I was enveloped by a red granite box, not much larger than myself. There was no lid, so I could look up at the red granite ceiling. I lay in the tomb of Cheops in the largest pyramid of Giza. Our guide switched off the ventilation fans for a few minutes to create silence. I imagined that I was King Cheops, risen from the grave.
The scale of the pyramids is something that can’t be appreciated until you’re right next to them. They were the tallest man-made structures on earth when they were built, and remained that way for 3800 years. I stared up at the ceiling and thought about how a mummy lay for thousands of years where I lay, the ceiling looking exactly the same for that entire time.
Each block that makes up the pyramids is enormous. Moving a single one a foot would be a feat none of us would attempt without a lot of friends and some modern equipment. I understand why conspiracy theories about aliens surround the pyramids. The idea that humans could have built them seems absolutely absurd. They’re just too big and too perfect.
The pyramids are also a lot more precise than I imagined they were. The lengths of the sides are off by less than an inch. The angles are nearly perfect. The room that I lay in, built from massive hunks of granite, seemed to be perfectly rectangular.
Being around the pyramids is both inspirational and daunting at the same time. You can easily imagine just how difficult every step of the process must have been: quarrying the rocks, sailing them up the Nile, moving them towards the pyramid, elevating them, setting them in place with just millimeters of tolerance. And yet, humans did it thousands of years ago. That speaks a lot to our potential.
Accomplishing big things requires an understanding that nearly anything is possible and at the same time that nearly anything worth doing is difficult. It’s so easy to set sights low and to turn away from difficulty. I guess that wasn’t as possible thousands of years ago when you were tasked with helping to build the pyramids and probably not given much choice on whether or not to participate.
Eventually the silence was broken and I stood up from the coffin. I could have lay there all day. Visiting the pyramids was a truly amazing experience I’d recommend to anyone, but perhaps the most valuable thing I got from it was that sense of perspective.
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Photo is me standing in front of the tomb. Hard to believe that’s in the middle of the pyramid! I sort of want to put in the effort to photoshop out the man-made stuff.
If you are going to Cairo and want a really crazy tour of the pyramids that I can’t even write about, contact me.
Notice the new shirt? I visited Wool and Prince in Brooklyn last week and they gave me a new shirt with an unreleased pattern on it! I wore my other one 350-400 times total and it doesn’t have a single rip, fray, or stain. Wool power!
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