in front of the Sphinx, from which what looks like a balustrade and a dark boulder rise up. I guess archaeologists had begun excavations. In Sebah’s photo, the guard stands on a sand dune that still conceals the lower formations. Here, I muse, time is still sand and ignorance.