by George Ade
CHAPTER XIII
ALL ABOUT OUR VISIT TO THE PYRAMID OF CHEOPS
During the first three days in Cairo a brilliant and original plan ofaction had been outlining itself in my mind. At last I could not keepit to myself any longer, so I told Mr. Peasley.
"Do you know what I am going to do?" I asked.
Mr. Peasley did not.
"I am going to write up the Pyramids. I am going to tell who builtthem and how long it took and how many blocks of stone they contain. Ishall have myself photographed sitting on a camel and holding anAmerican flag. Also, I shall describe in detail the emotions thatsurge within me as I stand in the shadow of the Sphinx and gaze up atthat vast and imperturbable expanse of face."
"It's a great scheme," said Mr. Peasley, "but you've been scooped.They've been written up already."
"_Scooped!_"]
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, sir; the whole outfit of Pyramids has been described in a specialarticle by a man named Herodotus."
"How long since?"
"About 470 B.C."
He produced a guide book and proved that he was right. All the thingsthat I had been getting ready to say about the Pyramids had been saidby Herodotus. He had got there ahead of me--just 2376 years ahead ofme. In daily newspaper competition, when some man gets his newstwenty-four hours ahead of another one he is proud of his "beat" and isthe hero of the office for fifteen or twenty minutes. But think oftrailing along twenty-four centuries behind a Greek space writer! Ittook all the starch out of me.
Mr. Peasley suggested that inasmuch as considerable time had elapsedsince the appearance of the first write-up, possibly the average readerwould have only a dim recollection of it and accept my account as brandnew stuff. But I knew better. I knew that some old subscriber, with acomplete file put away in the bureau, would rise up and draw the deadlyparallel on me. All I can safely do in regard to the Pyramids is touchup a few points overlooked by my predecessor.
Herodotus, by the way, had quite a time in Egypt. At that timeShepheard's Hotel was not in operation, although it must have beenunder way, and no round trip tickets were being issued by Cook, soHerodotus had to do his own booking and put up at a boarding house. InMemphis, which is now a fragmentary suburb of Cairo, Herodotus engageda guide. He does not tell us what he paid, but he does give us a lineon the character of the dragoman, who was full of superfluous andundesirable information, but who fell down when asked to divulge factsof real importance. This proves that the breed has not changed since500 B.C.
The guide took Herodotus out to the Pyramids and filled him up. It isnow believed that most of what Herodotus sent back was merely hearsay,but it made good reading. The Pyramids had been standing some twothousand years, and any information in regard to their origin couldhardly come under the head of personal recollections. WhateverHerodotus had to say about the Pyramids is now accepted as gospel, inspite of the fact that he never saw them until twenty centuries afterthe last block of stone had been put in place and Cheops had takenpossession of the tomb chambers. Rather late for a grand opening.
When he arrived at the Great Pyramid he stepped it off and put down thedimensions, and then he remarked to some of the natives standing aroundthat it must have been quite a job to build a tomb of that size. Theysaid yes; it had been a big contract, and as the work had beencompleted only two thousand years they were enabled to go into details.They gave Herodotus a fine lay-out of round figures. They said thatone hundred thousand men had worked on the job and that the timerequired was thirty years--ten years to build the road and the hugeincline for bringing the blocks of stone into place, and then twentyyears to quarry the stone and transport it across the Nile and thevalley. The stone cutters worked all the year, and during the threemonths' inundation, when farming was at a standstill, the entire ruralpopulation turned out, just as they would at a husking bee or a barnraising, and helped Cheops with his tomb. They did this year afteryear for thirty years, until they had piled up 2,300,000 blocks ofstone, each containing forty cubic feet.
Herodotus discovered some large hieroglyphics on the face of thePyramid and asked the guide for a translation. It is now supposed thatthe guide could not read. Anyone with education or social standingwouldn't have been a guide, even in that remote period. But this guidewanted to appear to be earning his salary and be justified in demandinga tip, so he said that the inscription told how much garlic and onionsthe labourers had consumed while at work on the job, and just how muchthese had cost. Herodotus put it all down in his notebook withoutbatting an eye.
