First we took a road that followed the west bank of the Nile downriver for a few miles, then we took a sharp turn to the left and ascended to a dry, sandy plateau. We hardly needed the guide to show us the way, for at every moment the Great Pyramid was visible, looming ever larger as we drew closer. By the early light of morning it appeared pale pink in color, and as flat as if it were a drawing cut from a piece of papyrus; but as the sun rose, and the heat increased, the pyramid appeared white and began to shimmer. At times it seemed to levitate above the earth, and at other times it quivered so much that I thought it might miraculously disappear before our eyes, but the guide explained that these uncanny visions were merely illusions caused by the waves of heat rising from the sand.
Larger the pyramid loomed, and then larger still. I glanced at Antipater and saw that he was as astonished as I was. It was one thing to be told that the Great Pyramid is the largest object ever made by men, another to actually see it with my own eyes. My imagination had been inadequate to prepare me for the awesome scale of what I beheld.
The plateau was crisscrossed with ceremonial roadways and dotted with temples, altars, and shrines, but because of the festival in Memphis there was not a person in sight. The solitude was uncanny. A part of me was glad we had waited for this day, to have the pyramids to ourselves. But I also felt slightly unsettled that we three should be the only specks of humanity on that vast, sandy plain. My sense of perspective was undone; in vain I looked for some way to judge size and distance.
Only once was the Great Pyramid blocked from view, as we passed close by a very large sand dune that seemed out of place amid the surrounding temples. Once we passed the dune, the Great Pyramid reappeared and filled my whole range of vision, not only from side to side but up and down, for the structure was nearly as tall as it was wide. From a distance, the pyramid had appeared to be made from a single block of stone, so smooth was the surface. Closer up, I could see that it was actually faced with many different stones expertly fitted together, and that these stones were of many different colors and textures—pale violet and glossy blue, sea-green and apple-gold, some as opaque as marble and others as translucent as sunlight captured in a wave. At a distance all these various stones merged together and appeared scintillating white. I had expected the Great Pyramid to be immense, but I had not expected it to be so beautiful and so finely made, as fascinating to behold close up as it was at a distance.
Around the bottom of the pyramid, great drifts of sand had accumulated. We remained on our camels and began slowly to circle the base. The eastern face of the pyramid was dazzling in the full morning sunlight, the southern face ablaze with slanting rays, and the western face entirely in shadow. Looking up, I watched the sun surmount the tip of the pyramid, where it seemed to hover like a ball of flame on its point.
“Who built such a marvel?” I exclaimed. “And how was it done?”
The guide opened his mouth to answer, but Antipater was quicker. “According to Herodotus, the Pharaoh Cheops employed a hundred thousand men just to build the roadway to transport the stones from Arabia. That labor alone took ten years; another twenty years were needed to build the pyramid itself. First the structure was built up in tiers, like steps, and then the tiers were fitted from the top down with enormous finishing stones lifted into place by a series of ingenious levers, then the whole surface was polished to a bright luster.”
“Is Cheops buried inside?” I asked.
“Herodotus states that Cheops was laid to rest in a chamber deep beneath the pyramid, a sort of subterranean island surrounded by water channeled underground from the Nile.”
As I tried to visualize such a bizarre funeral chamber, the guide loudly cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, “the stones of the pyramids were not raised into place by cranes or levers, but pulled up huge ramps of earth built especially for the purpose.”
“Nonsense!” said Antipater. “Such ramps would have needed to be enormous, larger in volume than the pyramid itself. If such massive earthworks were ever constructed, why do we see no remains of them?” It was true that there were no huge mounds of earth anywhere on the plateau. There were sand dunes here and there, including the large one amid the temples we had passed on our way, but even that mound was minuscule in comparison to the Great Pyramid.
“Those who built up the ramps disposed of them when they were done,” said the guide. “The earth was carted to the Nile, which carried it downstream to create the many islands of the Delta. And since you ask if Cheops is buried inside, young Roman, I will tell you that he is not. The Pharaoh so abused his people when he forced them to build this enormous tomb that when he died they refused to put him in the pyramid and buried him elsewhere. The pyramid is empty.”
