On the Shores of the Mediterranean (35 page)

‘They don’t open till ten,’ said the American gentleman whose name, he told us, was Henry Haythorn. ‘Can you beat it? Rosie and I got up specially to be here before the coaches. I guess now we’d better go on back down to the Mena House, grab breakfast and come back up again.’

Guarding the entrance to the still-locked interior was a Tourist Policeman, member of an admirable force specially recruited to protect visitors to Egypt from being defrauded and other forms of molestation.

‘Gom on,’ said this resourceful representative of law and order. ‘No need of a ticket. You go now. Many peoples later. Give me one half pound each. Gom on!’

We went in through al-Mamun’s forced entry to the Great Pyramid. Abdulla al-Mamun was Caliph of Baghdad, the highly cultivated son of Harun el-Rashid. In AD 820, while on an expedition to Egypt to subdue the Copts and Beduin, he initiated a search for a secret chamber in the Great Pyramid reputed to contain maps and spheres, long-forgotten information about the
earth and heavens, rust-proof weapons and glass that would bend without breaking. At that time the glittering white limestone casing that must have made it a truly wondrous sight in sun and moonlight was still in position, as it had been in the time of Herodotus in the fifth century BC, Diodorus Siculus of Agyrium in the first century BC and Strabo, who visited it on a trip up the Nile in 24 BC. Strabo had described a hinged door in the north face which when closed was indistinguishable from the rest of the casing and which led into a low, narrow passage which descended into a vermin-infested pit a hundred and fifty feet below the level of the plateau, on the ceiling of which Greek and Roman trippers had used the smoke of torches to write their names.

Unable to discover the door, which had presumably once more become a secret with the passing of nearly eight and a half centuries, al-Mamun ordered great fires to be banked against the casing stones at the seventh course, which eventually proved to be ten courses lower than the actual entrance. Then, when the stones were red hot, vinegar was poured on them and they shattered. What he and his men found within was remarkable enough architecturally, but they appear to have found no treasure, and the Arab workers employed on the project were extremely displeased.

Inside, the Pyramid was surprisingly hot. The smell was not what we had steeled ourselves to support, what someone had described as being like the inside of a public telephone box. Instead it was the stench of the deodorants with which mad humanity now sprays its nooks and crannies in order to suppress more natural, feral odours. The going was hard. Anything that isn’t horizontal in the Pyramid has a gradient of twenty-five degrees, one in two, and I was carrying a suitcase which contained cameras, quantities of baksheesh, passports and some great tomes about pyramids, everything I felt we might need in a pyramid and which
I was reluctant to entrust to a policeman, even a Tourist Policeman, as I had no key with which to lock it.

One belief held by some pyramidologists is that the Great Pyramid is an enormous allegory in stone, built under the influence of Divine Revelation, and that every part of it that can be measured has some particular significance.

What is perhaps the finest flowering of this belief was produced by David Davidson, a structural engineer from Leeds. An agnostic when he began his researches in the 1900s, he soon took off more or less completely and published an enormous book
The Great Pyramid: Its Divine Message
, which was one of the volumes inside my suitcase. A best-seller, it is nevertheless one of the most difficult books to read, which is not to denigrate it, as indeed it must have been to write and print. (In case the reader was not getting the message, the author paraphrased whole paragraphs and had them printed in small type in the margin.)

‘The Great Pyramid of Gizah,’ Davidson wrote, ‘is a building well and truly laid, perfect in its orientation, and built within five points symbolising the five points of the fulness of the stature of Christ … four define the corners of the base square – symbolising the foundation of Apostles and Prophets – the fifth point the Apex of the Pyramid … the Headstone and Chief Corner Stone, Jesus himself as the Head of the Body; the Stone rejected by the Builders.’

Because we had entered the Pyramid by al-Mamun’s forced entrance we had failed to travel down the Descending Passage as far as the First Ascending Passage, a stretch which for Davidson symbolized ‘The Period of Initiation into the Elements of the Mysteries of the Universe in a Spiritually Degenerate Age, from the time of the Pyramid’s construction to the time of the Exodus of Israel’, which he dated 2625 to 1486 BC. By doing so we had avoided one of the worst fates in Davidson’s Pyramid Game, which was getting into the dead-end of the Descending Passage. This
passage began below the First Ascending Passage and, once into it, any member of the human race descended irrevocably towards Ignorance and Evil. We had missed it because al-Mamun’s forced entrance had carried us across the Entrance Passage on what was the equivalent of a spiritual fly-over.

