The Red Pyramid

I arrived the day before the Nile Tour was set to begin, and booked into our hotel, the Marriott Mena House. Originally a private hunting lodge, the “Mud Hut” was bought and sold and rebuilt, opened to the public in 1886. It’s a posh place, once the destination of the elite when visiting Giza to take in the pyramids. High ceilings, plush carpeting, lots of marble; you get the picture. It still has a view of the Great Pyramid, despite it being somewhat removed from the historic site, but Giza sprawls between it and them now. The sprawl is low to the ground, thankfully.

I saw a small gathering near the front desk, reading the notice board, their fingers pointing to and tracing the text on the page with the Contiki logo splayed across its top margin. I thought it likely that these were some of the people I’d be spending the next week with, so I walked over to them.

“Contiki?” I asked.

They were, so we made our introductions. They were from Southern California. Their names fell from my memory even as they uttered them. Except one. One name stuck: John. Not only is that my middle name, he and I had already met, in a way. We’d been conversing for a couple months on the Contiki website. Contiki’s great for that, having dedicated message boards and chat rooms where past and present attendees could meet and greet prior to their trip.

We finished checking in, got our room keys and we all promised to meet up in the bar to get to know one another better; or they me, in their case. One of them had gathered up a few pamphlets from the front desk and they were leafing through them when I arrived.

“We’re thinking about starting our vacation early,” one of the girls said. “We were thinking about going to Saqqara. It’s not on our itinerary and we may not get another chance.”

I was in. We were off. We hired a couple cars and were there within the hour. It was hot. There was no air-conditioning, but at the speed we were travelling along Salah Salem and the Ring Road, that wasn’t much of an issue. We were thankful of the speed later, for yet another reason. We arrived not a moment too soon. That’s a silly saying, isn’t it? We only arrived in the nick of time. We were actually late. The site was almost empty of tourists and they were actually closing up for the day—nothing a little palm greasing didn’t alleviate. We consulted our cabbies, expecting to have to grease their palms too, but they told us not to worry, that we’d hired them for the day. That was a pleasant discovery, a little surprising as well, considering they’d cost less than most cab fares I’d ever had. They closed the gates behind us and escorted us to the base of the Red Pyramid, pointing up to a platform about two-thirds of the way up its flank, where a small group of tourists were just then emerging from the bowels of Sneferu’s tomb.

That’s a long way up, I thought before beginning my assent. If not for the stair cut into the blocks that climbed its steep northern slope, the assent would have been really taxing, each rise a couple meters in height. We were already winded when we passed those tourists on their way down.
“Is the climb worth it?” I asked those descending.

“Spectacular,” they said as they passed. That was encouraging.

We caught our breath for a moment before entering the passage. It was steep. Impossibly steep. It was tight, too. And blessedly cool. Three feet high and four feet wide, it sloped down like a ladder at 27° for two hundred feet before landing on a short horizontal passage. I descended facing away from the laddered steps, white-knuckling the bannisters that follow on either side. I tried facing the “stair” for a few feet before finding that way impossible; I couldn’t see where I was going; I had to stare down between my legs just to find the next rung. Not that facing away was much easier. I still had to stare down between my knees to fix a foot on the rung, the view inviting vertigo. It was steeper than I originally imagined. My legs had begun to cramp by the time I reached the landing. We rested there a moment, marveling at the engineering we saw there: a vaulted chamber whose corbelled roof rose forty feet high, rising in eleven steps. We pressed on. At the southern end of the chamber, but offset to the west, another short horizontal passage led into a second chamber. It was so low we had to bend double or crawl to gain the other side. From there, we climbed large wooden staircase that wound up the southern wall to another entrance to another short horizontal passage (as low as the other) that lead to a third and final chamber with another corbelled roof fifty feet high. Unlike the first two chambers, which had fine smooth floors on the same level as the passages, the floor of the third chamber was very rough and sunk below the level of the access passage. It smelled of dust and eons. The walls were blacked by centuries of smoking torches and the breath of the teeming multitudes who’d already passed through them for centuries prior to my own passage. I suspect that a fragment of my own breath lingers there with theirs too now, likely to outlast me as theirs has them. It’s the only thing of mine I left behind, unlike those others. There was graffiti everywhere up there. Everyone who’d made that trek in decades past had left their mark. 

I put my nose to the stonework, trying and failing to see a flaw in the stonework seams. I even tried to slip a corner of a banknote between them, to no avail. I wondered how they’d fit those stones so perfectly, how many hours they must have ground one limestone stone against the other to make so perfect a surface. I wondered if we could do such a thing now.

We climbed back up on burning legs, our backs as tasked as our calves and thighs.

My legs ached for days afterwards. But to my mind, it was worth it. I’d walked and crawled and climbed through one of the oldest man-made structures on the planet. I’d walked in the footsteps of the ancients.

I’d do it again in an instant.