I stood stunned for a moment, then raced back to the hotel. 'The Evil Eye', Tuesday warned. "Fruit trees wither. Cows dry up."

I reminded her I possessed neither. She frowned. "Men become impotent. That is, if your Berber femme fatale appeared envious." She rattled off several cures, including dipping olive oil or wax into water and praying, driving an iron nail into a lemon, or passing an egg over my face, raw.

"On the other hand," she reflected, "she could have been passing along the udjat eye." This farfetched notion was related to good health, even immortality.

"I like that one," I said.

Tuesday, however, was a grim realist and thus concluded that the woman was probably making sure she didn't trip over something on the Siwan road, or that, having caught me gawking, gawked right back simply because she was a typical human being, and human beings, black or white, male or female, Saharan or Swedish, don't like being stared at.

Still, the moment had seized me, had cracked open something inside of me, I was charged through the night with giddiness and sprung from my tick mattress early the next morning and ventured forth alone.

I would not normally have stolen out of the hotel by myself leaving Tuesday sleeping, and wandered off without a map or an idea of what was in store for me, neither warning Tuesday or dragging her along as my guide. Especially in Siwa, where to be foreign was to be as conspicuous as one of the Palm Hotel novelist's Martians. Sure, I could have taken a table at Mohammed's for tea or ahwa mazbuut, perhaps circled the town square, but simply to follow my instincts and take off for parts unknown mapless, bookless, thoughtless even, was out of the question. Until now.

I set off to explore, possibly to find the Oracle and ended up getting a lift from Mohammed, who pulled up beside me with a tired looking Quixotic donkey and an old wooden cart with shards of straw in the box, its exhausted wheels humping over the dirt road. Floating like clouds in Mohammed's albino face - imagine the color of an unripe strawberry - his pale eyes, tinged with blue, seemed unseeing, sleepy, beyond death. While he did not smile and said nothing (usually I'd get lifts from people expounding on what a great man Steven Segal was, or how Madonna epitomized sexy American women), I was comforted by his presence and hung my legs over the side of the cart.

Except for the clopping of the donkey hooves, the slow 'phlung phlung' of the lopsided wheel, and the lazy swish of Mohammed's cane pole, I endured a silent ride. As I bumped along, I mused over Alexander's life. He had gone this way. It seemed an oddly humble path for a man who would receive such elaborate gifts from admirers as a thousand smoked quails, for someone who sat at Aristotle's feet for three years, someone who thought, due to his mother's overactive imagination, he was a descendant of Hercules and Achilles, pestered by intimations of divine heraldry so vast that no amount of psychoanalysis would help. Indeed, the much esteemed Fakhry suggests Alexander inherited from his mother a "love of mysticism and the exercise of extravagant and superstitious observances," so intensely believing in oracles was no real stretch. The fact that he would tell only his mother what the Oracle had blurted out to him did, to be honest, seem unsettling.

We wound past many dwellings, a sort of suburb of the village, and occasionally I could see in through an open entranceway or over a half-finished fence at what looked like small compounds. By this time, I had seen a lot of Egypt and had become accustomed to how many of the people lived and the Berbers were not much different. One living space seemed to flow into the next, perhaps connected by mud walls or a donkey stall. There was lots of straw, thatched roofs, staggered, crumbling bricks, and low, dark ceilings. Fakhry had informed us that the Siwans made fantastic use of the palm trees. Palm trunks became rafters and doors, ribs turned into ceilings. For mats, they wove together the palm leaves, and they'd often throw them down and make music at whim.

A giant flatbed Mercedes, its futuristic beetle-like snout anachronistic in this oasis, grinded past, full of Siwa water workers finishing another anomaly here - the night shift. It was a strange vision in the quiet morning. Children with ratty packs and colorful western hand-me-downs dodged through gates and literally skipped down the road to school.

