Now, after spending some time giving an overview of daily life - finding a place to live, what to eat, and how to get around - it's time to embark on my first adventure outside Cairo.
CASA began the summer session of the program in mid-June, which consisted of three classes: Modern Standard Arabic and colloquial which were held Monday through Thursday (remember weekends are Fri-Sat, not Sat-Sun) and a cultural class that met on Sundays to go on field trips. Normally, the program took students to various popular touristy sights, but they decided this year to take us to more out-of-the-way places, figuring that we'd probably see the big ones on our own.
So with this in mind, our first field trip was to two famous pyramids located in Dahshur: Snefaru's Bent Pyramid and Khufu's first pyramid (pictured here - his second is the Great Pyramid at Giza. We went in through the little dot in the center). The Bent Pyramid is a fabulous sight in an of itself because of the place it holds in the process of pyramid-building. As the first pyramid to be built non-step style, it demonstrates how difficult construction can be. In the beginning, the slope was too steep, and halfway up, when the builders realized the walls wouldn't hold, they had to make the slope much more gradual, giving the entire piece a bent look.
It was the next pyramid, however, that really caught my attention because we were going to go
inside. I couldn't wait. I felt as Carter himself must have felt when he first discovered Tut's tomb. As we ascended the mammoth stones to the entrance of the pyramid, I felt like some great explorer/adventurer. What I didn't realize was
how we were getting in.
Beyond the door, there is a 58m-long tunnel which leads into the antechamber. While the door itself is person-sized, the tunnel is not. It is only about 3ft high, one person wide and angled relatively steeply downward... and it is the
only way in or out, so traffic must move in both directions. Fortunately for us, there were no other tourists present, so we didn't have to deal with a two-way path. To prevent you from slipping down the tunnel, the floor is a long wooden walkway with "rungs" spaced about 1.5ft apart.
To light our path, long, slightly-dimmed fluorescent lights were placed on the floor alongside the walkway though not all were on. Only four of them, chosen at distances of about every 15m tried valiantly to illuminate the little passageway. For those who, like me, think in non-metric units, the length of the tunnel 58m is 190 feet. Our only sources of light were every 49ft. And as the tunnel was so narrow, as soon as you'd passed the light, the shadow of the person directly behind you would eclipse the glow. So, the only purpose the lights serve is to obliterate your night vision as you proceed down the long tunnel of what is essentially an elaborate tomb. I couldn't see my hand in front of my face.
After long minutes in the stifling darkness, I alighted within the antechamber which I thought smelled heavily of cleaning solution. I was duly informed that what I smelled was ammonia and it hailed from another source. Still, I was very happy to be somewhere I could stand up properly and take stock of my surroundings and there were little vents pumping air in, so I could catch my breath for a moment. I was in a small room that was about three stories high. Straight ahead, a rickety-looking wooden staircase lead almost to the ceiling where the burial chamber was located. As I made my way upstairs I wondered what the ancient Egyptians had used to pass in and out. They certainly hadn't used these stairs.
I should explain that although the pyramid looks perfectly straight from the outside, the architect had cheated. Khufu's pyramid was built as any other step pyramid, then covered with rocks to give it a smooth facade. From within the tiny burial chamber, the structure was evident in the ceiling which stepped its way up to the pinnacle. I didn't care. I was still in awe.
From within the pyramid, I could barely breathe from excitement (and heat). Temperatures in mid-June are not forgiving, even less so from within an air-tight container that had been sitting in the sun all day. I was dripping sweat from every pore in my long-sleeves and long pants (I was new to Egyptian traditions and didn't want to take a chance on t-shirts). But I was happy. Oh so happy.
Imagine my position. I had just walked down a gangplank bent over doubled and crouching in total darkness and had emerged, as if from a cocoon, 3,000 years before I'd entered. Perhaps it was my enthusiasm or the fact that this was my first pyramid, but I really felt as though I could feel activity around me. If I listened hard, I could hear the chisels of workmen and smell the paint of the artisans. I saw overseers walk around me with papyrus "clipboards" checking progress. It was an incredible experience. All this despite the fact that there were no carvings or paintings on the walls (long since removed by grave robbers) and parts of the inner chambers were filled with rubble. But none of that mattered.
I was inside a pyramid.
And when I alighted again, into the sunlight which was now incredibly painful on my seriously dilated pupils, I thought that this is what pharoahs must have imagined they would see as their souls moved in and out of their resting place: a sprawling western view over the land of Egypt.
Less than a week after my first official field trip, which took me to Dashoor, I hopped on the bus to Saqqara and Memphis. The Arabic Language Institute (ALI), under whose umbrella CASA falls, offers its own field trips to locations that sometimes overlap and other times differ from where CASA took us. Whenever they differed, I tried to make my name first on the sign-up sheet. I was determined to do as much as possible. Always. Period.
