ALL ABOUT OUR VISIT TO THE PYRAMID OF CHEOPS
During the first three days in Cairo a brilliant and original plan of
action had been outlining itself in my mind. At last I could not keep
it to myself any longer, so I told Mr. Peasley.
"Do you know what I am going to do?" I asked.
Mr. Peasley did not.
"I am going to write up the Pyramids. I am going to tell who built
them and how long it took and how many blocks of stone they contain. I
shall have myself photographed sitting on a camel and holding an
American flag. Also, I shall describe in detail the emotions that
surge within me as I stand in the shadow of the Sphinx and gaze up at
that vast and imperturbable expanse of face."
"It's a great scheme," said Mr. Peasley, "but you've been scooped.
They've been written up already."
[Illustration: "_Scooped!_"]
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, sir; the whole outfit of Pyramids has been described in a special
article by a man named Herodotus."
"How long since?"
"About 470 B.C."
He produced a guide book and proved that he was right. All the things
that I had been getting ready to say about the Pyramids had been said
by Herodotus. He had got there ahead of me--just 2376 years ahead of
me. In daily newspaper competition, when some man gets his news
twenty-four hours ahead of another one he is proud of his "beat" and is
the hero of the office for fifteen or twenty minutes. But think of
trailing along twenty-four centuries behind a Greek space writer! It
took all the starch out of me.
Mr. Peasley suggested that inasmuch as considerable time had elapsed
since the appearance of the first write-up, possibly the average reader
would have only a dim recollection of it and accept my account as brand
new stuff. But I knew better. I knew that some old subscriber, with a
complete file put away in the bureau, would rise up and draw the deadly
parallel on me. All I can safely do in regard to the Pyramids is touch
up a few points overlooked by my predecessor.
Herodotus, by the way, had quite a time in Egypt. At that time
Shepheard's Hotel was not in operation, although it must have been
under way, and no round trip tickets were being issued by Cook, so
Herodotus had to do his own booking and put up at a boarding house. In
Memphis, which is now a fragmentary suburb of Cairo, Herodotus engaged
a guide. He does not tell us what he paid, but he does give us a line
on the character of the dragoman, who was full of superfluous and
undesirable information, but who fell down when asked to divulge facts
of real importance. This proves that the breed has not changed since
500 B.C.
The guide took Herodotus out to the Pyramids and filled him up. It is
now believed that most of what Herodotus sent back was merely hearsay,
but it made good reading. The Pyramids had been standing some two
thousand years, and any information in regard to their origin could
hardly come under the head of personal recollections. Whatever
Herodotus had to say about the Pyramids is now accepted as gospel, in
spite of the fact that he never saw them until twenty centuries after
the last block of stone had been put in place and Cheops had taken
possession of the tomb chambers. Rather late for a grand opening.
When he arrived at the Great Pyramid he stepped it off and put down the
dimensions, and then he remarked to some of the natives standing around
that it must have been quite a job to build a tomb of that size. They
said yes; it had been a big contract, and as the work had been
completed only two thousand years they were enabled to go into details.
They gave Herodotus a fine lay-out of round figures. They said that
one hundred thousand men had worked on the job and that the time
required was thirty years--ten years to build the road and the huge
incline for bringing the blocks of stone into place, and then twenty
years to quarry the stone and transport it across the Nile and the
valley. The stone cutters worked all the year, and during the three
months' inundation, when farming was at a standstill, the entire rural
population turned out, just as they would at a husking bee or a barn
raising, and helped Cheops with his tomb. They did this year after
year for thirty years, until they had piled up 2,300,000 blocks of
stone, each containing forty cubic feet.
Herodotus discovered some large hieroglyphics on the face of the
Pyramid and asked the guide for a translation. It is now supposed that
the guide could not read. Anyone with education or social standing
wouldn't have been a guide, even in that remote period. But this guide
wanted to appear to be earning his salary and be justified in demanding
a tip, so he said that the inscription told how much garlic and onions
the labourers had consumed while at work on the job, and just how much
these had cost. Herodotus put it all down in his notebook without
batting an eye.
