Making our way down the endless tunnel carved out of bedrock, lined by gargantuan 100 ton granite boxes, I felt my friend harden. Growing tetchy. Oh yes Mingo! Undoubtedly proof of ancient alien technology. I ignored him, gawping again at the boxes, it wasn’t all that far-fetched. These things were straight out of Prometheus, so precisely carved, spirit-level flat, so perfectly polished you could see the light bouncing off them.
The same light bouncing off the sheen coating my friend’s brow.
I looked over.
Mate… what is up with you?
Cruising back into Cairo in the back of the car twenty minutes later, a pallor still coating his forehead, Cowper looked over at me very seriously. Mate… then stopped himself. Looking out of the window, he turned back.
That was baffling.
*
Spinning the globe on the hunt for our next Kavalier & Clay adventure, a portal opened. Cowper, my friend since I was 4ft 3, had decided the best way to keep in touch was by embarking on annual trips to far-off sands, the weirder the better. They were really just an excuse to talk inanities to one another.
Two years ago he’d forced me to the Turkmeni desert, to Ashgabat, officially the trippiest place I’d ever set foot in.
We lived very different lives.
As he gazed out at all the light touched from his spotless Dubai penthouse, planning his next petroventure…
I gazed into the glow of my iPad screen planning my next half day..
Two decades of YouTube Premium had thrown up some nuggets of gold. Fighting for elbowroom among Soviet Traffic Accidents and Alsatians Protecting Newborns an algorithm would emerge unannounced from the ether. Sitting there drooling dust one morning, out the corner of my eye one such nugget wafted across my periphery.
The Anunnaki. Ancient Aliens. The Pyramids as dormant starships. They became my bedfellows. Hours became days became weekends. I grew to know the entrails of Ancient Egypt like a somnolent shuffle to the loo. I would do virtual tours, scrutinise diagrams of the Spinx, I learnt the Hieroglyphs for double ristretto. Staring down entranced by my glowing interface I was the Marco Polo of pixels.
So our destination seemed more like destiny.
Cairo sounds great, Cowper exclaimed. The city of my birth!
Keep your alien crap to yourself, Mingo.
Off we went.
*
I started looking into guesthouses.
I liked to travel, to get under the skin of things. I threw Cowper some options. Something near the Giza plateau. Charming, authentic, a small desk with kettles and cups, a stylish hallway.
It’s the Four Seasons or nothing. We need a concierge.
I’m not spending five grand a night for a fucking concierge.
A concierge is essential.
Cowper’s relationship with money is shall we say, complicated. Not for him, he’s having the time of his life. For everyone else he insists on callously controlling with it. Part of you feels like a cheapskate, a hanger on, clutching his coat tails as he bundles you into the back of another saloon car. Part of you turns a pampered blind-eye.
He organised my airport transit in Istanbul once. Off the plane a brunette in trousersuit with my name emblazoned on an iPad whisked me off on one of those 12 seater airport buggies, accelerating aggressively, through passports, two men in suits joined to wait by the conveyor belts for my backpack, then on to a carpark where a third handover was made. The whole thing was ludicrous.
The worst part of it all, as we sped towards the city in a private lane past the gridlock, scrutching out in the backseat cooled by the AC with my complimentary sparkling water, was the terrifying thought..
I could get used to this.
Your know that scene in Thomas Crown where Rene Russo wakes up one morning on his private island and in her wardrobe she finds a whole set of haute couture in her size, and for breakfast a butler brings her special smoothie she drinks in NYC in on a platter. And she is astounded.
Looking over she goes…
It was a bit like that.
At 5am I land in Cairo and our guide Ahmed greets me and we cruise into the great capital along the 6th October bridge, the longest in the city, as the sun yawns and crawls slowly upward. We pass a big expanse of water, what’s that I ask sleepily through the dark.
That, my friend, is the Nile.
Turning into the Four Seasons as the sun warms the concrete, eighteen valets take my bag into the hotel. Two days later, sunning myself by the pool as Cowper conference calls his team from his suite, I exhale and lifting an ice cold Sakara to my lips, channel my inner Rene.
Not once in four days do we go near the Concierge.
*
Cairo is nuts.
A sprawling cacophonous mass of horns and smiles, grapefruit sellers, donkey & carts vying for space with blacked-out Mercs, all the while its main artery the enormous glinting Nile keeps a watchful eye. The chaos of humanity, Cowper proclaims. It is so full of life I cackle with glee. Mate in five minutes this has given me the hit of life I didn’t get in five days in Turkmenistan! Ooooo edgy, Cowper mutters, staring out of his window, passing some comment about the litter.
On our first evening we cruise the highways to a restaurant and to my right in the distance over rooftops I spy a strangely familiar conical shape. Nooo!! I pee my Y-fronts a little.
The next morning post breakfast at the regal Tea Lounge where our wish is the waiters’ command we make our way to the Pyramids. Cowper has been baiting me about portals.
*
There are two ways to lie I read once.
The first is plain fabrication. The other is to claim certainty over something you are not sure of.
No-one knows how the Pyramids were built. Nobody.
If they tell you they do, they’re lying.
For starters the Great Pyramid is a scale model of the northern hemisphere. Its perimeter is by the same factor the exact equatorial circumference of the earth. It is aligned to true north by less than 1/20th of a degree.
It gets weirder.
The story goes it is the tomb of the Pharaoh Khufu. As a theory this is quickly being slung on the scrapheap. The Dynastic Egyptians put hieroglyphics everywhere they went, yet there are none anywhere near the Great Pyramid. The plot thickens.
