Monday 23 May 2016

8


Since I was old enough to travel on my own, I would take the train from Woking to Waterloo and make straight for the British Museum. Once there, I would make straight for the Egyptian section, striding past many thousands more years of history on my way.

Once in the Egyptian section, I would stare and stare and stare, at the same time soaking up the essence of the place with my nose - living in and breathing up the Victorian atmosphere of ancient Egyptian archeology. I could smell the 3000 year-old resins.

It was fairground showmen who first brought the romantic notion of Egypt back to the foggy London of Sherlock Holmes, when they returned with genuine artefacts bought from the real grave-robbers for a few shillings.

I would visit The Joke Shop in Tottenham Court Road and come home with a plastic mummy which - with the artless flick of a hidden magnet - refused to lie peacefully in its sarcophagus.

Back in Woking, I would go to the cinema to watch Boris Karloff - his bulging muscles wrapped in pre-stained cotton strips - pick up a victim with one hand, when I knew that real mummies were so light that even at that age I could pick one up with one hand myself.

I joined the Theosophical Society in case they could let me in on any secrets. They couldn't, of course, so the mystery deepened and my delusions thankfully remained intact.

As with most things, I was a little late in catching up with the craze for all things Egyptian, but even that had its advantages - looking back on the 1920s obsession for Egyptiana was double nostalgia.

Sets of cups and saucers with pyramids, palms and camels; door-knockers in Pharoe-mask form; alabaster jackals with meaningless glyphs set on mantlepieces; writing desks when people still wrote; Hollywood thrillers in black and white - two elderly men with moustaches doing a sand-dance on the pavement for a queue of theatre-goers...

I bought a book called The Secrets of the Great Pyramid, which was a compilation of the hundreds of theories, facts and fallacies attached to the massive structure on the Giza plateaux - some based on science, some based on pure nonsense. I liked both. Here's one fact: The Great Pyramid of Cheops alone contains more stone than all the religious buildings of Europe put together. How? Because it is solid. Nonsensical theories tend to bounce off something as large as this, causing it no harm at all.

I had to get it out of my system, so I made the trip to Egypt (via Athens) on my own, aged about 28. I was not disappointed and it never left my system. Not the romance, not the science, and not the notion of the foggy London of Sherlock Holmes. Why would I deliberately diminish my enjoyment of life by not escaping reality now and then?

Catching the right bus from central Cairo to the pyramids of Giza is easy. The bus starts from outside the university and is number 888. The number 'Eight' in Arabic is an equilateral  triangle, and three together read the same way from one side or the other. The bus has a little row of pyramids for the number.

You can only get a rough idea of how huge the Great Pyramid is from a distance of several miles. When you stand directly beneath it, its shape naturally diminishes as it rises, without the usual effects of fore-shortening. I have heard some fools who have visited it say how disappointingly small it is. I rode a horse out as far into the Sahara as Saqarah (during a rare and torrential thunderstorm) before turning round a looking again. It seemed to blot out half the horizon.

There is a great hall which rises to the King's Chamber (used for hoisting blocks the size of steam-trains, then later - before it was capped-off - as a telescope for a few years) and although it takes about fifteen minutes and a lot of sweating to climb, looks like a line drawn with a map-pen when depicted on a scaled drawing.

The King's Chamber is vast, and when I was there it was illuminated by one low-watt bulb hanging high on the ceiling. This too looks like a comparative speck on a drawing. You can sense the vast tonnage of stone all around you. It effects the very magnetism of the Earth.

I refused to leave with the group of tourists when asked to by the unofficial guide - "You must!" "I won't!" - so I listened to them huffing and puffing for a quarter of an hour on the way down, then was left alone for a half hour in utter silence.

I wandered around the chamber, and I climbed in to the 10-foot stone box (not a sarcophagus, but a unit of volume which relates to the very building-blocks of the universe) and I lay down and closed my eyes, hoping for the visitations that Napoleon had hinted at when he was left alone in the King's Chamber, but they never came.

Then the distant sounds of elderly Americans struggling to climb a 45 degree slope in the heat began to drift up, and I knew I would not be alone for much longer.

I am really glad that I never got Egypt out of my system.

29 comments:

  1. Let's see ISIS try to blow this one up.

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  2. Interesting. I have always been fascinated by Cairo, as opposed to Egypt as a whole, and not from the same perspective as yourself but from a geographical and historical view of how such a vast city started from nothing and grew to what it is today and all its people. I have yet to visit though.

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    1. It is busy. A very old woman actually helped me to cross the road outside the Ramses railway station. I would still be standing there now if it were not for her.

