The Messiah Secret - James Becker [68]
Bronson looked at his watch. ‘You want to go there now?’
‘Yes, we might as well,’ Angela said, fastening her seat belt. ‘We should be able to get there and back today.’
They headed north and picked up the Salah Salem road that ran south-west towards central Cairo. The traffic was flowing much more freely, and they were able to make good progress.
‘Where are the pyramids?’ Bronson asked, as they approached the centre of the city. ‘I’d like to see them while we’re here, and I thought they were quite close to Cairo.’
‘They are, but they’re over on the west bank of the Nile, probably about five or six miles in front of us. You might get the odd glimpse of them through the buildings when we start heading south. Right,’ she said, checking the map again, ‘stay on the east bank of the river, and keep going.’
‘Understood. Which side of the Nile do we need to be on eventually?’
‘I don’t think it matters. According to this map there are two main roads that follow the Nile south, one running along each bank, and there are several bridges where we can cross to the other side if we have to.’
The traffic was still congested, but most of the vehicles were heading towards the centre of Cairo, so Bronson was driving against the flow and, as soon as they reached the district of Tura, where the road turned due south, he was able to speed up a little as the traffic thinned out. The tall apartment buildings and office blocks were gradually replaced by lower, older and much more decrepit structures, and a couple of times they did catch just the briefest sight of the very tops of the pyramids in the distance, over to the west. On their right-hand side the Nile flowed steadily northwards, a wide, grey-brown mass of moving water, peopled with a variety of boats, including a couple of big Nile cruisers, scores of motorboats and dozens of lateen-rigged feluccas, the iconic sailing boats of old Egypt.
On the west side of the Nile, the built-up area seemed to have petered out, just a few isolated dwellings, but the road Bronson was following, which was right beside the bank of the river, had extensive urban developments extending to the east. He pointed out this oddity to Angela.
‘There’s a good reason for that,’ Angela said. ‘Over to our left there’s a large urbanization, but the land on the west side of the river has a lot of ancient sites. We’re just about level with a place called the Amba Armiyas Monastery, and just below that is Saqqara.’
‘That name rings a bell.’
‘As it should. It’s a huge ancient burial ground – I think it’s about five miles long by one mile wide – and it’s where you’ll find the oldest hewn-stone building complex ever discovered. That’s Djoser’s step pyramid, which dates from about two thousand six hundred BC, well over four thousand five hundred years old. Egyptologists believe that was the first stone pyramid of all time. They think it was built by erecting a large mastaba, a kind of flat-roofed rectangular tomb, on the bedrock, then building a slightly smaller one on top of it, and then another smaller one, and so on.’
‘It sounds like that would account for the steps,’ Bronson said.
‘True. But in fact stepped pyramids are found in several different parts of the world, where mastabas are completely unknown, so it could also have been a design that the ancient peoples liked the look of. The best known are the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia – that’s modern-day Iraq – and the pre-Columbian civilizations of South America.’
‘The Incas and the Aztecs?’
‘Yes, and the Maya and the Toltecs as well. They all had a go at building them. Anyway, as well as Djoser’s step pyramid, there are pyramids belonging to about fifteen or sixteen other Egyptian kings at Saqqara, in various states of disrepair. And, because the high officials of the court liked to be buried as close to their king as possible, there are shaft tombs and mastabas all over the place. And there’s also a thing called the Serapeum