the Adventure Lifestyle magazine

The song reverberates in the darkness, bouncing off 4,500-year-old stone walls, before tapering to a harmonized wordless chant. Five minutes later, Carolyn emerges from the sarcophagus. Her face, illuminated by a Rayovac flashlight, is flushed and joyful. "I felt something really powerful in there," she explains. "All this energy was just bubbling up inside me." Typical tourists visiting the Giza Plateau are overwhelmed twice: first by the sheer size and beauty of the human-made mountain s, second by the sheer num- bers of local souvenir vendors and camel-ride pimpers. Should these tourists venture inside the largest and most famous of the pyramids, the Great Pyramid, they are over- whelmed once more, this time by the crush of their sweat-soaked peers crammed into tight tunnels and dank, poorly venti lated chambers. But Carolyn, a lawyer back at home in Austin , TX, is no typical tourist. Like a small but growing number of visitors to Egypt, she was afforded a much more inti- mate audience with the country's premier attraction . "We had the pyramid all to our- selves," she enthuses. " I couldn't believe iF' Believe it or not, the Egyptian authori- ties now rent out the last still-stand ing wonder of the ancient world, capitalizing on the pyramid-obsessions of New Agers worldwide. Zahi Hawass, the Director of the Pyramids, works in a cluttered office a scarab's throw from the base of the Great Pyramid. With a wardrobe full of khakis and battered cowboy hats, and a resume ful l of major archaeological discoveries, he is often described as an Egyptian Indiana Jones. Unlike Indy, however, Hawass is an unyielding skeptic when it comes to the supernatural. "Ah yes, the Pyramidiots," he says, referring to the motley crew of New Agers who consume and purvey a myriad of eccentric theories concerning the Giza Pyramids. He frets that these theories are getting more attention than they deserve. Indeed, readers of best-sellers like The Mars Mystery and Fingerprints ofthe Gods might be forgiven for assuming that the greatest unresolved question concern- ing the Great Pyramid is whether it was built by space aliens or natives of Atlantis. Hawass, on the other hand, is a staunch defender of the traditionally accepted notion that it's basically just a very big tomb, built some 4,600 years ago by the ancient Egyptians to house the Pharaoh Khufu's corpse. When Hawass became Director of the Pyramids in 1987, he was upset to learn that groups of the so-cal led Pyramidiots were bribing guards in order to gain access to the Great Pyramid at night. His manner of stamping out this trespassing, was somewhat unorthodox: "I decided that since they were getting in anyway, we might as wel l make a profit," he says. "So we legalized the visits for a price." Since then, under his supervision, the Egyptian government has rented out the Great Pyramid to New Age tour companies approximately 60 times a year, charging each tour $500 an hour. The money generated through these rentals is used for the preservation of the pyramid . " It's good for the pyramid," says Hawass, smiling broadly. And, he adds, it's good for the Pyramidiots as well: "They believe that the pyramid can heal all kinds of problems, that it's something like a psychiatrist. Well I hope so, because these people, I can tell you, have some serious psychological problemsl " After three hours spent in an orgiastic frenzy of chanting and meditation, tapping into what they believe to be the ancient monument's wellspring of cosmic healing energies, Carolyn and her group emerge into the desert night, sweaty, dusty and beaming. The moon is three-quarters full and it coats the pyramids with a lumi- nous patina. " It's just so beautiful, " says Carolyn, staring up toward the Great Pyramid's craggy apex. Tonight was the climax of her $3,950, 13-day tou r of Egypt, organized by Luminati, an Arizona-based company special izing in "spiritua l journeys." In just a few hours, Carolyn will board a fl ight back to the United States carrying with her both standard touristic bric-a-brac and, perhaps, some new measure of inner wealth. Cairo's permanent haze screens al l but the brightest stars, but it cannot block out the sound of car horns wafting up to the Giza Plateau from the city below. Having survived tile bulk of human history largely unscathed, the Great Pyramid will probably still be here long after al l the cars belonging to those horns have been scrapped, maybe long after there are cars at all. Who knows, it might even outl ive its current status as a private playground for New Agers. 24

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