23.04.2011
I decided to hire Hamada and a driver for the Pyramid trip. For 60 quid I had a knowledgeable guide, a car, entrance to three Pyramid sites and lunch. The journey to Giza started at 7.30 am when we set off on the familiar roll of the dice which is driving in Egypt. They drive on the right here. Sometimes, however, some people drive on the left instead. It certainly makes for a more interesting ride. The driver called it “freedom” which I suppose it is in a way.
From the highway, you catch glimpses in between high-rise flats of these strange yet familiar shapes poking out of the desert. When up close, their size is simply staggering. Heaven only knows what ordinary Egyptians, or later Greeks and Romans, made of them. The largest – the Great Pyramid of Khufu built in 2600 BC– is 146m high. It was built for the Pharoah Cheops, whose son built another Pyramid – by tradition, a smaller one out of respect for his father – right next to his father’s. Cunningly, though, he had it built on a plateau so that it appears bigger than his old man’s. Most if the stone is local, but the granite was from 800km south (Upper Egypt), so thousands of tonnes of the stuff were transported all this distance. And this was before the invention of the wheel, according to Hamada. The Pyramids now have a jagged edge (one block on another) but originally would have had a casing which made the whole building perfectly smooth. A little of this casing is left on the smallest of the 3 Pyramids at Giza.
The site itself was wondrously quiet. Since tourism is down massively after the January 25th revolution, I was luckily to walk around Giza with not more than a few dozen other people on a site of several square kilometres on the edge of the desert. This really is a perfect time to come to Egypt – and it’s not even unbearably hot yet.
A little down from the plateau the Pyramids sit on is the Sphinx. Much smaller than the Pyramids – and smaller than I had imagined – it is nevertheless utterly beguiling. I don’t know the actual dimensions, but I’d say the whole thing is about the size of a couple of large houses. It was carved out of one huge piece of limestone left over from the building of the Pyramids. Hamada said that some people believe that Napoleon shot the nose off with a canon, but presumably this is a myth. Descriptions of the Sphinx must exist from before Napoleon, so it’s the sort of thing that could be easily checked. He hadn’t bothered, though, and I doubt I will either.
We then got back in the deathmobile to another Pyramid site Sakkara, which is visible from Giza. This journey gave me my first sight of green for some time. Both Cairo and the desert are beigey-brown in colour so the beautiful, lush Nile basin was a happy relief. A couple of hundred metres either side of the river are planted with alfalfa, maize, date palms and other crops and serve as a remarkable contrast with the vast desert which is most of Egypt. I found it amazing that at a certain point the desert simply ends abruptly and thriving vegetation begins.
Here we visited a burial chamber of a princess where you can still see quite clearly the 4500 year old hieroglyphics showing details of everyday life and the objects she wanted to take with her. Red, made, from ochre, was the most enduring of the colours, but green and blue from copper can still be made out. Apparently, they used a type of egg-wash varnish to preserve the colours, although I don’t imagine they thought they would last this long. There are scenes of scribes writing on papyrus, people fishing, slaughtering animals and even pictures of crocodiles and hippos which, since the building of the Aswan dam in the 1960s, no longer live on the Nile.
As I walked around these Pyramids and burial chambers, I could scarcely believe I was almost the only person there. The lack of tourists made it all the more special. As if any more proof of the decline in tourism were needed, at lunch I was the only person in a lovely restaurant which could have had a couple of hundred guests. Hamada wouldn’t eat with me, so I sat on my own amongst the bougainvillea (pink, purple, white and even orange) and enjoyed the oasis-like verdant lushness around me.
The third Pyramid site we visited was Dahshur. These are earlier, smaller efforts which didn’t have the ornate hieroglyphics seen in later examples. Most exciting of all, though, is that I actually went inside this one. There are limestone steps up going up the side to a height of about 30 metres. Then a square hole, one metre by one metre, brings you into a sloped passageway which you clamber down for about 50 metres. There are wooden banisters to hold onto and rails on the floor every foot or so to stop you plunging to the bottom in one go, but nevertheless getting yourself down is more difficult than it sounds. (Had there been any around, this might have been an ideal place to escape from fat American tourists.) Once you reach the end of the tunnel you reach a burial chamber several stories high. This room didn’t actually house the main treasure; it was built as a decoy for tomb robbers. The real tomb was next door. The door, however, was 20m up a sheer limestone wall which would have posed seriously difficulties to any robbers. Happily, however, for visitors they had built a wooden staircase which gets you up into the real tomb. Although there was nothing left to see as such – any artefacts had been sent to the Egyptian museum – simply being inside a Pyramid was enough of an experience. Getting out again was harden than on the way down and, with my thigh and arse muscles aching like hell, I could barely walk for a couple of days afterwards, but it was well worth it.
Conversation between me and a random stranger who came up to talk to me today.
Man: “Welcome to Asia!”
Me: “This is Africa, surely?”
Man: “Mm, yes. But also Asia!”
******************************************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment