Everyone knows what the pyramids look like, and almost everyone is wrong about where they are. You picture them alone in an ocean of sand, and you arrive expecting to cross it. Instead you drive out through the suburbs of Giza, through traffic and apartment blocks and a fried-chicken franchise, and the greatest structures of the ancient world rise up at the end of an ordinary street, over the satellite dishes, a short walk from a bus stop. The famous desert edge everyone photographs is, on the other side of the frame, a chain-link fence with a city pressed against it.
None of which makes them any smaller. The Great Pyramid is four and a half thousand years old, the only one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world still standing, built of more than two million blocks, and for nearly four thousand years it was the tallest thing human beings had ever made. Photographs flatten it into a neat triangle. They can do nothing with the size. You walk up to the base and the blocks come up past your head, one after another after another, and you stop being a person looking at a monument and become an ant at the foot of a mountain someone built on purpose.
There are three of them on the plateau, raised for three pharaohs of the Old Kingdom: Khufu’s, the Great one; Khafre’s, a little smaller but built higher up the slope and still wearing a cap of the smooth white casing that once sheathed them all; and Menkaure’s, the runt of the family. Out past the fence, if you walk far enough onto the sand, you can line them up and take the empty-desert photograph after all. It is real. It is just not the whole truth.
The visit itself is a contact sport. From the moment you arrive there are men with camels and horses and a hundred ways to separate you from your money, the classic being the free ride that turns out not to be free once you are up and would like to come down. Buy your ticket only at the official gate. As of last year the plateau works differently: private cars are kept out, and electric shuttles run between the pyramids and the Sphinx, which is a small mercy. Go at opening, at seven, before the heat and the crowds and the worst of the sellers, and if you mean to go inside the Great Pyramid, know that only a hundred and fifty tickets are sold a day and there is little in there but the climb.
The Sphinx sits below the pyramids, smaller than the pictures let you believe, its nose long gone and its face worn soft by four and a half thousand years of wind. It has the body of a lion and the head of a king and an expression that has outlasted empires, and it stares east into the sunrise, and also, these days, more or less straight at a Pizza Hut. Both things are true at once, and standing there trying to hold them together is a large part of the experience.
It stares east into the sunrise, and, these days, more or less straight at a Pizza Hut.
The city does not shrink the pyramids. If anything it makes them stranger: that a Wonder of the ancient world should end up hemmed in by traffic and phone masts and families who have grown up with it at the end of their street, still standing, still the largest thing for miles, entirely unbothered. Come at dawn, or stay for the sound-and-light show after dark, take the hustle in your stride, and walk right up to the base and let yourself feel small. The pyramids never needed the desert. They have outlasted everything else, including the idea that they were ever alone.