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  3. I was in the Britsih museum two days ago..my first visit
    And not my last

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    1. It has changed a lot since I was a kid. I preferred the old version with dusty cases and things lying randomly about. It's still good though.

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  4. Funny that you should write about this today Tom ..... we watched ' Egypt Unwrapped ......Secrets of the Valley of the Kings ' last night, all about why the Pharaohs stopped building in the Valley after 500
    years. It's repeated tonight on Channel 5 +24 or you'll get it on catch up or Demand 5..... Fascinating. XXXX

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    1. That sounds good. They are in the process of breaking through a wall in Tutankhamun's tomb to find - they hope - Nefertiti's. It's like the 1920s! I went down there, never suspecting there was more undiscovered stuff!

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  5. Thanks for that. I'm a glutton for these kinds of ancient mysteries. When I was young I used to read von Daniken. If I'm not mistaken he's still doing his thing.

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    1. Von Daniken was disgraced for manipulating photos to suit his own money-spinning theories years ago, but I daresay that there are some people who still go along with it. There are hundreds of people out there who firmly believe that the con-trails from airplanes are the 'government' spreading mind-altering chemicals, and most of them live in Glastonbury.

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    2. In Czech it is said that conversations on mobile phones can be by tuning in to chem-trails which are supposed to contain some reflective material and that's what's actually going on. It's daft enough to be true.

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    3. I missed out 'overheard'.

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    4. Tom, do you remember the Chernobyl Woodpecker? It was a damn nuisance on my radio every night when I was trying to get Radio Luxembourg.

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    5. You need a holiday. I suggest Glastonbury.

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    6. Mmm . . . be safer there than Cairo?

      ps - If you or any of your readers are not aware of the role of the Chernobyl Woodpecker in the Cold War I would recommend a quick google.

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  6. When I was six or seven while staying with the grandparents, Nanna took me to see what might have been an Abbot & Costello film - Meet the Mummy. We left the pictures well before the end and I was for some years very scared of the dark. I still don't like things wrapped up in bandages and have no inclination to see any mummies or tombs where they might have been placed.

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    1. My only fridge-magnet is an Egyptian mummy that looks like Boris Karloff. I bought it on my last trip to the British Museum. Weaver doesn't like it either.

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  7. I am glad too Tom because that is as interesting an account as I have ever read about it.

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    1. I used to be obsessive about it - like I can be with other things!

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  8. Have you been back to Cairo? or Egypt in general? do you think you will return? I would find it too claustrophobic for me inside one of the pyramids...but how wonderful to see and touch one.

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    1. No, I haven't been back and I wouldn't want to right now. I was attacked by 2 Moslem fundamentalists and picked up by the Secret Police even then, all those years ago. I did worry that the guides would lock me in for the night, but that might have been quite exciting - so long as they left the light on!

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  9. I have been to Egypt many years ago, and reading your post made me remember some things. I used to have a picture that I had taken of a former boyfriend standing in the 10-foot stone box. A lot of tourists probably stood in it - but to lay down in it with nobody else around? Now that's a cool idea and an experience quite unique!

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    1. The only other person I know who did was Napoleon, and I would like to leave it at that.

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  10. I think I frightened Nick away by my rudeness. Oh well, if he can't take a joke...

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    1. This is like a cliffhanger in reverse. Now I would have to trawl backwards to find the rudeness. I did not know that one had occurred. Or maybe, Nick is just on a cruise like Weaver was. So, Nick, you better cough up a postcard from the Mediterranean or there will be serious trouble in the hood.

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    2. I went back to read the fun, but you deleted the posts darn

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    3. It was all fairly harmless. He told me - a devout smoker - that he once tried a cigarette and found it horrid, and I said 'Did you? How fucking interesting'.

      I'm now getting it in the neck from Rachel, who I suspect to be in her cups.

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  11. I liked reading about your Egyptian visit and pyramid experiences. I will now always remember the 888 bus.
    The British Museum is a wonderful place, as is The Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York. The Met has a great Egyptian collection, most of which was also brought back from expeditions long ago. Howard Carter and Lord Carnavon were involved.
    One of the jobs I had at the Met back in the 1970s allowed me access to lots of photographs from those early Egyptian digs. Quite amazing and romantic indeed.
    Best wishes.

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    1. Yes, I have visited the Met in N.Y. - especially the Egyptian section! They even went so far as to bring back an entire stone temple and build it inside. Shame all that stuff has been spread around the world, but with 'people' like ISIS around, it may be in safer hands.

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    2. They shifted a massive temple complex in Aswan to stop it from being flooded when the dam was filled, didn't they?

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