"WOULD you like to rest?" asked the antiquities inspector as I struggled to catch my breath. We had just climbed 125 stone steps and were standing 28 metres above the ground at the entrance to the oldest pyramid in the world, the "red" pyramid at Dahshour, Egypt. The inspector, an enthusiastic young archaeologist named Sabri, reeled off statistics as I gulped the dry air and surveyed the desert around us.
The red pyramid is 99 metres high and has a base of 220 metres square, which is only 10 metres smaller than the Great Pyramid at Giza. We were about to enter a 65 metre-long passage that would take us down to three burial chambers, each measuring about nine by four metres. As the passage was only just over a metre high, we would have to bend double.
"Are you sure you don't want to rest?" he asked. I assured him I didn't and in we went.
Sixty-five metres later, our endurance was rewarded by a beautiful corbelled ceiling stretching up 15 metres above us, seemingly undamaged throughout the centuries. It was first built by the pharaoh Sneferu, father of the famous Cheops, some 4,600 years ago.
The red pyramid - so-called because of red graffiti that was scribbled on its outer casing in ancient times - is just one of 11 pyramids and a large number of tomb and temple remains that stand in Dahshour, a huge archaeological site about 40 km south of Cairo. Closed off by the military in the 1950s, the area was opened to the public for the first time at the end of September and has been hailed by Egyptologists as one of the most important archaeological sites in the world.
"If this site had been opened before, it could have been called one of the seven wonders of the world," enthused Dr Zahi Hawwas, director of antiquities for the Giza Plateau. "Now at last the father will have the same attention as his son."
It is easy to get excited about Dahshour. Unlike the pyramids and Sphinx at Giza, which have been almost engulfed by Cairo's urban sprawl. Dahshour is in peaceful, unspoiled desert (if you ignore the military buildings off to the north and west). Although a trickle of tourists has already begun to visit the site, the camel drivers, guides and other touts that infest Giza have yet to find enough of a market to make relocation worth their while.
Wandering undisturbed through the stretches of sand that separate the pyramids, a palpable sense of history mixes with the austere beauty of the desert to make visiting the site a memorable experience.
And then there are the monuments themselves. Besides the red pyramid, Dahshour is home to the world's only rhomboidal or "bent" pyramid, also built by Sneferu. Egyptologists are still unsure of the reason behind the pyramid's bizarre shape. The most popular theory is that halfway through its building Sneferu's architect realised the structure would have collapsed if it continued at the same angle. Others say the incline was changed to speed up construction when the pharaoh died suddenly.
ALSO unique to Dahshour is the tower-like "black" pyramid, a Middle Kingdom structure built 800 years after Sneferu's reign. Although it appears to have completely collapsed due to the pilfering of its limestone outer-casing in medieval times, the mud-brick remains actually contain a complicated maze of corridors and IS rooms designed to deceive tomb robbers. And while thieves did manage to penetrate its burial chambers they left behind a number of precious funerary artifacts which were discovered only three years ago.
Despite such recent discoveries, the military occupation of Dahshour has meant that there has been little archaeological activity there for decades. The last systematic excavation was carried out by British archaeologists Perring and Vyse in the 1830s, and towards the end of the century a Frenchman, de Morgan, unearthed a huge trove of gold jewellery now on display at Cairo's Egyptian Museum. At a dig sponsored by New York's Metropolitan Museum last year, gold cachettes were discovered under yet another pyramid at Dahshour, the white pyramid.
But these days' clues to the history of the distant past are coveted more than treasure and Egyptologists hope the site will tell them about everyday life in Old Kingdom Egypt.
"We need to know about life in the Old Kingdom," explains Dr Hawwas. "The only excavated site telling us about that is Giza. We really need to know about what came before Giza."
There is a host of other perplexing questions facing Egyptologists at Dahshour: How were the pyramids built? Why does the angle of the bent pyramid change? Where was King Sneferu buried? Where are the many missing architectural components of the 11 pyramid complexes?
"A door has been opened for scholars to come and work ... We need excavations to explain the unknown. There is work here for years and years to come," Dr Ali Hassan, secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, told journalists recently.
For now Dahshour's secrets remain hidden under the sand as archaeologists from the Council clear the site for the public. Still, in recent years major discoveries have been made in the course of such routine work. And given the area's 40-year isolation, there is a good chance that the same will happen at Dahshour, perhaps helping to solve at least some of the riddles surrounding ancient Egypt's complex rituals of life and death, rituals in which the pyramids played just one enigmatic part.