On the Shores of the Mediterranean (34 page)

We sat in the sunshine on the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, on chairs kindly provided by the Abyssinian monks. Through it the dome of the Chapel of St Helena sprouted up like some enormous mushroom. The roof forms part of the courtyard of the Abyssinian Monastery, the most hidden away of any of the various sectarian constructions in and around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and one of the comparatively few places in the city where you can have a bit of quiet.

Far below it, sixteen feet below the level at which the Sepulchre stands, probably in what was the moat of the second city wall, is the site of the original basilica built by Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, in 336, after the discovery of the tomb of the Saviour, ‘contrary to all expectation’. In this chapel of St Helena there are two apses. One is dedicated to St Dysmus, the Penitent Thief, which the Armenian Catholics pinched during the plague of 1835 from the Abyssinians, the least bellicose of all the sects which congregate about the Holy Sepulchre, who had jurisdiction over it. The other contains a stone seat said to have been used by the Empress Helena, Constantine’s saintly mother, while watching
the diggers who eventually, by which time she had already left Jerusalem, unearthed the True Cross of Christ and the crosses of the Two Thieves, the True Cross being identified because it raised a woman from her death bed; the nails being subsequently used to make for the Emperor a priceless horse-bit.

The best way into this courtyard is by a ramp which runs up from Souk Khan es-Zeit, the Market of the Oil Caravanserai, part of a very long, very narrow street which under various names bisects the Old City from north to south, from the Damascus to the Lion Gate. This ramp climbs up between what was once a Russian hospice when pilgrims from Russia still came to Jerusalem, which they did until 1914 in large numbers, and Zalatimo’s pastry shop, in which Zalatimo, his descendant or whoever is currently running the business, whirls great sheets of dough round his head, preparatory to plunging them in boiling oil, which is a step on the way to producing a delicious sweet pastry; and in his shop you can see part of the second enclosure wall attributed to Hezekiah, built before the Neo-Babylonian invasion led by Nebuchadnezzar, round 600 BC. Here, too, you can see part of the wall of the atrium, the courtyard of Constantine’s original basilica.

Sitting with us on the roof, but in the shade afforded by the dome, were three or four of the Abyssinian monks, who get quite enough sun in the summer months when the roof becomes an inferno, now recuperating from a service in their chapel that is so minute and full of religious equipment that when all those officiating are inside it there is scarcely room for a congregation.

These particular monks – it would be difficult to say whether we had seen the whole lot at the service we had attempted to attend – were typical Abyssinians of the sort I had met in Abyssinia. That is to say they had regular features, long black hair, lively eyes
as bright as if they were lit by electricity, and were of various hues from dark olive to jet black. They were also extremely friendly, although it was difficult for any of these particular monks to do anything but smile and make reassuring noises as none of them spoke any tongue with which either of us was acquainted.

Sitting with these kindly, well-disposed men, looking across the roof at the primitive hutments in which they lived under the trees on the periphery of what is one of the two most revered places in Christendom (the other is the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem), there were so many things that I would have liked to have asked them.

Why, for example, during the service, had the priest, at some particular part of the proceedings, changed his brilliant silk and brocade vestments for even more flamboyant ones? Was their Abbot, the Abouna, Our Father, still appointed by the head of the Coptic Church, ‘The Most Holy Pope and Patriarch of the great city of Alexandria and of all the Land of Egypt, of Jerusalem, the Holy City, of Nubia, Abyssinia, and Pentapolis (Cyrenaica), and of all the preaching of St Mark’? St Mark being the founder of the Coptic Church, the native church of Egypt.

I would also like to have known why they kept holy the Jewish Sabbath; why they celebrated Christmas once a month; what the Jewish rites were they had contrived to mix in with their own Christian ones (was this the reason why circumcision was practised and no graven image allowed in their churches?); why it was that they would only eat the meat of animals that did not have cloven hooves or chew the cud; why they had made Pontius Pilate a saint, and why they reverenced the Virgin and a very large number of saints more than the Almighty. Were they still allowed to have wives, providing that they already had them when they were ordained? I would like to have asked these men, members of the smallest and poorest of all the religious communities at the Holy
Sepulchre and one without a square foot of territory within the church, a distinction they shared with the Protestants.

