by Jeff Hoffmann

It was just before eight p.m. when Sara and I, nervous and dressed in dark clothes, slipped into the black sedan waiting outside our hotel. Gomal, who had been our driver for the length of our stay in Cairo, turned and smiled, discreetly accepted the envelope containing one hundred U.S. dollars, and then drove the car into the thronging chaos that is Giza at any hour.

Gomal, who with his black mustache and ready grin resembled a light skinned Eddie Murphy, had been recommended by a friend and had earned our trust quickly. As he drove through the tangle of streets, pointing out an Uncle’s house, waving to a cousin, stopping to talk low and quickly in Arabic to his brother, we found ourselves hoping that our trust was well placed. We drove past a group of teenagers playing soccer in their bare feet on a rocky sandlot and finally parked next to the wall behind which the desert loomed.

We got out of the car and Gomal opened the trunk. "For wild dogs," he said hefting a stout walking stick as he closed the trunk.

We followed him to a break in the wall and began the long walk across the dunes. The heat of the afternoon had given way to a brisk chill but the pace of our hike and our nervousness allowed us to work up a bit of a sweat. In the east, to our backs, were the bright lights of Giza and beyond that the dazzling sprawl of Cairo. To the southwest, the sands of the dunes contrasted with the dark night sky. From the northwest came the baritone voice of the German commentator as the laser beams from the seven-thirty sound and light show described the outline of the Great Pyramids of Giza.

About thirty minutes after we left the car, we arrived at the remains of a small tomb. "You wait here. I will go talk to the guards," Gomal said, pointing at a pile of stones to hide behind. "Stay down," he said and walked off into the night.

We stayed down and waited. All I could think of were the intimidating guards we had seen all week around the temples, wearing fatigues and carrying fully automatic weapons. Suddenly we heard angry voices shouting in Arabic. Sara looked at me in alarm. Did Gomal get caught? Were the friendly guards off duty that night? Should we stay down or head back to the car? Before we had time to do anything stupid, the shouting changed to laughter. We relaxed as we realized that it was probably just a typical Egyptian negotiation over the split of the baksheesh.

The playful arguing died down and Gomal returned to our hiding place. "The captain of the guards came by just fifteen minutes ago. We have almost two hours until he returns."

We followed him past the guard shack, where the two guards sat playing cards, looking more like a couple of shepherds than fierce soldiers. Only their AK-47’s attested to the nature of their night job. They smiled and waved as we walked by. Just past the guard shack was the great pyramid of Mycerinos. At two hundred-and-seventy-five feet tall, it’s the smallest of the three great pyramids, but standing at its base, at night, knowing what we were about to do, it looked colossal.

We began to climb.

The first fifty feet was a blast. We climbed up stone upon stone, occasionally ducking when the lights fell upon us. There was nothing to it. Then I looked down. I’m not afraid of heights but I suddenly became aware of just how precarious this climb was. Each of the stones was three to four feet tall and the offset between the edge of one stone and the base of the next was about a foot and a half. It became immediately clear that one slip, one crumbling handhold and we would fall, not just a few feet, but all the way to the bottom.

The English language show had started and I pictured the thousands of people seated in folding chairs a half mile away. We were on the south side of the pyramid, the left side from the perspective of the spectators, but with Gomal’s admonition to duck whenever the lights came our way, I couldn’t help but wonder if we were visible.

As I continued to climb, my heart thumped madly from both the exertion and from the fear. The fear of capture and arrest was replaced completely by the fear of falling, or even worse, Sara falling. I could clearly picture one of us lying bloody at the base of the pyramid and Gomal sneaking back across the desert and out of sight like Bill Murray slipping off the golf course in Caddy Shack. I suddenly realized that we only knew his first name. What in the hell are we doing here?

I looked up at Sara climbing ahead of me. I’m the risk-taker, the one who pushes to do the fun stuff. I’m the one that’s always certain that bad things won’t happen to us. She’s the conservative one, the pessimist, the safety commissioner for the trip. She’s the one who is supposed to make sure that we don’t do stupid stuff like this. What in the hell was she thinking, agreeing to this?

About fifty feet from the top, Gomal stopped us to wait out the brightest, most dangerous part of the sound and light show. It gave me a chance to relax, get accustomed to the height, and look around a bit. I peeked around the corner of our pyramid and watched as its neighbors were bathed in light. We had seen the show from the folding chairs a couple of nights before but it was nothing like this. Tonight we were much closer to the other pyramids and whenever the lights fell onto ours (and we definitely now thought of it as ours) it was as if we were part of the show. I looked up into the sky and saw all three pyramids silhouetted against the desert dust in the night sky. I leaned over and kissed Sara on the ear and squeezed her hand. Her hand was shaking. Or was it mine?

Gomal suddenly said, "Do you meditate?"

Confused, we both shook our heads.

"For fifty dollars I take people into the pyramids or into one of the tombs at night to meditated."

Evidently, if you pay Gomal fifty dollars there’s not a door in Giza that is closed to you. He then proceeded to sit in the lotus position and explain the process of meditating, the seven chahkras, and the special oils that some of his clients bring with them. It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. There I was, sitting on the side of a four thousand five hundred year-old pyramid, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, with Eddie Murphy playing the part of an Egyptian driver/guide, sitting cross-legged with the light from the sound and light show coming over his shoulder, explaining to us the basics of Zen Buddhism. The narrator’s voice boomed, "…these Pharos, these god-kings, moved their people, and moved these stones to build the greatest monuments ever known to man!" Where in the hell am I?

Before it got even more surreal, the music died, the audience began to applaud and soft, amber colored lights lit the pyramids. Gomal jumped to his feet for our push to the summit and we were right on his heels. Ten minutes later we arrived, at the very top of the pyramid. We crouched beside that last rock, each thinking our own thoughts. The sheer magnitude of the years since these monuments were built was breathtaking. The effort, skill, and technical innovation for such incredible structures to be built at that time were unimaginable. The ego of the men that built these mountains must have known no bounds. Perched on top, bathed in the light, it was hard to comprehend it all, hard to feel significant or substantial.

I crouched there breathing in the cool, dusty, desert air, feeling more alive than I ever had. Everything we had done that night, the treacherous climb and the risk of capture were worth it for these ten minutes at the top. Sara nudged me in the ribs, pointed down the way we had come and said, "Now how in the hell are we going to get down?"

Jeff Hoffmann and his wife, Sara, shortly after finding themselves in their thirties, quit their jobs, sold their house, and traveled internationally for fourteen months.  For reasons he still finds hard to explain, they brought their rubber chicken and asked people from the twenty-four countries they visited to pose with it for photographs.  Everybody loves a rubber chicken.  They now live in Chicago where Jeff fills his weekends patiently sending out query letters for his book of stories and photos from the trip.