Luxor

A 30-storey pyramid, elevators that climb at an angle, and the brightest light on Earth.

Key facts

The Luxor opened in 1993 as a 30-storey black-glass pyramid; because the walls slope, its guest-room elevators — called “inclinators” — travel at an angle of roughly 39 degrees rather than straight up.
The beam of light from the pyramid's apex, the Luxor Sky Beam, is produced by a bank of xenon lamps and is often described as the strongest beam of light in the world, visible to aircraft far from the city.
The Sky Beam attracts insects, which draw bats and owls, creating a small nocturnal food-chain in the column of light — an effect widely reported about the beam.

Narration transcript

There it is on your left: a thirty-storey pyramid of black glass, a genuine Egyptian sphinx crouched out front, and after dark, a column of white light punching straight up from the very tip. That's the Luxor, opened in 1993, back in the era when every new resort had to be something — a pyramid, a castle, a city.

The pyramid shape creates a wonderful problem. You can't run a normal elevator up a slanted wall, so the Luxor's elevators — they call them “inclinators” — actually travel at an angle, about thirty-nine degrees, riding up the inside of the slope like a funicular.

And that beam at the top is not just for show. It's one of the most powerful beams of light on the planet, thrown up by a bank of xenon lamps, and pilots can see it from far out over the desert. Here's my favourite detail: the light attracts clouds of insects, and the insects draw both bats and owls — so the Luxor has accidentally built a tiny glowing ecosystem in the sky, hunting in a shaft of light above the Strip.

Keep rolling north. Just ahead on your left, the theme changes completely: first the turrets and pennants of a medieval castle, and right behind it, a compact little Manhattan skyline squeezed onto one city block.