Remembering Assassin's Creed Origins, the game which opened out the mysteries of the Great Pyramid

There are, on balance, a couple of things I am always ready to read about. One of these things is to do with anytime some academic type puts an oil painting in an X-ray machine or something like that and discovers all these mysteries in the underpainting. Paths not taken or half taken. Forgotten faces suddenly looming out of the streaked grey murk, black eyes burning.

The other thing tickles the exact same part of my brain. We’re in Egypt, at Giza, and some academic type has used some kind of ground-penetrating imaging to reveal a hint of undiscovered passages within the Great Pyramid. They speak of chambers and causeways that we cannot reach, and ponder why they might be there and what they might contain. Again, I’m in that magical, electrical landscape of streaked grey murk, black eyes, burning, and some ancient figure turns towards us.

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All of which is to say, the thing I most like about the Pyramids of Egypt – and I really, really like the Pyramids of Egypt – is not that I suspect that they were built by Atlanteans or visitors from beyond the Kuiper Belt, but that they’re so old, so dizzyingly, incomprehensibly old, that we don’t know how the Egyptians who did build them actually did it. We have theories, and probably excellent theories, but there’s still a vapour of mystery to it. How? Why? What else? These are questions I almost hope we never solve, because they are so exciting to just ponder.