Cairo is so famously chaotic that after a quick look at the Great Pyramid and Tutankhamun’s treasures most people flee for the relative calm of Luxor. But they’re missing a trick. Tutankhamun was a fine lad, I’m sure, but he didn’t do much apart from, well, die. Suffering just a little from lifelong overdosing on Tutankhamun, I set off in search of a different pharaoh, the amazing but virtually unheard of Snofru (or Sneferu), who built three enormous pyramids that nobody ever bothers to look at.

We take the wonderful road that runs south of Cairo through the lush green Nile valley, my all-time favourite road, because beyond the palm trees is the desert, the necropolis of Memphis and the other pyramids that are Egypt’s best-kept secret. Ancient Egypt proper begins at Saqqara, where we stop to look at the Step Pyramid of Djoser, the first building to make extensive use of stone.

Until then, a dead pharaoh was buried under a mastaba – a huge two-storey oblong made of mud bricks. It was around 2700BC that Djoser’s vizier-cum-physician, Imhotep, had the wizard idea of stacking three mastabas on top of each other to create the first pyramid. Saqqara is a vast site, magical and mysterious, but there’s hardly anybody here: the splendid new Imhotep Museum is deserted.

To see the next-oldest pyramid, knocked up by Snofru about 4,600 years ago, means driving further south, into the Fayum oasis, well off the beaten track. The roads are just wonderful, busy with country people and animals for the date harvest. I spot a water wheel still turned by a blindfold ox after all these years, and mud-brick pigeon houses just like they built in antiquity. Things change in Egypt, but nothing ever changes much: driving down this road still feels remarkably like travelling through ancient Egypt.

Eventually, we reach the sleepy village of Meidum, where goats loiter in the street, and we can see Snofru’s weird three-stepped tower sticking up above the palm trees. Snofru was trying to put up a true pyramid here, with smooth sides, but his experiment failed when the outermost layer of stones collapsed. What is left is an imposing ruin with a mound of debris at the base, hence the name: the Collapsed Pyramid.

Near the top, pigeons flutter into a hole, their nesting place for 4,000 years. At the entrance for humans, 65ft off the ground, I take my last gulp of fresh air and crawl down a long, sloping passage barely one yard wide. Then I’m in a horizontal corridor, grateful for the invention of electric light and praying like mad for no power cuts. Before long, I’m standing in the burial chamber, admiring a fine vaulted and corbelled roof 50ft high. In the heart of the pyramid, it’s stiflingly hot, totally creepy but totally wonderful, literally breathtaking, and again we have it all to ourselves.

The pigeons stayed at Meidum, but Snofru abandoned his rather big mistake and went back to the drawing board. In fact, he moved his entire outfit back up the road to Dahshur, where he built “the city of the two pyramids”.

The Dahshur pyramid field has a remote air today, with nothing left of the mud-brick city, but Snofru’s vast stacks of stones are still standing. However, the next great pyramid experiment also went badly wrong. Ominous cracks in the internal chamber meant a drastic change of design, reducing the angle from halfway up by about 10 degrees, which explains why it’s called the Bent Pyramid. Snofru was making progress, though: at least his new pyramid didn’t fall down.

We walk round the outside, looking at the smooth, white limestone outer casing, which survives almost intact, showing how the Big Three at Giza must have shone in their prime. A hot breeze blows across the desert. There’s no sound but the police camels groaning, and not a Nikon in sight. In the near distance is the forbidding ruin of the Black Pyramid of Amenemhet III – off limits to visitors, in a military zone. We can, however, get right inside Snofru’s third creation, which did not collapse or need bending: the Red Pyramid.

It’s not the biggest – a mere 343ft high – and its outer casing has vanished, but – third time lucky for Snofru – this was the world’s first successful smooth-sided pyramid. Built using a plumb bob, without the advantage of pulleys, its construction is more accurate than that of many modern skyscrapers. The locals have ditched the old name of Shining Pyramid North, in favour of the Bat Pyramid. Wondering why, we squeeze down the steeply sloping entrance corridor that leads to the first of three chambers. There’s an echo, a distant crash, then silence.

