“Ya know this place is spooky haunted, dontcha? Ya know that, Marty?? All those creepy legends and tourists dyin’ from falling rocks and stuff. And the poison! Lots of’em died of poison. Terrible. Don’t even know why I came in here!” The lady’s eyes darted around the narrow rocky passage and looked with accusation at the guy named Marty.
“Miriam, shush, please,” he said in a low voice. “It’s embarrassing.”
The couple was 10 yards ahead of us in the entrance way to the Great Pyramid in Giza, near Cairo, Egypt. She wore a silver lamay shirt, neon pink leggings, pink flip flops and sported a bouffant blond pile of hair. Miriam was like a beacon in the diminishing light of the passage that led up to the tomb chamber of Pharaoh Khufu. The other dozen or so of the visitors in the long, dimly lit passage were subdued and seemed awed by the majesty of the place.
Marty leaned down to her and said, “It’s not haunted. It’s just, well, old. And cramped. And dim. So it seems spooky.” He put an arm around her. “Ya know, that book o’ yours, HOW MARTIANS BUILT THE PYRAMIDS, ain’t the be all, and end all. It ain’t exactly the Oxford Book of History, ya know.” Marty was tall, bald and wore a Hawaiian shirt and bright orange floppy shorts, white compression socks to his knees and Nike running shoes. “Ya don’t believe all that stuff, do ya Miriam?”
“Yes I do, Marty. Yes I certainly do!”, Miriam said and pouted. I’ve read all about it. And seen the movies. You know I’m right Marty, you know it!’ He smiled back at her. Miriam tapped the book in her hand, “This says, the bottom of the Great Pyramid is like 10 football fields big. Ya hearin’ me, Marty? Huh?” He nodded. “10! And it’s like 45 stories tall! Nothin’ like this nowhere could have been built back then, like, before the Pilgrims or somethin’, even before the Romans maybe! Humans just couldn’ta done it!”
“Miriam, believe me, the Egyptians built it. They were like geniuses with this stuff. I’ll prove it to ya!”, Marty said. He explained the ancient Egyptians’ advanced mathematics, how the workers dragged the big blocks up mud ramps, put the blocks in place and covered the whole thing with polished granite. It was a pretty impressive explanation.
“I don’t know, Marty. I gotta see more, I guess,” Miriam said.
My group was so entertained by Marty and Miriam that we followed them along the entire passageway. They were like listening to the Bickersons with a New Jersey accent, or Gracie Allen and George Burns.
We followed the pair as the hallway gave way to an even narrower passage and the way up grew dimmer, the air closer. I ran my fingers along the stone walls just as the builders had done 4500 years ago and touched the same creases and bumps. To give Miriam and her book a little credit, the Great Pyramid is so huge and complex, it’s hard to imagine the ancients had built it, in fact, that anyone could have built it. And the size information in the book was correct. But a little truth can cover up a lot of lies.
“Marty, Marty, wait up,” I heard Miriam say. “If you’re right and some guy named Koo-Foo built this for his tomb,” she shuddered, “that means it’s one huge tombstone. So we’re walkin’ in a cemetery! I told ya it was haunted!” Miriam bent to pull a pink flip flop back on and put a hand on the stone wall to steady herself as she stood. She brushed her finger tips back and forth over the uneven ancient surface, then didn’t move for several seconds, letting her fingers rest on the stone. “And ya say it was built 2500 years before Christ? Holy Moses. Like in reverse time. It could all collapse, Marty, ya know, like crush us in a second.” She glanced up at the ceiling and shrank back.
Miriam’s fear wasn’t unreasonable. We were deep inside a 5000 year old structure, in a narrow, claustrophobic, dimly lit, cave-like hallway which was inside a pyramid made of 2,300,000 blocks. Each of those blocks weighed 6,000 pounds. Until that point, I hadn’t considered the possibility of the pyramid’s collapse. But I figured it had stood for 5 millennia so I supposed it could last a little longer. I was also sure Miriam wasn’t the first person to experience this fear.
I imagined the construction guys back then working in the heat of the Sahara Desert, in this same passageway, but with only flickering torches, not steady electric light. The heat, the heavy work and the close quarters, must have had an effect on all of them. A couple of the earlier pyramids in the Saqqara, near Memphis, had partially or totally collapsed and the workers on the Great Pyramid must have known that. This crew had to rely on the new math and construction techniques of the architects, who were not working inside the building. If the math or plan was wrong, the architects would be ok but the workers would be crushed.
Being cooped up in here, trapped in a way, was the perfect breeding ground for all sorts of fears. A typical worker, I’ll call him Karomama, is a stone mason in 2530BC, working alone in this passageway by torchlight, the heat swallowing him, his sweat dripping onto the floor, hungry and thirsty, the oxygen level low. Karomama hears a snap and glances around, expecting to see another worker. No one is there. He hears another snap, louder this time. The torch begins to gutter and die, the shadows dance on the wall and the fear of a cave-in rises in his throat. He breathes in short gasps, whirls around in panic, imagines the whole thing is going to come down on him. He backs away from his work, tingles with fear, and his blood pressure rises. He tenses his muscles and knows the pyramid is coming down and he begins to sprint toward the entrance. As he runs, he hears the passage behind him collapsing.
Karomama bursts out into the dying light, his chest heaving, his limbs trembling, gulping in fresh air. He turns to look back. No collapse. He’s safe and the structure stands. The stone is settling, says the foreman, of course you’ll get these strange noises, he explains, but Karomama is not convinced and refuses to work inside for several days. If he had stumbled through time and run into Miriam, they both would have commiserated, understanding each other’s fears.
We meandered our way ever upward on ramps and ladders, toward the chamber that had held Pharaoh Khufu’s tomb. My group was deep in conversation about the design of the place when, from somewhere up the passage, came a gasp loud.
‘Miriam,’ I said, and my group nodded. Rounding the curve, we came upon them, Marty waiting patiently, Miriam doubled over beside him. “I’m done, Marty, I can’t go any further.” Her shirt was sweat stained, she was out of breath, and bent forward with her hands on her knees. “I’m stoppin’ here!”, she said.
“Miriam, ya can’t stop here. Ya got folks behind ya. Besides, the chamber is right here, right ahead. Ya gotta see it. You’ve come this far!”, Marty said. She stood up, heaved in gulps of air, and followed him, shoulders sagging.
Ahead was a huge dark slab that almost blocked the passage except for a short crawl space underneath. In disbelief, Miriam said, “I gotta get on my hands and knees!?! Geez, Marty, what I do for you!”, but she dropped to the ground and began to crawl through.
I followed Miriam’s neon pink leggings through the low dark passage into an open space. The chamber was the size of a small chapel, tall and broad, sheathed in granite, with a waist-high stone block at one end where the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Khufu had sat 4,500 years ago. Otherwise, the room, once filled with the treasures of empire, was empty. When Khufu was first brought here, mummified and in a gold coffin, the space would have been choked with precious jewels, a throne, a chariot, golden masks and food for the afterlife. Now it held nothing but a stone plinth, robbed most likely shortly after Khufu’s death by the men who had been entrusted to guard it.
We paced about and whispered our amazement. We were standing inside the center of a 4500 year old tomb, the grandest tomb in the world. Marty and Miriam drifted away and I was taken in by the power of the space, almost hypnotized. The tomb may appear empty, but it is filled with the magic of the past and the drama of life. The hypnotic effect filled the chamber, at least until Miriam’s cockatoo voice broke the silence.
“Oh wow!,” came her whisper across the room. “Oh my gosh Marty, you were right. Those people, those Egyptians, were incredible.” She made no mention of Martians or a cave in. “It’s like being in a church,” she said. “And look. That’s where the coffin was,” and pointed to a stone block on one end of the chamber. “Sarcophogus”, Marty said in a low voice. “See Miriam, I told ya it would be worth it!”
“Marty, it’s….it’s magical. Can we stay a few minutes? I just wanna be here and feel it. Can we?” Marty nodded.
He and Miriam were still staring silently around the chamber, as my group and I got down on our hands and knees and crawled out.