_Herodotus put it all down--without batting an eye_]
"How much did they spend for onions and garlic?" he asked, poising hispencil.
The guide waited for a moment, so that his imagination could get arunning start, and then he replied, "They cost 1600 talents of silver."
Now, that sum in talents is equivalent, under modern computation, to350,000 English pounds, or $1,750,000. Think of a million dollars'worth of garlic! Try to imagine the bouquet that permeated the desertwhen one hundred thousand men who had been eating garlic began to callfor more bricks and mortar!
Herodotus told his story and got away with it. By the time the nextletter-writing traveller came along, a good many centuries later, theouter casing of the Pyramid had been stripped off and the inscriptionhad disappeared. His story has stood because he was here ahead of therest of us and saw the marks with his own eyes and had them translatedby a ten-cent guide. But can you believe that a great monarch woulddevote thirty years and sacrifice thousands of lives and work the wholemale population of his kingdom to skin and bones putting up a colossalsepulchre and then set aside the most valuable space on this gloriousmonument for telling how much onions and garlic had been fed to thehelp?
Marco Polo, Mark Twain, and all the other great travellers of historylove to tell tall ones once in a while, but the garlic story byHerodotus will doubtless be regarded as a record performance for a longtime to come.
Cheops was possibly the most successful contractor in history. It isestimated that he really did work one hundred thousand men in thebuilding of the great Pyramid, as related by Herodotus, and that hemust have devoted at least thirty years to the big undertaking. Duringall that time he never had a strike or even a clash with the walkingdelegate. The eight hour day was unknown, and no one dreamed of such athing as an arbitration committee. All he had to do was to give ordersand the entire population obeyed him. Everybody worked but Cheops. Hedidn't even pay salaries. It is true that in a spirit of generosity heset out a free lunch for the labourers--about $2,000,000 worth ofgarlic and onions. If he had tried to feed them on quail probably hewould have gone broke.
Nowadays visitors go out to the Pyramids by tramcar. For some reasonwe had the notion, doubtless shared by many who have not been there,that to get to the Pyramids one simply rides through Cairo and out ontothe flat desert. As a matter of fact, the Great Pyramid at Ghizeh, itstwo smaller companions and the Sphinx are on a rocky plateau five milesto the west of the city. There is a bee-line road across the lowlands.It is a wide and graded thoroughfare, set with acacia trees, and as youride out by trolley or carriage you look up at the Pyramids, and whenyou are still three miles away they seem to be at least a half-miledistant. At the end of the avenue and at the foot of the hill there isa hotel, and from this point one may climb or else charter a dumbanimal.
Not knowing the ropes, we engaged a carriage at 100 piastres to take usfrom the city out to the plateau. This is not as much as it sounds,but it is about twice the usual rate. After we struck the long roadleading across the valley and saw the trolley cars gliding by andleaving us far behind, we decided to send the carriage back to the cityand take to the trolley, where we would feel at home. The driverinformed us that he could not return to the city, as the big bridge hadbeen opened to permit the passing of boats, and that it would be threehours before he could drive back to town. It seems that he was right.The big bridge swings open but
once a day, and then it stays open for afew hours, and the man who finds himself "bridged" must either swim orengage a boat.
It is a five minutes' climb from the end of the drive up to the rockyplateau on which the pyramids are perched, and the ordinary touristgoes afoot. But we were pining for Oriental extravagance and newsensations, so we engaged camels. The camel allotted to me wasdestitute of hair, and when first discovered was in a comatosecondition. His or her name was Zenobia, and the brunette in chargesaid that its age was either six or sixty. It sounded more like "six,"but the general appearance of the animal seemed to back up the "sixty"theory. As we approached, Zenobia opened one eye and took a hard lookat the party, and then made a low wailing sound which doubtless meant"More trouble for me." The venerable animal creaked at every joint asit slowly rose into the air on the instalment plan, a foot or two at atime.
