Demon Box

I: SAFARI SO GOOD

September 26, 1974. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. At-One-Ment. To be observed, God makes it plain, this one-day fast from sundown to sundown once a year, forever and ever. An auspicious day to embark on a pilgrimage to the pyramids.

September 28, Saturday. Paul Krassner's in S.F. I ask Krassner if he observed the Yom Kippur fast. He says he would have but he was too busy eating.

September 29, Sunday. Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost. Krassner's packed and ready. He plans to visit the pyramid with me as part of his conspiracy research, something about using the angle of the Grand Gallery to prove conclusively that the bullet that killed Kennedy could not possibly have come from Jack Ruby's gun.

September 30, Monday. Jack Cherry from Rolling Stone drives Krassner and me to the airport where we are going to fly to Dayton, Ohio, to talk with the great underground pyramid expert, Enoch of Ohio, about the Great Underground Pyramid. Cherry is to fly to New York later to rendezvous with the safari. He speaks Egyptian.

October 1, Tuesday. Succoth, the First Day of Tabernacles. Enoch of Ohio runs a tattoo parlor where he specializes in tattooing women and pierces nipples on the side. The walls of his shop are filled with color Polaroids of his satisfied customers. When we arrive he is buzzing a rendition of Adam and Eve Being Driven from The Garden into the flaccid flank of a forty-year-old housewife from Columbus, wiping aside the ooze of ink and blood every few seconds. Krassner stares as I question the artist.

Enoch tells us, over the whir of the needle and the whine of the housewife, what he knows about the secret underground temple. Enoch of Ohio is a famous Astral Traveler and has visited the Valley of the Kings often in his less corporeal form. He is full of information and predictions. His eyes burn brighter as he talks, and his needle produces more flourishes and blood. The housewife continues to groan and grimace until we can barely hear his prophecies.

"Okay, Sweetmeats, that's enough for today. You look a little pale."

I follow him to the back of his shop where he washes his hands clean of the stain of his trade, still expounding on ancient and future Egypt. A gasp and a crash from the other room rushes us back. But the housewife is fine. Krassner has fainted.

October 2, Wednesday. I throw Lu, The Wanderer, and am ready to move on. But Krassner has had enough of the arcane. "They'd probably search me and find out that I am circumcised," he says and flies back to San Fran.

I buy a creamo '66 Pontiac convertible from a furniture designer and head out to Wendell Berry's in Port Royal, Kentucky, hoping to enlist him in the cause. I hear over the car radio that the earliest frost in fifty years has smitten the Kentucky tobacco crop. Fields on both sides of the road are full of limp leaves and dour farmers. Much as I dislike cigarettes I can't help but be touched by these forlorn figures in overalls and baseball caps. There is a quality timeless and universal about a farmer standing in the aftermath of a killer frost. It could be a hieroglyph, a symbol scratched on a sheet of papyrus depicting that immortal phrase of fruitless frustration: "Stung!"

October 3, Thursday. Birthday of St. Theresa. Another record-breaking cold night. After biscuits and eggs Wendell and I hitch up his two huge-haunched Belgian work mares and gee and haw out into the cold Kentucky morn to see if his sorghum survived. The leaves are dark and drooping but the stalks are still firm. We cut a few samples and head on up to the ridge for the opinion of two old brothers he is acquainted with.

"The Tidwell twins'll know," Wendell allows. "They been farming this area since the year 'ought-one."

The wagon rumbles along the winding, rocky ruts, through thorn thickets and groves of sugar maple and osage and dogwood. We find the brothers working a lofty meadow high above the neighboring spreads. No woe is frosted on the faces of this pair; their tobacco crop is hanging neatly in the barn since well before the cold snap, and they are already disking under the stalks. Erect, alert, and nearing eighty, the picture presented by these two identical Good Old Boys might describe another hieroglyph: Them as Didn't Get Stung.

They examine Wendell's stalk of sorghum and assure him how it ain't hurt in the joint, which is what roorins the crop.

"Don't let no cows into it, though," they warn. "Freeze like that makes prussic acid sorghum. Mought make a animal sickly…"

Listening to these two old American alchemists one can better understand why Wendell Berry, an M.A. from Stanford and a full professor with tenure two days a week at the U of Kentucky, busts his butt the rest of the time farming with the same antiquated methods the land of his forefathers; there is a wisdom in our past that cannot be approached but with the past's appurtenances. Think of Schliemann finding ancient Troy by way of Homer.

On the way back down from the ridge I tell Wendell of the team of scientists from Berkeley who tried probing the pyramids with a newfangled cosmic ray device in search of hidden chambers. "What they found was that there was something about the pyramids that thwarted our most advanced gadgetry. The only thing their ten tons of equipment accomplished was to electrocute a rat that tried to nest in the wiring."

"Killed a rat, did they?" says Wendell, tromping the brake to keep the wagon from overrunning the mares down the steep slope. "For Berkeley scientists, that's a start."

October 4, Friday. Dateline Paris (Kentucky, that is).

Looking for the Bible in the drawer of my ancient hotel room, I find a phone number penciled onto the unfinished wood of the drawer bottom, a dark number, etched deep and certain, after which is penciled even darker this rave review:

EPIK FUCK!

The phone is on the nightstand right next to the drawer and I must admit I'm housed upstairs alone with the classic traveling-salesman horniness. I look at the number again, but farther back in the drawer there's the Bible, after all. Besides, I have hired out to do an article, not an epic.

The passage I am seeking is Isaiah, chapter 19, verses 19 and 20. It is a pivotal quote in the first volume of a four-volume set on pyramidology that I bought in S.F. for sixty bucks, but the author has written the passage in its original Hebrew, fully aware that your usual reader will have to refer to the Bible to find out what is said. The only thing else he lets you know about the passage is that it contains 30 words and 124 Hebrew letters, and that when the numerical value of these ancient words and letters is added up by a process known as gematria the sum total of the passage equals 5,449, which is the height of the Great Pyramid in pyramid inches.

The pyramid inch is a unit so close to our own inch (25 pyramid inches = 25.0265 of our inches) that I will henceforth refer to these units simply as inches: 5,449 is also the weight of the pyramid in tons times 100. Comparisons continue ad infinitum. Compressed within the scope and accuracy of the Great Pyramid's angles and proportions seem to be all the formulas and distances pertinent to our solar system. This is one of the reasons we don't want to switch to the metric system. It'd be like cutting off our feet so we can get Birkenstock transplants.

The book falls open to Psalm 91 – "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty" – which is one of the Egyptian verses written, according to the Urantia Book, by that first great teacher of monotheism, King Akhnoten, who, according to Enoch, was schooled personally by Melchizedec himself, who, according to Cayce blah blah, you see what I mean? The path to this pyramid can lead you down endless alleys of rumination. On to Isaiah.

Here it is, chapter 19, and underlined in the same dark pencil as was used to record the phone number on the drawer bottom:

19 In that day shall there be an altar to the lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar at the border thereof to the lord.

20 And it shall be for a sign and for a witness unto the lord of hosts in the land of Egypt; for they shall cry unto the lord because of the oppressors, and he shall send them a saviour, and a great one, and he shall deliver them -

Wait a minute. That way lies the musclebound madness one sees caged behind the isometric eyes of the Jesus freaks – not the way I wish to wander in this quest. I don't need a course in spiritual dynamic tension. I return the gift of the Gideons to its drawer and shut it away along with the secret gematria of the Epik Fuck. All very interesting but I don't need it. Being raised a hard-shell Baptist jock I consider myself still fairly fit faithwise. Besides, going to the Great Pyramid to find God strikes me as something of an insult to all the other temples I have visited over the years, an affront to the words of spiritual teachers like St. Houlihan and St. Lao-tzu and St. Dorothy who, perhaps best of all, sums it up: "If you can't find God in your backyard in Kansas you probably can't find him in the Great Pyramid in Egypt, either."

In fact (I may as well tell it now) this expedition is not aimed at the Great Pyramid of Giza at all, nor any of the other dozens of already-studied and profusely interpreted temples lining the west bank of the mighty Nile, but another marvel, as yet undisclosed and said to contain in its magnificent halls all the mysteries of the past – explained!

Like just how did they cut those stones so hard and move them so far and fit them so tight? And what was the device that once crowned the summit of Cheops with such power that it echoes all the way down to the back of our Yankee dollar? Where did those builders come from? Where do we come from and, more important, as our nation's worth leaks away and the gears of this cycle's trip grind from Pisces to Aquarius in approach of the promised shifting of the poles, where are we bound?

This expedition is going to try to find the edifice called by John the Apostle the New Jerusalem and by Enoch of Ohio the Secret Temple of Secrets and by Edgar Cayce, in countless readings that prophesy the discovery of this hidden wonder sometime between 1958 and 1998, the Hall of Records.

Next stop: The A.R.E. Library, the Association for Research and Enlightenment, in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

October 5, 6, 7, 8. Research at Cayce's A.R.E. Library.

As the great accusing aftermath that followed the French Revolution dragged on and the lines of heads scheduled to be lopped off grew too long to be serviced by Dr. Guillotine's nifty machine, the overflow of minor-league aristocrats was relegated to a more cut-rate end. When their time came they were grasped by the arms and hustled indecorously from their cells to an open field where a burly nonunion executioner held aloft a simple sword.

To alleviate the boredoms of these day-in day-out heads-offs, the head hostlers developed this simple sport: just before the sword came down they would hiss in the ear of the trembling wretch they were holding bent forward, "You are free, mon ami: run!" and release his arms. Then the spectators would bet on how many steps the headless body would run before toppling. Seven steps was not unusual; twelve was par for a particularly spirited specimen. The record was set by a woman – twenty-four strides and no sign of falter before the sightless body encountered a parked manure wagon.

Some things keep going farther than others. "A spirited lass, that one…"

This same ongoing spirit surrounds the big white A.R.E. building that houses the 49,135 pages of verbatim psychic readings given by the unassuming little man known as the Sleeping Prophet.

What I learn after four days' research is that hundreds have preceded me in this search for Cayce's Secret Pyramid. The most noteworthy is a certain Muldoon Greggor. Scholar Greggor has written a book on the subject, called The Hidden Records, and is in fact at present in Cairo, according to his brother, continuing his research. Has he unearthed anything new?

