Inside the Pyramid

North Canterbury Gazette, Volume 8, Issue 36, 1 September 1938, Page 2

Inside the Pyramid

Into the Land of Egypt. . .

% H. V. Morton

XI. VOU w iU remember, if you read my last article, that I had been lying ill within a few yards of the Pyramids, watching from the balcony of my room the daily procession of tourists on camels. How exasperating it was to lie within sight of the Pyramids, and within five minutes' walk of the Sphinx, yet to be unable to go out and see them. One morning the doctor said that I could get up, but he added, "Don't attempt to go inside the Pyramids, or you may get a chill. It isn't worth it, is it?"

I agreed that it wasn't worth it; but no sooner had I walked to the great platform of sand on which the Pyramids are built, than I forgot all about the doctor, and of course I. did as you and anyone else would have done—l went inside. And I am sure it did me good.

gY this time I was on familiar terms with the Pyramids. I had been sleeping for days within a few yards of them, watching them in the glow of the early morning, in the blaze of afternoon, and in the stillness of the night. But when I actually stood beneath the great Pyramid of Kheops, it looked even larger and more improbable than any work of man's hands that I had seen in my life. There are plenty of pyramids of all shapes and sizes in Egypt. You can see them from the Mokattam Hills, near Cairo, lying far off jalong the Nile like a straggling herd of elephants. But this Pyramid' of Kheops is the largest and the most famous. Sir Flinders Petrie has estimated that it is built of 2,300,000 separate blocks of limestone of an average weight of tons each. Most of the stone was quarried On the east bank of the Nile, and had, therefore, to be ferried across the river, and drawn for miles on a causeway to the site. When it was built about 5000 years ago, it was sheeted from top to bottom in. the finest white limestone, smoothed after the blocks had been placed in position, so that the immense structure looked as if made of one. solid slab of polished stone. That was how the ancient world saw it.

The reason why the Pyramid is now a series of steep stone steps, narrowing to the summit, is because when the Arabs conquered Egypt, they stripped off the casing, and used the stone to build Cairo. The entrance to the Pyramid is about forty feet from the ground, on the North side. It was made centuries ago by treasure hunting Arabs. * \* * "WHEN you walk round the Pyramid, you notice that several similar attempts have been made to bash a way in; but this is the only successful one, because the Arabs made their tunnel immediately below the original entrance, and joined their passage with the main corridor, along which the mummy of the Pharaoh was dragged to the stone room in the middle of the Pyramid. This entrance is a big black hole in the towering mountain of stone. I climbed up to it over slabs of limestone, where one of the Arab guardians took charge of me. Baedeker's guide book, which always observes such tender care for the aged or infirm, contains this typical warning about the Pyramid: "A visit to the interior of the Great Pyramid is facilitated by modern staircases, but should be omitted by nervous or delicate persons, especially those predisposed to apoplectic or fainting fits." But Baedeker does not mention the worst thing about the Pyramid; the nauseating smell of the thousands of huge bats that live inside it. The smell of goats is attar of roses compared with the dry, hot sickening smell of bat that meets you the instant you step out of sunlight into the blackness of the entrance. I walked upright for a few paces, and then had to bend double, and crawl downward for about twenty yards. I was surprised to find that the Pyramid is lit by electricity. When an Arab turned a switch, a row of naked electric lights shone in the darkness. After twenty yards the burglars' tunnel joins the main corridor, which rises steeply into the' Pyramid, still so narrow that I had to crawl bent double. * * * JTOR a moment the Arab had stayed behind, and I moved on in the hot, smelly, semi-darkness until I came

to an obstruction, which turned out to be the back view of an English lady. She was crouched in the passage with a hand on the wall on each side, but she made no attempt to go forward, or backward. "Who is it?" she called, out, with a hint of hysteria. "Can I help you?" I said. "I can't goon," she replied. "I've got claustrophobia. I'm suffocating. I can't go forward or back/' At this point a tactless Arab, who was somewhere ahead, joined in: "Come along, lady," "he said, with exasperating affability, "I give you my hand." "Go away,~l won't touch your hand," replied the lady. "I only want to get out of this loathsome place!" I realised that there were two things to do, either to lie down and let her crawl over me, or to back out and persuade her to follow. This eventually I did; and we parted, rather flushed at the entrance, where, for some reason which I cannot explain, I was astonished to discover that she was a good-looking girl. As I crawled again into the bat reek, I thought how inartistic life can be. She should have met not me, but the man she would eventually marry. What a grand retort in the years to come to that question: "Daddy, where did you first meet mummy?" "In the mummy shaft of the Great Pyramid, my boy." The girl, had she only known it, had not more than twenty yards to crawl before the passage widens, so that you can stand upright in it. It rises straight into the heart of the Pyramid, a narrow stone tube about thirty feet in height, which looks like a shaft of a moving staircase in a tube station. The electric lights illuminate limestone walls, whose masonry is so> perfect that it is difficult to find joints in the stqnes with a finger nail. Steps and a handrail have been fixed to one side.' They offer a steep climb for another 50 yards when, once again I had to crawl on hands and knees through a stone tunnel not more than 3£ feet high. This led to a really astonishing sight—the room in the heart of the Pyramid where Kheops was buried. This mummy chamber is built of immense slabs of granite. One wall is 17 feet long; the other "is 34 feet. The roof is 19 feet high. The air is stale and hot. The reek of bats is so strong that I kept looking up, expecting to see them hanging on the corners of the walls. Although this room is 140 feet above the level of the sunlit sandhills outside, it .gives the impression of being in the depths of the earth. The Arab who had followed me in suddenly switched off the light and said with a horrid laugh: "Dark —very dark!"

It -was indeed the darkness of the grave, and joined to the darkness was the silence of death. I have never known what claustrophobia is, but I have often felt frightened in coal mines. As I thought of the way tip to this place, I was conscious of a faint feeling of panic. •JHE only object in the burial chamber is. a massive granite coffin without a lid or an inscription. The Arab swent over to it, and tapped it with his .hand. It gave out a metallic bell-like sound. This was the sarcophagus in which the Pharoah Kheops was buried 5000 years ago. • One of the remarkable things about the Pyramid is that it was built round this coffin, or rather when the structure had reached the height of the mummy chamber the coffin was duced, and then the top portion of the Pyramid was built over it. This coffin' is too big to have passed along any of the narrow ascents which lead to the mummy chamber. It could not even pass through the door. Therefore, the king's mummy must have been. hauled up the tunnels- in a light wooden sarcophagus, and introduced into the large granite sarcophagus after it had entered the burial chamber. •Herodotus tells us that it took 100,000 men, Avorking for three months every year, ton years to prepare the site, and twenty years to build the Pyramid. : >- : .-

J)UPvING this time the King must have come to see how it was getting on. He must have stood in this chamber when it was still open to the sun, with his coffin standing in the corner. He may have struck it with his hand to

hear the sweet metallic bell-like note. He may have come again when the room was closed, dark and ready. Then one day for the last time he came with a gold mask on his face to the straining of ropes and the chanting of priests. So this was the secret of the Pyramids! This was the stone prison which long ago one man had built in order that his soul might have a body to return to, believing that he would lie there secure, century after century in the hot velvet darkness in x the heart of the stone mountain. Surely Kheops could have known little about men, or did he over-estimate the awe in which he was held? Could he never imagine a time when, no longer the great dead god, he would be only a dry old mummy covered with gold, lying in the world's greatest challenge to the treasure-hunter? For the ingenuity of the architects—those narrow tunnels, blocked with granite slabs after the funeral, the single entrance-stone on a pivot known only to the priests—were all seen through within two hundred years or'so of Kheop's death. * * * "IVE shall never know who broke in thousands of years ago, and levered the lid from the great stone coffin. We shall never know who stripped the Pharaoh of the gold, and strewed his bones about the floor. But we know that centuries after his tomb had been desecrated' men continued to bash at the Great Pyramid, unable to believe that it did not still contain riches. Persians, Romans and Arabs attacked with battering rams; they tunnelled and they mined. When, gun-powder was invented they even tried to blow it up. Now and then some would enter its dark passages and creep along them with beating hearts. Instead of the piles of gold, they came to an empty coffin, dust and the twittering of the bats.