Far below us, and what was probably the only monastery on a roof in the entire world, was something unique: a church, or rather a number of churches, in the possession of a number of on the whole mutually antagonistic sects – Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians and Copts – the greater part held by the Greeks, the keys to which were held in perpetuity by a Muslim family to whom they had been entrusted during the time of the Ottoman Turks.

The only parts of this rambling and in some places ramshackle construction common to all these sects – the Protestants are only allowed inside on sufferance – are the vestibule, where the custodians sit, and one aisle of what would otherwise be part of the Greek Cathedral, in which there is the stone, actually a replacement put there in 1808, on which Jesus was laid to be anointed by Nicodemus, a stone that was owned by the Copts in the fifteenth century, the Georgians in the sixteenth century and afterwards by the Greeks. It is now owned by the Latins, who originally paid the Georgians 5000 piastres to be allowed to burn candles over it, a privilege which they now share with the Armenians, the Greeks and the Copts.

Common ground, too, is the Rotunda of the Sepulchre, built in 1810, with a hideous dome added in 1866, and the Holy Sepulchre itself which was reconstructed at the same time by the same architect who worked on the Rotunda, and which contains within it, in the interior chapel, what is said to be the actual tomb, six and a half feet long and six feet wide, now roofed with marble, and which is also the fourteenth and last Station of the Cross, the outer room being the place where the angel rolled away the stone from the mouth of the tomb.

The Greeks, besides having a perfectly enormous church, their
so-called Katholicon, own, among other places, the place where St Longinus, the soldier who pierced Christ’s side, was cured of blindness; the Place of the Raising of the Cross, of the Mocking and of the Crowning of the Thorns. They also own Calvary, which is fourteen and a half feet up in the air above the level of the Holy Sepulchre and which has a silver-lined cleft in it in which the Cross was set up and, down at ground level, the burial place of Adam’s skull on to which Christ’s blood dripped, restoring him to life, which is in a cavity which communicates with the Centre of the Earth.

They are also the proprietors of the Stabat, the Place where Mary received Christ’s body, while in their church, the Katholicon, they have a stone marking the Centre of the World. They also possess the Place of the Invention, or Discovery, of the Holy Cross and the stone seat in which St Helena sat.

The Latins own the Place of the Nailing, the Place where Mary Magdalene stood, the Place where Our Lord appeared to her in the Guise of a Gardener, the Place where He appeared to His mother after the Resurrection, the Place of the Recognition of the Cross, part of the Pillar to which He was Bound and the Altar of the Franks in the Chapel of St Helena.

The Armenians own the Place where the Virgin Mary stood when the Body of Christ was Anointed, the Chapel of the Parting of Our Lord’s Garments, the Chapel of St Helena and the Chapel of the Penitent Thief.

The rest are more modestly endowed. The Copts have what is an extremely lucrative altar attached to the back of the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre and a chapel adjacent to the Syrians’ only possession, a dark, mysterious and highly romantic chapel behind the Sepulchre which communicates with the Tomb of Joseph and Nicodemus. The Copts used to own the Fissure in the Rock of Golgotha, but whether they still do or not is not clear.

There was enough down there in the semi-darkness, whether fact or inspired fiction, to keep any normal intelligence whirling for an eternity, enough even to content the Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians and Copts. The only ones left out were the Protestants and the Abyssinians, and the Abyssinians seemed quite happy up on the roof.

As no one at the El Nil Hotel, one of the less expensive caravanserais, seemed to have any idea what time rosy-fingered dawn occurs over Cairo in mid-January, we settled for a 4.45 a.m. departure to get us to the Pyramids in time to witness it.

At 4.15 a.m., rather like a
corps-de-ballet
all taking off on the same foot, everything began to happen at once. The alarm clock went off. The telephone waking system jangled into action, operated by the night porter who a few seconds later – we were five floors up – was thundering on the door with what sounded like an obsidian sledgehammer, announcing, ‘Your limousine, Mister!’ I opened it a couple of inches to tell him that we had got his message and would he kindly desist, and a chambermaid the shape
of a scarab beetle slipped in through this chink and began dusting my hat. She was followed by three humble but dogged-looking men, the sort I imagined who had been forced to build the Pyramids. They began shutting our bags, apparently under the impression that we had already had enough of Cairo and were on our way to the exit, although we had not checked in until midnight, having come straight from a party that was probably still going on. In the face of all this, still dressed in pyjamas, I felt my reason going.

‘Ma fish bakshish.’
(‘There is no baksheesh.’) ‘Try again Monday,’ I said, the last bit in English, when we were finally ready to go.

‘Mas es-Salama!’
‘Go with safety,’ they said, hoping that I would be preserved that long, raising some sickly grins.

Take plenty of baksheesh, ladies and gentlemen, when visiting Egypt under your own steam, unprotected by couriers. Wonderful how it softens the hardest Muslim or Coptic heart, better than any nutcrackers. And do not begrudge it; most people, even those quite far up the social scale, are poorer than it is possible for most of us to imagine.

Then in the limousine, an immense, black, air-conditioned Mercedes, we howled up the road to the Pyramids, the six-milelong, dead straight Shari el-Ahram, built by the Khedive Ismail for the visit of the Empress Eugénie of France on the occasion of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Then, having traversed it at more than a mile a minute, we climbed on to the escarpment on which the Pyramids would have long since been descried if it hadn’t still been pitch black night with a sandstorm in progress.

After a bit we stopped and the driver, a distinguished-looking Egyptian of fifty-odd on whom constant intercourse with the limousine-using classes had conferred the manners of a Firbankean cardinal, assisted us out of the vehicle by the elbows as if we were antiques.

‘Good place, Sir,’ he said.

‘Good place for what?’ Apart from a small segment of flying sand, illuminated by the headlights, one could see nothing. The only thing it seemed adapted for was a witches’ coven.

‘Good place for seeing Pyramids,’ he said, gently, as if humouring a couple of loonies, which I suppose, thinking about it in retrospect, was what we were. ‘From up there,’ pointing into the murk. ‘Up there, where there are weruins, broken buildings in the desert, Sir.’

‘Is it safe?’ I asked. ‘I mean for my wife and I to be here alone? It’s horribly dark.’

‘Safe, Sir, safe? What is safe?’

‘I mean are there any bad people?’

‘No bad peoples, all good peoples here,’ he said, raising his hands in an expansive gesture, as if embracing the teeming inhabitants of the Valley and all those scattered over the three-million-square-mile expanse of the Sahara Desert, then dropping them and entering his vehicle.

‘Here, I say,’ I said, genuinely alarmed at the thought of being left alone in such a spot. ‘What time’s dawn, actually?’

‘Dawn, Sir, actually? About dawn, Sir, actually, I do not know. Will that be all, Sir? Thank
you
, Sir, Madam!’ receiving from me a generous helping of closely folded baksheesh which a lifetime of experience told him was an ample sufficiency without actually counting it. And he drove away.

It was now 5.15 a.m. and bloody cold with the wind that was raising the sand around us coming off the snowbound High Atlas in Morocco, 2500 miles to the west, with nothing in between to slow it down as it droned over the debased ‘weruins’ up to which we climbed. Underfoot they felt like what they were (I had forgotten to bring a torch), a bulldozed brick barrack block with sheaves of those metal rods that are used to keep reinforced
concrete together protruding from them, and lots of broken glass, all of which made it impossible to walk or even run about in order to keep warm. We tried running on the spot but it was exhausting. Then we tried slapping one another, but I did it too hard and we had a row.

Then, around 6.15 a.m., the terrible wind suddenly ceased, as if whoever was in charge had switched it off at the main, the sand fell back to earth where it belonged, the sky over the Gulf of Suez and Sinai turned an improbable shade of mauve, overhead the morning star shone down brilliantly out of a sky that had suddenly become deep indigo, and the Pyramids of Giza – two huge ones, of King Cheops and King Chephren, a lesser one of King Mykerinos and three little ones, one behind the other – appeared to rise up out of the ground with the rapidity of mushrooms in a slow-motion film, the only Wonders of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world – first designated by Antipater of Sidon in the second century BC, six of which were on the shores of the Mediterranean (the other, which was not, was the Hanging Gardens of Babylon) – to survive more or less intact.

