Word: pyramidal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sitting impassively on the sunbaked Giza Plateau on Cairo's outskirts, the pyramids look from a distance as though they have hardly aged in the more than 4 1/2 millenniums since they were built. But up close they look anything but eternal. Rubble and rock dust crumbling from the pyramid of Chephren have accumulated in piles on its lower levels. In the pyramid of Cheops, encrustations of salt, left by the evaporation of brackish groundwater, have eaten away at the walls of the burial chamber. The Sphinx, a few hundred feet away from the pyramids, has lost...
Working on a book about Soviet civilization, I have come to the conclusion that the Soviet system is made up of massive, heavy blocks. It is well suited to the suppression of human freedom, but not to revealing, nourishing and stimulating it. On the whole, it resembles an Egyptian pyramid built out of colossal stones, carefully assembled and ground to fit together. A mass of dead stone, an impressive monumentality of construction, which once served majestic ends now beyond our reach, a huge structure with such a modicum of useful space inside. Inside -- the mummy, Lenin. Outside -- the wind...
...must ask, Can you rebuild a pyramid into the Parthenon? The ancient Egyptian pyramids are rightly considered the most enduring of architectural forms -- much more durable and solid than the Parthenon. And the legitimate question arises: Do pyramids lend themselves to perestroika? It would be possible, of course, to adorn them with decorative colonnades, to cover them with molding, to suspend Greek porticoes on them. But would these changes enhance them? Wouldn't they spoil the fundamental style and profile...
When perestroika began, I asked myself if perhaps I hadn't been mistaken about the pyramid. But not long ago, I had the sad occasion to spend some time in Moscow. On the evening of Dec. 30, my friend Yuli Daniel died. If it had not been for his death, they would not have let me into Moscow. Moscow had been denying my wife Maria a visa for a year and a half. The Soviet consulate in Paris had informed us by telephone on the morning of Dec. 30 of the latest denial. Then, after two days of negotiations, they...
More raids followed, including one in which a looter was killed. The trail took police and archaeologists to a huge adobe platform at the base of a weathered Moche pyramid near Sipan. When the authorities arrived, they found men, women and children combing the area for artifacts dropped by the huaqueros, who unload the contraband on the black market for buyers in the U.S., Latin America and Europe. Driven off by police, the villagers viewed the new diggers as little more than government-protected thieves. Threats followed, including oaths of vengeance sworn by the relatives of the slain huaquero. Nightly...