We had come thousands of miles to see the Pyramids, and for the nextten minutes we were so busy hanging on to those undulating ships of thedesert that we overlooked even the big Pyramid, which was spread outbefore us 750 feet wide and 450 feet high. Riding a camel is likesitting on a high trestle that is giving way at the joints and is aboutto collapse. The distance to the ground is probably ten feet, but youseem to be fifty feet in the air. As soon as we could escape from thecamels we walked around and gazed in solemn silence at the Sphinx andthe three Pyramids and doubtless thought all of the things that wereappropriate to the time and place.
The great Pyramid of Cheops has been advertised so extensively thatdoubtless many people will be surprised to learn that there is a wholeflock of Pyramids on this plateau along the edge of the Libyan desert.There are Pyramids to the north and Pyramids to the south, five groupsin all, sixty of them, and they vary in size from a stingy little moundlooking like an extinct lime kiln up to the behemoth specimen which isphotographed by every Cook tourist.
Why do these Pyramids vary so greatly in size? Each was built by someroyal personage as an enduring monument to his administration and thelast resting place of his remains. The most eminent students ofEgyptology now agree that the size of each of these Pyramids is a fairmeasure of the length of each king's reign. The reason that Cheops hasthe biggest Pyramid is that he held office longer than the others.When a king mounted the throne, if he was feeling rugged and was whatan insurance company would call a "preferred risk" he would block outthe foundation of a Pyramid tomb that would require, say, ten years forthe building. If, at the end of ten years, he was still feeling ingood physical condition and confident of lasting a while longer hewould widen the foundations and put on additional layers up to thesummit. Labor was free and materials were cheap, and he kept everybodyworking on his tomb as long as he lived. Finally, when the courtphysicians began to warn him that his time was limited, he would beginputting on the outer coating of dressed stone and arrange for theinscriptions. The ruler who lasted only three or four years was buriedin a squatty little Pyramid, which soon became hidden under thedrifting sands of the desert. Cheops kept piling up the huge blocksfor thirty years, and that is why his Pyramid holds the record. IfMethusaleh had been a Pyramid builder he would have been compelled toput up a tomb probably a mile and a half high and about eleven milesaround the base. In a revolutionary South American republic the rulerwould probably get no further than laying the corner stone.
We visited the pyramids. Also, we looked at the golf links, staked outacross the barren sands--not to be played on, but merely to be featuredin the hotel advertisement. Think of a golf course which is one hugehazard! Drive the ball in any direction and you can't play out of thesand! Forty centuries gazing down on a bow-legged tourist in fuzzyScotch stockings!
Most of the pleasure seekers that we encountered in the neighbourhoodof the Pyramids seemed to be quite elderly--some of the more sprightlyas young as sixty, and from that going up to where it would be betterto stop guessing. Mr. Peasley gave an explanation of their presence.He said that the dry climate of Egypt would preserve antiquities for anindefinite period.
Here they were, these male and female octogenarians, not propped up inarm chairs dividing the family silverware and arranging bequests tohospitals and libraries, but out on the blinding desert, thousands ofmiles from home, falling off donkeys, climbing up on camels, devouringguide books, rummaging around for time tables, kicking on the charges,and leading on the whole a life of purple strenuosity. We heard of twoEnglish women, sisters, both over seventy, who had just returned fromKhartoum, from which point they had gone on a hunting expedition stillfurther into the interior. They had to wear mosquito bags andsemi-male attire, and were out in the wild country for days at a time,chasing gazelles, hyenas, and other indigenous fauna.
Just as I am about to conclude this treatise it occurs to me that,although I have given a wealth of useful information regarding thePyramids, I have rather overlooked our old friend the Sphinx. I canonly say in passing that it looks exactly like the printedadvertisements. There is no deception about it. It is in a bad stateof repair, but this is not surprising when we consider its age.Herodotus does not mention the Sphinx. It was right there at the time.In fact, it had been there fourteen hundred years when he firstarrived. It seems strange that an observing traveller should haveoverlooked a monument sixty-six feet high, with a face nearly fourteenfeet wide, a nose five feet and seven inches long, and wearing a smilethat measures over seven feet! Herodotus either walked by withoutseeing it or else he did not think it worthy of mention. The onlyplausible explanation is that he was too busy figuring up the garlicstatistics.
ON THE NILE