[Illustration: _Herodotus put it all down--without batting an eye_]
"How much did they spend for onions and garlic?" he asked, poising his
pencil.
The guide waited for a moment, so that his imagination could get a
running start, and then he replied, "They cost 1600 talents of silver."
Now, that sum in talents is equivalent, under modern computation, to
350,000 English pounds, or $1,750,000. Think of a million dollars'
worth of garlic! Try to imagine the bouquet that permeated the desert
when one hundred thousand men who had been eating garlic began to call
for more bricks and mortar!
Herodotus told his story and got away with it. By the time the next
letter-writing traveller came along, a good many centuries later, the
outer casing of the Pyramid had been stripped off and the inscription
had disappeared. His story has stood because he was here ahead of the
rest of us and saw the marks with his own eyes and had them translated
by a ten-cent guide. But can you believe that a great monarch would
devote thirty years and sacrifice thousands of lives and work the whole
male population of his kingdom to skin and bones putting up a colossal
sepulchre and then set aside the most valuable space on this glorious
monument for telling how much onions and garlic had been fed to the
help?
Marco Polo, Mark Twain, and all the other great travellers of history
love to tell tall ones once in a while, but the garlic story by
Herodotus will doubtless be regarded as a record performance for a long
time to come.
Cheops was possibly the most successful contractor in history. It is
estimated that he really did work one hundred thousand men in the
building of the great Pyramid, as related by Herodotus, and that he
must have devoted at least thirty years to the big undertaking. During
all that time he never had a strike or even a clash with the walking
delegate. The eight hour day was unknown, and no one dreamed of such a
thing as an arbitration committee. All he had to do was to give orders
and the entire population obeyed him. Everybody worked but Cheops. He
didn't even pay salaries. It is true that in a spirit of generosity he
set out a free lunch for the labourers--about $2,000,000 worth of
garlic and onions. If he had tried to feed them on quail probably he
would have gone broke.
Nowadays visitors go out to the Pyramids by tramcar. For some reason
we had the notion, doubtless shared by many who have not been there,
that to get to the Pyramids one simply rides through Cairo and out onto
the flat desert. As a matter of fact, the Great Pyramid at Ghizeh, its
two smaller companions and the Sphinx are on a rocky plateau five miles
to the west of the city. There is a bee-line road across the lowlands.
It is a wide and graded thoroughfare, set with acacia trees, and as you
ride out by trolley or carriage you look up at the Pyramids, and when
you are still three miles away they seem to be at least a half-mile
distant. At the end of the avenue and at the foot of the hill there is
a hotel, and from this point one may climb or else charter a dumb
animal.
Not knowing the ropes, we engaged a carriage at 100 piastres to take us
from the city out to the plateau. This is not as much as it sounds,
but it is about twice the usual rate. After we struck the long road
leading across the valley and saw the trolley cars gliding by and
leaving us far behind, we decided to send the carriage back to the city
and take to the trolley, where we would feel at home. The driver
informed us that he could not return to the city, as the big bridge had
been opened to permit the passing of boats, and that it would be three
hours before he could drive back to town. It seems that he was right.
The big bridge swings open but once a day, and then it stays open for a
few hours, and the man who finds himself "bridged" must either swim or
engage a boat.
It is a five minutes' climb from the end of the drive up to the rocky
plateau on which the pyramids are perched, and the ordinary tourist
goes afoot. But we were pining for Oriental extravagance and new
sensations, so we engaged camels. The camel allotted to me was
destitute of hair, and when first discovered was in a comatose
condition. His or her name was Zenobia, and the brunette in charge
said that its age was either six or sixty. It sounded more like "six,"
but the general appearance of the animal seemed to back up the "sixty"
theory. As we approached, Zenobia opened one eye and took a hard look
at the party, and then made a low wailing sound which doubtless meant
"More trouble for me." The venerable animal creaked at every joint as
it slowly rose into the air on the instalment plan, a foot or two at a
time.
