Like most of my generation, I was a child when I first learned of the pyramids. A single photo in an elementary school text book. Black and white surrounded by a sea of words, it wasn’t a passing image.
“Someday I’ll visit them,” I assured myself.
It’s a fifteen minute walk from the Lotus Inn. Easy going along the side of the highway, then a steep climb to the entrance.
Thirty minutes before opening and already the first tour buses.
Having purchased my ticket online, I was through the turnstile and out the other side.
I had prepared. Read blogs (most of which are worthless), reviewed maps, talked to locals, revisited Mark Twain.
One bit of advice seemed particularly relevant:
“Go off road, and go behind them.”
Sage advice for sure, I immediately discovered.
As early as it was, many had arrived before me, phones and cameras in hand, on the asphalt pavement to the right.
I went left, alone and free to wander, and wonder.
Oh my.
That single image from my boyhood studies towered over the desert landscape.
A laborious walk brought us to the foot of the great Pyramid of Cheops. It was a fairy vision no longer.
- Twain
With the sun rising quickly, details were exposed.
Each of its monstrous sides is a wide stairway which rises upward, step above step, narrowing until it tapers to a point far aloft in the air. Each side is as long as the Capitol at Washington, or the Sultan’s new palace on the Bosporus, and is longer than the greatest depth of St. Peter’s at Rome, which is to say that each side extends seven hundred and some odd feet.
- Twain
I detoured,
then returned to the path from which I’d come.
A man on a camel yelled,
“Where you from, sir, want photo?”
A friend had warned, “Be wary of men on camels.”
I had sworn not to get on one,
but it all happened so fast.
Abdul wanted 1,000 EGP. I offered 200. We negotiated - 200 for him, 200 for the camel.
Swearing not to get near a camel again, I continued on,
the Pyramid of Khafre approaching.
Beyond it,
the Pyramid of Menkaure.
From there, it was open desert,
A mighty sea of yellow sand stretched away toward the ends of the earth, solemn, silent, shorn of vegetation, its solitude uncheered by any forms of creature life.
- Twain
There were other ruins,
scattered along the way.
After a considerable walk,
a great shape appeared.
And I knew.
After years of waiting, it was before me at last. The great face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as never any thing human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient. If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond every thing of the present, and far into the past.
- Twain
It was gazing out over the ocean of Time—over lines of century-waves which, further and further receding, closed nearer and nearer together, and blended at last into one unbroken tide, away toward the horizon of remote antiquity. It was thinking of the wars of departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five thousand slow revolving years.
- Twain
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