5-9-15. Cairo, Egypt
Travel days always feel long, and yesterday was no exception. My flight from Chicago, scheduled to leave a little after 9 PM, did not take off until 10:30. My connection in Munich was also more than an hour late, and I did not escape the airport in Cairo until about 10 PM local time. The trip felt even longer than it was, largely because a combination of screaming babies, snoring men, and untimely turbulence made it impossible to get any sleep. When I finally arrived in Cairo, it took me nearly an hour to find the man my hotel had sent to pick me up, since a terrorist scare had led the airport authorities to ban all private drivers from the premises a few days before my arrival. Thus it was almost a full day after leaving Chicago that I got my first taste of Egypt, as my driver hurtled headlong past a seemingly endless series of dingy concrete tower blocks, garishly lit by neon signs in Arabic.
We stopped in front of a decrepit building in the heart of downtown, where the clerk – a pleasant young man without a word of English –helped me load my suitcase into an Art Deco elevator with a broken door. Shuddering to a halt at the fourth floor, we walked along a high-ceiling corridor lined with tall glass-paneled doors, one of which was opened to reveal the “deluxe” room I had blithely reserved two months earlier. Perhaps a century ago, no expense was spared in its construction; in the decades since, every cost has been cut. It is fitted with a shower (awkwardly perched in a corner beside the door) and a reasonably efficient air conditioner; but the floor, door, walls and windows bear testimony to three or four generations of hard use.
The fact that the windows are original is particularly unfortunate, since my room is located on what must be the loudest corner in Cairo. Having dispensed with such niceties as traffic laws, lanes, and the instinct of self-preservation, Egyptian drivers keep from killing one another solely by lavish and unremitting use of their horns. From about 6 in the morning to well after midnight, a constant chorus of beeping – tapped, trilled, hammered and held – wafts on exhaust fumes through the rattling uninsulated panes beside my bed, punctuated by the howls of street vendors. I asked the manager for something to mask the noise, and he obligingly supplied me with an ancient oscillating fan that popped and groaned in tune to the traffic.
As may be imagined, I slept fitfully. Woken shortly after dawn by a particularly frantic orgy of beeping, I groggily assembled my day pack, braved a cold shower, and prepared to see the pyramids. I met the hotel’s driver at 7:30, and we followed the Nile – lined with grimy tower blocks and shrouded by a smoggy haze – towards the Giza necropolis twenty kilometers away. The ride passed to the tune of liturgical music. My driver – as I gathered from the icons that festooned his dashboard, the figure of St. George that guarded his rear windowsill, and the enormous cross that served as the fob of his keychain – was a pious Copt, and kept a tape of monastic chanting playing for much of the morning. This was just as well, since his English and my Arabic were too exiguous for conversation. Soon after we crossed the Nile into the smoggy suburb of Giza, he paused his tape (which was skipping badly anyway) to point out the distant summits of the pyramids, looming incongruously over long rows of ramshackle apartment buildings. The sprawl of Giza extended all the way to the desert edge, where my driver parked, wished me well, and ambled over to nap in the nearest shady place.
I paid for my ticket, and was immediately accosted by a half-dozen camel and donkey drivers, each desperate to conduct me the half mile or so to the Great Pyramid. Having been warned in advance about touts by my guidebook, I gave my best “laa shukran” (no thanks) to the lot of them, and shook off a dozen more in like fashion as I climbed uphill. The road passed a dozen yards from the Sphynx, dramatically framed against the Pyramid of Khafre – a view only slightly compromised by the disheveled knot of touts and camels in the foreground. The colossal bulk of the Great Pyramid grew unimaginably as I drew closer: it is one thing to read and know that the pyramid is 480 feet tall, and quite another to look up the endless progression of jumbled blocks towards its summit. As I walked along the eastern face, I could relish the solitude of being alone with the great structure (and a few dozen dejected camel touts); rounding the corner to the north face, however, I discovered a parking lot already busy with buses, several of which were disgorging crowds of Japanese tourists. This was bad news. A special ticket is needed to enter the Great Pyramid, and only 150 are issued every morning, on a first-come, first-served basis. Racing to the north ticket booth, I managed to get one of the last tickets (at an outrageous 200 EP), and made my way through a sea of aggressive souvenir sellers to the entrance.
