Just then a group of young men on horseback thunders past, glossy black tails streaming out behind the horses as they gallop. A younger boy—maybe twelve or thirteen—runs after them with a riding crop in his hand, cracking it as hard as he can against the last horse’s rump until the horses outpace him and he falls behind, laughing.
“If you would like to ride,” Mr. Elhadad says. “Look for horses or camels that appear to be healthy and without sores. Your guide can make arrangements.”
Simply walking to the ticket building is a gauntlet of pressure pitches. On both sides of us are tables filled with trinkets: pyramid-shaped paperweights, gold-plated pharaoh busts, and head scarves so tourists can look like Bedouins. Men offer us bottled water, boys offer to take our picture. They are relentless.
“For free,” one man says, attempting to stuff a kaffiyeh into my hand, even though I am already wearing a baseball cap to keep the sun from incinerating my face. I curl my fingers into a tight fist so he can’t make me take the scarf. “For a beautiful lady.”
The thing is, even though I know it’s not actually free, I still want the scarf in the same way I wanted a sand dollar painted with a tacky-looking sunset when I was five in Florida, or the Niagara Falls snow globe when I was eleven. Except I am afraid that to even talk to this man, let alone try to haggle with him, will open the floodgates to every other tout on the Giza Plateau. I shake my head and keep walking.
Our tour guide, wearing a KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD T-shirt, is waiting for us just outside the ticket building. “I’m Tarek Kamar,” he says, his accent as American as mine as he shakes hands with both Mom and me. “Welcome to Egypt.”
As we walk through the scorching heat, Tarek explains that he is an Egyptian American, born and raised in Detroit, studying at the American University in Cairo. “My grandparents live here, so I’m staying with them while I work on my Egyptology degree.”
“How do you like it?” Mom asks.
“I love it now, but at first I was kind of overwhelmed,” Tarek says. “I mean, Detroit’s a big, dirty city, but not this big and not this dirty. And back home, without a mosque on every other street corner, it’s pretty easy to skip out on prayer time.”
“And now?”
He gives a small, embarrassed laugh. “I’m still pretty slack and my grandma is none too happy about that.”
Tarek begins his tour, explaining that the pyramids are part of a vast complex of temples, causeways, and tombs of ancient wives and Egyptian nobles, as well as cemeteries where the people who built the pyramids were buried. I didn’t have any of those things in my elementary school diorama. “So the three largest—the ones everyone thinks of when they think of the pyramids—are Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure, all of whom were pharaohs during the fourth dynasty, around 2500 BC. The interesting thing . . .”
The trinket vendors fall away as we focus our attention on our guide, who tells us how the three largest pyramids align with the stars of the constellation Orion, which scholars believe was deliberate because Orion was associated with Osiris, the Egyptian god of rebirth and the afterlife; how more than two million stones were used to build Khufu, the Great Pyramid; and how the surface of the pyramids were once covered with polished white limestone that made them shine. The walk is long, just like Mr. Elhadad said, but Tarek fills the time with so many interesting facts.
“Whoa.” The word whooshes out of me as we reach the base of the Great Pyramid. If it was breathtaking from a distance, it is mind-blowing up close. I lean back to look at the top. From this angle, it appears to go on forever, and the passing clouds make it seem as if it could topple over on us, even though centuries of existence say otherwise.
“We can go inside if you want,” Tarek says. “It’s basically a very narrow and hot passageway to the main chamber. I’ve taken people who think it’s an Indiana Jones experience not to be missed, while others wished they’d saved their money. Your mileage may vary, but this time of year it will be superhot. Honestly, as cheesy as it seems, riding a camel over to the Sphinx is a lot more fun.”
“I’m not sure I like how the animals are treated around here,” Mom says.
“There are some pretty shady operations,” he says. “Desperate circumstances make people do desperate things for money, but I found a guy I trust and we worked out a deal. I bring my business solely to him, he gives me a fair price, and no hassles over taking pictures.”
Mom looks at me. “What do you think?”
Which is how I end up on the back of a camel named Sylvester Stallone.
CHAPTER 11
I was about nine or ten—and going through a horse-crazy phase—when Dad took me to a riding stable a few times. Riding a camel is nothing at all like being on horseback. First, the saddle is wider and longer with no stirrups, so I hang on for dear life, trying not to fall off the camel’s back as he lifts up on his spindly legs. Second, the camel walks with an uneven, bumpy gait that makes it hard to predict which direction the next step might jolt me.
But as the camels caravan their way through the desert in a straight line, I finally relax enough to ease my grip on the saddle and take pictures of the pyramids, Amjad the camel man, and my mother, bumping along on a camel called Marilyn Monroe. Total tourist. I snap a shot of Sylvester Stallone’s sand-colored ears and, after we dismount at the Sphinx, take a photo of his grumpy camel face with gnarly teeth almost smiling at me—or trying to bite me. It’s hard to tell for sure.
“So what did you think about the camels?” Tarek asks, leading us to the Sphinx. Like the pyramids, I didn’t realize just how massive the statue was until now, as I find myself dwarfed by one of the enormous paws.
“It was pretty fun,” I say, positioning myself next to Mom so Tarek can take our picture. “But I do kind of wonder what it would have been like to go inside a pyramid. Maybe I’ll do that another day.”
“Since you’re going to be here for a year, my suggestion is to wait until the heat breaks,” he says. “And then go to the Red Pyramid in Dahshūr. Same experience, fewer crowds.”
We walk around the entire statue, and Tarek explains that the most common belief among Egyptologists is that the face of the Sphinx was meant to represent Pharaoh Khafre. “Some theorize that the Sphinx was built before the pyramids in the shape of a lion and was altered to look like a pharaoh at a later date. But the layers of rock match the layers of other structures during Khafre’s reign, which suggests he was the one who built it. No one truly knows for sure, and I think we could study the plateau for another millennium and never have all the answers. It’s fun to try, though.”
Mr. Elhadad is waiting for us in the parking lot closest to the Sphinx when we finish taking pictures and say good-bye to Tarek.