"He can be found at the university," the brother advises me without looking up from his research. "Why don't you wait until you get to Cairo and ask him? Myself, I'm into almonds."

October 9, Wednesday. New York City. I'm in this raging Babylon not half an hour and my car gets towed away. It takes me the rest of the day and 75 bucks to get it back. A little girl waiting with her daddy in the angry line at the redeeming pier tells me their car was stolen, too, and is probably crying after the abduction.

"They drag them away by their hind foot, you know."

October 10, 11. More museums and libraries. I think I've got the information to piece the history together. I had planned to write my assimilation of all this material during these few days before Jacky Cherry arrives for our departure, but this city is too overpowering. Awful and awesome. It is here that the leak is most evident, a constant hiss of escaping economy. When you stand near the New Jersey Turnpike you can feel a great protein wind blowing from all over the nation into Long Island and right on out into the ocean to the ten-mile square of floating garbage.

Jack is here and we fly to Cairo tomorrow. My next filing will be from the other side of the globe.

II: RAMADAN: "THEY TEEM BY NIGHT!"

October 13. Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost. Our 747 comes wallowing down out of the clouds into the Amsterdam airport like a flying pig, bellying in to the trough.

Three big trucks swarm out to service her, to see carefully to her comfort. In turn, this pampered porker spares no expense when it comes to the comfort of her clientele. We are lavished with it. Refreshments are served constantly by an ample staff of smiling nubilians. For entertainment you have stereo music, in-flight movies, and a free magazine. Passengers are invited to take this free piece of worthless printed crap home. Of course, there is the very latest in sanitation: everything that comes in human contact is incinerated afterwards.

What a difference when we deplane in Ankara, Turkey, and board the dowdy old DC-8 that will carry us on to Cairo. The plane is smelly as a subway, jammed to the gunwales with every sort of heavy-lidded heathen.

"No wonder the terminal search took so long," Jacky whispers. "Everybody looks like a terrorist."

He says he recognizes the tongues of Turks, Serbs, Kurds, Arabs, Berbers, and, he thinks, some Nurds-all flying to the climax of their month-long religious observance, all sweating and singing and noisily spattering each other with their various dialects and languages that sound, as Jack the language gourmet puts it, "like popcorn popping."

We unload a bunch at Istanbul, more than half. Oddly enough, the plane gets even noisier, swarthier. The remaining passengers look Jack and me over with new respect. "You? You go to Cairo?" We tell them yes, we are going to Cairo. They roll their eyes.

"Ya latif! Ya latif!"

In the air again, I ask Jack what it means. "Ya latif is the Arab equivalent for Far Out. To the devout it means, 'Nice Allah, making for me more surprises.' "

As we cross the Suez we break from the clouds into open night. Out the window thunderheads stand like bored sentries, the shoulders of their rumpled uniforms laced round with rusty stars. They are rolling little balls of heat lightning back and forth, just to keep awake. They wave us on through…

Sunday midnight. Cairo. The turmoil at the airport is unbelievable, tumultuous, teeming – that's the word: teeming – with pilgrims coming and going and relatives, waiting for pilgrims, coming and going. Porters wait on passengers; ragged runners wait on the porters. Customs officials bustle and soldiers in old earth-colored uniforms stroll and yawn. Hustlers of every age and ilk hit you up from every angle known to man. Jacky takes the action in suave stride.

"My year in the Near East," he tells me, "I saw all the gimmicks."

We work our way through, filling forms and getting stamped, moving our bags through a circle of hands – this guy hands the stuff to this next guy who wheels it to this next guy who unloads it by the desk of this next guy – all expecting tips – until we finally make it outside into the welcome desert wind.

The hustler's runner's porter who has attached himself to us runs down a taxi and hustles us in. He tells us, Do not worry, is great driver, and sends us careening terrifically down an unlit four-lane boulevard teeming from curb to curb with bicycles, tricycles, motorcycles, sidehackers, motorscooters, motorbikes, buses dribbling passengers from every hole and handhold, rigs, gigs, wheelchairs, biers, wheelbarrows, wagons, pushcarts, army troop trucks where smooth-chopped soldier boys giggle and goose each other with machine guns… rickshaws, buckboards, hacks both horse- and camel- and human-drawn, donkey-riders and -pullers and -drivers, oxcarts, fruitcarts, legless beggars in thighcarts, laundry ladies with balanced bundles, a brightblack farm lad in a patched nightshirt prodding a greatballed Holstein bull (into town at midnight to what? to butcher? to trade for beans?) plus a huge honking multitude of other taxis, all careening, all without head- or taillights ever showing except for the occasional blink-blink-honk-blink signal to let the dim mass rolling ahead know that, by the Eight Cylinders of Allah, this Great Driver is coming through!

Miraculously, we make it through the clotted city center and across the Nile to the steps of our hotel, the Omar Khayyam. The Omar Khayyam is now somewhat faded in splendor from its heyday, when its statues still had all their noses and nipples, and the lords and colonels and territorial governors still raised their lime squashes in terse toasts to the Empire that the bloody sun would never set on!

We are shown to our room and unpack. It's after two in the morning but the incredible hubbub from across the river calls us back out into the night. As we walk through that obsolete colonial lobby, Jack fills me in on some of the other wonderful things the British did for the Egyptians.

"They introduced the rulers of Egypt to the idea of buying things on credit. Egypt as a result immediately went into stupendous debt, so the British were honorably obliged to come in and clear up their finances for them. This task took seventy years.

"The British plan was to convert Egypt to a single-export economy – cotton. To encourage this they started building dams on the Nile. It bothered the British that the country got so flippin' flooded every year.

"Without the yearly flood that had always brought new soil to replenish the land, the Egyptians were soon dependent on wonderful fertilizers. Also, now that they didn't have to worry about those nasty floods, the British didn't see any reason why they shouldn't get two crops a year instead of one. Perhaps even three! The rulers, none of whom were Egyptian-born or even spoke Arabic, thought it was all wonderful. Albanians, I believe, and they were throwing incredible sums of money around, building Victorian-style mosques, importing things, and paying European creditors absurd rates of interest…

"What happened when there were three crops a year instead of one was that the farmers spent a lot more time standing around in the irrigation ditches. So there was a tremendous increase of bilharzia, a parasite that's spread by a little water worm that starts at the foot, so to speak, of the ladder, and climbs to the eyes. It gave Egypt the highest rate of blindness in the world. Over seventy percent of the population had it at one point.

"Peculiarly enough, for all the modernization they were introducing to the Egyptians, the British never quite got around to building any hospitals. The mortality rate from birth to age five was about fifty percent. They have a proverb here, 'Endurance is the best thing.' The British helped emphasize this."

We have reached the other side of the Nile, where Jacky's history of recent Cairo is drowned out by the city's stertorous present. Nowhere else have you heard or imagined anything like it! It has a flavor all its own. Mix in your mind the deep surging roar of a petroleum riptide with the strident squealing of a teenage basketball playoff; fold in air conditioners and sprinkle with vendors' bells and police whistles; pour this into narrow streets greased liberally with people noisily eating sesame cakes fried in olive oil, bubbling huge hookahs, slurping Turkish coffees, playing backgammon as loud as the little markers can be slapped down without breaking them – thousands of people, coughing, spitting, muttering in the shadowy debris next to the buildings, singing, standing, sweeping along in dirty damask gellabias, arguing in the traffic – millions! and all jacked up loud on caffeine. Simmer this recipe at 80 degrees at two in the morning and you have a taste of the Cairo Cacophony.

After blocks with no sign of a letup we turn around. We're tired. Ten thousand miles. On the bridge back, Jack is accosted by a pockmarked man with a tambourine and a purple-assed baboon on a rope.

"Money!" the man cries, holding the tambourine out and the baboon back with a cord ringed into the animal's lower lip. "Money! For momkey pardon me sir, for mom-key!"

Jacky shakes his head. "No. Ana mish awez. Don't want to see monkey dance."

"Momkey not dance, pardon me sir. Not dance!" He has to shout against the traffic; the baboon responds to the shout by rearing hysterically and snarling out his long golden fangs. The man whacks the shrieking beast sharply across the ear with the edge of the tambourine. "Momkey get sick! Rabies! Money" – he whacks him again, jerking his leash – "to get momkey fixed."

The baboon acts like his torment is all our fault. He is backing toward us, stretching the pierced lip as he tries to reach us with a hind hand. His claws are painted crimson. His ass looks like a brain tumor on the wrong end.

"Money for mom-key! Hurr-ee!"

Walking away, 50 piastres poorer, Jack admits that Cairo has come up with some new gimmicks since he was here ten years ago.

As we round the end of the bridge we surprise a young sentry pissing off the abutment of his command. Fumbling with embarrassment, he folds a big black overcoat over his uniform still hanging open-flied.

"Wel-come," he says, shouldering his carbine. "Wel-come to Cairo… Hokay?"

October 14, Monday morning. Jack and I are out early to look up a Dr. Ragar that Enoch of Ohio sent me to see. We find him at last, set like a smoky stone in the wicker chair of his jewelry shop, a rheumy-eyed Egyptian businessman in a sincere serge suit and black tie. We try to explain our project but he doesn't seem as interested in digging up an undiscovered temple as in putting down his assortment of already discovered stuff. He slams a door to a glass display case.

"Junk! I, Dr. Ragar, not lie to you. Most of it, junk! For the tourist who knows nothing, respects nothing, is this junk. But for those I see respect Egypt, I show for them the Egypt I respect. So. From what part of America you come from, my friend?"

I tell him I'm from Oregon. Near California.

"Yes, I know Oregon. So. From what part Oregon?"

I tell him I live in a town called Mt. Nebo.

"Yes. Mt. Nebo I know. I visit your state this summer. With the Rotary. See, is flag?"

It's true; hanging on his wall among many others is a fringed flag from the 1974 Rotary International meeting in Portland, Oregon.

"I know your whole state. I am a doctor, archaeologist! I travel all over your beautiful state. So. What part the town you are living? East Mt. Nebo or West Mt. Nebo?"

"Kind of in the middle," I tell him. Mt. Nebo is your usual wide spot in a two-lane blacktop off a main interstate. "And off a little to the north."

