10/1 – 10/3/24

10-1

In the final hours before an international flight, I am invariably confronted by some sort of crisis. This time, it was a Chicago-wide Verizon outage, which made it impossible for me to pay my corporate taxes. Leaving that aside, Russ was sick, and the video scheduled for release the following day was delayed.

My flight to Frankfurt was delayed, too. I killed time at Barbara’s Bookstore, where I was surprised to find copies of my books. The flight, once I finally boarded, was uneventful. I was seated next to a Syrian-American couple honeymooning in Greece and Italy. They asked whether I knew anything about Rome.

We descended over the skyscrapers of Mainhattan in the clear morning air, and then – in my case – boarded a series of shuttles for the jump to Egypt. That, too, was without incident: snowy Alps, the broken Adriatic coast, the green maze of the Nile Delta, and finally the endless hazy sprawl of Cairo.

The terminal was chaotic, just as I remembered. A series of drivers accosted me as I waited in the visa line. “Where you go? I give very good price…” But I was committed to Uber. I was startled when the driver who picked me up addressed me in Spanish. His wife, it turned out, was Mexican; he ran a popular Facebook group on Egyptian archaeology. He showed me a picture of a gold coin of Alexander the Great that he had found (he said) at Saqqara.

My hotel was on the top floor of a ramshackle midrise. The elevator stopped at the seventh floor; my room was on the ninth. As I trudged up, I paused by a small window in the stairwell. The foreground was filled by the upper stories of decaying colonial-era buildings. Beyond were dusty-looking glass skyscrapers, crimsoned by sunset.

I bought a sausage roll from a street vendor and ate it in Tahrir Square. Back at my hotel room, I began to hear scuffling and tapping noises. Pigeons, I realized, were nesting in the air vents. I tried tapping on the duct. The birds became louder. I tried ignoring the noise. It didn’t go away. I threw a shoe at the vent.

At last, desperate, I walked downstairs and asked the desk whether I could change rooms. The manager was apologetic but unhelpful. “I’m sorry sir. The birds will probably settle after dark.” They didn’t.

10-2

I had arranged for a driver recommended by the Moon Guide to pick me up from the hotel and drive me to two of the pyramid fields. Moamen, a friendly man in his forties, had a forehead calloused by years of prayer and a brain full of trivia gleaned from his recent guide exams. We headed off to Giza on a partially-finished new highway, and found only a few tour busses in the lot. (“Because of the war,” Moamen said, “no tourists are coming. Just the Spanish.”

I bought my tickets, and Moamen accompanied me up to the Great Pyramid. Although it was already too crowded for comfort, the Grand Gallery had lost none of its magic. Nor, despite ongoing restoration work, had the King’s Chamber.

After walking around the Great Pyramid, we drove to a promontory a short distance away, from which all three of the royal pyramids were visible. This was also a favorite staging point of the local camel drivers; and as I tried to record a short segment for my travel channel, pachyderms pawed and spat around me.

Filming at the Sphinx was no easier. The plaza around the statue’s paws was closed, and the overlook packed with Spanish and Chinese tourists, whose chatter made recording all but impossible. But the view of the Sphinx’s headdress, framed by two pyramids, was as memorable as ever.

We followed half-built roads south into the countryside. As we drove beneath shady groves of date palms, Moamen became wistful. “My father,” he said, “is from a place like this. Very peaceful.” After being coolly overcharged by the attendant at the entrance gate, we entered the Dahshur pyramid field, dominated, as it has been for 46 centuries, by the two vast pyramids of Snefru.

I started with the Bent Pyramid, recently been opened to tourists. The passageway down to the tomb chambers was only about four feet high, and I kept bumping my head and scraping my backpack as I descended. One of my water bottles, dislodged from its pocket, clattered down the ramp ahead of me.

At last I emerged in the impressively corbeled Lower Tomb Chamber, connected by a narrow, twisting corridor to the Upper Chamber at the pyramid’s heart. There, when I stopped panting, there was no sound but the skittering of bats, which clung in twos and threes to the walls and ceiling.

After I emerged, sweating bullets, from the humid darkness, Moamen drove me to the Red Pyramid. Another long, long descent down a narrow passage brought me to a pair of vaulted antechambers. Beyond, at the end of a waist-high corridor, was the tomb chamber, ravaged by robbers millennia ago. It was here, almost certainly, that the body of the greatest pyramid-builder was laid to rest.

Back in Cairo, Moamen dropped me off at the Egyptian Museum. It was as cluttered and poorly signed as I remembered, and the artifacts of the Tutankhamen exhibit were on the verge of being moved to the Grand Egyptian Museum. But it was memorable all the same. I especially enjoyed wandering the smaller galleries, where I was often the only visitor, and peering through dusty glass cases at jumbled statuettes and mummies and masks that would have been the centerpieces of any other museum. An embarrassment of riches, indeed.