My head was filled with Siwan lore. At one point, Siwa was a place of banishment. Rumors of strange, ferocious beasts roamed the palm groves. Some of the first westerners to visit Siwa posed as Arabs. The list of travelers intrigued me: Frederic Cailliaud, Letorzec, Drovetti, Von Minutoli, Bayle St. John, James Hamilton, G. Rohlfs, a famed geographer working for Khedive Ismail, Robecchi, Mr. Blundell and a journalist named Ward.

And there were some fabulous stories associated with Siwa, many of which suggested it was not always such a pleasant place to visit. Around 1800, English visitor W.G. Browne was "assailed with stones" and "abusive language" when he ventured through the streets. While he was there, he noted a baby had been heaved off a roof. A few years later, Hornemann was chased by a Siwan army because they thought the German had criticized the Muslim religion and wanted to kill him. It seems he was often late to prayers and interested in pagan sites more than the holy ones. In 1819, Butin was nearly killed when the locals discovered his secret reason for visiting. It turned out he'd lugged a boat across the desert and wanted to explore the great salt lake in order to steal a treasure rumored to be buried there. Apparently he escaped. Fahkry himself had to sign papers to state that he traveled at his own risk, and that no one would be liable if he was killed. Of course, Alexander was the most famous individual to tour Siwa and I wondered, while Mohammed's cart rearranged my spinal column, how the young conqueror traveled down this very road.

We left the village and jostled down a narrow lane with wild grasses growing near a vast, cavernous palm forest as mystical and enchanting as Peter Pan's world or Mowgli's jungle and no one in sight; for Egypt, aside from desert treks, that was a miracle in itself. Mohammed pulled to a stop at a fork in the road and waved a hand toward a narrow path.

"Is that the way?" I asked and he nodded inscrutably, turned his pale, fathomless eyes toward the forest and seemed meditative. A primitive sign with white painted letters said 'Cleapatra's Bath'.

"I should go there?" I asked again.

"It is very beautiful," he said in a hoarse voice. I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd slumped over and slept on his little wooden bench. I handed him some money and watched as he urged his donkey on, wondering where he was going and what he would be doing there. It all seemed perfectly normal and yet wholly absurd.

I turned and walked the path for about a kilometer until suddenly, rounding a bend, I came upon an opening which looked like a gathering place for the villagers, only it was absolutely barren. The pool was circled by huge marble bricks white and smooth as alabaster. I approached hesistantly, as if I had stumbled across a bag of gold, waiting for people to rush from the palm forest and overtake me, warn me, chastise me or at least try to sell me Coke from the nearby stand now shuttered and vacant. Unlike so many places in Egypt strewn with litter and peopled with squatters, shisha smokers, shade lovers and friends chatting, there was no one around, and nothing much except the wide white gravel expanse and, off in the distance, the dusty road narrowing and disappearing back into the forest.

I climbed upon the ledge and looked into the water, amazed. First of all, the pool seemed vast and deep though it was probably only 40 feet in diameter. Second, it looked to be a true spring (in Egypt, one learns to doubt everything, and never to take an elevator), with white craggy rocks sculpted into the dark recesses and some moss waving at me while an occasional gigantic bubble slowly rose to the surface. Most striking was the color, cerulean blue, that sadly enough reminded me of Windex or perhaps the blue vinegar with which I dyed Easter eggs when I was a kid. Near the ledge where I sat were some chipped steps leading into the water. I took off my shoe and dipped my toe in.

It was lukewarm.

An almost preternatural element of homosexuality ran through Siwan culture, but Fakhry assured his readers that this behavior has been outlawed and that Siwa is no different from any other place in Egypt. Interpret that any way you like, I shrugged it off with my shirt, then removed my jeans.

