“He seems quite proud of what his ancestors built.”
“He should be,” she said, using the edge of her charcoal to shade some of the steps she had added to her drawing.“This pyramid is a result of trial and error?—”
“The first successful straight-walled pyramid,” he finished for her.“Built at a forty-three-degree angle.White limestone veneer, now missing.”
She closed her sketchpad and returned it to her satchel.“Someone was listening,” she teased, helping herself to a piece of flatbread.
Randy pretended offense.“Don’t expect any more information from me.I left before he finished.”He offered her the lastkofta, and when she declined, he finished it off in a few bites.
Easily coming to her feet, Diana placed her hands on her hips and regarded the stairs directly in front of her.“I am tempted.”She reached out and offered a hand to Randy, who grunted as he struggled to stand.
“To go inside?”he asked in disbelief.He attempted to brush the red dust from the back of his top coat, wincing when he only managed to smear it on the superfine.
“At least go part way up,” she replied.“For the view,” she claimed, waving to the Bent Pyramid three miles off to their right.
He regarded the fairly shallow stairs followed by the steep stone steps.“I’ll go with you.So we can help each other,” he offered.
She fished a pair of kid-leather gloves from her satchel and pulled them on, and he followed suit with the pair he had stuffed into his top coat pocket when they had started the picnic.
Diana set off climbing the man-made stairs leading up to the pyramid’s exposed building blocks.Randy followed, admiring her bum as she scrambled up to almost the halfway point of where a dark rectangle indicated the entrance.When she turned around on a particularly large block, he was still a few steps down, and his gaze was directed at her midsection.
“Have you been staring at my bum?”she accused.
“Yes,” he replied, struggling to catch his breath as he joined her on the same step.“It’s all that’s kept me climbing.”He panted a couple more times before his breathing seemed to even out.“I thought you were going to stop when we reached the stones,” he complained.“How is it you’re not winded?”
Diana chuckled.“We’re not that high up,” she countered, tempted to ignore his comment about her breathing.“Mayhap fifty feet.As for not being particularly winded, I am younger than you,” she added with a prim grin.She decided not to remind him that she had spent most of her life following her father around on his digs, climbing ancient marble and stone steps into a variety of temples and tombs.
Her gaze swept the horizon to the south.The larger of two dark silhouettes on the horizon appeared to be a pyramid with walls angled in about halfway up.“That is the Bent Pyramid,” she commented.
“Was that one a pyramid?”Randy asked, his gaze directed on what was left of the Black Pyramid.The odd-shaped mound was even darker than the Bent Pyramid, and nothing of its current shape would suggest it had at one time had four walls.
“It was,” she acknowledged.
“What happened to it?And who was buried there?”he asked.
“Amenemhat the Third and his queens,” she replied.“He was supposedly the first pharaoh to have his wives buried with him.The pyramid was once called ‘Amenemhat is Mighty’ because it used to be rather large, but it suffered from structural problems and obviously fell apart.”
“Wrong angle?”he guessed.
Diana lifted a shoulder.“It was built during the Middle Kingdom, so they knew what angle to build it,” she reasoned.“But it likely collapsed because it was too close to the river, and because it was made of mud bricks rather than stone,” she explained.
“The groundwater probably softened the bricks,” Randy reasoned.
“Indeed.Once the limestone veneer was removed, that’s the color that was revealed.”
“Hence the name,” he finished for her.“What a shame.”
Diana nodded.“Well, I rather imagine the rest of our party is going to miss us if they don’t already.”
Randy glanced down the steps and winced.Even though they were only a quarter of the way up the side of the pyramid, it felt rather high.Too high.“How far up did you think we were?”he asked.
“Only about fifty feet, I think,” she replied, her attention on the Bent Pyramid.“The entrance is at about a hundred feet,” she added, her gaze going up the face of the pyramid where a makeshift platform marked the entry.
“Only?”he repeated.
Diana glanced over at him, her brows furrowed.“Is this the highest you’ve ever climbed anything?”she asked.
He swallowed.“Maybe.”
