A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (30 page)

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.

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-nayo-gozaimasu!’
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.

‘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!’

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.

‘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 – 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 outside 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”.’

Of all the Muslim cities on the Mediterranean littoral none is more intricate and virtually unknowable by foreigners than Fez. It is not the
muezzins
, the regular summoners to prayer, who are the first to sound reveille in Fes el-Bali, Old Fez, which they do with such notable effect at the first intimation of light in the east. Long before there is any suggestion that the
fejer
, the dawn, is on the way, back in the middle watches of the night, the Companions of the Sick, ten devout Muslims chosen, like the
muezzins
, for their voices and provided for by a bequest made long ago by one who was himself sick and required moral sustenance in the night, begin their weird and hauntingly beautiful chanting, changing over throughout the night at half-hourly intervals. Failing this, half an hour before the dawn, there is the
ábad
, the thrice-repeated cry of praise to God which begins, ‘the Perfection of God, existing for ever and ever’.