However, by missing the way down to Eternal Damnation, we had also missed the entrance to the First Ascending Passage which begins at the date of the Exodus, 1486 BC, ends at the Crucifixion and is symbolized by the granite plug which blocks its lower end, ‘sealing up all the Treasures of Light, Wisdom and Understanding’. It was also the ‘Hall of Truth in Darkness’ up which ‘Nation Israel progressed under the Yoke of the Law towards the True Light, the coming of which was to lighten the Darkness of the World’.

There was no doubt about the fate of those who rejected the Messiah. It was awful. Borne swiftly along the horizontal passage leading off from the top of the Hall of Truth in Darkness, symbolizing ‘The Epoch of Spiritual Rebirth’, they found themselves in the Queen’s Chamber, otherwise the ‘Chamber of Jewish Destiny’ and, the way Davidson interpreted it, a spiritual dead-end.

But by now we were no longer engaged in what had been beginning to resemble a game of snakes and ladders, with rules invented by Davidson, played out on an evolutionary, spiritual plane. Instead we were plodding on foot what seemed interminably upwards in al-Mamun’s most awesome discovery, the Great Gallery, which leads into the heart of the Pyramid. Nearly thirty feet high, a hundred and sixty feet long, its walls of polished granite seven feet apart at their widest point but diminishing in width towards the ceiling, and so finely jointed that it is impossible to insinuate a hair between them, it is a place of nightmare.

It was also Davidson’s ‘Hall of Truth’, a direct route, symbolizing the Christian Dispensation, up which we were climbing at
the rate of one pyramid-inch a year, with no chance of taking a wrong turning, from the Crucifixion (7 April AD 30 according to the Old Style, Julian Calendar), to the first day of the Great War (4–5 August 1914, according to the Gregorian, new one). It was rather like being on a moving staircase in a chic department store which normally takes you to the restaurant on the roof without stop-offs but has ceased to function so that you have to foot it.

At the top, having hauled ourselves over a monolith known as the Great Step, which symbolizes ‘The Great Epoch of Science for the Consummation of the Age’, we passed, bent double, through ‘The First Passage of Tribulation’ which led from 4 August 1914 to 11 November 1918. From there, after the Armistice, we successfully negotiated ‘The Chamber of the Triple Veil’ which would have been a continuous period of woe and tribulation, lasting until 1936, if Divine Intervention had not shortened it so that it ended 29 May 1928.

With the goal almost in sight we passed through ‘The Passage of Final Tribulation’, which extended from 1928 to 1936 – a period (was it a coincidence?) that almost entirely covered my schooldays – after which came the end of all toil and pain and the end of human chronology in ‘The Chamber of the Mystery of the Open Tomb’, better known as ‘The King’s Chamber’ to non-pyramidologists.

It was a tense moment, the one before entering it. In theory it should have disappeared on the night of 15–16 September 1936, and everything else with it, but it was still there, an astonishing construction at the heart of an edifice in which the epithet loses force from sheer over-use.

In it is what archaeologists believe to be the empty, lidless tomb chest of King Cheops, cut from granite so hard that saws nine feet long with jewelled teeth and drills tipped with diamonds or corundum had to be used to cut it and hollow it out; what some pyramidologists believe to be a symbol of the Resurrection
in a chamber in which ‘The Cleansing of the Nations in the Presence of the Master of Death and the Grave’ should have taken place back in 1936, a happening I would have dearly liked to witness from a safe distance, and judging by the smell inside it something of which they still stood in need. Others believe that it embodies a standard of cubic measure left for posterity to do what it will with.

And above this chamber, which is entirely sheathed in polished granite, unvisitable, are five more chambers, one above the other, with floors and ceilings each composed of forty-three granite monoliths and two enormous limestone ones at the very top, each of the granite ones – many of them badly cracked by an earthquake thought to have taken place soon after the presumed burial of the King (those in the King’s Chamber, including walls and ceilings, are all cracked) – weighing between forty and seventy tons. Here, 300 feet or so below the apex of the Pyramid, 200 feet from the nearest open air (the King’s Chamber is connected with the open air by two long ducts), and with the ever-present possibility that another earth tremor might bring down something like 4000 tons of assorted limestone and granite monoliths on our heads, I felt as if I was already buried alive.