“How could you possibly know such a thing?” said Antipater.
The guide smiled. “Did I not tell you that I, Kemsa, am the best of all the guides? I know what others do not. Follow me.”
He led us back to the south face of the pyramid, where he gave a sign that brought all three camels to a halt. I would have sat there indefinitely, gaping at the pyramid, had my camel not folded its knees and pitched forward, making clear its desire to be rid of me. As the creature turned its head and prepared to spit, I hurriedly dismounted. Antipater did likewise, though with more dignity.
“Shall we go inside?” said our guide.
“Is it possible to do so?” Antipater's eyes grew wide.
“With Kemsa as your guide, all things are possible. Follow me!”
The face of the pyramid must once have been as smooth as glass—impossible to climb—but time had worn and pitted the stones, making it possible to clamber up by staying low and gaining purchase amid tiny cracks and fissures. I worried that Antipater would find the effort too strenuous, but, as he had done so often before on our journey, my old tutor displayed amazing dexterity and stamina for a man of his years. Antipater would complain of having to climb a few stairs to our room at the inn, but nothing could stop him from scrambling up the pyramid!
Perhaps two-thirds of the way to the top, Kemsa showed us a spot where a flat slab of stone could be lifted on a pivot. The hidden doorway was so expertly fitted that it was practically invisible. Antipater and I would never have found it on our own.
“Astonishing! Herodotus makes no mention of an entrance to the Great Pyramid,” said Antipater.
“No?” said Kemsa. “That's because this fellow Herodotus did not have me for a guide. Watch your head!”
Kemsa held the door up while Antipater and I stepped inside. Using his shoulder to keep the door open, Kemsa produced three torches, one for each of us, and used a flint to ignite them. Once the torches were lit, he allowed the door to fall shut.
The narrow, steeply sloping shaft before us plunged into utter darkness. I noted with some relief that there was a rope that could be used to steady one's descent.
“Do you wish to go on?” said Kemsa.
Antipater looked pale in the firelight. He swallowed hard. “I haven't come this far to forgo an opportunity that even Herodotus missed.” He held his torch in one hand and gripped the rope with the other. “Lead on!”
The guide went first. Antipater and I followed.
“But if there's no tomb at the bottom, what is there to see?” I said. Even though I spoke quietly, my voice echoed up and down the shaft.
“To know that, you must see for yourself,” said Kemsa.
I suddenly felt uneasy. What if the pyramid was a tomb after all—not of kings but of common fools like myself, led to their death by Egyptian bandits posing as guides? Would there be a chamber full of skeletons at the bottom, with my own soon to be added? What an irony if the Great Pyramid should turn out to be the resting place not of Cheops, but of Gordianus of Rome!
I told myself there was nothing to fear; it was only the darkness, the weird echoes, and the cramped space of the descending shaft that unnerved me. Clutching our torches and the rope, we continued our slow, steady descent.
> At last the surface became level. After passing through a short hallway we entered a chamber of considerable size. By the flickering torchlight I discerned a flat roof perhaps twenty feet above our heads. The walls appeared to be made of solid granite, finely fitted and polished but without any sort of decoration. The chamber was empty except for a massive sarcophagus hewn from a solid block of granite. The sarcophagus had no lid. Nor was there any decoration or carving on its surface.
“Can this be the sarcophagus of the great Cheops?” I whispered. Within such a fabulous monument, I had expected to see a burial chamber of great splendor.
“This is a burial chamber, yes, and that is a sarcophagus,” said Kemsa. “But as I told you, there is no Cheops. Go and see for yourself.”
Antipater and I stepped up to the sarcophagus and peered inside. My old tutor gasped. So did I.
