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"From the summit of these monuments, forty centuries look upon you!" stated Napoleon. Two centuries ago. The Great Pyramids of Giza defy age. They stand unbowed, piercing the skies, axes around which the rest of human history revolves. These were already ancient mysteries when Herodotus named them among the Seven Wonders of the World in the fifth century BC. Indeed, the Pyramids of Giza were already as ancient to Herodotus as the Colisseum in Rome is to us today.
‘Awe-inspiring’ is too banal a word to describe these monsters. It seems silly, but I just did not expect the Pyramids to be as big as they actually are! The smallest of the three (that of Menkaure / Mycerinus) is the size that I probably expected the largest (that of Khufu / Cheops) to be. The first glimpse you get of these behemoths, looking through the smog off Pyramid Road, framed by twentieth-century high-rises, blew me away. The
Pyramid of Khufu loomed overhead oppressively as we drew nearer, almost out of perspective, as though it and its sisters had been badly super-imposed over the scene by a budding Harryhausen. Because this is not some remote, untouched site. Modern-day Cairo abuts Giza, the living and the dead in close proximity. According to the cosmology of the ancient Egyptians the eastern bank of the Nile was associated with the rising of the sun and hence life in the minds of the ancient Egyptians; it was there that their towns and temples were largely sited. In comparison the western bank was the domain of the darkly-aspected god Set, associated with the setting of the sun and death. This is why tombs were often located to the west of the Nile, whether we are talking of the Tombs of the Nobles across from Aswan, the Valley of the Kings across from Luxor / Thebes, and of course the famous pyramid fields from Giza down to Dahshur. Now the city sprawls west to Giza, only stopped by the harsh and unforgiving desert. It is here, on the very edge of Set’s domain that the Pyramids sit.
First a note on terminology. The Pyramids are best known by the Greek names of their entombed occupants – Cheops, Chephren, and Mycerinus. However, I prefer to use the actual Egyptian names – Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure respectively. Khufu’s is the largest; Khafre’s looks equal in height (or even slightly bigger), but that is because it was constructed atop a rise. Menkaure’s is noticeably smaller, a little bit further away, and slightly out of line with the other two (compare their alignment with the stars of Orion’s Belt…).
Abdul, our driver, directed our minibus up the plateau while Laila, our guide explained orientation (top lesson: trust no one – be paranoid!). Honestly, she never stopped for breath. LE50 allows access to the Giza Plateau for the Great Pyramids, several smaller pyramids for queens and so on, an assorted huddle of tombs, the solar barque museum, and of course the Sphinx (to be reviewed separately). The plateau is not a flat courtyard. It is a rugged terrain of knobbles and crevasses, sudden extrusions and dips, all scattered with fragments of masonry and rubble. Tourists weave in and out – noticeably to my eyes the khaki-clad westerners were greatly outnumbered by Egyptians in clean white shirts and brightly-coloured skirts and headscarves. The presencde of so many Egyptians all dressed up to take their children out to see their heritage actually imparted a sort of festival atmosphere to the procedings.
Firstly, we headed to a stand on the northern side of
Khafre’s Pyramid. Close to, like all the pyramids, it is not smooth, but comprised of numerous jagged blocks. It was once faced with limestone however, and the limestone cap can still be seen on the Pyramid of Khafre. And for a mere LE25 (little more than £2 GBP) you can plunge into its interior. Leaving our cameras behind, we bought tickets , and then climbed up to the entrance. Bending double (literally – you crouch in half and keep your head down!) we descended via a steep duckwalk, delving deeper and deeper into the monumental edifice, aware of just how many thousands of tonnes of rock pressed down above our contorted bodies. Finally this introductory metre-square passage opened up into a horizontal corridor where I could almost walk upright. Then, time to crouch once more as we ascended into the pyramid’s very heart.
At least we breached
the burial chamber. By this point I was slick with sweat. The heat was intense, like a sauna. The chamber was high, with a peaked ceiling, but this did nothing to cool me. The air was dead. But at least I could stretch up to my full height. The chamber was unadorned, save for a large inscription in Italian on one wall, daubed by the archaeologist Belzoni who first discovered this chamber in 1818 (now imagine taking that route in total darkness, with no footholds, the air foetid with having been trapped in here for millenia, your only guide a flickering torch…). A plain stone sarcophagus lies in situ – it was too big to get out through the passge. Notably, it was also too big to have been brought in via the passage – the pyramid was constructed around it. Unprompted, I climbed into the sarcophagus. Lying down, at the very core of the pyramid, I lay, arms folded across my chest. The old god-complex rearing its ugly head again!
Back to the outside, gulping greedily at the air, wafting my shirt to try to cool myself down. There was a lot of haze in the air. Desert dust or city smog? Actually, my photos came out better than I thought they would. Walking with a female friend we were approached by a young man:
"You are married?"
"No."
"You are friends?"
"Yes."
"You are lucky man."
He then proceded to offer me twenty million camels for her. I swear these guys must be employed by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism – it’s just the most stereotypical thing we expect to hear in the middle east, it makes the woman feel complimented, it was not in any way sleazy… It is the perfect memory!
In actual fact, in general the pestering (for camel rides, postcards etc) was nowhere near as bad at Giza as in the
Khan el-Khalili market in Cairo. I was quite impressed. And it vanished entirely once you rounded the corner of Khafre, to where
Menkaure’s Pyramid sat a little apart. Behind it, the scarp of the desert rising up behind it. Here there were no flotillas of coaches, as there were around the foot of Khufu’s Pyramid, here there was no press of crowds. I felt like I had stepped once more from one world to the next, that I was in one of those 19th-century David Roberts watercolours. This could have been the very view that Mark Twain had in his ‘Innocents Abroad’ before he was bodily dragged to the top of the Pyramid of Khufu. I wouldn’t have fancied it myself. The things are
steep. The warning signs against climbing were quite extraneous as far as I was concerned, even if I had never read Twain’s description: "Each step being fully as high as a dinner-table; there being very, very many of the steps; an Arab having hold of each of our arms and springing upward from step to step and snatching us with them, forcing us to lift our feet as high as our breasts every time, and do it rapidly and keep it up till we were ready to faint – who shall say it is not lively, exhilarating, lacerating, muscle-straining, bone-wrenching and perfectly excruciating and exhausting pastime, climbing the Pyramids?"
Apart from the varied low tombs and piles of rubble, there is one last area of interest around the pyramids. Several
solar barques were buried around the Pyramid of Khufu, and one 43-metre long boat is now preserved in a temperature-and-humidity-controlled building. Viewing it costs LE35, but I was put off by the frightful queues.
Coaches progress from here up a surfaced to a viewpoint on the scarp from where you can gaze upon the three great pyramids marching away east, the grey blur of Cairo merging into the sky seamlessly behind them. There is a little open-air bazaar here, where you can buy trinkets and curios. And then it was back on the coach, heading for the mysterious
Sphinx.
(One final tip. There are toilets on site, but the queues are appalling. Go before you come. Or wait until you reach the Sphinx, where there are much saner underground toilets just in front of it).
From journals
Pyramids, Popes and Parallel Worlds