Giza

It stood 146 metres and now reaches 137 with the casing stripped away. The inner passage is narrow and steep, so the climb is made bent over.

Carved from a single outcrop, it runs 73 metres with a lion body and a human face. Several accounts compete over how the nose was lost.

A cedar vessel found in a pit beside the pyramid was reassembled from its pieces. It measures 43 metres and the planks are tied with rope rather than nailed.

Casing stone still clings near the top and shows what the surface once looked like. It is lower than the great pyramid yet looks taller on higher ground.

From a dune behind the pyramids the three fall into a single line. It is reached by camel or by car and photographs are taken there.

Built beside the pyramids, it received more than a hundred thousand objects. Climbing the entrance stair puts the pyramids straight ahead through the glass.

A hall of dressed granite pillars survives close to its original state. The body is thought to have been brought here before the embalming.

Counted the oldest stone structure of its kind, it rises in six steps. It was built about a century before those at Giza.

The angle was changed partway up, so the sides bend to a gentler slope. Few people come, so the inner passage is entered without waiting.

A sand track approaches the pyramids from the desert side and is ridden by camel. Unless the price is settled first, a second price may be named on the way back.

The smallest of the three Giza pyramids, still wearing a few courses of red granite casing at its base. A big gash in the north face marks a twelfth-century attempt to tear it down that was given up. Three small queens' pyramids line up in front.

East of the Great Pyramid, three small pyramids built for Khufu's queens stand in a row. Around them, the stone mastaba tombs of nobles are laid out like streets. The crowds packed round the big pyramid seldom wander this far.

An underground gallery where the sacred Apis bulls were buried, with one granite sarcophagus set into each side chamber. Each weighs tens of tonnes, and nobody agrees yet on how they got in. Long shut after quake cracks, it reopened once shored up.

Tomb of the Old Kingdom vizier Mereruka, whose many linked rooms rank it the largest private tomb at Saqqara. Hippo hunts, herding and metalworking cover the walls in relief, some paint still clinging. It lies just northeast of the Step Pyramid.

The museum by the Saqqara ticket office, named for Imhotep, architect of the Step Pyramid. A section of blue faience tile wall taken from inside the pyramid hangs here. Seen before the site, it puts Saqqara in order in your head.

The first pyramid finished with true smooth sides, named for the reddish tint of its stone. A long stooping descent down a sloping passage leads to chambers whose ceilings narrow in steps. Bats leave a sharp smell of ammonia inside.

Mit Rahina village keeps this outdoor museum where Memphis, the Old Kingdom capital, once stood. A colossus of Ramesses II, found lying down, still lies in a roofed hall, and you look down at its face from an upper rail. An alabaster sphinx sits in the yard.

A pyramid whose outer steps slumped away to leave a tower, about a hundred km south of Giza. So few people come that walking down the passage to the burial chamber alone is common. The fallen rubble rings it like a hill.

A workshop in Harraniya village, begun when the architect Ramses Wissa Wassef taught local children to weave without a drawn design. Looms still work under its mud-brick domes. Stop on the way to Saqqara; the hanging tapestries are for sale.

A UNESCO World Heritage site in the Fayoum desert, where fossil whales that still had legs rest bared in the sand. Shell fossils among the rocks also prove this was sea. Walking keeps to marked paths, and after dark the sky fills with stars.

After dark, seats face the Sphinx while light plays over the pyramids and the old story is narrated. Each night's showings are fixed to a language, so check the schedule beforehand. The desert night wind is cold, so winter needs a jacket.