Here comes the mummy

People don’t tell travel stories of how they got scared so much they ‘almost’ peed themselves.
‘You know, in Sudan I saw pyramids that are so much cooler than your own!’ I was bragging to my friends on Egypt. Little they knew of the horror story that accompanied this sightseeing escapade. Meroe site in Sudan is located in the middle of endless desert dunes between Khartoum and Atbara.
‘Your stop here,’ the driver smiled through his bushy moustache. I got off. A thorny shrub and an old sliced tyre on the side of the road. The bus drove away.
About 1km ahead, against the backdrop of blue mountains, the pyramids towered above the sea of yellow sand. O ancient marvels produced by tireless slave labour, never will I forget your silhouettes against the sky!
The ticket man gazed at me lazily, said I could pitch my tent anywhere except inside the pyramids, and then disappeared along with a flock of children. First rule of desert camping: the wind will get you wherever you pitch your tent. Mine would have turned upside down and rolled over if I was not inside.
At midnight, my sharpened senses woke me up with the most terrifying sound of footsteps. I was completely alone, under the most starry of all moonless skies I’ve seen, in the desert by ancient pyramids, and someone was out there. Waiting. Add to this the sound of the zipper banging against the front of my tent, as if somebody was trying to pull it. The battery on my phone was running low. It would take the mummy fighting squad a least 3 hours to get here from Khartoum.
I need to explain perhaps, why would a girl go camping out in the desert alone. I could probably say that I was brave like 300 spartans, but in fact, I was simply unable to find any travel buddies. I’d weighed all the pro’s and con’s, and the biggest pro was that it would be a great story. A great story of how I almost peed myself and spent 5 minutes breathless of fear.
I spent 5 minutes lying quietly and thinking what items in my bag could be used as a weapon against the zombie pharaonic invaders. Then, I realised what was scaring the sh*ts out of me.
The wind. The bloody wind was stirring the sand outside, producing the noise that almost drove me nuts. To make sure that it was, indeed, not a mummy, I crawled out of the shaking tent and dug my head into the sand. Just kidding, only ostriches do that. No, they don’t.
I neurotically laughed at myself. The ghostly mummy soon left, sad and alone, because I didn’t want to play. I tweeted about it.