Kemsa, who seemed to know everything about the pyramid, was wrong about the sarcophagus. It was not empty; there was a body in it. For a Pharaoh, he was very plainly dressed, not in royal garments but in a long white robe and a simple nemes headdress, not unlike the clothes I was wearing. The hands crossed over his chest and his clean-shaven face were those of a man of middle age, darkened by the sun and somewhat wrinkled, but for a man who had been dead for hundreds if not thousands of years, he was remarkably well preserved. I could even see a bit of stubble across his jaw. Antipater had told me that Egyptian mummification was a sophisticated process, but this specimen was extraordinary.
Seeing our stunned reaction, Kemsa raised an eyebrow and walked over to join us. When he saw the body in the sarcophagus, he stopped short. By the flickering light I saw his face turn ashen. His eyes grew wide and his jaw hung open. His amazement appeared so extreme, I thought he must be playacting—until he emitted a shriek and tumbled backward in a faint, dropping his torch on the floor.
While Antipater tended to him, I returned my attention to the body in the sarcophagus, and I saw what had made Kemsa shriek.
The mummy had opened its eyes.
The mummy blinked. Then, staring upward into the darkness, the mummy spoke in a hoarse whisper. “Am I still alive? Or am I dead? Where am I? The priest of Isis promised that a savior would come to me!”
My heart pounded in my chest. My head grew light. For a moment I feared that I, too, would faint. But as Antipater had pointed out, I was a Roman. Disconcerted I might be, even discombobulated, but at some level I knew there must be an explanation for what was happening. For one thing, the man in the sarcophagus spoke flawless Greek, with the local accent I had heard in Memphis. He was not Cheops.
Nor was he a mummy, I thought—then felt a quiver of doubt as he reached up and gripped my arm with a hand as cold as ice.
He stared up at me and hissed. “What is this place? And who are you?”
I swallowed hard. “My name is Gordianus. I'm a visitor from Rome. We're inside the Great Pyramid.”
He released me, then covered his face and began to sob.
“And who are you?” I said, no longer fearful, for the man in the sarcophagus now appeared more pitiful than frightening. “And what are you doing here? And how long have you been lying in the dark?”
The man ceased to sob and gradually composed himself. He sat upright in the sarcophagus. His movements were stiff. His eyes were dull and his face was drained of all expression. He appeared so lifeless that for a moment, by the uncertain light, I wondered if he might be a mummy after all.
“If you would know the story of Djal, son of Rhutin,” he said, “help me out of this accursed stone box. Lead me out of the darkness and back to the sunlight, and I will tell you everything, young visitor from Rome.”
* * * *
When we emerged from the shaft, the glare of the noonday sun was blinding. Kemsa, embarrassed by his fainting spell, cast baleful glances at the stranger, who seemed to be more blinded by the sunlight than the rest of us. As I was to learn later, the man had been inside the pyramid, in total darkness, for no less than two days.
Kemsa extinguished the torches and made ready to descend, but Antipater held me back. “We find ourselves not far from the summit of the pyramid, Gordianus. Shall we ascend to the very top?”
“But the man from the sarcophagus—”
“What do we care about him?” said Antipater in a low voice. “Yes, he gave us all a fright, but so what? If some local lunatic wishes to spend his time lying in the empty sarcophagus of Cheops, I don't see how that's our concern. We find ourselves at the Great Pyramid at midday, Gordianus, with a chance to stand on the very summit at the hour when the pyramid casts no shadow.” He raised his voice and spoke to the guide. “Kemsa, help this fellow down, and give him some water. Gordianus and I will finish the ascent.”
Looking displeased, Kemsa nonetheless did as he was told, and the two men began to descend.
“But are you up for this, Teacher?” I said. “You've exerted yourself so much already today, and the sun is so hot—”
Even as I stated my doubts, Antipater started climbing.
Grumbling at Antipater's willful nature, I followed. When I reached the top, panting for breath, my efforts were rewarded beyond my wildest expectations.
