Giza

The next day was spend in and around Giza, so we even had the luxury of being able to sleep in. I hadn’t done that for a week, so I took advantage of it and had a laze about the bed for a few minutes, stretching like a cat before rising and showering. I was still the first down, relishing two Turkish coffees before settling in to breakfast. The rest staggered in in their twos and threes as I finished up eating, gathering up an American coffee and heading out to the terrace for a few moments with Pynchon and Gravity’s Rainbow.

We hopped on the bus and travelled the short distance up Al-Haram, past the Mena House Golf Course to the Giza Necropolis and the Great Pyramids. You know the ones: Khafre (Chephren), Menkaure (Mykerinos), and Khufu (Cheops). There are actually six, all told, counting the Queens’ burial pyramids. But there’s more to the necropolis than just pyramids; there’s a whole complex of workers’ village, workshops and their surrounding cemeteries, too. They’d been building pyramids here for decades after those of Saqqara, so there was a sprawling community about. FYI: there’s been no evidence of vast masses of Hebrew slaves, just Egyptians tolling at erecting enormous tombs for religious reasons, the burial of their living god, the Pharaoh. There’s been accounting tablets, work tallies, and love poems unearthed, but no chains, no mass graves, no slavery.

We disembarked well before the entrance, coming upon the arms of the Great Sphinx long before the pyramids and cemeteries, where we were told the official history of the sphinx and nothing about how the head is out of proportion to the rest of the body and how the body may actually predate the pyramids themselves, the statue potentially recycled from an earlier lion, originally carved during a wetter age. Egyptologists don’t buy that theory, but geologists note the tell-tale signs of water erosion on the lower body, something the Egyptologists, having no instruction on how rock wears when subjected to either wind and sand or water, immediately dismiss. I nodded agreement to all our guide Ahmed was saying while inspecting the water erosion for myself.

When we came upon the pyramids, we were informed that we could not climb or enter the pyramids like we did at Saqqara. I was a little angry at that, but what was there to do? We milled about, looking to get better shots of the big three without too many of the hundreds of tourists in attendance. I backed away, only to be set upon by Arabs holding a camel.

“Would I like my picture taken on the camel?” they asked.

“I have one with me on a camel, already,” I said.

“Ah, but with the pyramids behind you?”

They had me there.

I handed over my camera, they helped me aboard, and began to draw me away. We were headed out into the desert, the crowds of tourists thinning out. I grew nervous.
“Hey,” I said, “where are we going?”

“To get a better shot,” they said, drawing me away even faster, looking back over their shoulders at where we’d come from. That made me look back too, astonished at the distance covered in so short a time.

“Stop,” I yelled.

They didn’t.

I threw my leg back over the camel, and slid off, headless of whether I might hurt myself upon landing.
“Give me my camera,” I demanded, stalking the guy who had it, who was backing away. “Give it to me or I start screaming for help.”

They tried to calm me. They tried to reason with me. They tried to get me back on the camel, reaching out and taking hold of me, trying to direct me back onto the animal, gripping me harder than I was comfortable with. By that time, any form of persuasion was more than I was comfortable with. They stopped only when I shoved them away. They finally handed the camera over and I began to walk away, back the way I thought we’d come, throwing a nervous glance back over my shoulder once or twice.
My trajectory was a slightly off. The teeming masses threw me off, and before long I was headed a few degrees off course. You’d be amazed what a difference a few degrees can make. Maybe not; observe a golf ball when sliced. I didn’t know it at the time but I was making for the wrong pyramid and soon found myself walking around the far side of the Pyramids, and not sure which pyramid, either. Tourists were few and far between. I didn’t see any of my people and wondered if I ought to backtrack. But backtrack to where? I was hopelessly turned around.

I thought a little altitude might help. I mounted the hill surrounding the complex, meaning to find my way back to the entrance. It was a hot walk, the sun beating down on my head. When I’d almost completed my trek, I saw my bus, “Contiki” in bright bold letters splashed across the side. It was driving away. Driving away? I couldn’t believe it. They were leaving me. I panicked. I ran, waving my arms, thinking I’d already done this once before in South Africa. What the hell? I thought. Why were they leaving me? I couldn’t have been gone that long! What’s with buses and their not doing headcounts….

The bus stopped, I breathed a sigh of relief and climbed aboard, and found myself the subject of some questioning. “Where the hell did you go?” they asked. “We saw you on a camel headed out into the desert.”

I didn’t answer at first, not believing what I was hearing. And no one thought to chase after me? I thought, and said as much.

Thankfully we had nothing to do in the afternoon except laze around Mena House, taking in the sun, trying to lure a little tan onto our flesh. Derik and Jackie and I chatted a lot. I found myself watching Jackie more than I ought to have, having grown rather fond of her over the last few days. But we only had one other full day remaining and she was more than a couple years younger and had not once cast an inquisitive eye in my direction, so I let my crush lie unrequited. There were more conversations with the others too, engaging in that time-honoured tradition of letting loose one or two secrets to those intimate strangers one finds along the way while travelling together.

That evening, after an early supper, we were back on the bus, and brought to the limits of the Necropolis. We took our seats and were to be treated to a light show and history lesson, painted on the bodies of the Pyramids and Sphinx. There was music, there was a suitably Orson Wells-esque voice overlaid, relating the truncated version of three thousand years of history while pictures snapped and flowed across the structures. Everyone wooed and aahed and applauded as expected.

We found our way to the Mena House bar, eager to just have a night out where we talked about anything but Egypt.

Our host and I found ourselves settled onto barstools, slightly away from the others for a while, comparing notes. We were of a similar age, staring the end of our youth down. What had we sowed? What had we reaped?

I’m ready to pack this in, he admitted to me. I’ve no roots, he said. A man my age ought to have built something by now.

I’d been rooted to a spot, I noted. But I hadn’t set down any roots, either.

I think we were both in need of some.