'The land breathes with the presence of those dead men who had struggled and prospered long before I was born' - James Lee Bourke
On the outside, the Valley of the Kings is unassuming, no different to the others that surround it... at least on the surface. Everywhere I look, tailing piles indicate the search for buried treasure, the death and times of long forgotten Pharaoh's and their loot. Hidden beneath the surface are tombs, rich and beautiful, adorned with the stories of Egyptian civilisation and mythology thousands of years old.
They say you never forget the first time... and as we descend down the passage and into the first antechamber of Tuthmosis III, we're transported back 3000 years to an unforgettable set of scenes carved into solid rock where heiroglyphics have the centre stage and the line between myth and fact blurs into obscurity. Mr T III had a grand send off - his tomb is intricately decorated with a full suite of mythological paintings and writing to send his soul safely through to the underworld, and protected with an elaborate array of booby traps to protect the loot from grave robbers. It's mindblowing to see firsthand the dedication to death and the afterlife - 63 tombs and chambers of various sizes are located in the valley, an amazing tribute to a civilisation long since past.
* The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty - Winston Churchill
* No garden is without its weeds - Thomas Fuller.
* If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore - Ralph Waldo Emerson.
* The trick is in what one emphasises. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same - Carlos Castaneda.
* One ship sails East and another West, by the self-same winds that blow. Tis the set of the sails, and not the gales, that tells the way we go - Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
* Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it's not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't. it's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere - Barack Obama.
* To repeat what others have said, requires education, to challenge it, requires brains - Mary Pettibone Poole.
* Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are - Bernice Johnson Reagon.
* Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear - Mark Twain.
* Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary - Cecil Beaton.
* No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world - Robin Williams.
* I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to put to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to die discover that I had not lived - Henry David Thoreau.
* Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness - Mark Twain.
* If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the sea - Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
* We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are - Anais Nin.
* The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is "look under foot." You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world - John Burroughs.
* Man cannot discover new oceans until he has courage to lose sight of the shore - Andre Gide.
* If I accept the sunshine and warmth, then I must also accept the thunder and lightning - Kahlil Gibran.
* You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true - Richard Bach.
* Live your own life, because you die your own death - Latin Proverb
* A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience - Oliver Wendell Holmes.
* The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes - Marcel Proust.
* We must never cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time - T.S. Eliot.
* It is easy to live for others. Everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves - Ralph Waldo Emerson.
* A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step - Lao-Tzu.
On the outside, the Valley of the Kings is unassuming, no different to the others that surround it... at least on the surface. Everywhere I look, tailing piles indicate the search for buried treasure, the death and times of long forgotten Pharaoh's and their loot. Hidden beneath the surface are tombs, rich and beautiful, adorned with the stories of Egyptian civilisation and mythology thousands of years old.
They say you never forget the first time... and as we descend down the passage and into the first antechamber of Tuthmosis III, we're transported back 3000 years to an unforgettable set of scenes carved into solid rock where heiroglyphics have the centre stage and the line between myth and fact blurs into obscurity. Mr T III had a grand send off - his tomb is intricately decorated with a full suite of mythological paintings and writing to send his soul safely through to the underworld, and protected with an elaborate array of booby traps to protect the loot from grave robbers. It's mindblowing to see firsthand the dedication to death and the afterlife - 63 tombs and chambers of various sizes are located in the valley, an amazing tribute to a civilisation long since past.
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