Visitors to Luxor can now enjoy a spectacular view of the sites at night, writes Ingrid Wassmann The location deserves to be in the spotlight night and day, as it is the cradle of some of Egypt's supreme antiquities, including Pharaonic tombs and mortuary temples. The foreground looks like a pastoral watercolour, with its sugarcane fields, palm trees, brick houses and felucca sails flanked along the banks of the Nile. In the distance, steep dry slopes push up against the imposingly scarred Theban mountains that watch over the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens. However, until now this splendid view of the West Bank of the Nile at Luxor could get smudged by haze and pollution during daylight hours, and at nightfall it would sometimes blend into almost complete darkness. In order to overcome this limited visibility, the Misr Company for Sound, Light & Cinema has stepped in to shed greater light on the landscape. This Egyptian company has recently installed some 1,000 lighting units to illuminate the West Bank mountains and sites at night. "Now they really stand out at night and look more sacred," said veteran Egyptian photographer Sherif Sonbol, whose photographs of the West Bank illustrate this story. Over the past weeks, the Misr Company has been completing the second and final stage of the project with the installation of an additional 300 units that will light up the palm trees along the Nile on the West Bank. "It's a great tableau to offer tourists at night from their hotels on the East Bank," said Misr Company for Sound, Light and Cinema Director Essam Abdel-Hadi. Yet the project was not without its complications. "The sandstone of the mountains made it difficult to transport and operate the digging equipment for the cable trenches," explained Kamal Rabie, lighting project manager for the West Bank, before pointing out the project's impressive dimensions. "The mountains are one kilometre high, two kilometres wide, and six kilometres long," Rabie said, noting that three kinds of white light were used in order to create a "classical and natural" look to the illuminations. Some six kilometres of the West Bank were illuminated to reveal the palm trees. Behind this ambitious LE50 million project, contracted by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities and financed by the Ministry of Culture, is French lighting company Architecture Lumière, which has designed the illumination not only of the West Bank at Luxor, but also of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Parthenon in Athens. Luxor Governor Samir Farag is a great supporter of the new experience that now awaits visitors. "We wanted to give tourists who come to Luxor the opportunity to see the Valley of the Kings at night," Farag explained. He also underlined the additional advantage, especially during the hot summer months, of being able to visit the sites after sunset when the temperature has dropped. "Opening the sites at night also creates jobs for the local community," Farag said. "And it makes it easier to prevent smuggling of antiquities from the West Bank." Recalling the early stages of the project, Farag explained that "at first, some of the lights used to illuminate the mountains disappeared shortly after they had been installed. To solve this problem, we hired the heads of tribes on the West Bank to look after the lights." The West Bank is now illuminated from 5:30pm until midnight, and in summer the lights will be switched on at 7pm. Although a soft opening of the West Bank illumination was held in November, the official inauguration is not expected to take place until February, when President Hosni Mubarak will be in attendance. "It's the greatest lighting project in the world," said Abdel-Hadi, who hopes that the new feature will attract more visitors to Luxor. Cairo resident Christina Baligh, who recently travelled to Luxor for the Eid Al-Adha, was enthusiastic about the nightly glow now on the West Bank. "The mountains are lit in stages like three giant steps. It is all very well done, and it really looks most elegant."
