Giza

Description

The plateau sits across the river and up out of the flood plain, an hour and a half from the Auberge by donkey, ferry, and horse. From Cairo the Pyramids are a detail in the haze, pale and exact, visible from the roof terrace on a clear morning and from the river on the approach from Rashid. They do not resolve into anything larger as you cross the flood plain. They simply keep being there, and then the ground goes hard and flat and the green stops all at once, and they are not on the horizon any more. They are the horizon.

There is no vegetation on the plateau and no water. The Sphinx is buried to the neck, sand up to the chin, and in 1814 nobody has dug it out. Giovanni Caviglia will make the first serious attempt at the chest and forepaws in 1817. For now it is a head in a dune, and the head is enormous, and its nose has been gone for centuries.

The stone is warm before the sun clears the ridge. By ten it is unbearable, which is why Bruyère insists on the dawn start. His phrasing, delivered as a matter of settled fact: at noon the Pyramids belong to the flies.

What Is Actually Up There

There are three of them, and this matters, because everyone arrives expecting one.

The plateau is not three objects standing on sand. It is a necropolis, and it has been one for four thousand years, and almost all of it is buried. What the party can see in 1814 is the tops of it.

• Khufu, the Great Pyramid. The northernmost and the largest. The casing was stripped centuries ago and carted down to build Cairo’s mosques and walls, which leaves the stepped core exposed, which is the only reason a man can climb it at all. Climbable, badly, by anyone determined enough. The local guides will take a European up for a fee and will not enjoy it. This is the only one you can go inside, and see below.
• Khafre, the second. Standing on higher ground, which makes it look taller than Khufu from most angles, and it is not. It still wears its casing at the top. A cap of smooth white limestone perhaps a fifth of the way down, which is the last of the surface every one of them used to have, and it is the single most useful thing on the plateau for explaining what these were supposed to look like: not stepped, not brown, not climbable. Smooth. White. Sealed.
• Menkaure, the third and much the smallest. Granite at the base, hauled from Aswan, five hundred miles up the river. A gash has been cut down its north face by somebody trying to take it apart, and they gave up, because it is easier to build a mosque than to unbuild a pyramid.
• The queens’ pyramids. Three small ones east of Khufu, three more south of Menkaure. Ruined, stubby, largely ignored by every traveller who has ever come here, because they are standing next to the largest building in the world.
• The mastaba fields. Streets of them, west and east of Khufu, laid out in rows like a town, which is what they are. Tombs of the people who built the thing and the people who ran the place. Sand-drowned. In 1814 they read as low mounds and the odd exposed corner of dressed stone, and unless somebody tells the party what they are looking at they will walk over the top of a city of the dead and see lumps.
• The Sphinx. Buried to the neck. Head only. Nose gone for centuries. Nobody has dug it out and nobody will until Caviglia goes at the chest and forepaws in 1817, which is three years after the party stands in front of it. There is a temple in front of its paws, and it is entirely under the sand, and no living person knows it is there.
• The guides. The plateau is a livelihood. The village at the foot of it sends men up to meet every party that crosses, and they will climb, carry, light candles, pull a European up a step too high for him, and price all of it on the spot. They are not a threat and they are not a curiosity. They are working, and they have worked this ground their whole lives, and their fathers did.

Inside the Great Pyramid

Yes, they can go in. It is the first question any table asks and the answer is yes, and it is horrible.

The way in is not the original door. It is a hole. Around 820 AD the Caliph al-Ma’mun’s men cut a forced tunnel into the north face, hunting treasure, and smashed sideways into the passages, and that scar is how every visitor has entered for a thousand years. The party goes in through a wound.

What follows, in order, with the guides going first with candles:

• The descending and ascending passages. About four feet high. You do not stoop, you fold, and you go up a polished granite slope at an angle that would be difficult standing and is worse doubled over. It is a long way. The Bedouin ahead of you do it like walking.
• The Grand Gallery. The passage opens up and goes vertical, a corbelled vault stepping inward all the way to a roof twenty-eight feet above your candle, running a hundred and fifty feet up at the same steep angle. It is the most extraordinary interior on earth and it is pitch black and your candle shows you about six feet of it at a time.
• The King’s Chamber. Red granite, polished, enormous blocks, and empty. Nothing in it but a granite sarcophagus with no lid and one corner broken away, sitting where it has sat since before anyone reading this had a language. The stone is warm. It is always warm.

The conditions, which are the actual experience. It is hotter inside than out and there is no air moving anywhere in it. The dust is four thousand years of powdered stone and it gets into the mouth. There are bats, and there is a great deal of bat dung, and the smell of ammonia in a dead-still passage at body heat is something no traveller’s account has ever managed to be polite about. Everyone strips to shirtsleeves and everyone comes out black. Names are cut everywhere. Greek, Latin, Arabic, French, English, going back further than anyone can read, and the French ones are recent and some of them are soldiers.

Khafre is shut. The second pyramid has no known way in. There is no visible entrance, the local men will tell the party there is none, and the men are correct as far as anybody alive knows. Giovanni Belzoni finds it in 1818, four years after the party stands at the foot of it, and it turns out to have been opened and emptied in antiquity and closed again by the sand. In 1814 it is simply a sealed mountain and nobody has been inside in living memory.

Notable Features

• The far bank — where the ride actually starts. Fresh mounts wait here in the half-light with their breath showing, and the ground between here and the plateau is flat, open, and hard, which matters to exactly one member of the party.
• The Old Cairo ferry — the crossing. Donkeys from the Muski, ferry over, horses on the far side.
• No sound. This is the plateau’s real feature and the one worth playing. Cairo is the loudest place the party has been since London and Giza at dawn has wind and nothing else. It is also the only ground in Egypt that is packed with dead who are simply dead. This place is a graveyard from the escarpment to the sand and nothing in it is ever going to get up. After the theatre under Vienna and the thing that climbed the hull off Crete, that is worth more to this party than the architecture is, and no one of them will say so.
• Unvisited, and never more so than this week. The ride falls on the second day of Eid al-Fitr, when every Cairene with a grave to sit beside is at the cemeteries on the other side of the river, with palm branches and kahk and the whole family. Nobody comes out here for the feast. Not because the plateau is empty, because it is not, but because there is nobody left alive who owes these dead a visit. The party will have the largest tombs ever built entirely to themselves, on the one morning of the year the city’s whole attention is turned toward its dead.

Session Appearances

Session 5 (Cairo, 16–20 Sept 1814) — VISITED, dawn 18 September 1814. The party made the excursion, reaching the plateau via the old Cairo ferry across the Nile and then an hour’s ride. The Sphinx sat buried to its neck in sand, its nose already long gone. The Great Pyramid’s casing stones were long stripped and the stepped core climbable; the party entered through the forced tunnel cut into the north face c. 820 AD, up a steep polished granite slope to the Grand Gallery (the corbelled vault ~28 ft high running ~150 ft up). Georgiana made the climb alone by candlelight. Freddy sketched and bought thin local wine outside. The Mastaba fields lay sand-drowned nearby.

Connections

• Cairo — the city across the river.
• Auberge du Muski — where the excursion is booked and outfitted.
• Sergeant Bruyère — runs it. Tariff of 30 piastres per head per day, chalked bilingual, prix fixe, no haggling.
• The Nile River — crossed to reach the far bank.

Appearances