Standing on the great Pyramid of Khafre, 15 feet above the desert floor on a hot block of stone, there is a palpable sense of doing something wrong.

Along with the possibility of falling or of desecrating the site by scraping dirty sneakers on it, there is a feeling — enhanced by the camel-mounted tourist police staring at you — that you shouldn’t be standing on the world’s most recognizable monument.

And by all accounts, you definitely shouldn’t.

If your guidebook is to be believed, it is strictly forbidden to climb on the world’s oldest man-made feature, a restriction supposedly enforced by park officials at the site in Giza, Egypt.

But as with many activities in foreign countries, there are two ways to tour the Great Pyramids: legally and sort-of legally.

Legally, you can take a taxi to the gates, pay for your ticket (40 Egyptian pounds, about $7) at the booth and waltz over to the Sphinx, then cruise along the prescribed paths through the prodigious tombs of the pharaohs.

Legally, you can sign up with a tour group and brave the human shield of touts and perfume hawkers at the entrance in the safety of numbers, heeding the instructions of your guide on where to go and what you can touch.

Marginally legally, you can accept an offer from any of the multitudes of touts haranguing you to take a camel or pony ride to the same places, an offer you will undoubtedly receive on a near-constant basis while you are in Giza.

For the latter option, the choice is pretty much random. But lucky visitors will find a man like “Sam,” an Egyptian camel wrangler with good English and deep brown teeth who leads a 90-minute tour of the highlights.

To find you, Sam takes an angle popular with touts at the pyramids: He waits at an intersection and, instead of screaming at you to take a ride (another popular method), he approaches your taxi driver. They work out some business in Arabic, and then, wherever your taxi stops, he is there with his offer, a marvelous offer, he insists, available only because you arrived with his good, good friend, the taxi driver — whatever his name is.

But if you’re going to ride a camel at the pyramids, you’ve got to say yes to someone, and Sam is funny and amiable, so it might as well be him.

A marvelous offer? Hardly. His rate is 200 Egyptian pounds (about $35), a princely sum for a camel ride, and he will expect a tip at the end. But if your bargaining skills are good, he can be talked down.

Once the price is agreed upon, a camel named Moses 2000 is brought around, and a semi-legal tour of the pyramids begins.

From almost the moment the camel begins to waddle, it is clear you are not on an authorized excursion, though Sam repeatedly insists everything in his package is legit.

For instance, instead of directing Moses 2000 to lumber toward the pyramids, Sam, astride a horse, leads him away from them. Instead, he goes down the back alleys of Giza to an abandoned construction zone fenced off with a metal cable and guarded by a half-dozen men. Some are uniformed, some not.

It’s fun to avoid the beaten path, but things get a little awkward when a furious argument erupts between Sam and the men, and threats seem to be exchanged before the cable is lowered.

With business apparently taken care of, Sam lights a cigarette and starts dispensing stories about the building of the great pyramids and the history of the pharaohs.

He’s not a bad guide, and as Moses crests a short, steep hill behind the construction area, you can see that you are level with the pyramids, less than a mile away, and with a pretty good view.

You are also completely on your own, with hardly a tourist in sight, save for those in the distance, standing near their tour buses.

If there is one key to a successful illegal ride around the pyramids, it is having a guide who knows how to deal with the tourist police, whose role it is to prevent you from doing exactly what you are doing. For Sam, the tactic is to simply walk around them, yelling at them in Arabic and whipping Moses 2000 onward.

Whatever he tells them, it works. In challenge after challenge, he simply presses forward with impunity, uttering some sort of password or claim of legitimacy.

Somehow, it gains him immunity in the park. He encourages his guests to climb on the monuments, do anything they want, right under the eye of the tourist police.

Along with urging you to break the cardinal rule of the pyramids — don’t climb on the monuments — Sam invites you to dismount and scramble among some lower tombs of workers who built the pyramids, making various claims about who is buried where.

Sam’s tour is all very close-up and under the normal tourist radar, to be sure — no tourists passing through the gate can be found at the workers’ tombs — but it has its drawbacks.

One is the chafing from the uncomfortable burlap blanket that covers Moses’ hump. Another is that Sam will only push the lenience of the guards so far, which means he can’t get near the Sphinx.

It’s a tradeoff — take your chances with a random camel tout and win the experience of standing on the pyramids, or pay the cheaper fare and see the face of the world’s most famous man-lion.

Take your pick.

Know and Go

While the U.S. State Department issued a travel warning for Israel and the bordering Gaza Strip last month after the outbreak of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, it has no new warnings for Egypt.

It does, however, include the country in a “worldwide caution,” reminding travelers of the “continuing threat of terrorist actions and violence against Americans and interests overseas.”

According to a State Department safety and security briefing, Egypt has been the site of deadly terrorist attacks in or near tourist sites in late 2004, 2005 and 2006, often coinciding with major local holidays.

It advises Americans to be “especially vigilant in crowded tourist areas in the Sinai, practice good personal security measures, and be alert to their surroundings.”

— Stars and Stripes