There was a sudden flash, brighter than a thousand suns as it bounced off the polished walls, caused by the Japanese gentleman letting off a fully thyristorized, dedicated AF 200-type flash on top of a Pentax fitted with a lens that seemed more suitable for photographing what lay on the floor at our feet than the actual chamber. Perhaps this was what he was photographing, this unsuitable human offering on the floor.

‘Holy hat!’ said a fine hard voice that I recognized as that of Rosie, the Girl from the Middle West. ‘Who in hell laid that? Don’t say it was the cop. They got a sign outside, “No Smoking”. What they want’s one saying, “No Crapping”.’

‘Well, it wasn’t one of us,’ I said, beginning to suspect that Rosie must have had some more lively incarnation before settling down to life entombment with Haythorn in Peoria, or wherever.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Wanda said, who in some ways is disappointingly sensitive for one who prefers to travel rough. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

Whatever the reason, she was not the only visitor to find the King’s Chamber too much for her. In it, or on the way to or from it, Abd el-Latif, the chronicler of al-Mamun’s excavations, who taught medicine and history at Baghdad, had fainted away. Napoleon, left alone in it on 12 August 1799, at his own request, as Alexander the Great is said to have been, refused to speak of what happened while he was in it, and said that he never wanted the incident referred to again. ‘What’s the use. You would never believe me,’ were his last words on the subject to Count Las Cases on St Helena, shortly before his death.

‘I’m with you all the way, honey!’ said Rosie. And to me, ‘Lead on, Macduff!’

Having set Henry and Rosie safely on course, toddling down the road towards the Mena House, we went to visit the Nagamas, down at the place below the plateau where they relaxed and fed their animals bright green forage. There they didn’t try to sell you anything. They sat looking noble by their dung fires, surrounded by couched camels, donkeys which occasionally let loose volleys of hysterical, spine-chilling shrieks, and hobbled horses, bellyaching about the state of the nation and particularly of the tourist trade. It was like being in the worst sort of London club.

‘No more Yumbos,’ they said, which was all Sadat’s fault, getting himself assassinated. ‘No more English! No more Germans! No more Americans! No more French!’ one elder intoned. It sounded like a dirge, or an end-of-term hymn. We tried to persuade them that it was a world recession that was keeping people at home
and the jumbo-jets half empty and shouldn’t they be thinking of putting a few of their fellow Nagamas in mothballs until things looked up, but it was no good and we left them listening to their soothsayer and nodding in gloomy acquiescence.

The
Ascent
of the Pyramid though fatiguing is perfectly safe. The traveller selects two or three of the Beduin. With one holding each hand, and the third pushing behind, he begins the ascent of the steps. The ascent can be made in 10–15 minutes but, in hot weather especially, the traveller is recommended to take nearly double the time …

Egypt and the Sudan
, Karl Baedeker, 8th edition

Later that afternoon I climbed the Great Pyramid from the north-west corner in Baedeker’s ten minutes without any Beduin to push, pull and support me. The easiest way is from the northeast corner, but as it is now forbidden to climb it from any corner I wanted to be out of sight of the Pyramids police station which is situated in what used to be one of King Farouk’s pleasure houses on the edge of the plateau below the east face. The top, truncated by the removal of the limestone, is about twelve yards square, and I was the only one on it.

The view could scarcely have been more extensive. To the west, the north-west and to the south, where the stepped Pyramid of Sakhara, prototype of the Giza Pyramids, stood on the edge of the plateau above the valley, was the Libyan desert which in the late afternoon sunshine looked as if melted chocolate had been poured over it. Across the river, below the cliffs of the Mukattam Hills, from which so much of the 6,000,000 tons of stone used to build this single pyramid was quarried, were the mosques and spectacular minarets of Muslim Cairo, the largest city in Africa, and the great labyrinthine cemeteries, now also occupied by the
poor. And the other cities: the secretive remnants of Old Coptic Cairo which also conceals within it the first known city on this site; the Roman, pre-Christian fortress called Babylon, and out beyond it, lapped by smoking rubbish dumps that may soon engulf them, the burnt brick and stone remains of El Fustat, the oldest Arab settlement, established in AD 641. And down towards the Nile, to the north of Old Cairo, was the modern city with the high buildings rising above it, not enough of them, as in Manhattan, to form groves and forests which gives them an air of majesty, but as they are in London, in melancholy twos and threes, or completely isolated.