Once in the pool - Cleopatra's Bath I reminded myself - I clung to the steps for at least a minute before I worked up the courage to kick off and drift out to the middle, feeling absolutely blissful, floating upon my back and spinning slowly in the lukewarm water which may have once been Cleo's private springs. The profound force of history shot through me as I floated, naked, upon the surface of a warm spring laden with historical weight, out here, in the middle of an epic, mythic desert, sheltered by an oasis of glorious date palms smack dab in the middle of a culture just about as different from my own as could be, and I was shedding every literal and psychological piece of western baggage I'd stuffed into my pack and into my psyche, shedding the stores of millions of false moments which made up me, and I became diffuse, as I had when confronted with the Berber's gaze, my first authentic experience.

Wheeling as slow as Mohammed's cart under a cloudless Saharan sky, I mused as how it is that we fall into other cultures, we fall into another universe and connect with the humanity that is the world. And there, turning in the water, it seemed I'd fallen into the omphalos, the center of the earth and its navel as Joyce meant it; fallen into an oceanic euphoria as the mystics had meant it, and everything made perfect sense. There was the eye and the oneness that crazy American Brahman Emerson loved to extoll.

I was feeling all this pretty intensely when suddenly I heard loud machinery hammering its way toward me from across the field. It sounded like metal grating upon metal, the clashing of a thousand armies, a roving band of crazed mechanical beasts, the clanging of bucklers and swords bearing down upon the pool in slow, methodical fashion with such harshness that I could not fathom what I had awakened out there.

In an instant I was under water and stroking back to the steps, where I pressed myself against the cool stones and waited, my clothes only a couple feet away. I reached out for my shirt, but knew it was impossible to slip it on without being seen. In my head, my mind tortured me, "it's the Arab men in one of those Mercedes trucks coming to bath!" The crush of gravel was deafening and I nearly stopped breathing. What had I been thinking? This was taboo, gleefully stripping and jumping right into their pool. I remembered once a Muslim man told me they don't even look at themselves naked in the mirror.

I had been living abroad for some time and was used to Egyptians. In general I found them to be fantastically garrulous and gregarious, happy go lucky and vibrant, even if they were living in squalor, even if they were living under martial law, even if the desert dust coated itself upon their souls practically. There was no way around it. They were wonderful, loveable people. But there was an animal earthiness clinging to them I admired tremendously. The men carried the wild nobility and fierceness of wolves, lean, haughty, and venerable. I had seen them roused to mindless fury, often during Ramadan, great crowds of them wielding tire irons. And yet there was a longing for unbounded love in the Egyptian man's heart as deep and intense as an adolescent girl's. Still, these were Siwans, possibly Berbers. Who could really know what they were like? My aloof chauffeur Mohammed had put me at ease but perhaps it was the woman and her damnable glance? They had heard. And I was in for it.

The sound grew louder and louder until it was practically upon me and seemed like several animals, horses perhaps, trotting toward the pool in steel hooves. This thing plowed the gravel under while it wheezed and clanged. Then, just as it was upon me, it began to swing by and recede. I peeked over the stones and glimpsed a turban gliding by just on the other side of the pool. I inched higher. Under the turban was a wizened Arab profile. Higher still I saw peacefully riding toward the village an old man upon his black one speed bicycle, his galabaya hiked to his thighs to allow him free access to his pedals and to expose a pair of powder blue long johns; it was, after all, a chilly morning.

Dripping wet, I dressed in record speed. I figured I'd be dry by the time I reached the hotel, but I didn't much care. The sun was already climbing up past the distant mountain of the dead, and felt warm on my shoulders. I did not hang around but instead turned from the Coke stand and the pool and briskly followed the cyclist.

But then I slowed my pace and considered my swim. Is it possible to be baptized without a shaman present to witness your rebirth, a minister to douse your head, a priest to lave ointments upon you? What's more, could your rebirth take place in a pagan pool named after a woman played by Elizabeth Taylor?

I wondered about this some as I walked upon the ancient road that had possibly seen Cleopatra's feet, possibly Alexander's, and all the other travelers who would come and go in awe, and while I considered all of this, I wondered if Mohammed would pass by for a ride back to the village, but thought better of it. I wanted to be alone for a little while.