I can hear my heart beating as I stand in the burial chamber, inhaling essence of bat droppings matured for 4,000 years.

Why Snofru needed three pyramids is a question nobody can answer, but he was probably buried right here. I certainly feel as if his ghost is breathing down my neck. The benevolent Snofru’s sheer power shows in the astonishing mass of his absolutely monster pyramids at Dahshur and Meidum. He must have used the stars to mark out their plans, but the structures have been there so long, the stars have changed position in the sky. To build them, he shifted a total of 124m cubic feet of stone, exceeding the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza. That makes Snofru, not his more famous – and proverbially nasty – son Cheops, the greatest pyramid-builder of all time. In hieroglyphs, Snofru’s name ends with two triangles, as if they called him Two Pyramids, like an ancient Egyptian Two Jags.

IF THERE’S not much left of Snofru himself, his wife’s elegant gilded furniture gives us a glimpse of palace luxury: in the Cairo Museum we inspect Queen Hetepheres’s cedar bed with lion legs, her canopy for antimosquito curtains, her gold manicure set, a box of 20 silver bracelets with butterfly motifs – and her exquisite gilded armchair, which is reputedly the oldest chair in the world. Another day, we return to Saqqara to see the tombs, many of which have carved and painted scenes of daily life four millenniums back. In the tomb of Princess Idut, a crocodile eyes up his lunch, fresh baby hippo.

In the tomb of Kagemni, there are marsh and river scenes with fish, butterflies, frogs and hyenas. The 32-room tomb of Mereruka is decorated with dancers, acrobats, and kids wrestling – and some charming taxation scenes that show the nonpayers getting beaten up. It’s all rather like an early species of strip cartoon, but all in deadly earnest, because what is shown on the walls is what the deceased will enjoy in the next world. Most important, then, are the depictions of food – meat, wine, bread and beer – which could be magically brought to life as a perpetual feast for the dead man’s ka, or soul, in eternity. In the main offering hall, Mereruka’s more-than-life-size ka-statue strides into the room, hot from the afterlife, as if making a beeline for the grub. In the tombs, the stillness is broken only by birdsong. It feels as if I’ve walked inside ancient Egypt and shut the door.

Back in town, I set off on foot to look at Old Cairo, and get wonderfully lost in the maze of Bab al-Wazir, north of the Citadel, where the country seems to exist inside the city. Chickens peck in the dust; a boy drops a pile of flat loaves in the mud; donkey carts laden with vegetables jam the narrow streets, which teem with people and are full of exotic smells: spices, cooking and shisha smoke.

Far from fleeing the chaos, I begin to enjoy the uproar, the crazy traffic, the deep voice barking from a mosque loudspeaker, the startling differentness. Although Cairo is a modern city, it also feels ancient and timeless: underneath lie the ruins of Heliopolis, City of the Sun, where (according to the ancient Egyptians) creation began: Cairo isn’t called the Mother of the World for nothing.

Five mosques and six miles later, I’m feasting like a pharaoh on stuffed pigeon, an ancient delicacy that’s still firmly on the menu. ThenI’m off up Pyramids Road in a taxi, to check out the sequined belly dancers. In the fabulous frenzy of drums, harsh braying wind instruments and rhythmical clapping, I’m in a total time warp, reminded of nothing but Snofru’s girls in fishnet dresses, and Mereruka’s permanent party in the afterlife. Historical by day, hysterical by night, isn’t that how Egypt is meant to be?

Duncan Sprott is writing The Ptolemies Quartet, an epic fictional account of the Greek pharaohs in Egypt; Volume 2, Daughter of the Crocodile is out now in paperback (Faber £8.99).

He travelled as a guest of Mediterranean Experience (0845 277 3304, www.medexperience.co.uk), which has similar five-day trips, including four nights at the Four Seasons Hotel Cairo at the First Residence, flights from Heathrow to Cairo with Egyptair and two full days’ sightseeing, from £1,035pp. Other operators include Audley Travel (01993 838410, www.audleytravel.com ) and Mosaic Holidays (020 8574 4000, www.mosaicholidays.co.uk)

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