Pictures of the Places We Couldn't Take Pictures (Pt. 4)

The final installment of this four-part feature, "Pictures of the Places We Couldn't Take Pictures," on our recent trip to Jordan, Israel, and Egypt, is found in Giza, near Cairo.

WIth my friend Chris, I had the joy of actually entering into one of the Giza pyramids, the Khafre pyramid, second-largest of the three (and located between the other two). We entered through the lower entrance on the diagram below:

Initially, the lovely Robin and Chris's mom Sandy were with us, but almost immediately upon entering the passageway shown below, it was apparent that the tight confines, which necessitated either schooching on one's rear end or walking while bent double, would have resulted in injury to backs and psyches:

After a long and increasingly stuffy journey down, then level, then up again, we arrived in the burial chamber at the pyramid's center. The first pic, below, is the view looking back down the way we came:

With the exception of its ceiling, the burial chamber was excavated completely out of the rock. Located over the pyramid's base, the burial chamber's gabled ceiling is built from enormous pented, limestone blocks.

Near the west wall of the burial chamber, almost directly under the vertical axis of the pyramid and situated within a niche stands the black granite sarcophagus of the king that originally was surmounted by a sliding lid. The lid was found in two pieces close by.

Though there wasn't much to see once we got to the burial chamber, it was immensely satisfying (and instructional) to have actually walked to and stood in the center of the ancient structure.

No comments:

Post a Comment