Looking at them, under a sky that was now rapidly turning from mauve to apple green and lower down was the colour of honey, with the lights of Cairo glimpsed shining between them until they were either switched off or made invisible by the strengthening light of day, there was no doubt that these were among a select body of man-made wonders of any date which in spite of having all the attributes of follies and having suffered severely from over-exposure, actually came up to expectations, if for nothing else, for their shapeliness.

The Great Pyramid was built by King Cheops, Kheops or Khufu, who is thought to have begun his reign in about 2690 BC. It is the first of the three pyramids built at Giza by the kings of the IVth Dynasty which lasted from 2720–2560 BC. The Great
Pyramid was known to the Egyptians by the enigmatic name Ekhet Khufu, the Horizon of Khufu. The other two have more prosaic names.

The Second Pyramid, called Wer-Khefré, Great is Khefré, was built by the king of that name (Herodotus called him Chephren as do most people today), who reigned from about 2650–2600 BC. The Third Pyramid, Neter Menkewré, Divine is Menkewré, was built by the son of Chephren, referred to by Herodotus as Mykerinos, and according to Herodotus its construction was inspired by the Greek courtesan, Rhodopis.

The Great Pyramid is the most famous, the largest, the highest, the most visited, the most written about, the most scrupulously measured and the one that has attracted more crackpots than all the other pyramids put together.

The limestone plateau on which it and the other Giza pyramids are built is roughly a mile square, about forty acres, of which the Great Pyramid covers thirteen acres, the equivalent, according to an American source, of seven New York mid-town blocks. An area large enough, according to an even more assiduous calculator, to contain the Houses of Parliament and St Paul’s Cathedral, or the cathedrals at Florence, Milan, St Peter’s at Rome, Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s.

Napoleon, in a rapid calculation made after he had defeated the Mamelukes at the Battle of the Pyramids, while his generals and savants were on top of the Pyramid admiring the view, worked out that the amount of stone in the Three Pyramids of Giza – what another of his
savants
, Baron Denon, described as ‘the final link between the colossi of art and the colossal works of nature’ – was sufficient to build a wall ten feet high and one foot thick round the whole of France (the effect of which would have been incalculable), and this did not include the casing stones.

The Pyramids of Giza remained undamaged externally until
1196, when Malik el-Kamil, a nephew of Saladin, who later became ruler of Egypt, made, for what was otherwise a prudent man, a mad attempt to demolish the Pyramid of Mykerinos. But after months of frenetic activity his demolition workers had only succeeded in stripping part of the casing, which was of granite in the lower courses, limestone in the upper ones, from one of the sides.

In 1356 Sultan Hasan began work on the great mosque which was to bear his name and stone quarried from the Pyramids was used to build what is accepted to be, if not the most beautiful, the finest example of Mameluke architecture in Cairo. Forty years later the Seigneur d’Anglure, on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, reported ‘that of these stones are built, and have been built these many years, the finest constructions to be seen in Cairo and Babylon’.

In a century or so the Arabs succeeded in removing the entire twenty-two acres of limestone casing, eight feet four inches thick, from the Great Pyramid, apart from a few courses at the base which escaped their attentions because they were covered with rubble, and used it not only to build architectural masterpieces but to construct bridges over irrigation canals, walls, dwelling houses and for other mundane purposes.

The last serious plan to destroy the Great Pyramid, some say all three, was made by Mohammed Ali, the viceroy of Egypt, in 1833. He issued an order that the proposed Nile barrages, north of Cairo, which were to control the flow of water through the Delta, should be built with stone from this source. This meant, now that the casing stones had all been used up, removing the backing stones which made up the four faces, and attacking the core, which would have turned it from a pyramid into a shapeless heap of rubble. It was Linant de Bellefonds, the French engineer who initiated the construction of the barrages, who persuaded
the viceroy that it would be less expensive to quarry fresh stone than to dismantle a pyramid.

And now, across the mist-filled Valley of the Nile, the sun came roaring up from behind a black rampart of cloud that was resting on top of the escarpment of the Mukattam Hills, turning what is a seven-hundred-foot limestone escarpment into what looked like a colossal mountain range. It shone palely at first on the southern faces of the three big pyramids, but diagonally so that the countless thousands or millions of stones that composed them stood out in such a way that each individual one was distinct from its immediate neighbour and one had the crazy feeling that with enough patience one could have counted them.

As the sun rose it shone down into the thick white mist that filled the valley and illuminated the tops of what must have been some immensely tall palm trees which rose up through it, producing an unearthly effect, as it would be, I imagined, to look across the Styx.

It also illuminated the hideous ‘weruins’ in which we were imbrangled, and for a few moments it filled the whole of this vast landscape, in which, apart from ourselves, there was not a living thing to be seen, with a vinous, purply light. Then everything turned suddenly golden. It was like the springtime of the world and we set off downhill into the eye of this golden orb for what must be, for no one has so far come up with a scheme to make you pay for looking at them, the greatest free show on earth.

Then, just as the pyramids had seemed to rise out of the earth, so when we were at last among them, did a picturesque, elderly, shifty-looking Beduin, mounted on a camel and with a donkey in tow, close in to the Pyramid of Chephren. Perhaps he had spent the night in one of the innumerable, lesser tombs with which the plateau is riddled.

‘Good morning, King Solomon,’ he said, dismounting from the camel which made a noise like a punctured airbed as it sank down, ‘I kiss your hand,’ seizing it and doing so before I could stop him. ‘Good morning, Queen of Sheba, I kiss your hand also.’

‘Oh no you jolly well don’t!’ said the newly-elevated Queen, dexterously avoiding this attention. ‘You kiss your own.’

To tell the truth, he was a distinctly smelly old Beduin. If he had come out of a IVth Dynasty rock tomb then he needed a re-embalming service. He was a Nagama, one of a highly sophisticated tribe of Beduin who for uncountable centuries (they may have commissioned the pyramids as a tourist attraction) have descended like swarms of gad-flies on visitors in order to suck them dry of life-giving baksheesh, in return offering their victims camel, horse and donkey rides and, until recently, when some kill-joy forbade the practice, assisting them up the outside of the Great Pyramid, at the same time contriving to manoeuvre female ones wearing skirts into positions of peculiar indelicacy, not all of them fortuitous.

Now he offered us a selection of these various services, including the opportunity to take his photograph in one of the stylized poses the Nagamas permit themselves in this traffic with the infidel. To all of which, not wishing to hurt his feelings but enjoying being called ‘King Solomon’ as much as I enjoy being addressed as ‘Squire’ by London taximen, I replied, ‘Later, later!’

‘Laters, laters! See you laters, alligators! In a whiles, crocodiles!’ said the Son of the Desert, getting the message finally that we were a no-show, fishing a transistor designed to look like a military transmitter out of his saddle bag, plugging in to Radio Cairo and departing in a blast of harem music round the south-west corner of the Pyramid of Chephren, which was now the colour of Kerrygold butter but with added colouring, with his donkey in tow.

Close in under the cold, sunless north face of the Great Pyramid,
looking up its fifty-one-degree slope to a summit eighty-five feet higher than the cross on top of St Paul’s, I had the impression that a petrified seventh wave to overtop all seventh waves was about to fall on us and rub us out. Outside the original entrance and another forced entry made by the Caliph al-Mamun in AD 820, which made it look as if it had been gnawed by giant mice, there were two notices: NO SMOKING IN THE PYRAMID and NO CLIMBING THE PYRAMID. Across the way from these holes in the Pyramid two young Japanese, a man and a pretty girl, and an elderly American couple were hovering indecisively outside an office advertising trips to the interior at £2 ($2.80) a head.
‘O-nayogozaimasu!’
the Japanese said, bowing as if welcoming us to a tea ceremony, baring what looked like a couple of upper and lower sets of silicon chips.