Romantic traveler at Giza. ©2004, UrbisMedia
Giza is a good fifteen miles from the center of Cairo, a long ride on a road that, although built less than twenty years ago, is rutted, potholed, and crowded with half-built, and already obsolete, buildings comprising overcrowded slums along nearly its entire course. Even at this hour it was lined with people squatting at the curbside doing little businesses, or eating, or just watching everything else going on. Cairo, typical of most every Third-World capital city, cannot keep pace with the influx of its citizens from the countryside and its own out-of-control birthrate, confirming that, deprived of other distractions, the principal amusement for the poor must be sexual intercourse.
We bounced along the road, windows open, Hisham’s Sadé tape blending with the sounds of the crowded thoroughfare, music, laughter, shouts, and the sibilant tones of Arabic. It hardly seemed like a religious occasion, but then a month of Ramadan is a long time to sustain an attitude of solemnity.
But solemnity does characterize the atmosphere of the pyramids at Giza. After handing over a wad of Egyptian pounds to Hisham as baksheesh for the military guard at the gate we are allowed to drive up onto the plateau of the pyramids.
In the distance I can see the silhouette of the Sphinx, it’s profile ruined even in shadow. It was supposed to guard against intruders and grave robbers, but all I wish to steal from this ancient, fabled place is an unusual experience. It seems that the conditions could not be more propitious for letting the imagination have a go at spanning the millennia, back to when the pyramids were sheathed with glistening stone and the Nile flowed free and clear. This night was bright, an almost full moon in a clear sky. The temperature was still in the humid eighties, cooled slightly by an occasional breeze. And it was quiet, appropriately, deathly quiet. The wheels of the government car crunched the gravel of the roadbed as we drove up to and alongside Kufu.
I could just make out in the gloom the entrance, several courses of stone up one side, forced into the great pyramid’s side like a jagged gash. I remembered a couple of years earlier entering there and climbing up hands on knees, head to butt, with other tourists, through the fetid air of the shaft that leads upward to the king’s chamber. That shaft led into the ‘Grand Gallery’ a tall and narrow ascent that communicated with the little room that was the burial chamber. There are still lampblack stains on the walls and ceilings from the days when the pyramid was built. Here we ascended on wooded ramp that aided access. I shuddered at the thought of those high, stone walls closing in a crushing us.
I recalled the clamminess of the interior of the pyramid, as though the moistures, gasses and other exhalations of countless visitors remained hermetically sealed by the mass of surrounding stone. In the burial chamber itself the king’s red granite sarcophagus was coated with the greasiness of innumerable sweaty hands. Even its long vacant interior was coated with the oils of visitors who had lain in it for the obligatory ghoulish souvenir “pharaoh photo”. On that particular day a small group of fellow Californians were there, lotus-sitting around the perimeter of the chamber, engaged in some ‘new age’ attempt at cosmic connection, desecrating the place with psycho-babble and flaky ‘pyramidology. There have been enough books of bullshit written about the pyramids to pile into pyramids twice the size of the originals.
ut if one can somehow block out all of the touristic static and let the mind and imagination focus on where one really is there is a little aperture to an almost transcendent state. When is made my way down to a much smaller, secondary chamber, called the ‘queen’s chamber’ even though no one really knows for certain, I was for a few minutes completely alone to wonder at the mysteries of this ancient place. It wasn’t the groupish ‘new age’ connection that interested me—I wasn’t looking for some miraculous harmonic convergence that would ensure me financial success, or make my cellulite disappear—I wanted to get as close as I could to what had intrigued me since I first read a book: time travel. I wished to be a time traveling fly on the chamber wall, a witness to some ancient funerary rite, to the priestly figures in the torchlight, the smoke and incense, the aromas of the chemistry of mummification, and the incomprehensible babble of requiem incantations in a language whose true sounds remain a mystery. I wanted to see the sarcophagus set it its place for the eternal journey, surrounded by the riches of the pharaoh. I wanted to hear the chamber being sealed. Was it true that priests and slaves, maybe even concubines, might have been sealed in as well? There seemed a ghostly presence is the bare, reticent, chamber.
Now, on this balmy Ramadan night I wanted to walk the entire perimeter of the great pyramid of Kufu. As I did I thought I did hear the eerie moans and mournful murmurs of those long-ago voices of sealed-in priests and concubines. I soon realized, as my eyes accustomed themselves to the low light and the shadows that I was not alone. In the shadows and crevices of the huge blocks of the pyramid were, I discovered, people, or more accurately, couples. Even more accurately, if my senses were detecting the meaning of those moans and murmurs, copulating couples!
What a marvelous notion! What a concept! Making love on a pyramid! Doing perhaps the most affirming act of life on a monument to death!
How many people had “done it” at the very summit of Kufu, its top flattened off from the long missing golden point, and its stones covered with inscribed graffiti from over the ages? What a reward after a long, and perilous and arduous climb: a “black mass” on the altar or Eros. But alas, the unromantic authorities now prohibit climbing the pyramid..
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©2004, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 5.2.2004)