Staring up at it I gawp.
I can’t quite tell if we are on the hunt for Ancient Aliens or if this is another one of Cowper’s photoshoots. Ten minutes earlier he throws a fit on an electric bus moving efficiently through the Giza complex because he learns we could’ve hired a private car. Egyptian school kids run to him to take photos. Tourists smile and balk by turns at his ridiculous 18th century colonial garb.
The entire of the Giza plateau is a mystery. Weathering around the Sphinx enclosure tells us the whole thing could easily be 25,00 years old. I point this out to Cowper and our irate guide Muhammed scowls. Apparently we have uncovered 1% of what there is yet to be revealed.
One might contend this is all but..
the tip of the Pyramid.
We enter the Grand Gallery, it is stiflingly hot. We crawl up the passages to the King’s Chamber. I am mesmerised. The busyness of it is a little jarring but still it is a marvel. Apparently Napoleon spent the night in here alone.
I show Cowper the Gantenbrink shaft where they constructed a tiny tank-like contraption with a camera in 1993 to see where the hell it lead. They drove it up by remote control and it arrived at a sealed door. They retrieved it, attached a drill, drove it back and drilled through to see what was there. A tiny room on the other side of which, was another door.
The whole thing is one confounding mystery.
The answer it seems…
is in the stone.
The Grand Gallery, littered with 70 ton slabs of Aswan granite stacked 300 feet in the air. Aswan, 500 miles away, over mountains ranges. How on earth could they have moved these megaliths. There were just too many questions. Flinders Petrie an 18th century Egyptologist, had found core drills in the stones all around the plateau, and investigating them now with modern software, revealed a drill-strength of 500 times the power and speed we are now capable of.
The only answer, seemingly, is Apocalypse. Literally, earth-shattering comet impacts. Highly advanced civilisations, (not combustion-engine-iPhone27-type but on a different trajectory altogether) levelled to dust one idle morning by enormous asteroids hitting the earth. Impelling our evolution back to square nought.
Why does every single religion have a flood myth. Were they merely reporting back, distant embers from a pre-catacylsm civilisation. Cowper was picking up the jargon fast. Looking over at a rubbish dump off the side of the road, he mutters… looks pretty pre-cat mate.
*
After lunch we are headed to Saqqara, and the Serapeum.
The boxes.
It was the main reason I wanted to come. Upheld by many as the most mysterious site in Giza, these were the Promethean boxes I’d spoken of, 100 tons of black granite, in underground alcoves. The great mystery being not simply the perfection of their symmetry, but that they were too heavy to be lifted into place by manpower. There simply wan’t enough room.
Walking amongst them down the bedrock tunnel, Cowper’s mood flips. These nubs are also found in Peru! I exclaim. Ohhh so the construction company was transatlantic. How convenient. He is aggressive and agitated, then silent. Even the energy in the corridors seems off. Was something about to go down.
20 minutes later, in the back of the jeep cruising back towards town in silence, he goes in.
Mate… that was baffling.
In consternation…
What the hell did I just see. That was so clearly machine made, I just don’t understand. How did they get the precision on the inside corners. What the fuck. That was so weird. Mate…what just happened. That was… baffling.
My work here is done.
I thought about getting Ahmed to take me straight to the airport. Mulled over 1-arming it Shearer-style down the motorway all the way back to the hotel. I’d got what I came for.
*
And so they passed, the four days in a haze of fine breakfasts, UFO research, Cowper picking up the tabs assuring me we’d settle it at the end. We tasted some Cairo nightlife, both got acute alcohol poisoning from some sketchy tequila. To avoid awkward lift interactions I would rail it down the staff stairwell 9 times a day.
Nakatomi Plaza Die Hard style.
Most of our time was spent in the back of the jeep cruising around the madness of Cairo, asking Ahmed questions. Cowper offering him job opportunities around the Middle East, me asking him to put on another R&B Egyptian banger. You are great clients, he’d say smiling. Always laughing.
When things got heated or I was on the cusp of being shot down, I’d just say.. mate.. the BOXES. And he’d go quiet. It became our safe word. Any sniff of character assassination, any glimmer of lifestyle takedown, one word and he’d go pale, thousand-yard-stare it out the car window.
Months later, he would barrage me with YouTube shorts.
*
On our last day we sack off a day trip to Alexandria to see more Pyramids. To Dashur, the Bent pyramid and the Red pyramid. God you must watch a lot of YouTube, he shouts. You know more than the guides! Cowper is sold.
Hook line sinker.
What was it he’d said.
The answer… is in the stone.
*
So that was us. Second destination, checkacheck. Sat here at home, climbing out of a January drudgery, cracking a cold one on my 9.34am wakeups, I laugh out loud at the world. All just so endlessly mysterious.
The Aztecs described their pyramids as the place where the Gods were born. The huge monoliths of Sacsayhuaman. The Barabara caves in Bengal. The weird handbags etched onto reliefs of totally disparate cultures the world over.
The boxes.
There really is weird looney magic going on. It could be so much baser. We could just settle for Pret and lowrent sunsets and Traitors on a Sunday afternoon. But there is much more. The Socrates schtick. The more you know the more you realise how you really know diddlysquat.
Long weekend, Four Seasons Cairo.
Ice cold Sakara, poolside, condensation coats the bottle.
Reverie.
I’ll take it.
Absolute stone cold banger.
