Giza

“Avoid eye contact,” our guide advised us, “if you don’t want to buy anything.” He was referring to vendors on the Giza Plateau, site of two of the world's most famous ancient monuments, the Great Sphinx and the Great Pyramid of Giza.  These were within walking distance of our hotel – indeed, we could see the Great Pyramid through our hotel window -  but we traveled there by bus. This made it easier for our guide to keep all twelve of us together and it was probably quicker too.  Besides, we would suffer less exposure to the city's smog-fouled air.

Giza, the third largest city in Egypt, sits on the west bank of the Nile, across from its larger and older twin, Cairo. I had imagined that the monuments we were going to see lie far into the desert, and I suppose that this was once the case, but in fact urban sprawl has surrounded them.  A Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet stands about 300 yards from the Great Sphinx.  When we stepped down from the bus, vendors  immediately assaulted us, offering to sell us postcards, glossy guides to the site, and various inexpensive souvenirs such as necklaces, scarabs, and miniature pyramids.

The vendors were extremely aggressive, waving their merchandise in your face, some going so far as to press against you, trying to put into your hand a “gift.”  I never looked at the so-called gifts, so I don’t know what they were, only that I didn’t want them.  Some vendors were so insistent that I had to turn around and walk in the other direction.  Finally, I realized that avoiding eye contact was insufficiently discouraging.  In addition, I shook my head, which in most cases warned them off.  Perhaps their aggressiveness was a sign of desperation.  Tourism had fallen off drastically and the crowds of tourists normally found at the site had disappeared.  On the other hand, a greater supply of tourists might have called forth more vendors.

The Great Pyramid, built by the fourth dynasty pharaoh Khufu or Cheops (2589-2566 BCE), was the tallest building in the world before the construction of the Eiffel Tower.  It’s composed of 2.3 million blocks, whose average weight is 2.5 tons.  Its size is astonishing, considering the primitive tools – bronze, not iron - that fashioned it.   Its age was brought home to me when my wife told me that the amount of time separating us from Herodotus, who visited the site, was about the same as the amount of time separating him from the pyramid’s construction.  It’s been a tourist site for thousands of years, and no doubt there were vendors and touts to pester Herodotus. 

When you look at the pyramid, you see a massive triangle, soaring up to its apex from its base.  Our guide told us that the pyramid’s four bases were almost identical in length.  This information required some mental rearrangements, since I had thought that the base of a pyramid was a triangle rather than a square.  This would, of course, be impossible, but the idea had been lodged in my brain ever since I saw a photo of a pyramid, which goes to show that my consistently low high school scores on tests of spatial relations were entirely justified.  I had to discard another long-held notion, namely, that slaves, subjected to the lash, built the pyramids.  Our guide told us that a workers’ village, recently excavated near the site of the Great Pyramid, included a bakery, a brewery, and a clinic.  A permanent corps of about 10,000 workers was supplemented by, if I recall correctly, by about another 70,000.

My wife, intrepid as usual, climbed several of the pyramid’s courses, and she might have continued climbing to the top, a dangerous enterprise, were it still permitted.  She had to satisfy herself by looking down at me from a lower height, while I stood as squarely as I could on terra firma.  In fact, even the terra didn’t seem so firma to me, so I declined the opportunity to join her on an upper level.  It was the first of many times during our tour that I felt old.  Indeed, I was the oldest person in our group. 

That night, we attended a Sound and Light Show directly in front of the Great Sphinx, with the Great Pyramid and two lesser pyramids behind it.  Our guide warned us to dress warmly, for the desert air, even in summer, can be cold at night.  I wore as many layers as I could, including silk long underwear, but I shivered throughout the 45-minute performance.  To allow workers to get to the polls, which closed at 7:00 pm, the show began a half hour late, so we sat in the cold even longer than necessary.  The show was unimaginably hokey and entirely too long.  I tried to sleep, but I was too cold.  As one of our fellow travelers commented, the show presented the history of Egypt and made us feel as if we had lived through all of it.  But hey, we sat shivering while the polls were still open, during the country's first fair and free election.   Even the Great Sphinx had seen nothing like that.


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