On the Shores of the Mediterranean (36 page)

And out beyond the road to the Pyramids which we had traversed what now seemed a long time ago, lined with rickety-looking apartment blocks and night clubs and hoardings advertising enormous belly dancers, was rural Egypt, full of fields of dark Nile silt intersected by canals with the tall palm trees soaring overhead. Fields in which the
fellahin
, the peasants, who still make up some 80 per cent of the population, men with big bones, yellowish complexions, wide mouths full of excellent, intensely white teeth, rather thick noses, and dense black eyelashes shielding brilliant almond eyes, use wooden ploughs drawn by bullocks and raise water from one level to another using the
shâdûf
, a bucket suspended by a rope from a swinging beam suspended between two uprights with a counterpoise weight at the other end, just as their ancestors are shown doing on the walls of the ancient tombs. Men who for working in the fields wear nothing but a skull cap, cotton drawers and a sort of apron. Their women wear the
burko
, or face veil of black crepe, which conceals everything except the eyes, beautified with
kohl
, made with smoke-black which is produced by burning a sort of aromatic resin. In some cases the
burko
reaches almost to the feet which, like the hands, are stained with henna. Some have tattoo marks in blue
or greenish colours tattooed on their foreheads, hands and feet. They live in single-storeyed houses that are simple rectangles of Nile mud thatched with straw in which the hens roost. By nature home-loving, despising persons of every other faith as children of perdition, submissive yet obstinate, cheerful, hospitable, temperate yet licentious, quarrelsome, terrible liars (falsehood was commended by the Prophet when it tended to reconcile persons at variance with one another and in order to please one’s wife, and in Egypt has long since reached a point of development that entitles it to be regarded as an art form) and hard-working by necessity rather than nature.

Long ago their ancestors migrated from western Asia to the Valley of the Nile, which they called Atur. There they settled on its banks and mingled their blood with that of the indigenous Africans and, by the construction of a complex system of irrigation works which relied on the
shâdûf
or on long lines of men simply passing buckets from one to another, they succeeded in winning from the deserts which hemmed the river in closely on either side, a thin green line of oasis which extended downstream to the point below the present city of Cairo where the waters of the Nile expand to water a fan-shaped area of constantly replenished alluvium, the Delta, which, together with the region between the Tigris and the Euphrates, was the richest farm land in the whole of the ancient world.

They were the first recorded people to sail the waters of the Mediterranean, but not the first to do so. In about 2600 BC the Pharaoh Seneferu, the immediate predecessor of Cheops, the builder of the Great Pyramid, ordered the cutting of a hieroglyphic inscription at Medum on the left bank of the Nile in Lower Egypt, where he was subsequently interred in a great, stepped pyramid. It announced the bringing of forty ships of one hundred cubits with cedar wood from Byblos on the coast of Lebanon, the oldest known
city, for the furnishing of temples and palaces, the first recorded sea voyage in the history of the world, although by that time men had already been sailing in the Mediterranean for at least four thousand years.

The Egyptian ships were little more than scaled-up river boats with punt-shaped hulls. They were equipped with a single sail and were propelled by a dozen or so oarsmen on either side and they were steered with oars lashed to upright posts.

By the time the voyage to Byblos took place Egyptian civilization was highly developed and extremely sophisticated. The Egyptians had the advantage of living on the banks of the Nile, the only really navigable river that debouched into the Mediterranean; but in spite of this they were basically freshwater rather than deepwater sailors, using river boats, the smaller ones made of papyrus reed, for internal communication and depending for their prosperity on intensive farming rather than on external trade.

But in spite of knowing these things, and in spite of what someone in London before we left on this trip had said about the top of the Pyramid being a good place to collect my thoughts about the Mediterranean, it was no good at all. For one thing I couldn’t see it. For another, however fine the view and what it conjured up, for me it was the Pyramids themselves, and particularly the one I was at present standing on, that dominated everything. In the mind’s eye it was the embodiment of what can only be described as an insane and misplaced expenditure of human effort which for the protagonists, except those of the ruling and priestly caste who initiated it, can have had little or no religious significance and have given little hope of personal salvation, or even of an afterlife.

According to what seems a more or less generally accepted opinion based on the writings of Herodotus, the only author of
ancient times to have left an account of their construction, 100,000 men were employed each year for three months from July to the end of October (the period when the Nile flooded and the mass of the population would have been idle) on the building of the Great Pyramid for a period of twenty years. In addition there would have been a large force of quarrymen and stonemasons, estimated at some 40,000, who would have worked all the year round. It has also been estimated that a further 150,000 women and children, dependants of the workers, would have encamped around the site, and that a large proportion of the 400,000-strong standing army would have had to be deployed as guards.

The number of stones transported was approximately 2,300,000, including 115,000 glittering white limestone casing stones, with an average weight of two and a half tons. About 115,000 blocks a year which, if each one was handled, as they are thought to have been, by gangs of eight men – inscriptions recording the names of individual members of such gangs have been discovered – would have meant each gang moving ten or twelve blocks every twelve days, from the Mokattam quarries to the right bank of the Nile on a causeway, then across the river by boat and up to the plateau on another causeway. Ten years alone may have been devoted to the construction of this colossal causeway on the left bank, and if this is so then the figures given may be completely wrong.

If they are not wrong (the figures are Sir Flinders Petrie’s) and are not a gross underestimate, this meant, assuming 7300 workdays, delivering 315 stones a day, 26 stones an hour, working 12 hours a day. However this does not take into account the granite monoliths used in the construction of the King’s Chamber and the others above it, some of which weighed 70 tons, the weight of a locomotive. They were cut in the quarries of Syene, near Aswan, 500 miles upstream, and transported to the site in reed boats. To drag such blocks, and there were limestone blocks used
for the same purpose of commensurable size, up a simple incline of one in twenty-five, the gradient of the Giza causeway, would have required at least 900 men for each block, disposed in double ranks and hauling on four ropes to raise them 120 vertical feet to the plateau. Once they reached the plateau the stones had to be lifted into position, and some experts suggest that a simple, straight, inclined ramp, of the sort referred to by Herodotus, would have been impracticable as it would have had to be increased in height constantly as the building progressed, with a consequent increase in gradient. To carry a one in ten ramp to the top of the Pyramid would have meant starting it more than 3000 yards from the foot of it, down in the river valley, and this would have required more than 75,000,000 cubic feet of mud bricks, four times the number of cubic feet of stone in the entire Pyramid. Various suggestions have been made as to how it was done: by the use of tapering ramps or with ramps with slanting sides which wound up around the Pyramid, encompassing it on all four sides. The refuse from the cutting of the stone at the site, which was thrown down over the escarpment, amounted to half the bulk of the entire Pyramid, and this was only one of three.

So far as is known all that has ever been found in the Great Pyramid is the single, empty tomb chest, vermin and huge bats. It may have been pillaged as early as the XIIth Dynasty, 2000–1790 BC, the most prosperous period in the history of Ancient Egypt.

What was it, if it was not a tomb, or besides being a tomb? Our suitcase also contained a giant paperback version of a book entitled
Secrets of the Great Pyramid
, written by an American, Peter Tompkins, who first visited it in 1941. His book sums up more or less everything known about it. Without Sir Flinders Petrie, Tompkins and Davidson, none of whose books are really suitable for reading in the field, to me the Pyramid would have been a pyramid built that way because the builders liked the shape.

Is it, Tompkins asked, to quote him, pure chance that its structure incorporates a value for
pi
(the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter) accurate to several places of decimals; that the King’s Chamber incorporates the sacred triangles which Pythagoras embodied in his theorem, triangles which Plato said were ‘the building blocks of the Cosmos’? Does its shape incorporate the fundamental proportions of what is known as the golden section (the proportion of the two divisions of a straight line, or the two divisions of a plane figure, such that the smaller is to the larger as the larger is to the sum of the two, known by the Greek letter
phi
)? On the other hand were
pi
, Pythagoras’ Theorem and
phi
known about at the time the Pyramid was built?

Was it built as an almanac, by means of which the length of the year could be measured accurately; a giant theodolite, used for surveying the Delta and the Nile Valley; an accurately adjusted compass; a geodetic marker from which the geography of the world could be extended; a celestial observatory from which maps and tables of the stellar hemisphere could be accurately reproduced; a depository of an ancient system of weights and measures, left for posterity; a scale model of the northern hemisphere, incorporating the geographical degrees of latitude and longitude; or a building constructed under the influence of Divine Revelation, an allegory in stone?

All the various and almost innumerable theories seem to depend on the meaning attributed to such terms as ‘accurate’ and ‘precise’, and whether the various sorts of measures used, such as ‘British inches’, ‘sacred inches’, ‘pyramid inches’, ‘sacred cubits’, ‘profane cubits’ and other variations, have been manipulated to achieve a desired result.

As one American coarsely put it: ‘If a suitable measurement is found – say versts, hands or cables – an exact equivalent to the
distance to Timbuctu is certain to be found in the roof girder of the Crystal Palace, or in the number of Street Lamps in Bond Street, or in the Specific Gravity of Mud …’

I was now joined by a host of little Nagamas, fiends in nightshirts who had seen me climb the Pyramid and now, with their insatiable demands for baksheesh and their constant tugging at my clothing, very nearly succeeded in driving me round the bend.

Before retreating I took one more look over the edge. It was a Friday, the Muslim day of rest, and the lower courses of the Great Pyramid and to a lesser extent that of King Chephren were filled, although the sun was setting now, with happy bands of modern Egyptians, couples and families and bands of students, most of whom had come out from Cairo or Giza by bus, car, shared taxi, or on motorcycles to spend the day picnicking, singing, sometimes to the accompaniment of musical instruments, or listening to transistors, while others played football on the level expanses at the foot of it. Almost all, without exception, if we passed close enough to them, had welcomed us to Egypt, had asked us if we liked the country, if we liked them, and, if they were eating or drinking, had invited us to join them. The proximity of these Egyptians also ensured in some mysterious way freedom from the attentions of the Nagamas. What a difference, I thought, it made in one’s relations with them, to be no longer a member of an occupying army, as I had been, who referred to them one and all collectively as ‘wogs’.

When I reached the bottom I was met by the same Tourist Policeman who had admitted us to the Pyramid.

‘No climbing of the Great Pyramid,’ he said severely. It was as if we had never met before. ‘Fine is fifteen Egyptian pounds.’

‘I haven’t got fifteen Egyptian pounds,’ I said. It was true. I imagined he wouldn’t want a cheque on American Express.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘You give me one Egyptian pound.’

‘OK,’ I said. I liked this policeman. He reduced justice to a level of extreme simplicity, if not absurdity.

‘OK,’ he said, pocketing the money, saluting smartly and moving off, having successfully solved yet another problem for a foreign tourist in distress.