The City of the Dead – sounds awful but isn’t – bodies are laid to rest in underground tombs and the caretakers of these tombs live on site, and since they like all people have married and produced families down the years, a whole city, town, has built up of people living here. Some of the tombs display faded grandeur from centuries back and are in a state of decay and are overgrown…. We went into one courtyard behind one of these walls -and although it looked like anyone else’s courtyard anywhere else in the world – paved with tiles of granito, several plants in pots arranged around, and one or two plastic chairs, there was one freshly cemented area of tiles that Jenny pointed out. These would have been lifted, the underlying panel taken out and the steps going dosn into the tombs were then ready to admit an incoming body, which is laid there on the earth, wrapped in it shroud and left to decompose. It is a quiet place with very little traffic, a sound refuge from the greater city of Cairo itself, let me tell you!

By the time of our visit, mid morning, anyone who could do so was seeking shade, and I suspect this spinner packed it in for a few hours after we left, too -he would have resumed in the evening to work several hours after sundown. People who live there or go into that part of the city know of the work which requires lengths of the silk thread to be run out back and forth between the spinner’s stand ULpic, and a T-shaped stand you can’t see under the distant tree in the LR pic; and they know to be on the lookout for these strands crossing through an intersection or two – they duck under – and for vehicles the whole array is lifted up to allow them to pass under without breaking the strands of the cord in progress – see the control wires in LR pic. I have often made small lengths of customised cord to trim a project, looping threads over something stable and unyeilding like a door handle or my sewing machine, and this is exactly the same principle but on a much larger scale.

What a marvel of recycling the spinners’ stands are. We saw lots of them around the streets here, each a little different but all the same principle and all cleverly constructed from discarded timber and metal.

When the strands are all laid out, they are then twisted together by the spinner turning the bicycle wheel. As the cord twists it becomes tighter and shorter, and the spinner deftly ‘walks’ his 3-legged stand forward along the sandy street until it reaches the predermined point where he stops – the twist will be correct at this point. It looks easy as he does it, LL, but as you might sense from my pic UR, I found it wasn’t. The end product is firmly twisted cord, probably about 250m, perhaps 300m length, and these cords are deftly wound off using the X-shaped wooden structure in UL, and tied into the hanks you see hanging off the equipment in LL. The hanks then go on to clothing manufacturers to be couched onto and decorate clothing and household items, sometimes simply other times quite elaborately.