The Great Pyramid’s base was only about a quarter of a mile from the Sphinx, though the massive area it covered, the bottom of each face over 750 feet long, meant the walk needed to reach the entrance on the northern side was close to twice that. The entrance itself, where several dozen people were already waiting, was gated and watched by the Tourist Police and official guides. Access to the pyramids’ interiors was only allowed twice a day to small numbers. Even exhausted by the eleven-hour flight from New York, Nina had insisted they be there the moment the ticket office opened.
When the gate opened, some discreet but firm blocking by Eddie allowed Nina and Macy to be the first to scale the stone tiers and enter. ‘It’s steeper than it looks in pictures,’ Nina commented. The narrow, smooth-walled passage descended into the heart of the pyramid at almost a thirty-degree angle, and the ceiling was uncomfortably low.
Eddie caught up, squeezing past an annoyed tourist at the entrance. ‘Christ, it’s cramped,’ he complained. ‘Guess the pharaohs were all short-arses. So, where does this go?’
‘There’re two routes,’ said Macy. ‘If you keep going down you end up in the original burial chamber, but it’s kinda boring, there’s nothing there. They decided to use a different chamber while the pyramid was being built.’
‘Must’ve pissed off the architects,’ Eddie said, grinning. ‘I can just imagine it. “He wants to do what? But we’re already halfway finished. Fucking clients!” ’
After sixty feet the passage split, one leg continuing down while the other, its ceiling even lower, headed upwards at an equally steep angle. Though she wanted to explore the entire place, Nina opted to take Macy’s words to heart and follow the latter route. Even this early in the morning, the air in the tunnels was hot and stifling. Leg muscles protesting at the floor’s steepness, she headed up the passage, bent low.
‘So did this place have any booby traps?’ Eddie asked.
‘Booby traps? Shyeah,’ said Macy sarcastically. ‘You only get those in Tomb Raider games.’
‘Oh, ya think?’ Nina said, prompting a surprised look from the other woman. ‘You should try reading the International Journal of Archaeology rather than just magazine articles sometime.’
‘I do read the IJA!’ Macy insisted. ‘Well, the interesting bits.’
‘It’s all interesting,’ said Nina, affronted.
‘Right, like finding sixteenth-century Mongolian toothpicks compares to discovering Atlantis.’ Behind Macy, Eddie laughed, annoying Nina even more.
But her irritation vanished as she arrived at another section of the pyramid’s interior. A horizontal passage branched off the one she was ascending, but it was the continuation of the climb that caught her attention. Though little wider than the tunnel from which she had just emerged, it was far taller, almost thirty feet high. The Great Gallery was a long vaulted chamber constructed from massive limestone blocks.
‘Now this is more like it,’ said Eddie, stretching as he emerged from the passage. ‘What was it for?’
‘There’s a theory that it was part of a counterweight system to lift blocks up to the top, but . . . nobody really knows,’ Nina admitted. Like so many aspects of the pyramids, the Great Gallery’s exact purpose was a mystery. She looked down the horizontal passage. ‘That’s the Queen’s Chamber down there, right?’
‘Yeah,’ said Macy as more tourists entered, most of them opting to take a break from the climb by going along the flat corridor. ‘Although there was never a queen in there - her pyramid’s a little one outside. It’s just another boring unfinished burial chamber.’
‘Another one?’ said Eddie. ‘Christ, the architects must have been throwing down their papyruses by now.’
‘Even if it’s empty, it’s hardly boring,’ Nina objected as she continued up the steps that had been added to the Gallery. ‘The workmanship - of all of this - is amazing even by today’s standards, and they did it all with just simple tools.’
‘And loads of slaves.’
‘Nuh-uh,’ Macy countered. ‘The builders were actually all skilled craftsmen. They got paid. The slave thing’s just a lie that the pharaohs who came after Khufu, or Cheops, whatever you want to call him, spread to make themselves sound better. “Sure, we could have built an enormous pyramid too if we’d used loads of slaves,” kind of thing. Khufu wasn’t any worse than any other pharaoh.’
‘So why’d they decide to build pyramids in the first place?’ Eddie asked. ‘What’s so special about that shape?’
‘Nobody knows,’ said Nina.
‘I’m going to hear that a lot, aren’t I?’
‘It’s probably symbolic, something of religious significance, but nobody’s come to any agreement on exactly what. But it’s a shape they spent a lot of time and effort trying to perfect, even in the earliest dynasties. The pyramids back then were stepped like ziggurats, one layer on top of another, but as their engineering skills improved they started building them with smooth sides. A pharaoh called . . . Sneferu, I think?’ Nina glanced back at Macy, who nodded, pleased to be asked. ‘He built the Red Pyramid at Dahshur, which was the first “true” pyramid. It was pretty big - but the pyramid built by his son was a lot bigger. And we’re in it.’ She swept out her hands to take in the vast structure surrounding them. ‘As for why they were so determined to build pyramids . . . like I said, nobody knows.’
They reached the top of the incline, Nina pausing to recover her breath. To her mild irritation, Macy appeared completely unfazed by the climb. Another low horizontal passage led deeper into the tomb, opening into a taller chamber after just a few feet. Eddie peered inside, seeing deep grooves running up the far wall. ‘What’s this?’
‘Anti-theft device,’ said Macy.
‘Thought you said there weren’t any booby traps?’
‘It’s not really a trap. More like a vault door. They built it with three huge stone blocks hanging from the ceiling. Once Khufu was buried, they dropped the stones so tomb raiders couldn’t get in.’
They entered; the room was completely empty. ‘So where are the stones?’
‘Tomb raiders got in,’ Macy chirped. ‘They smashed the stones, then walked right into the burial chamber. It’s just through here.’ Another hunched traversal of a short stone tunnel, then . . .
The King’s Chamber. The burial vault of the pharaoh Khufu, sealed over four and a half thousand years before.
‘This is it?’ asked Eddie, disappointed. The rectangular room was almost forty feet by twenty, dominated by the remains of a large granite sarcophagus - but apart from the lidless coffin it was completely empty. Not even the walls bore any decoration. ‘I was expecting something a bit more flash.’
‘It did get Lara Crofted,’ Macy pointed out, a little condescendingly. ‘If it was like Tutankhamun’s tomb, the whole room would have been full of treasure.’ Her eyes lit up at the thought.
‘It wouldn’t all be treasure,’ Nina reminded her. ‘A lot of it would have been items for Khufu’s journey through the Underworld to be judged by Osiris - food and drink, things like that. But yeah, there would still have been plenty of treasure.’
Eddie stood aside as other tourists entered, leaning against the granite wall. He watched as Nina examined the sarcophagus, after a minute saying, ‘I don’t think he’s in there.’
‘I know that. I just don’t get many chances to see things like this in person any more, do I?’
‘You should have asked the Egyptians when you were at the IHA,’ Macy suggested. ‘They’d have probably given you a private tour.’