No, not those pyramids. In 1979, when I was seconded to lecture at the University of Khartoum, I took the opportunity to do some of the things which I had long regretted omitting on my first visit to the country so many years before - to follow the course of the Nile, to visit the ancient slave-trading port of Suakin and see the amazingly colourful undersea life of the Red Sea, and to visit the little known pyramids of the Sudan.

So, one free weekend, David (my fellow visiting lecturer) and I took off in our Landrover travelling north along the east bank of the Nile. En route we visited the Sixth Cataract, a minor waterfall in the flow of that great river, but sufficient to impede the British gunboats sent up river in 1885 in an unsuccessful attempt to reach General Gordon, besieged in Khartoum by the Nahdi. Further on, we came to the town of Shendi from where it was a short distance to the ancient capital of Kabashiya and the site of the pyramids.

The pyramids are quite different from the more famous ones close to Cairo - much smaller, steeper-sided and built from shaped blocks of haematite rock rather than limestone. There were about twenty of them of varying sizes. They had been built in an area used in ancient times for the production of iron from the haematite rock.

They were sited a short distance from the Nile. So close that, in the middle of the 19th century, they attracted the interest of travellers who were following the river in their journey to the south, including a German explorer who was so convinced that such imposing structures must contain vaulable treasures that he proceeded to insert explosives to blow the top off each, ruining what must have been a truly wonderful sight. Of course, he found nothing.

It seemed poetic justice and a commentary on the foolishness of man that, on our visit, we found another German there - a professor from East Germany who was toiling away with very few resources, collecting the stones and trying to piece them together to reconstruct the pyramids. There was great excitement on the day of our visit because he had just found a capstone which had formed the very apex of one of the pyramids. This meant that yet another pyramid could be restored to its former glory to stand, as it had stood for thousands of years, in isolation among the dark rocks in that sea of golden sand.