We must have drifted over a thousand palm trees, our shadow covering their latticework of shade before we finally reached a barren realm of yellow rocks and sand. And it was a world of pyramids. One after another they rose up, with edges so old as to be curved now. The dunes around them were littered with shards and bricks—as if the entire necropolis had been smashed with a hammer and the pieces left to scatter in the wind. Joseph, Daniel, and I stayed silent as we floated beneath the late-morning sun, the shifting of levers and the creaking steering wheel the only sounds as we focused on the ruins below and the pyramids passing by. Joseph broke the quiet first. “That mound at the very northwestern corner—beside the column.” We all squinted into the distance. On the far edge of the ruins was a mound rising up from a dune that I never would have thought man-made if not for the eroded column thrusting up beside it. Except it wasn’t a column. As we approached, I realized it was an obelisk, like the one at Heliopolis, and it burned like a candle flame beneath the sun.
