TIME MACHINES AND PYRAMID SCHEME

MARCH 3, 2022 – The day arrived when I’d get to see and touch the leading Wonder of the Ancient World—the Great Pyramid of Giza—along with its timeless but smaller two partners, and for extra credit, the nearby Sphinx. As the bus carried my fellow passengers and me through the countryside south of Cairo, I recalled Professor Beam’s brilliant lectures on ancient Egypt. And here I was—aboard a time machine that would take me back nearly 4,500 years to Egypt’s Old Kingdom. I presumed that what I was about to experience would be a highlight of my Grand Odyssey.

My first, fleeting glimpse of the Pyramids was through the date palms that lined the road. As the bus sped back in time, the monuments grew skyward, increasing my already exuberant expectations . . .

. . . until . . .

The time machine reached its destination, came to an abrupt stop, and dumped its passengers at the entrance . . . the present—in the form of a giant tourist trap.

In my letter home, I described the circus-like atmosphere. “[The visitor] is surrounded by camel drivers, horse riders, trinket vendors, cold-drink sellers, picture-takers, baksheesh seekers, and phony guides.  They swarm and buzz around like a million flies, and the poor visitor—there to contemplate in solitude the awesome, solemn, mysterious monuments of the Ancient World—has barely a moment to lay eyes on the Pyramids.

“Twice I went to Giza and twice I was miserably disappointed. I even ran from the mobs and headed out into the desert a half mile or so.  Even there, a camel driver came trotting up to say, ‘Cheap ride! You student? I have student camel!’ My emphatic retort: ‘Get lost!’

“On my second attempt, I arrived at 6:00 a.m., thinking I’d see the Pyramids before anyone else came around. Was that ever a mistake! I was, of course, the first tourist of the day, but all the hawkers, vendors, touts, and bogus this, that, and the other, were there ahead of me. So, there I was—their first target of the day. Never again!”

None of the “tourist trappers” had appeared in any of Professor Beam’s slides.

Returning to Cairo disappointed, I found a degree of consolation by spending a day inside the Cairo Museum, which housed many of the items featured among Professor Beam’s slides. “[T]he most significant objects,” I wrote home, “were two trilingual steles inscribed in Greek, cuneiform, and hieroglyphics.  Combined with the Rosetta Stone, they formed a narrow passageway through which scholars could squeeze into the Ancients’ world.”

The museum in modern, bustling Cairo was a time machine more reliable than the ancient bus that had delivered me to the “Pyramid scheme.”

But holding additional promise was the Valley of the Kings near Luxor—the ancient city of Thebes—over 400 miles up the Nile from Cairo. With Simon and Julie, an agreeable couple from New Zealand I’d met at the hostel in Cairo, I took the nine-hour train trip through the “ancient” Egyptian countryside of the present.

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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson