SO FAR WHAT HAS been told has been largely the mise en scène of the camping trip in the Libyan desert; of our camels, our tents and our men. But to end there would be like describing the train in which one travels through strange and foreign lands.
Yet this narrative must be one of small if quaint experiences. No great adventure befell us. In spite of the warnings, to take a guard with us, we carried none. Nor even a weapon, save an antiquated shotgun belonging to Assour, a blunderbuss of deadly recoil and a barrel so dirty that to fire it was an experiment of extreme uncertainty. But the Bedouins who met us in the desert passed us with a civil greeting. Indeed, the only time we were in physical danger the quarrel did not concern us at all, and we simply found ourselves in the usual position of innocent bystanders in a fracas. And the rioters were not desert dwellers at all, but fellahin, or farmers.
To begin with, then, we established our first camp in the desert three miles from the Pyramids. There we spent our first day and our first night; across the river lay Cairo, and on the hill beyond it the citadel and the great Mosque of Mohammed Ali, with its huge rounded dome and its minarets. From our position high on the sand dunes we would see also the great quarries whence came the stone for the Pyramids. And so clear was the air that the Pyramids themselves seemed but a stone’s throw away.
We could even see the white-clad figure of the man who makes a living by climbing to the top of the Great Pyramid and back to the ground in six minutes! A predecessor of his did the same thing, but one day his foot slipped, and he crashed to the bottom.
“He was all broke to pieces, madams,” Assour tells me. “He was like a jelly.”
One pays this man a certain amount to carry out his contract; if he fails, nothing is owing. But I hoped, as I sat there, that the group of Americans below would pay him anyhow. Probably they would have done so, but he made it. We held a watch on him.
On the top of the Great Pyramid is a flat area about twenty feet each way, taken off like the smooth casing, for building material long ago. And on this small and windy spot there sits all day an old Arab, who brews coffee for those who make the climb. At least I am told it is coffee, I have heard an ardent dispute among those who have sampled it, some maintaining that it is tea.
He could be seen now and then from our camp, a microscopic figure, like some small god atop a mighty altar. He makes a few piasters a day, this old man, for his climb and his descent, and for those long hours of loneliness in cold, in wind and in boiling heat.
Napoleon is said to have told his soldiers beneath the Pyramids that twenty centuries looked down upon them. But Napoleon was no archeologist, and this old man on top of the Great Pyramid looks down, not on twenty, but on fifty centuries.
There is a type of tourist which professes disappointment in the Pyramids. For such people there is no hope. Ruskin said, looking at the pillars of Karnak: “At last size tells.” But the temple of Karnak seems to me to be a pigmy undertaking compared with the Great Pyramid. It was not difficult, from the commanding position of that first camp of ours, to reconstruct the making of this miracle; the great barges bringing their loads of limestone blocks from the quarry far across the river in the eastern hills, and waiting for the annual inundation to bring them close to the chosen site. Three hundred thousand blocks, each weighing an average of two and a half tons, were thus brought over; and the labor of a hundred thousand men for twenty years was required for the whole project.
It took ten years, according to Herodotus, merely to build the great stone ramp or causeway up which these blocks were dragged to the plateau where the Great Pyramid stands. It covers at its base thirteen acres of desert land.
And all of this by man power! It necessitated the building of a mountain of sand as well, for as the monument grew so also grew the ramps of sand up which the great blocks were dragged. Naked in the blazing heat of the Egyptian summer, shivering in the damp and cold of winter, a city of a hundred thousand laborers and slaves starved, bled and died in their rope harness, that one royal body might lie secure.
But there is a legend that Khufu did not lie so safely after all, that after his death and burial the slaves revolted and at night broke in and took the body away.
“They cut it into thirteen pieces, madams,” Assour asserted, “and buried the pieces here and there in the sand. His queen, she find all but the head, but that she not find.”
One rather hopes that the legend is true. There should be some punishment for a crime like this, and the Great Pyramid is not only the one surviving marvel of the Seven Wonders of the world; it is the enduring evidence of a great wickedness.