Triangularities

A sea of 16 million people abruptly halts at the cliff's base as it juts skyward toward grandeur. The cement ceases to be as if in involuntary reverence, as the human-induced grayness of civilzation gives way to a natural tan of the desert. It is there, on the plateau stuck in the corner of the Sahara, that the ancients' ancients' understandings of nature beckon on.

The great pyramids at Giza outlast every other monument that mankind has aspired to build. These structures, and these alone, have withstood every quest for their demolition by nature and overzealous caliphs alike. Even after their limestone facades have mostly decayed into eternity, they eminate an aura of perfection even today. They sit in their magnificence indifferent to the predictable hoards of tour busses and school kids; nonchalantly brushing away the camel drivers and donkey riders - for these stone structures have their own great story. And they contain more wisdom in their stationary stone blocks than in all the great minds swarming in the sandy ocean in their midst. They know what we do not.

For 5000 years they've stood - and in them have remained buried the mysteries of the Egyptians' relationships to the stars. In them has remained alive, but incomprehensible, the power of triangles on energies that modern science fails to understand. And in them has remained all of the wonderous remnants that their builders intended to reside therein for all eternity.

In them has lived on, that is, everything that the Egyptians intended to live on...until the modern times. Until the times when sufficient photographs could be taken, sufficient stories could be told, and sufficient human interests could be provoked. The mummified corpses that modern science would find it difficult to preserve with such perfection were never intended to be stripped of their jeweled coffins, or their servants, or their mummified cattle or pets for the afterlife. The Pharaohs were never to leave their eternal resting places inside - they were never meant to be transmitted into a square museum building and given plastic boxes so that backpacker Joe could pay 7 dollars to disturb their eternal rest; so that Backpacker Sally and group-tour Apple could drag their souls back from their intended destination and place them in the center of mortal spectacle. The tombs themselves were never to be reopened, and yet today I stood and looked at the eternal resting place in the heart of Khufre's Great Pyramid, and saw sadness echoing between the empty walls that were stripped of the millenia of seclusion and sit now as black-walled empty space. Where a gateway to the immortal once resided, now I find only darkness. And it strikes me as bizarre that even as onlookers read and understand the purpose of the eternal resting places, to them (us) 5000 years seems plenty of time to let the souls pass through to their destinations. We deem the ambitions of the Pharaohs unnecessary, and we will gladly pay 10 more dollars to impose, if it means we get to walk through a really cool ancient hallway.

And so it became that as I sat on a hilltop wondering at the humanity needed to layer the perfect limestone facade over Khafre's tomb; and as I pondered the mysterious elusive reasons for the existence of the Sphinx, I wondered also at man's capacity on this Earth. These stacks of bricks are perhaps the most perfect monuments ever constructed, and have survived elements, nature, and man for longer than my mind can conceive. And in the end, they stand here today permeated, altered, partially, at least, destroyed not by malice or vengeance or jealousy or nature, but by man's overbearing curiosity to pry open the doors of the unknown, and to disturb it.

There are only a few things man has ever created that stretch on for five millenia, and even then with the aid arguably of the mysterious power pyramids contain. Aid, that is, from something non-human. Man's power to bring into being something so revolutionary as to be called "new" is nearly non-existent. For us to create outside of the parameters that nature allows is a wholly elusive goal, and so every novel building, idea, concept, reality is merely a reflection of the old. No amount of further exploration into technology, or into the soul, or into the mind will alter that reality. Man's power to create is confined by something outside of man's understanding.

But man's power to destroy seems without boundary.