The tip of the Great Pyramid must originally have been capped in gold or some other precious metal, to judge by the remnants of pins and clamps that had fixed the metal to the rough-hewn stone beneath. That splendor was no longer to be seen—someone had looted the metal long ago—but the view was spectacular, and like no other on earth. As I slowly turned from north to south, I saw the vast green Delta, the sprawling city of Memphis, the sinuous Nile vanishing into the distance, and the rugged mountains of Arabia beyond. Below us, the various temples and shrines on the plateau looked like models built by an architect; among them I noticed again the large, incongruous sand dune we had passed on our way. To the southeast, I gazed upon the Great Pyramid's rival; its peak was clearly below our level, but it was still enormous. Turning to the west, I beheld the fearful beauty of the Libyan wilderness, a trackless waste of jagged mountains and gorges.
I had thought no view could match those from the Mausoleum in Halicarnassus or the Ziggurat in Babylon, but to stand atop the Great Pyramid is truly to look down upon the world as the gods must see it.
The desert wind whistled in my ears and dried the sweat from my brow. For a long while Antipater and I crouched in that timeless spot, taking in the view. Eventually, gazing down at the foot of the pyramid, I saw our guide and the stranger from the sarcophagus sitting in the shade cast by the camels and sipping water from one of the skins the guide had brought.
“I'm thirsty,” I said.
The climb down was trickier than the climb up. We proceeded with caution, taking our time. At any moment, I feared that Antipater might lose his grip and take a terrible tumble—but it was I who made a careless move near the bottom and found myself sliding out of control down the last fifty feet, landing in a pile of sand at the bottom, unharmed but quite embarrassed.
Kemsa allowed me only sips of water, saying it was dangerous to swallow too much too quickly. To take our midday meal, he suggested we retire to a nearby temple. With the stranger mounted behind Kemsa, we rode our camels to the smallest of the three pyramids. Beyond it, we came upon three much smaller tombs, also pyramidal in shape but built in steps, which I had not noticed before.
“How many pyramids are there in Egypt?” I said.
“There are many, many pyramids,” said Kemsa, “perhaps hundreds of them, not only here on the plateau, but all along the Nile. Most are very small in comparison to the Great Pyramid.”
Before one of these minor pyramids stood a small but beautiful temple dedicated to Isis. Brightly painted columns shaped like stalks of papyrus flanked the entrance. Normally there would have been worshipers in attendance, Kemsa explained, but on this day everyone was at the festival in Memphis. Sitting on the steps of the temple in the shade, we took our meal of flatbread, wild celery, and pomegranates.
Rel
uctantly, the man from the pyramid accepted a bit of our food.
Antipater paid him little attention, but I was curious. “You say your name is Djal?”
The man nodded.
“How long were you in there?”
Djal frowned. “I have no way of knowing. I entered on the seventh day of the month of Payni—”
“But that's two days ago!” said Kemsa, giving him a dubious look.
“You've been in there all this time?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Did you have any light?”
“I had a torch when I entered. But it soon burned out.”
“Did you have food or water?”
“None.”
“What did you do?”
“I lay in the sarcophagus, as the priest—a priest from this very temple—instructed me to do, and I awaited the coming of the one who would save me. I thought perhaps Anubis would appear with a message from the gods, or one of my ancestors from the Land of the Dead—maybe even the ka of my poor father! But no one came. I lay in the darkness, waiting, sometimes awake, sometimes asleep, until finally I could not tell if I woke or slept, or even if I was still alive. And no one came. Oh, what a fool I've been!” He began to weep again—or rather, to go through the motions of weeping, for I think there was not enough moisture in him to produce tears.
“You promised to tell us your story,” I said quietly, thinking to calm him.
He nibbled a bit of bread and took a few sips of water. “Very well. I am Djal, son of Rhutin. I have lived in Memphis all my life, as did my ancestors before me, going back many generations, even to the days before the Ptolemies ruled Egypt. The prosperity of my family has varied over the years, but always each son has taken care to see that his father was given the proper rites when he died, and was mummified according to the standards of the first class, never the second or third.”
EQMM, June 2012 Page 14