A guard took my camera (photography is, for some reason, forbidden inside the pyramid, as though a flash might harm granite untroubled by 47 centuries), and I made my way at a crouch down the tunnel hacked by ancient robbers into the pyramid’s heart. About twenty yards in, this joined the smooth and straight corridor made by Khufu’s builders, a claustrophobic (c. 4 ½ ft. high) tunnel leading sharply upward. After a few minutes of uncomfortable closeness, I emerged into the famous Great Gallery, the steep and galleried corridor that stretches toward the king’s burial chamber. At its upper end, a short low corridor opened onto the tomb chamber itself, a tall room lined with polished granite. At the far end stood the surprisingly modest sarcophagus of Khufu himself, one corner broken by the robbers who desecrated his burial. After a few reverential minutes to savor the experience of standing inside of the greatest architectural accomplishments in human history, I descended the gallery and tunnel to the hubbub outside.
A strong wind was blowing off the western desert, flipping up the brim of my hat and whipping grit into my face. The air grew hazy with suspended sand as I trudged along the road leading past the Great Pyramid to the Pyramid of Khafre, its slightly smaller but better preserved neighbor. After pausing to take a few pictures of its distinctive profile (and after dodging the attentions of yet more camel touts), I continued to the Pyramid of Menkaure, smallest and latest of the three pyramids at Giza, which stood against the poignant backdrop of the vast Western Desert. The windblown sand, however, made it too uncomfortable to linger, so I retraced my steps to the Great Pyramid, and thence to the parking lot, where I found my driver deep in conversation with a local souvenir seller.
Hopping back in the car, we drove through the trailing suburbs of Cairo and a series of palm plantations to the necropolis of Saqqara, burial place of Egypt’s rulers for most of the Old Kingdom. The highlight here is the oldest, and in some ways the most interesting, of all pyramids: the famous Step Pyramid, designed by Imhotep for King Djoser. After fighting through an irritating knot of touts claiming to be guides, I emerged in the courtyard of the pyramid. Although most of the elaborate funerary complex that surrounded it is now closed to tourists, I was able to explore a corridor lined with small rooms for offerings. The pyramid itself was partially shrouded with rickety-looking wooden scaffolding, but I paused for a moment to admire the building sometimes hailed as the “birth of architecture” – that is, the first truly monumental complex executed in stone.
My next stop was the Mastaba of Neferherptah, the tomb of a fifth-dynasty princess. Though not architecturally remarkable, the corridors and chambers of this structure bear much of their painted decoration, colors still vivid after 4200 years. I attached myself as inconspicuously as possible to an English-speaking tour group, and admired the many scenes from daily life (including a splendid fresco of a hippo fighting a crocodile) incised and painted on the walls. The Pyramid of Pepi II, a short drive away, was unimpressive in profile, many of its blocks having been stripped away by later builders. Inside, however, a steep tunnel led down to an evocative burial chamber, whose massive ceiling blocks, loosened by millennia of earthquakes, dangled precariously over the massive basalt sarcophagus. More mastabas painted with vivid scenes from daily life stood nearby. I concluded my visit with the Serapeum, a series of cavernous tunnels lined with the immense (c. 15 feet high) sarcophagi that housed Sacred Bulls of Apis.
A twenty minute drive past canals, verdant fields, and palm plantations brought us to the pyramids of Dahshur, four lonely hills of stone surrounded by shifting sand – and consequently off the tourist radar. The two most impressive pyramids here – the “Red” and the “Bent” – were both built by Snefru, father of the Khufu who constructed the Great Pyramid. In the Red Pyramid, a seemingly endless shaft, scarcely four feet high, led to a series of three chambers with beautiful corbelled vaults.
Although the Bent Pyramid – so called because the builders, fearful of collapse, changed the angle of its sides about two-thirds of the way up –could not be entered, its well-preserved casing and evocative desert setting made it my favorite pyramid.
I was slowly circling the base, trying to find the best vantage point for a shot of the east face, when I noticed a man with an assault rifle running toward me. Remembering that a military base was nearby, I assumed that I had been trespassing, and began scrounging through my pockets to find bills for a bribe. The man slowed to a menacing walk as he approached. He stopped a few feet in front of me, eyes unreadable behind aviator sunglasses. And then, in a gravelly voice, he spoke: “Welcome to Egypt, sir! Can I take your picture?”
With my new friend’s help, I was able to climb the ruins of the small pyramid erected for Snefru’s queen for a panoramic overview of the site and surrounding desert. To the north, beyond the bulk of the Bent Pyramid, the Step Pyramid was just visible through the haze and blowing dust; to the east, past the tumbled ruins of the so-called “Black Pyramid,” the green stripe of the Nile valley snaked its way through gray and tan desert. South and west, rolling hills of sand stretched to infinity.