We had come thousands of miles to see the Pyramids, and for the next
ten minutes we were so busy hanging on to those undulating ships of the
desert that we overlooked even the big Pyramid, which was spread out
before us 750 feet wide and 450 feet high. Riding a camel is like
sitting on a high trestle that is giving way at the joints and is about
to collapse. The distance to the ground is probably ten feet, but you
seem to be fifty feet in the air. As soon as we could escape from the
camels we walked around and gazed in solemn silence at the Sphinx and
the three Pyramids and doubtless thought all of the things that were
appropriate to the time and place.
The great Pyramid of Cheops has been advertised so extensively that
doubtless many people will be surprised to learn that there is a whole
flock of Pyramids on this plateau along the edge of the Libyan desert.
There are Pyramids to the north and Pyramids to the south, five groups
in all, sixty of them, and they vary in size from a stingy little mound
looking like an extinct lime kiln up to the behemoth specimen which is
photographed by every Cook tourist.
Why do these Pyramids vary so greatly in size? Each was built by some
royal personage as an enduring monument to his administration and the
last resting place of his remains. The most eminent students of
Egyptology now agree that the size of each of these Pyramids is a fair
measure of the length of each king's reign. The reason that Cheops has
the biggest Pyramid is that he held office longer than the others.
When a king mounted the throne, if he was feeling rugged and was what
an insurance company would call a "preferred risk" he would block out
the foundation of a Pyramid tomb that would require, say, ten years for
the building. If, at the end of ten years, he was still feeling in
good physical condition and confident of lasting a while longer he
would widen the foundations and put on additional layers up to the
summit. Labor was free and materials were cheap, and he kept everybody
working on his tomb as long as he lived. Finally, when the court
physicians began to warn him that his time was limited, he would begin
putting on the outer coating of dressed stone and arrange for the
inscriptions. The ruler who lasted only three or four years was buried
in a squatty little Pyramid, which soon became hidden under the
drifting sands of the desert. Cheops kept piling up the huge blocks
for thirty years, and that is why his Pyramid holds the record. If
Methusaleh had been a Pyramid builder he would have been compelled to
put up a tomb probably a mile and a half high and about eleven miles
around the base. In a revolutionary South American republic the ruler
would probably get no further than laying the corner stone.
We visited the pyramids. Also, we looked at the golf links, staked out
across the barren sands--not to be played on, but merely to be featured
in the hotel advertisement. Think of a golf course which is one huge
hazard! Drive the ball in any direction and you can't play out of the
sand! Forty centuries gazing down on a bow-legged tourist in fuzzy
Scotch stockings!
Most of the pleasure seekers that we encountered in the neighbourhood
of the Pyramids seemed to be quite elderly--some of the more sprightly
as young as sixty, and from that going up to where it would be better
to stop guessing. Mr. Peasley gave an explanation of their presence.
He said that the dry climate of Egypt would preserve antiquities for an
indefinite period.
Here they were, these male and female octogenarians, not propped up in
arm chairs dividing the family silverware and arranging bequests to
hospitals and libraries, but out on the blinding desert, thousands of
miles from home, falling off donkeys, climbing up on camels, devouring
guide books, rummaging around for time tables, kicking on the charges,
and leading on the whole a life of purple strenuosity. We heard of two
English women, sisters, both over seventy, who had just returned from
Khartoum, from which point they had gone on a hunting expedition still
further into the interior. They had to wear mosquito bags and
semi-male attire, and were out in the wild country for days at a time,
chasing gazelles, hyenas, and other indigenous fauna.
Just as I am about to conclude this treatise it occurs to me that,
although I have given a wealth of useful information regarding the
Pyramids, I have rather overlooked our old friend the Sphinx. I can
only say in passing that it looks exactly like the printed
advertisements. There is no deception about it. It is in a bad state
of repair, but this is not surprising when we consider its age.
Herodotus does not mention the Sphinx. It was right there at the time.
In fact, it had been there fourteen hundred years when he first
arrived. It seems strange that an observing traveller should have
overlooked a monument sixty-six feet high, with a face nearly fourteen
feet wide, a nose five feet and seven inches long, and wearing a smile
that measures over seven feet! Herodotus either walked by without
seeing it or else he did not think it worthy of mention. The only
plausible explanation is that he was too busy figuring up the garlic
statistics.
ON THE NILE