The pyramids at Meroë are not Egyptian and were never meant to look it. At least 147 of them stand on the desert east of the Nile in Sudan, the royal cemetery of Kush. Kush had ruled Egypt outright as its 25th Dynasty, then withdrew south and kept building pyramids for six centuries after Egypt gave the form up. They are smaller and far steeper: sandstone walls pitched at about seventy degrees, so at the foot of one the stone goes up almost in your face, nothing like Giza's long slope. From a crest on the walk in you get the whole northern cemetery, one sharp silhouette behind another.
You go in at first light, when the sandstone warms to honey and every steep face throws its shadow down the dune behind it. Each pyramid has a small chapel against its eastern side, carved with the dead ruler being led into the afterlife and with Meroitic script that scholars can sound out but cannot fully read. Around 24 BC a Kushite army raided Roman Egypt and brought home a bronze head cut from a statue of Augustus. It went under a temple staircase, so everyone climbing in trod on the emperor's face. The last stretch of open sand has long been crossed on camels brought out by Tarabil, the village next door, whose living depended on this place; the war has taken that trade. Most of the pyramids are missing their tops. In 1834 an Italian treasure hunter, Giuseppe Ferlini, worked down from the summits of some forty of them, and the scar his crowbar left is still there for you to read. He did find his hoard, gold and silver from a queen's tomb. European buyers turned it down at first, unwilling to believe African workshops had made anything so fine. Berlin and Munich bought it in the end, and the queen's armlets are there still, a continent from the pyramid he opened to get them.