What A Day In Cairo

Woke up at 4:30 am today to go to the Pyramids for sunrise. Admission was only 200 US dollars total. I guess they have to make money somehow. There were sunspots that were interfering with camera so the pictures all turned out blurry. While we were watching the sun this nice man came and gave  us some tea. Not being a big tea person I discreetly poured mine in the sand. Cookie drank hers and seemed to really enjoy it. Oddly enough about half an hour later, despite the butt cold temperatures, Cookie began removing all her clothes and running around the Pyramids naked. She was moving pretty fast and it took about 45 minutes for the guards to catch and tackle her. Of course they may have been partially blinded by the sun reflecting off her white skin. I saw a lot of men taking pictures, so hopefully some turned out and Cook can make it in the local paper. As I said, the sunspots were disrupting my camera. Once she'd been apprehended the guards gave her some ipecac to help her get rid of the hallucinogen she'd been given. Which is why you should never take food or drinks from strangers. It took us a few minutes to find all of her clothes, a sock and her panties are still missing, souvenirs I guess, but once we did we headed towards the sphinx. Cookie wasn't about to allow her streaking adventure and all the catcalls she was now receiving cut our day short.  The sphinx has the most enigmatic look, like it knows some big secret. We were poking around it when I tripped and fell. I looked back to see what I'd fallen on and imagine my suprise to see some sort of a lever. Well Cookie and I stood in front of it trying to get it to move and we were getting frustrated when I jumped on it. Suddenly the floor fell out from underneath us and we crashed down in a flood of sand, which fortunately  broke our fall. Now we were below the sand with no way out but up, about 6 meters (20 feet) away. We were about to try and call for help when the trapdoor we'd just fallen thru began to shut. Fortunately I always carry my torch (flashlight to us Americans) so I pulled it out and we decided to head deeper to find a way out. The air was remarkably fresh seeing as it must be thousands of years old. The only direction we could walk was towards the sphinx itself, the other three walls were solid hewn rock. The path began to tilt down after a few meters and the ceiling got lower. We were considering turn back the way we came as things were getting very claustrophobic when suddenly the walls all around opened up. The sudden increase in space combined with our reckoning of the distance we'd traveled led us to think that we were now in the belly of the beast. There were shallow basins all along the wall and in the movies those are always for lighting so since we had a match pack with us from my cousin Charlse's wedding to Amy I figured I'd give it a try. The first few matches wouldn't light, they must have gotten wet during the typhoon in Vietnam, but just as I was about to give up one caught. I set it in the nearest basin to my left and for a second thought the movies had all been wrong, but then Spielberg proved his worth and the basin was filled with light. All the basins must be connected by some sort of trough system because suddenly the fire began to spread along the walls illuminating the room much to our amazement. The dimensions of the chamber, as they were reveled by the fast spreading fire, were enormous. It must have been at least 40 by 80 meters (132 by 264 feet). The chamber itself was sunken in three layers, the threshold where we now stood being the highest. Once the fire had filled all the basins on our level it spilled down the wall and began to fill the next level. The stairs, which were oriented slightly to our right also had fire running along them, lighting the way. We headed down and decided to walk the perimeter of this level before venturing down further. There were extensive hieroglyphics covering the walls above the basins and in the flickering firelight the figures seemed to dance and move with a life of their own. The pathway was more than wide enough for two people to walk side by side and I would even venture that a chariot would have had ample room to maneuver, although it would have first had to navigate the stairs. The second level contained nothing more than the hieroglyphics, which seemed to mock my inability to read them. Oh how I wished I could understand these words from the past, an Egyptologist could spend a lifetime decoding their mysteries. Despite the fire the third level was deep enough that from our vantage point we could make out no more than hazy shadows tantalizing our imaginations from below. Would we discover gold, jewels, a vast treasure trove of pharonic wealth, oh the scenarios running through our heads were endless. Or perhaps it was a trap and we would blindly head down to our doom, with some cruelly ingenious device lay in wait to send us to our untimely end. Even if we found vast wealth and not devious traps our future was still far from certain, we were trapped in the belly of the sphinx with no food, only a liter of water, and most importantly no way out. Our only reprieve was that the sunspots had finally stopped affecting my camera and the pictures we were getting were amazing.    

So much to tell