"Yes. North Mt. Nebo. I know very well that section your city, North Mt. Nebo. So. Let me show you something more…"

He checks both ways, then draws his wallet from a secret inner-serge pocket. He opens it to a card embossed with an ancient and arcane symbol.

"You see? Also I am Shriner, thirty-two degrees. You know Masons?"

I tell him I already knew he was a Mason – that was how Enoch knew of him, through a fraternal newspaper – and add that my father is also a Mason of the same degree, now kind of inactive.

"Brother!" He claps his palm tight to mine and looks deep into my soul. He's got a gaze like visual bad breath. "Son of a brother is brother! Come. For you I not show this junk. Come down street next door to my home for some hot tea where it is more quiet. You like Egyptian tea, my brothers? Egyptian essences? Not drugstore perfumes, but the true essences, you know? Of the lotus flower? The jasmine? Come. Because your father, I do you a favor; I give you that scarab you favored."

He clasps my hand again, pressing the gift into my palm. I tell him that's not necessary, but he shakes his head.

"Not a word, Brother. Some day, you do something for me. As Masons say, 'One stone at a time.' "

He holds my hand, boring closer with sincerity. I wonder if there is some kind of eye gargle for cases like this. I try to steer us back to archaeology.

"Speaking of stones, doctor, you know the legend of the missing Giza top stone? Where the Temple of Records is supposed to be hidden?"

He laughs darkly. "Who could better know?" he asks, pulling me after him along the sidewalk. "But first, come, both of you; for refreshment."

Jacky follows but he isn't to be so easily distracted. "Then you've heard of this place, doctor? This hidden temple?"

"Dr. Ragar? – Archaeologist, Shriner? -- hear of the Hidden Temple of Records?" He laughs again. Like that flag from Portland, there is in his laugh a dark insinuation that keeps you guessing. "Everybody hear of the Hidden Temple. Hear this, hear that… but The Truth? Who knows The Truth?"

He stops and holds his Masonic ring out for me to see, not Jacky. "We of the Brotherhood know The Truth, which we cannot by oath tell the uninitiated. But you, my brother son-of-a-brother, to you I can maybe show a little light not allowed others, eh?"

I nod, and he nods back, tugging me on a few steps more to a narrow doorfront.

"First here we are at my factory with excellent spice tea… white sugar – none for me, I must apologize; this holy fast – then we talk. Ibrahim!" he shouts, unlocking the heavy door. "Tea for my friends from America!"

We enter a smaller, fancier version of the other shop. It is hung clear to the ceiling fan with old rugs and tapestry. This muffles the noise of downtown Cairo to a medium squawl. But good Christ, is it stuffy. Doctor turns on the fan but it can barely budge the swaddled air.

"So. While we wait my cousin bring the tea you will smell the true essence of the Nile lotus which no woman can resist."

Jacky ends up buying $50 worth of perfume for the girls back at Rolling Stone. All I get from the wise doctor, besides my free scarab, is the use of his telephone to call the American University of Cairo. I leave a message for Mr. Muldoon Greggor to please contact me at the Hotel Omar Khayyam. After an afternoon in the essence factory I can tell that if you want some straight information here in Cairo, you're going to have to see an American.

Walking back to our hotel we pass a street display of the '73 war, the campaign when Egypt crossed the Suez and kicked Jew ass and got away with it. In the center of the display is a two-story cement foot about to crunch down on a Star of David. I want to shoot a picture of it, but everybody watching makes me nervous about this damn big negative-print Polaroid.

An intense young vet of that war leads us personally through the exhibit, pointing out strategic battle zones and fortifications in the big sand model he has built. He is passionately patriotic. He points to a bazooka shell propped against the sand that depicts the Bar-Lev, the Israeli version of the Maginot line.

"That missile? Made in America. These captured guns? Also American."

His eyes are hard when he says these things to me, but there is no animosity. Even when he speaks of the Jews (pointing out their faces in the photographs so I can tell the bedraggled Israeli captives from the dust-ridden Egyptian captors), his voice holds no blame. He talks of the Israeli soldiers the way a player from one team speaks of his rivals across the river, with respect. And such close rivals, I realize, looking at the way Fate and the United Nations have placed Cairo and Jerusalem within a jet's moment from each other. No wonder the military show on every street.

Returning over the bridge I see again our little soldier standing shabbily at guard beside his tent and his haphazard pile of sandbags. We salute and I march toward the hotel, feeling a new familiarity with the political situation.

October 15, Tuesday. Still unable to begin my article. Lots of walking in town. There are some hard sights, putting my put-down of our pampered lifestyle to the test: childworn wives leading patched families past the fruit stands to the mildewed piles of cheaper foods in the rear; a dog peeled to the bone with terminal mange, gnawing on a Kotex; a cryptic black lump in the middle of the sidewalk, about the size of a seven-year-old, all balled up with a black blanket pulled tight over everything except the upturned palm stuck on the end of a withered stick; whole families living in gutted shells of Packards and Buicks and Cadillacs biodegrading against the curbs…

"Jacky, what this town needs is some New York tow-away cops. Keep the riffraff on the run."

And always the smell of urine, and the unhealthy stools half-hidden everywhere. As Cairo has a distinctive and subtle recipe of sound all its own, so it has its odor.

All in all, it's awful to behold. I carry the special Polaroid I bought in New York with me everywhere, but as yet I'm too squeamish to point it at this hard privation. I remember an argument I had with Annie Liebovitz: "Listen, Annie. I don't want any pictures of me shaving, shitting, or strung out!" Neither would I want any shots of my teeth rotted away, or my eyes gummed over with yellow growths, or my limbs twisted and tortured.

Tuesday night or Wednesday morn. Today is the last day of the Ramadan fast. Christmas in Cairo. Like New York, the power of this city is overwhelming, a presence too frightful to face. Unlike New York, though, the power of Cairo is generated by more than the daily flow of liquid assets through economic turbines. Cairo's main current streams from its past, out of a wealth that flows toward something yet-to-be – a power of impending power. This is a city of influence since before New York was a land mass, a place of ancient records since before the Old Testament was in rough draft. Somewhere between the brittle no-magic nationalism of the young patriot in the park and the shopworn mysticism of the Illuminoid in serge, this larval account is swelling.

Even now the cannon fires – the signal for the last day of Ramadan. The caterwaul of traffic politely drops so the amplified chants can be heard from the minarets on this night of nights.

It gets quiet. You can hear the responses of the faithful in the scattered Moslem night, the prayers rising from the mosques and sidewalks. This afternoon I saw a streetsweeper prostrate himself alongside the pile of dirt he was herding, answering the call from Mecca with cabs swerving all around him.

Ye gods, listen! It spirals louder yet. Let me out of this moldering room! I'll take my pen and camera and face this thing while it's still damp with dawn.

I hurry past third-rate Theseus and his plaster legions, through the lofty lobby where chandeliers hang from ceilings infested with gilt cupids, around the praying gateman outside up the sidewalk to the belly-high cement wall that runs along the steep bank of the Nile.

I put my notebook on the wall. The prayer is still going on but the city's business has stopped holding still for it. Engines sing; brakes cry; horns tootle; head- and taillights blink off and on. Long strings of colored lights go looping along the streets, past elaborate cafe neons and simple firepots cooking kebobs on the curb. In the minarets the chant leaders are vying with the city and each other in amplified earnest, as thousands upon thousands of lesser voices try their best to keep up.

It's windy, the historic wind that blows against the current so the Nile boatmen of eons can sail south upstream and then drift back downstream north. A dog in the back of a passing pickup barks. The soldier comes out of his tent and sees me at the wall writing in my notebook. He turns up the collar of his long overcoat and comes toward me with a flashlight. He carries it with his hand over the lighted end so it is like a little lamp glow between us. We smile and nod at each other. This close I notice the bayonet on his shouldered carbine is rusty and bent.

The din across the river jumps even higher in response to the chanting dawn. We turn back toward the city just in time to see first the fluorescent tubes across the bridge, then the landing lamps on the opposite bank, then every light in Cairo blow out – zam! Allah be praised! We turn to each other again, eyebrows uplifted. He whistles a low note of applause to the occasion: "Ya latif!" I nod agreement.

The amplifiers have been silenced by the power overload, but the chanting in the streets hasn't stopped. In fact, it is rising to the challenge of the phenomenon. Wireless worship. A voice spun from fibers strong as the fabled Egyptian cotton – longest staples in the world! – spindling out of millions of throats, into threads, cords, twining east toward that dark meteorite that draws all strands of this faith together like the eye of a needle, or a black hole.

The soldier watches me write, kindly leaking a little light onto my notebook. "Tisma, ya khawaga," he says. "Een-glees?"

I tell him no, not English. "American."

"Good." He nods. "Merican."

My throat is dry from the wind and the moment. I take my canteen from my shoulder and drink. I offer it to the soldier. After a polite sip he whistles a comment on the quality of such a canteen.

"Merican army, yes?"

"Yeah. Army surplus." Ex-marine friend Frank Dobbs had helped me pick it out, along with my desert boots and pith helmet. "United States Army surplus."

He hands back the canteen and salutes. I salute him back. He gestures toward my notebooks, questioning. I point to the sound from across the river, cup my ear. I lift my nose and smell the Nile wind, then scribble some words. Finally I make a circle with my hand, taking in the river, the sky, the holy night. He nods, excited, and lays his closed fist on his heart.

"Egypt?" he asks.

"Yes," I affirm, duplicating his gesture with my fist. "Egypt."

And all the lights of Cairo come back on.

We lift our eyebrows to each other again, as the amplifiers skirl back up, and the lights and the traffic join again in noisy battle. When the soldier and I unclench our fists there's maybe even tears. I fancy that I see the face of Egypt's rebirth, charged both with a new pride and the old magic, silhouetted innocent and wise against that skyline of historic minarets and modern highrises – the whole puzzle. I must get a picture! I'm trying to dig the Polaroid out of the bag when I notice the light in my face.

"No." He is wagging the light from side to side. "No photo." I figure it must be some religious taboo, like certain natives guarding their souls, like me with Annie Liebovitz.

"I can dig it. I'll just snap a shot of that skyline dawn across the Nile."

"No photo!"

"Hey, I wasn't aiming anywhere near you." I start to stomp away, down the wall. "I'll shoot from somewhere else if you're so -"

"No photo!"

Slowly I take my eye from the viewfinder. The flashlight has been put aside on the wall to leave both hands available for the carbine. Too late I realize that it is the bridge he is guarding, not his soul.

I put the camera away, apologizing. He stands looking at me, suspicious and insulted. There is nothing more for us to say, even if we could understand each other. Finally, to regain a more customary relationship, he puts two fingers to his lips and asks, "Seegrat?"

I tell him I don't smoke. He thinks I'm lying, sore about the picture. There is nothing to say. I sigh. The puzzle of Cairo shuffles off to stand in token attention on the abutment, his collar up and his back turned stiffly toward me.

The light is coming fast through the mist. The wind dies away for a moment and a sharp reek fogs up around me. Looking down I see I have stomped into a puddle of piss.

October 16. The Ramadan holiday. Erstwhile Egyptologist Muldoon Greggor calls, tells us to come over to his place; he'll go with us to the pyramid tonight after his classes.

"Check out of that morgue right now!" he shouts through the phone static. "I've reserved rooms at the Mena House!"

So it's outta that rundown Rudyard Kipling pipedream through the surging holiday streets up seven floors to the address Greggor gives us. A shy girl lets us in a ghetto penthouse. Jacky and I spend the rest of the afternoon drinking the man's cold Stella beers, watching the multitudes below parade past in their gayest Ramadan gladrags. The shadows have stretched out long before Muldoon Greggor comes rushing in with a load of books. We barely shake hands before he hustles us down to catch a cab.

"Mena House, Pyramid Road! We want to get there before dark."

So it is at dusty sundown that I see it at last: first from the window of the cab; then closer, from the hotel turnaround; then through the date palms walking up the hill; then – Great God in Heaven Whatever Your Name or Names! – here it is before me: mankind's mightiest wedge, sliced perfect from a starblue sky – the Great Pyramid of Giza.

III: INSIDE THE THRONE

Imagine the usual tourist approaching for his first hit: relieved to be finally off the plane and out of that airport, a bit anxious on the tour bus through that crazy Cairo traffic but still adequately protected by the reinforced steel of the modern machine, laughing and pointing with his fellow tour members at the incongruous panorama of the Giza outskirts – donkeys drawing broken-down Fiats, mud huts stuck like dirt-dauber nests to the sides of the most modern condominiums – "Pathetic, but you gotta admit, Cynthia: very picturesque" – fiddling with his camera, tilting back in his seat a little sleepy from the sun; when, suddenly, the air brakes grab and the door hisses open and he is ejected from his climatized shell into the merciless maw of the parking lot at the bottom of Pyramid Hill.

A hungry swarm of his first real Egyptians comes clamoring after him: buggy drivers and camel hasselers and purveyors of the finest Arabian saddle steeds. And guides? Lord, the guides! of every conceit and canon:

"Wel-come, mister, wel-come; you are fine, yes?"

The handshake, the twinkle, the ravenous cumin-winded come-on:

"You like Cairo, yes? You like Egypt? You like Egyptian people? You like to see authentic hidden mummy the late King Koo-Foo? I am a guide!"

Or, even worse, the Not-Guides:

"Oh, pardon sir if I cannot help but notice you are being bothered by these phony fellaheen. Understand please; I am not a guide, being official watchman, in employ the Department of Antiquities in Cairo. You come with me. I keep these nuisances away from your holiday. I am Not-Guide!"

Our poor pilgrim fights his way through the swarm up the curving walk to the aouda (a big limestone lot in front of the northern base of the pyramid, swarming with more of the same), presses on to the monstrous stack of stone blocks which are perched all over with more damned guides and Not-Guides grinning like gargoyles… pays his piastres for the tickets that allow him and his nose-wrinkled wife to crawl up a cramped and airless torture chamber to a stone room about the size of the men's room of the bus terminal back home – and smellier! – then hightails it back to the relief of the bus:

"But tell me the truth, Cyn, wasn't that thing unbelievable big like nothing you ever saw in your life? I can't wait to see these shots projected on the screen at the lodge."

Unbelievable big doesn't come close. It is inconceivably big, incomprehensibly big, brutal against the very heavens it's so big. If you come after the rush hour and are allowed to stroll unsolicited to it, you witness a phenomenon as striking as its size. As you cross the limestone lot the huge triangle begins to elongate into your peripheries – to flatten. The base line stretches, the sloping sides lengthen, and those sharpening corners – the northwest corner in the corner of your right eye; the northeast corner in your left – begin to wrap around you!

Consequently the vertex is getting shorter, the summit angle flatter; when you finally reach the bottom course of base stones and raise your eyes up its fifty-degree face even the two-dimensional triangle has disappeared! The plane of it diminishes away with such perfection that it is difficult to conceive of it as a plane. When it was still dressed smooth in its original casing stones the effect must have been beyond the senses' ability to resist; it must have turned into a seamless white line – a phenomenon of the first dimension.

Even in its present peeled condition, the illusion still disorients you. You tell your senses, "Look maybe I ain't seen the other sides but I did see this one so it's gotta be at least a plane." But planes are something we know, like airfields and shopping center parking lots, hence horizontal. This makes it seem that you could walk right out on it if you just lean back enough to get on the perpendicular. Ooog. It makes you stumble and reel…

To calm my stomach I leaned against one of the casing stones. It was smooth to my cheek; it made me feel cool, and a little melancholy.

"It's sad, isn't it?" Muldoon said. "Seeing the old place so rundown and stripped."

Muldoon Greggor wasn't the tweedy old Egyptologist we had expected. He was a little past twenty, wearing patched Levi's and a T-shirt, and a look in his eyes that still smoldered from some psychedelic scorcher that had made him swear off forever.

"It's eroded more in the six centuries since the Arabs stripped it than it did in the forty centuries before – if you accept the view of the accepted Egyptologists – or in the hundred and seventy centuries – if you go for the Cayce readings."

"Sad," I agreed. "How could they do it?"

"They figured they needed it." Jacky came to the defense of those long-gone Arabs. "For Allah."

"More than just sad," I kept on. "It's insulting… to whoever composed this postcard in stone, and took the trouble to send it to us.

"The Arabs needed the stones to rebuild Cairo. Remember Nasser's construction of the High Dam?"

Jacky was talking about Nasser's flooding of architectural treasures with the construction of a hydroelectric dam. For the sake of the power-poor millions I had seen in Cairo, I was forced to admit that I would have done the same.

"Removing the casing stones is different," Muldoon said. "It's like a goal-tending foul committed before the rule was enacted. Now we don't know; was the shot going to go through or not? Those whoevers that built this thing were trying to transmit information important to everybody, for all time. Like how to square the circle or find the Golden Rectangle. None of the other pyramids convey any of this. Their message is pretty ego-involved, saying essentially: 'Attention, Future: Just a line to remind you that King Whatnuton was the Alltime Greatest Leader, Warrior, Thinker, and Effecter of Stupendous Accomplishments, a few of which are depicted on the surrounding walls. His wife wasn't half bad either.' There's none of that around the Great Pyramid. No bragging hieroglyphs. A much more universal message is suggested."

"Maybe," Jacky said, "it isn't obliterated at all. Maybe in the intervening eons since they sent it we have simply forgotten how to read."

"Or maybe this was just a decoy," I said, "for the Arabs. Maybe the message was never in there in the first place."

I can maybe with anybody.

A patter of gravel drew our attention up the face. A small figure had come out of the entrance tunnel and was working his way down to importune us.

"Come on," Muldoon said. "There's a place back behind the southern face where they don't find you."

Jacky and I followed around the northeastern corner and along the western base to the rear. It was darker, the lights of Cairo being blocked now by the huge structure. Carefully Muldoon led us into the excavated ruins of a minor funerary temple located between the rear of the Great Pyramid and the eastern face of its companion giant, the Pyramid of Chephren.

"See that black ball down there?"

Muldoon pointed off down the hill in the direction of the Giza village. I could make out a spheroid shape a quarter mile away.

"That's the back of the Sphinx's head." He found a seat facing the ominous silhouette.

Jacky located a spot where he could look longingly east toward the twinkle of Cairo After Hours. I picked a rock with a backrest aimed so I could see the whole dim trio of pyramids, called in tour booklets "The Giza Group." Check the picture on a pack of Camels.

Far to the west is little Mykerinos. Much nearer is Chephren. With a crown of casing stones still in place on its summit, Chephren is almost the size of its famous brother. It is in fact some few feet farther above sea level, having been built on a slightly higher plateau than the Great Pyramid. It looks every bit as massive. But – as Muldoon mentioned about the other ruins and edifices – Chephren just doesn't have the chutzpah. The little crown of casing stones that eluded the Arabs actually gives it a quality slightly comic, like a cartoon peak sculpted by a Disneyland architect. Oh, it's also unbelievably big, Chephren is; and you are amazed by the manipulation of all that masonry, and gratified that its top is still there and cased; but it does not hold you. Your eye keeps being drawn back to the topless headliner, the star…

"What's that dark slot?" I ask Muldoon. "Is there a back door in the Great Pyramid?"

"That's what Colonel Howard-Vyse thought, about 1840. He was the guy that blasted open the chambers above the King's Chamber, you know, and disclosed that damned cartouche of Khufu."

It's this name "Khufu" found scratched in an upper attic that goes hardest against the Cayce readings.

"The Colonel was big on blasting, and he had this Arab working for him named Dued who apparently lived on blasting powder and hashish. Years of working with these two combustibles had made Dued deaf but had given him some fine theories about excavation.

Like Vyse, he had a theory that there was another entrance, and he believed that, with the proper combination of his favorite ingredients, he could find it."

The wind had dropped and it had grown very still. For a moment I thought I saw something coming around the southwestern corner toward us, but it vanished in that fathomless shadow.

"One of those blasts in the upper chambers short-fused and the Colonel thought he had lost a prize powder monkey. But after a couple days Dued woke up, with a vision - that there was a back door, situated exactly opposite the front door. The simplicity of the vision interested the good Colonel."

I noticed all the dogs in the village below had stopped barking.

"Not that there are any other southern entrances in any of the other shitload of pyramids, of course, but old Howard-Vyse thought that, just to be on the safe side, they'd go around back and check… knock a couple of kegs' worth."

"Did he find anything?" Jacky wanted to know.

"Just more rock. It is called 'Vyse's Resultless Hole.' "

"Wouldn't ya know it," Jacky said.

"He fired Dued and moved his operations to Mykerinos, where he found a sarcophagus that he claimed held the pharaoh's mummy, but as luck or fate would have it the boat sank on the way back to England and Howard-Vyse lost his trophy. All he had to show for five years of digging and blasting is that resultless hole there and those damned upper chambers. One of which was filled with a mysterious black dust."

"Yeah? What was it?"

"When science progressed enough to analyze it, it was found to be the bodies of millions of dead bugs."

"Terrific." Jacky stood up and straightened his necktie. "I'm inspired to walk back to the hotel and kill mosquitoes. Let me know if you turn up anything resultful."

After Jacky moped off, Muldoon painted in some of his past for me. Raised by parents both ecclesiastical and into the Edgar Cayce readings, Muldoon had grown up pretty blase concerning theories arcane. Enoch of Ohio was his first real turn-on.

"He came to town and set up his tent. During the day he did horoscopes and tattoos, then at night he'd have these meetings. He'd go into a trance and answer questions, as 'Rey-Torl.' Rey-Torl used to be a cobbler in Mu, made Mu shoes, then his business went under so he moved on to Atlantis and became an unlicensed genetic surgeon. He eventually got run out of town and ended up in Egypt, helping Ra-ta build the pyramid."

"Sounds hot. Did Rey tell you any good dirt?"

"Not really. The same thing that Cayce and all the other prophecy brokers say: that the Piscean Age is flopping toward the end of its two-thousand-year run and the Grand Finale is coming up soon, and that it's going to happen in this last quarter of this century. Rey-Torl called it Apodosis. Enoch called it the Shit Storm."

"The last quarter?"

"Give or take a couple of decades. But soon. That's why the Cayce people place so much importance on locating that secret hall. It's supposed to contain records of previous shit storms plus some helpful hints on how to survive them. However --"

I had the feeling this wasn't the sort of stuff Muldoon talked about with fellow Egyptology students at the university.

"- everything has to be exactly right before you can find it: you, the time, the position of the earth, that damned Cat's Paw."

Looking off toward the black lump of the Sphinx's head he quoted by heart the most famous of the Cayce predictions:

" 'This in position lies, as the sun rises from the waters, the line of the shadow (or light) falls between the paws of the Sphinx, that was later set as the sentinel or guard, which may not be entered from the connecting chambers from the Sphinx's paw (right paw) until the time has been fulfilled when the changes must be active in this sphere of man's experience. Between, then, the Sphinx and the river.

It was the same prophecy that had drawn me to the pyramid by way of Virginia Beach. Everybody at the Cayce library was familiar with it. Whenever I mentioned that I was on my way to Egypt the usual response from blue-haired old ladies and long-haired ex-hippies alike was, "Gonna look for the Hall of Records, huh?"

"And the Sphinx isn't the only guard," Muldoon went on. "The readings mentioned whole squadrons of 'sentries' or 'keepers' or 'watchmen' picketed around the hidden hall. All around here, actually. This whole plateau is a geodetic phenomenon protected by a corps of special spooks."

I shivered from the wind. Muldoon stood up. "I've got to head back to Cairo if I'm going to make my eight o'clock tomorrow." He snapped his Levi's jacket closed, still looking off at the Sphinx. "A woman from the A.R.E. did come over and try, you know? After a lot of rigamarole and red tape they actually let her drill a hole in the front of the right paw…"

"Did she find anything?"

"Nothing. How she chose that one spot out of the mile or so between the paw and the river she never disclosed, but it was solid rock as far down as she drilled. She was very disappointed."

"What about those ghostly guards, did they smite her?"

"That was not disclosed either. She did, however, end up marrying the Czechoslovakian ambassador."

Hands in his pockets, Muldoon headed off into the shadows, saying he'd see me "bukra fi'l mish-mish." It was a phrase you hear a lot in Cairo. "It's the Arabic version of mañana," I remembered Jacky had said, "only less definite. It means Tomorrow, when it's the season of the apricot.' "

Left alone, I tried to recall what I knew about geodetic phenomena. I remembered my trip to Stonehenge, watching the winter solstice sun rise up the slot between those two rocks directly in front of me, knowing that exactly half a year later it would slide up between those other two rocks exactly to my right, and how the phenomenon forced you to strain your concept of where you are to include the tilt of our axis, the swing of our orbit around the sun, the singular position on our globe of this circle of prehistoric rocks – how it made you appreciate being in the only place on earth where those two solstice suns would rise thus.

I know that the pyramid was built in such a place – one of the acupuncture points of the physical planet – but no matter how I tried I couldn't get that planetary orientation that Stonehenge gives you.

For one thing I was still disoriented by that feeling of dimensions dropping away – everything still seemed flat, even the back of the Sphinx's head – and for another, I couldn't quite convince myself that I was alone. There seemed to be someone still close, and coming closer! The two hundred Egyptian pound notes in my pocket were suddenly bleeping like a beacon and I was beginning to glance about for a weapon when, down the hill, the Sphinx's whole head lit up and proclaimed in a voice like Orson Welles to the tenth power:

"I… am… the… Sphinx. I am… very old."

It boomed this out over the accompanying strains of Verdi's Aida, as Chephren lit up a glorious green, and little Mykerinos glowed blue, and the Great Pyramid blazed an appropriate gold. It was the Sound and Light show, put on for the benefit of an outdoor audience at the bottom of the hill. From the tombs and mastabas everywhere banks of concealed floodlights illuminated the pyramids in slowly shifting hues while the Sphinx ran it all down in grandly amplified English. I just happened to hit it English night. The other performances rotate through French, German, Russian, and Arabic.

In this golden glow I suddenly saw the little figure I had sensed, hunkered on a limestone block about thirty yards away, watching me. Taking advantage of the light, I got up and headed immediately back around the Great Pyramid in long strides. I didn't turn until I had reached the road. He was right behind me.

"Good evening, my friend. A very nice evening, yes?" He hurried the last few steps to fall in beside me. He wore a blue gellabia and scuffed black oxfords without socks. "My name is Marag."

I came to know that it was spelled that way but it was pronounced with a soft "g" so it rhymed with collage, only with the accent on the first syllable: Mah-razhhh.

"Excuse me but I hear you wish to buy some hashish? Five pounds, this much."

He made a little circle with his thumb and finger and smiled through it. His face was polished teak, alert and angled, with a neat black mustache over tiny white teeth. His eyes flashed from their webwork of amused wrinkles. An old amusement. I judged him to be at least forty, as easily seventy, and not quite as tall as my thirteen-year-old son. Hurrying along beside me he seemed to barely touch the ground. When at last I relinquished the five-pound note and shook his hand to seal our deal, his fingers sifted through my grip like so much sand.

There's a little outdoor restaurant at the edge of the aouda where I sipped Turkish coffee and watched the pyramid change colors until the lights went out and the Sphinx shut up, then I paid my tab and left. I had waited nearly an hour. He had said twenty minutes. But I knew the rules, they're international: whether you're in Tangiers or Tijuana, North Beach or Novato, you don't get up off the bread till you see the score. Twenty minutes… in the season of the apricots.

But just as I came out of the restaurant I saw a little blue figure come whisking around up the shadowy trail from the village. Panting and sweating, he slipped five little packages into my hand, each about the size of a.45 cartridge and wrapped in paper tape. I started digging at one with my thumbnail.

"I had to go more far than I think," he apologized. "Eh? Is good? Five pieces, five pounds?"

I realized he was telling me that the score had cost him exactly what I had put out, none left over for his efforts. His face sparkled up at me. Reaching again for my wallet, I also realized that he could have packaged five goat turds.

He saw my hesitation. "As you wish." He shrugged. I gave him two American bucks, worth about a pound and a half on the black market. After examining the two greenbacks he grinned to let me know he appreciated my logic if not my generosity.

"Any night, this corner. Ask for Marag. Everybody know where to find Marag." Reaching out, he sifted his hand again through mine, his eyes glittering. "And your name?"

I told him, somewhat suspicious still: was he going to burn me, bust me, or both, as the dealers were known to do in Tijuana?

"D'bree? D'bree?" Trying the accent at each end amused him. "Good night to you, Mr. D'bree."

Then was whisked back into the shadows.

Back in the hotel room I found the little packets were bound so tight I had to use my Buck knife. I finally shelled out a tiny brown cartridge ball of the softest, smoothest, sweetest hash I had ever tasted, or maybe ever will, the way Lebanon's going crazy.

It is at this point my journal resumes:

October 17, Thursday. First day at the Mena House. Great place. After a huge breakfast and lots of strong coffee we head up the hill. The holiday crowd has arrived and are mounting the great hill from all sides like a gaudy herd of homecoming ants. But not all the way to the top. They climb a few courses and sit among the stones and eat pickled fish and fruit, or mill around the aouda below, eyes eager for action. They are drawn to Jacky and me as though we were sweating honey.

Impossible to take a photo and damn near as hard to write. They love to watch me with my notebook, watch my hand drag the pen across the page whereas their hands push the script, gouging the calligraphy from right to left as into a tablet of clay.

Jacky and I climb to a niche about twenty-five courses high and watch the multitudes throng kaleidoscopic up the hill.

"I was here after Ramadan ten years ago," Jacky marvels, "and it was nothing like this. It's the victory last year against the Israelis. They feel proud enough to come face this thing."

A cop in a white uniform comes clambering up the stones, belt in his hand. He lays into the kids who have been climbing up to observe us. They flee screeching with delight. He stops, breathing hard. Jacky asks him why such a fuss about the kids. He explains in Arabic, then heads off after another batch of climbing kids, leather belt twirling.

"He says a kid fell yesterday and died. Today they got ten cops patrolling each face."

"I can't see that it's that dangerous. Some kid just horsing around, probably."

"No. He said there has been a kid killed on the pyramid on Ramadan feast every year for thirty years. That last year there were nine killed. He respectfully requests that we move down or go inside before we lure any others to their doom."

At the hole the tickets are 50 piastres apiece. This is the tunnel known as El-Mamoun's. We move in as far as the granite plugs and wait while the stairs empty of sweat-soaked pilgrims streaming down wild-eyed. You must remember: these are all Egyptians, not tourists, and it is probably 90° outside compared to the famous constant 68° you know it to be inside. Nobody outside was sweating.

You also know from your research that the ascending passage is 26° 17', up a tunnel about four foot square. But you have no notion how steep this is, or how small, until halfway up another stream coming down has to push past you. No wonder the sweat and wild eyes. It's too small a place for this many people! Not enough oxygen and nobody in charge and everybody knows it, just like those early rock shows – nobody in control.

Pushing hysteria upward, you break at last into the lofty relief of the Grand Gallery. The crowd behind goes gasping on up. You know, though, that you only have to continue on horizontally through the spur tunnel to the Queen's Chamber to find fresh air. None of the natives seem so researched.

"Ahhh," breathes Jacky. "Unbelievable. And none of the other pyramids have ventilation like this?"

"Nope. That's why this one is considered to be maybe something other than a tomb!"

"Right. The dead don't need ventilation."

"I think it was another Howard-Vyse breakthrough. He figured because there were vents at these points in the King's Chamber above, maybe there was something similar here in the Queen's Chamber. So he calculated where they ought to be, gave a good knock, and there they were, within inches of coming all the way through."

"Weird."

"Not the weirdest, though. Look here…" I run my hand over the wall, like I'm showing a classmate around the family attic. "This stuff on the walls and ceiling? It's salt, and only in the Queen's Chamber and passages – crystallized sea salt."

"How do the Egyptologists explain that?"

"They don't. There's no way to explain it except that this whole chamber was once filled with seawater… by some ancient plumber for some unknown reason, or by a tidal wave."

"Let's go." Jacky has had enough. "Let's get outta here back to the hotel for a sensible beer."

"One more stop," I reassure him, ducking back into the passage out of the Queen's Chamber.

We reach the Grand Gallery and resume our climb, still as steep, but there is nothing oppressive in this vaulted room. More than ever I am assured that these were initiatory walkways; when lit by torches instead of these fluorescent tubes, the Grand Gallery would appear to lift eternally above one's head.

Before we enter the King's Chamber I have Jacky stand and feel the protruding Boss Stone right where I know it to be in the pitch-dark little phonebooth-sized foyer. "In case the Bureau of Standards ever goes belly up, here is the true inch."

We duck on into the King's Chamber. The crowd of pilgrims are laughing and boo-boo-booming like frogs in a barbershop quartet contest. We walk past them to the coffer.

"It's carved from a solid piece of red granite. In angles so accurate and dimensions so universal that if every other structure were swept from the earth it would still be possible for some smart-ass cave kid with a mathematical bent to arrive at damn near all we know about plane and solid geometry, just by studying this granite box."

We lean and look into its depths as the crowd goes boom boom BOOM boom ahee hee! -- mixing laughter and rhythm and Arabic discord until the room rings like the midnight streets.

"They've captured the essence of Cairo," Jacky admits, "right down to the smell."

When our eyes become accustomed to the gloom of that empty stone sepulcher we both realize that the bottom is about an inch deep in piss. Boom boom BOOM ahee aheeee… To stave off delirium I take out my Hohner. Startled by German harmonics, the crowd becomes silent. Jacky plucks at my sleeve but I keep blowing. They all stand staring as I blow myself dizzy, filling the stone vault with good ol' G chords, and C's and F's. I'll show you ignorant pissants how a Yankee pilgrim can play and boom-boom both! I'm clear into the chorus before I realize what I'm singing:

"Shall we gather by the rih-ver, the beautiful the beautiful the rih-hih-verrr…"

Stare away! What beautiful river did you think it was, you Moslems, you Methodists, you Bible-belters – the Mississippi? The Congo? The Ohio?

"Yes we'll gather by the rih-ver -"

The Amazon? The Volga? The Yangtze? With that ancient picture on the back of your dilapidated dollar and that newborn profit in your bullrushes, what the hell river did you think it was?

"- that flo-o-ohs by the throw-own… of God." Jacky hauls me out before I start preaching. By the time we're back through the Grand Gallery my head has stopped spinning but my insides are churning like a creekful of backslid Baptists.

"You look bad," Jacky says.

"I feel bad."

We just make it into the open. To the applause of the whole aouda I toss my great Mena House breakfast all over the face of the Great Pyramid.

October 18. Sick unto death. The Curse of the Pharaohs pins me sweating to the bed. I read some awful holocaust theories, have horrible dreams of humanity backsliding forever.

October 19. I try to climb back up to the thing and am again wiped out with a high fever. More reading and dreams. Extrapolating. Okay, let's say it's coming: the Shit Storm. Let's say the scientists have definitely spotted it, like in When Worlds Collide. People everywhere are soiling their laundry, rushing around in circles, demanding somebody do something. Do what? Send an elite sperm bank into space, as Dr. Leary proposes in Terra II, thus giving the strain at least a shot in the dark?

Accept it as the Will of Allah and let it wash over us?

Try to outswim it?

But wait. There isn't any real evidence for the need of a lifeboat to preserve the species. The Shit Storm has happened many times and Homo sapiens has hung in there. What is really in jeopardy is not our asses, or our souls. It's our civilization.

Imagine, after some sudden absolute-near-annihilation (they've found mastodons frozen with fresh flowers in their mouths – that sudden) – that there are little clots of survivors clinging to remote existences. Imagine how they struggle to preserve certain basic tricks. How would we hang on to let's say for example pasteurization? It's hard to explain bacteriology to a caveful of second-generation survivors, even with the aid of some surviving libraries. Rituals would have to come first.

"Remember, boil-um that milk! Boil-um that milk!"

"Will do, Wise Old Grandsir. Boil milk!" They break into the milk song: "Boil-um that milk an' kill-um that bug that nobody see but make-um you sick."

The libraries exist! Old rituals hold clues to their whereabouts. Old chants! Chambers! Charts -!

At this point Jacky Cherry breaks into my fever in a fervor. "Muldoon's here! He's found somebody who says he knows where it is! He's going to lead us out there tonight."

"Knows what?" I rally a bit from my stupor. "Who?"

"A local visionary. He had a vision three Americans were looking for a secret hall so he drew a map to it!"

"A map?"

"To an underground hall! The guy must have something on the ball to know we were looking for one, sounds to me like."

Sounds to me like Jacky is getting a little desperate over the flak from the home office about the resultless state of our expedition, but I dress and totter out to the street. Muldoon is negotiating with a little man in a blue gellabia.

It is Marag.

IV: DOWN THE TOMBS OF TAURUS

Still October 19, Saturday afternoon, only a few tense seconds having elapsed.

"Good morning, my friend," says Marag, sifting his hand from the sleeve of his blue gellabia; "It is a good morning?"

I tell him it isn't a bad morning for two in the afternoon and shake his hand. We look each other over for the first time in the daylight. He's older than I thought, graying, but his eyes are as youthfully bright and black as his teeth are white. He's smiling at me to see what I'll do. There's protocol at stake here on this sunny sidewalk: an acknowledgement that this is my main hash man could be a faux pas costing me a good connection; on the other hand discretion might be taken as a snub, etc.

Muldoon ends my dilemma by introducing him to me as Marvin instead of Marag. I tell him my name is Devlin. Muldoon says Marvin has this map, and quick little hands produce a roll of paper. Something is dimly penciled secondhand over a kid's math assignment still showing through. We lean to look and it rolls back up like a windowshade.

"Marvin says it's a map, to a Secret Hall of Holy History -"

"Secret Tunnel," Marag corrects, "of Angel History. Not far. I have car and driver will take you there very reliable. Hut! Nephew! My friends from America. Hut hut hut!"

He waves at a guy slouched against the fender of his cab at the curb, a surly sort about twenty years old, wearing polyester-knit slacks and a polo shirt, sleeves rolled up to emphasize the arms-folded biceps. He looks us over, the set of his jaw and the beetle of his brow letting us know here, by Allah, is a customer cool yet dangerous. He answers Marag's hail with a curt nod, the very image of rawboned threat were the effect not flawed by the driver's actual squat-legged big-butted round-shouldered shape.

"Not so much education," Marag confides, "but a fine driver."

"Say, Marvin, just where'd you get that map?" I can't remember mentioning anything to him the other night about the Hall of Records.

"I hear talk the American doctors one with baldness are searching for the Secret Tunnels. I draw this last night this map."

"You drew it?"

"And have my son write in the words. Very reliable secret map. My family is live at Nazlet el-Samman many hundreds of years, pass down all is know."

Muldoon says all he is know is Marvin wants ten pounds for it. Ten pounds! Jacky and I say at once.

"Only five for me," Marag hastens to add. "Other five for car and my nephew driver." He notes our hesitation and shrugs good-naturedly. "As you wish, my friends. I don't blame you being cautious. We take only five now – for car, gasoline – and my five for map when you are return satisfied. Is good? Only five now?"

Five seems to be the going front figure. Marag keeps grinning at me.

"Let's go for it," I decide. I take a five-pound note out of my wallet. The hand comes out and the note vanishes into the folds of the blue gellabia; not as quick as the nephew's eye, though; he comes fuming over and he and Marag have a splendid argument in screaming Egyptian.

As squat as the nephew is, he still is some inches taller than his bantyweight uncle, and you can tell he's pushed a little iron down at the YMMA. Still, it's an obvious no-contest. That bright-eyed little mink of a man would swarm all over Cool Yet Dangerous, leaving nothing but a pear core.

"My nephew is a fool with money," he confides, showing us all toward the battered Fiat. "But a most reliable driver you can be insured."

As he bustles around the car closing us in, I realize he isn't coming along.

"Also most furthersome. His name is T'udd."

"Thud?" we all ask in mutual dawning apprehension. "Thud?" - as a thick brown thumb punches the starter into a victorious roar. Pumping the foot feed, Thud turns and gives us a thick-lipped leer of triumph. The map is crumpled in his hand.

"I haven't seen a grin like that," Jacky concedes, "since Sal Mineo won the Oscar for Young Mussolini."

Thud adjusts the mirror so he can see his reflection, brushes back an oily lock, then "peels out" is, I believe, the term: lays rubber in a squealing fishtailing brodie away from the Mena House turnaround off down Pyramid Boulevard, the pedal to whatever metal there is in a Fiat floorboard. Too late we realize we are in the sainted presence of Brainless Purity; as Las Vegas has distilled Western Materialism down to its purest abstract, so Thud is the assimilated essence of motormad Egypt. Blinking his headlights and blaring his terrible warhonk, he charges the afternoon traffic ahead, fearless as the Bedouin! wild as the Dervish! He reaches the creeping tail end of the traffic pack at full fifty. Never touching the brake he goes rocking shockless over the shoulder to the right of a poky VW, cuts back sharply between two motorcycles, and guns into the left lane to pass a tour bus, the passengers gawking horrified as we cut back just in time, then to the other lane around one of those big six-wheeled UAR machines the two soldiers on top with a cannon-passing left or right, again and again, just making it each time by the skin of our grill, finally getting in front of the pack to what looks like a promising clear stretch a chance to really unwind -- except for one minor nuisance, a little accident jam ahead, about thirty cars, coming up fast -

"Thud!"

There is the sickening metal-to-metal cry of brakes screaming for new shoes; then the shudder of the emergency against more scored metal; finally the last-minute cramping skid. My door is inches from the rear of a flatbed full of caged turkeys.

"Jacky for the love of God, tell him no more! I've got a wife and kids! Tell him, Muldoon!"

It's no use; both interpreters are in tongue-tied shock. Thud can't hear anyway, has his horn full down and his head out the window, demanding to know the meaning of all this mangled machinery impeding us. He eases ahead so we can see. It's two flimsy Fiat taxies just like ours, amalgamated head on, like two foil gum wrappers wadded together. No cops; no ambulances; no crowd of rubberneckers; just the first of those skinny street jackals sniffing the drippings, and what apparently is the surviving cab driver groggily standing on the center stripe with a green print handkerchief pressed to his bloody ear with one hand, waving the oncoming traffic around with the Other. Thud keeps shouting until he provokes a response. He pulls his head back in and passes the information on to us, so matter-of-factly that Jacky is brought from his trance to translate.

"He says that's a relative, mother's side. The dead cabby is also a relative. Was a good relative but not a very good driver – not amin, not reliable."

"Tell him about my unreliable heart!"

Too late – Thud has spotted what looks to him like a remote possibility, is peeling around the rival driver – the green paisley handkerchief hanging unheld to the injured ear as the man shakes both fists after us in outrage – Thud paying no heed – all under control – situating the rumpled map on the dash so he can study it as he simultaneously scans the road checks his face in the rearview honks his horn drives down the wrong side of the center line straight at a big fucking yellow Dodge panel oncoming with furniture all inside packed clear to the windshield a brass bedstead lashed to the grill in front springs on top while Thud -- [Here, the page of the journal is smeared]

October 20. Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, just after dawn and before breakfast… out in back of my cabana in chaise lounge without the chaise.

Jacky went to the desk last night and raised a dausha about them not putting his call through to Jann Wenner and us not getting separate rooms yet. He was so effective they moved us right out of our nice room into two poolside cabanas, tiny cement cells intended for bathing-suit changers, not residents: a hard cot, no windows, no hot water, costing as much apiece as our other room. But Jacky was going nuts with me prowling weird in the wee wired hours from all that Turkish coffee and Pakistani hash…

I've wheeled the lounge chair from the pool to where I can sit looking at the Great Pyramid over the hotel ledge. The morning sky is spectacular, piled with thunderheads. The air is so still I can hear the pyramid ravens jiving around the summit, a dozen black specks jostling for the king perch on the long wooden pole that is planted atop the pyramid to indicate where the peak would be if the capstone was in place. They are having a great time, swooping and skawking. Must be better than Turkish coffee. Kirlian photographs of small pyramid models show force fields streaming straight up out of the peaks, like volcanoes erupting pure energy. There are all sorts of tales of mysterious machinations manifesting on top of the Great Pyramid: compasses going crazy, wine botas shooting sparks, radium paint crumbling off the wristwatch dials to rattle around inside the crystals like green sand. I should check it out before going home…

Yesterday was the first time away from the pyramid since coming out from Cairo a week ago. I had resolved that I would concentrate my time only on the Giza area and resist the tourist's mistake of trying to "see it all."

But yesterday we were driven to see one of those alls, for all of my resolve, and damn near to our doom as well. Thud turned out to be about as reliable and furthersome as Marag's map, and a much dirtier burn.

As soon as we were a good skid away from the Mena House he forsook the ability to comprehend any English whatsoever, and when he finally realized that Jacky and Muldoon weren't shouting Arabic phrases for his hairbreadth triumph through that amazing pile-up he went into such a cloudy sulk that even they couldn't reach him. Every request for slower speeds was answered with a "Mish fahim abadan."

"It means?"

"It means I don't understand,' " Jacky screamed. "But what it really means is we have insulted the sonofabitch! He's kidnapping us is what it amounts to."

Thud wrenched the car full right, off the crowded Pyramid Boulevard onto a narrow blacktop running between a high shady row of Australian gum on the right side and a wide irrigation canal full of half-sunken cows and car carcasses on our left. Free at last of the sticky traffic, Thud could cruise full out with nothing in the way but insignificant items – chickens, children, donkeys, and the like.

"Thud" – I tried to make contact over a more universal frequency – "you trite pile of outdated camel shit, you're driving too fast!"

"Also too far," Muldoon added, scratching his head. "I think he's taking us out to Sakkara, to the Step Pyramid."

"That damned Marag set me up."

"You mean Marvin?" In the front seat Jacky has captured the wad of paper from the dash. "Maybe not. See, this map isn't actually to Zoser but to some area a ways past it, to a place called the Tunnels of Serapeum. See? He might have thought it meant seraphim, as in angels."

We gave up trying to get through to Thud. Jacky said all our shouting was just making it worse, and Muldoon added that it was probably a good idea for us to see Sakkara anyway. For perspective. "The Step Pyramid is the old-age champion grandaddy in all camps, except Cayce's. It's worth seeing, got a lot of soul."

"Have you seen this Tunnel of Angel thing?"

"Serapeum? I went through it with a class. It's got a lot of – of I guess you might say balls."

After about twenty miles along that canal road we took another right, west up out of the narrow Nile Valley onto another limestone plateau. When you crest the rise you can see the Giza group shining across miles of sand, like channel markers in the sun. Then, the other direction and much nearer, the step structure of King Zoser.

"Very badly gnawed by the tooth of time," said Muldoon. "One of the guys at the university has an act called Tennessee Egypt. He sings a song about this tomb called 'The Old Rugged Pyramid.' "

Thud was so placated by his magnificent drive that his comprehension returned and Muldoon talked him into detouring for a look. We followed Muldoon through the reconstructed temple gates toward the dilapidated old structure. "Built for King Zoser, they say, by an architectural genius named Imhotep. About fifty years before the Great Pyramid, the Egyptologists say."

It was hard to think of this primitive pile as being only fifty years older than the masterwork of Giza, but it was even harder to think of it as being 5,000 years younger than Cayce's construction date.

Muldoon took us to a tipped stone box at the rear of the pyramid where you climb up and look through a two-inch peephole. A stone effigy is sitting at the rear of the module, tipped back in the same incline as the box, like an astronaut ready to fire himself into space.

Muldoon told us how they think the pyramid was built by a continual adding of new wings to the basic block tomb, finally stacking them up in diminishing steps. "Some of Khufu's contractors saw it later, the theory goes, and said, 'Hey! if you just filled in those steps you'd have a great pyramid; let's build one for the Chief.' "

He escorted us down into beautiful chambers of alabaster, tattooed ceiling-to-floor with comic strips of daily Egyptian life 5,000 years ago. There were farmers plowing, planting, harvesting; a thief was traced from crime to capture to trial; fishermen cast nets from boats over underwater reliefs depicting finny denizens in meticulous zoological detail, some familiar, some long since disappeared.

Thud followed behind, getting more and more impatient with all this interest in things immobile. Finally he would follow no farther; he stood with his arms folded, calling out threats.

"His dander is up again," Jacky translated. "He says if we don't get back to his taxi he's going to go on without us."

Even fixed again behind the wheel Thud's dander didn't go back down. All the rest of the desert drive to the Serapeum location he bitched at us for taking so long, and just to look at a lot of dirty graves! We tried to humor him, offering gum, asking him to join us down the Serapeum tombs. Phhht! Crawl down in a big hole like a lizard? Not on all our lives!

We left him revving his motor and walked out into the sand. We had no problem following the trail of torn tickets to the underground temple's entrance, a wide, sloping slot cut through the limestone down to a high square door. It looked like a steep driveway down to a sub-level garage for desert trucks.

At the bottom the armed Arab took our piastres and handed us three half tickets from the pile of already torn halves. We entered the high door and turned left down a spacious passage, roughly hewn through the earth. Another guard asked us for another payment and took the scraps from us and halved them again. He solemnly returned our halved halves to us and placed his on his dusty pile (which was only half the size of the other guy's halves, being only quarters) and waved us on. It grew dimmer. There was another turn, left or right (I'm lost now), and another high door and we were in the main tunnel.

It's a simple, solitary passageway cut through solid stone, rough-walled, high-ceilinged, level-floored, big enough to handle a complete subway system; two trains could come and go side by side and still have ample room along the walls for gum machines and muggers. But it's completely empty. It runs on vacantly ahead of you, until out of sight in the dim distance.

It is lit indirectly, the light coming, you realize, from large rooms chiseled alternately into each side of the tunnel about every twenty paces. These rooms are rugged, regular cubicles and similar in size, about forty feet on a side, a little higher than the roof of the tunnel and sunk a man's height deeper than the tunnel floor so when you stand at each crypt, leaning on a safety rail, you are looking down on the top of the room's sole furnishing.

It is the same in every room: one enormous granite coffer with corresponding lid pushed slightly aside allowing a peek into the empty insides. Except for different chiseled inscriptions the coffers are all identical, each carved from a single solid block of dark red granite, each stark and somber and huge. You could have put Thud's taxi inside and closed the lid.

As far down this eerie subway as you care to walk, it is the same, room after room; one to the left; then, a few dozen paces on, the next to your right, each with its arched entrance, each with its grim granite vault identical almost to the angle of the ten-ton lid pushed askew to allow the contents to be long ago pilfered.

"They were for dead bulls," Muldoon told us. "Sacrificial bulls. One a year, every year for thousands of years, evidently."

We walked down steel steps into one of the sepulchers and stood next to the giant coffer. I could reach to the top of the lid. Muldoon searched over the inscribed granite sides until he found a picture of the tomb's sacrifice.

"The bull had to look like this; had to have exactly this pattern on his rump, plus had to have two white hairs in his tail and a birthmark under his tongue shaped like a scarab. Here, sight down these sides."

The granite sides of the huge hollowed block were as flat as still water.

"Yet the archaeologists won't give them anything better than copper! That's all the tools there is evidence of from this period. Our modern high-speed diamond drill takes a week to poke a little hole through, but the archaeologists won't give these poor carvers anything but copper."

The whole effect was macabre, disconcerting; such modern precision, for something so stone-aged. Jack stamped around the giant enigma in dismay. "What the hell was their trip? I mean forget about the goddamned tools; even if they were equipped with Goldfinger's laser and Solomon's worm, it's still a hard way to carve your roast."

"Nobody knows why they did it. Maybe it was initially intended as some kind of symbolic burial of the Age of Taurus, and they got so deep into it they kept going. But nobody knows."

Jacky Cherry couldn't get over it. "There's something downright perverse about it, you know? Something -"

"Bullheaded," Muldoon filled in. "Which reminds me: we better see if our driver is still reliably waiting."

We found Thud in such a thunderous peeve he wasn't going to look at us, let alone drive us home. He stared in the direction of Cairo and claimed we had robbed him of a whole afternoon's livelihood, tips and everything. He diatribed he was going to sit there and listen to the radio until some tourists arrived on one of those camel caravans from Giza. After their voyage aboard one of those smelly ships of the desert, plenty tourists would be ready to jump camel for a berth on his luxury liner, hopefully pay him enough extra to make up for what our dawdling had cost.

It was a bare-faced bluff. There might not be another caravan until tomorrow and he knew it, but he was going to milk every possible piastre out of the predicament. Worse yet, I realized, when the bastard finally consents he has it in his four-cylinder mind to scare the shit out of us!

It was getting downright depressing all around. While Thud argued with Jack and Muldoon I remembered my Polaroid; I would while away this bullshit time practicing my photography.

I got the bag and bucket of negative developer out of the rear seat and carried it to a little stone bench at the edge of the parking lot. When I took the camera from the bag I heard Thud's diatribe stumble slightly. And every time I snapped a button or turned a dial his concentration was further distracted. As an experiment I swung the lens toward him and he hushed entirely so he could suck in his gut. I swung on past to take a shot of the Step Pyramid. He tried to resume his tirade, but he was faltering fast. Then he saw it produced pictures immediately! He was a lost man.

He left Jack and Muldoon in mid-squabble and came bargaining humbly to me: all our insults, all our dawdling and delays would be forgotten and forgiven, but for only one picture of himself produced immediately.

I squeezed off another prizewinning shot of the sand and sky, pretending not to fahim. When he saw that precious film being wasted on wasteland he began to beg shamelessly. "Snap," he wheedled. "Snap me; snap T'udd!" I told him I had only one more snap in this packet and wanted to save it to get a shot of those farmers I had seen back down in the valley, so picturesque working that deep dark Nile soil. "But I'll tell you what, Thud. You drive us nice and slow back to the Mena House and I'll get another pack."

We were away at once. When I tried to photograph the farmers he jumped out and ran around the front of the taxi to try to find a place in the frame. I cropped out all but his bicep, but even that meager sliver was enough to make his breath come thick and his hands grasp uncontrollably.

It was the worst attack of covetousness I have ever had the displeasure of witnessing. It was degrading and embarrassing, and a little frightening. Thud knew he was losing all cool but he couldn't help himself. He climbed under the wheel like a whipped spaniel. He readjusted the mirror, this time so he could watch me. He watched me like Dog Watches Man With Meatball. He didn't even turn on his transistor.

All the strained ride home he kept helplessly clearing his throat into the silence. When he turned up Pyramid Boulevard he forced himself to drive so slowly that it was almost as unpleasant as his speeding. By the time we reached the hotel all of us were trembling, and Thud's hands were shaking so he could hardly turn off the key. His stomach was growling. His brown face had actually gone ashen with the agony of that stretch of unnatural driving forced on him by his terrible yen.

"Snapping now?" he begged pitifully.

"Going to get film," I told him. "At the cabana." I didn't dare take the camera along. He would have driven right across the pool after me.

"Hurry back and snap him soon," Jack Cherry called. "Before he snaps himself."

When Thud saw me returning he almost broke into tears. I loaded the camera and noticed my hands were shaking under the scrutiny. Jacky positioned him with sideshadow, the pyramid at his back: "For dramatic effect."

He stood on the curb. It took him nearly a minute to pull himself together and pump up to the right pose before nodding he was ready.

"Now! Snap me!"

He snatched the Polaroid print away before I could coat it. Its impact on him was incredible. As he studied his developing image on the little square of paper, we could actually see his face begin to change and shift. He set his jaw, then his shoulders. He worked his features until they presented once again the countenance of a very cool cat, watch out. His breathing slowed. His color returned. When he had it all together, as they say, be damned if the fucker didn't demand an extra five pounds!

Another huge hassle. Thud laughed scornfully at our deal with Uncle Marag. Who is Marag? Where is he, this Marag, with the so-called car's five pounds promised, eh? Why isn't this Marag here to complete the transaction? Okay, okay, Jack sighs and hands over the five. No no, that was just the usual fare! (Thud glanced again at his photograph for reassurance; yep, he was still there.) Another five was what he was talking about, for all the time we made him wait. I was getting tired of it. I said okay, here's the extra five. But I get the picture back.

He gasped.

Hadn't that been the deal? I gave you picture; you gave us nice ride and no extra? He blinked, looking around. He wasn't alone. Some of the other cabbies and hustlers had ambled over to see what was happening. They were all grinning. It was very clear what was happening. Thud was cornered.

To save face he had to give face up.

He snatched the bill from me and slapped the photo down on the street (face up) and roared off in his taxi, shoulders back, stomach sucked in, head held high. Almost made you proud of him.

Later that night, however, the power of the picture must have run down. He came knocking on my cabana door with one of those little metal outfits you throw away when your pack of Polaroids is empty. A little flimsy black box. He'd found it under the seat where I'd kicked it, my bag already full to the brim with the print peelings and all that other Polaroid waste.

He grinned triumphantly, holding the little box high in the air.

He would trade, he carefully explained, this obviously valuable photographic attachment for the picture, which could be of no possible value to me. He stood, grinning and waiting. How could I explain to him that I had never coated his picture and that the prints from these special positive-negative Polaroid films fade blank in minutes without that coating goop? Besides, that other deal had gone down. So I told him no dice; he could keep the valuable photographic attachment, I'd keep the picture, albeit nonexistent.

"No dice?" he cried. "No dice is no trade?"

"No trade is what no dice is. No picture. No deal."

He was dumbfounded. He stared at me with a new respect; here was someone as bullheaded as he was. He cursed and threatened me for a while, in Arabic and English and three or four other fractional languages, brandishing a black metal box that was as empty as his threats.

When he finally stalked off, bewildered and pissed, I made a mental note to henceforth check both ways very carefully before crossing any busy Egyptian thoroughfares.

Back from supper I finish washing my negatives in the little gallon bucket of chemicals you have to carry with this kind of Polaroid film. A hassle and a nuisance.

I bought this complicated process because of all the photogs over the years who have sought to snare my likeness – affronting my view, plaguing my poise, making me stumble where I had walked sure before, always promising, "I know it's a bit of a bother but I'll send you prints! - only to disappear into their darkrooms never to be seen again.

I thought this process would be more equitable; the subjects could have their print, I'd have the negative. But piss on it. It's just too much hassle.

V: WITHIN THE STONE HEART

When you got nothin' to say, my Great-uncle Dicker advised me once in a kind of Arkie ode to optimism, go ahead and say it.

"Because it's like having nothin' to serve for supper but say a pot of water and some salt; could be after you get the water boiling and salted, some colored cook on a potato wagon might aimlessly run over one o' yer prize hens… ob-ligate herself to you."

Advice I have followed, as a potboiler of aimless words, to many a last-minute successful stew.

"How-and-ever," Uncle Dicker must have amended, "don't invite a bunch over to take supper on the basis of this could-be. Help is just too blessed unree-lie-abul!" An amendment I must have forgotten, because here I am trying to write in Egypt, with a table full of invited readers, bellies growling, salty pots steaming, but no sign of any last-minute Jemima or her potatoes.

To tell the truth, when Marag and his map didn't come through, I pretty much gave up watching the road past the henhouse. I wish I could duck out of the kitchen entirely. Let Jann Wenner make a change in his menu: "Scratch the chicken stew special, Jacky, and open some windows; the whole diner is steamed up."

The vaunted Secret Sanctorum? I was closer to opening it in Dayton, Ohio, than moping here in Giza watching my linen maid suck a persimmon – I can't even open a conversation. "Hot today," is all the talk I can come up with, though I know her name to be Kafoozalum and the juices of the fruit are dripping. Her eyes are on me like the top two buttons of her Mena House uniform, talk about open.

I know she speaks English. I've had many an opportunity to watch her prattle around the cabanas, cart full of fresh white linen and uniform full of ripe brown hide, but never had occasion to make conversation more than Hello or Thanks, even when she gave me her most treasured smile, 14-carat incisors, conversation pieces both of them… until this noon.

I'd been hurrying back to the hotel with an exciting find. Buttoned in my khaki shirt pocket was the best thing I'd found since the '66 Pontiac convertible: a fantastic old Roman coin, I think, or Greek, with a noble profile still clearly raised from its time-battered bronze.

In my enthusiasm to show Jacky Cherry that I could find something of ancient value, I had headed back as the crow flies. Instead of circling the grounds to the front gates I had managed a running vault over the rear wall of the compound. I lit, feet first, right between the spread brown knees of Kafoozalum on a little square tablecloth.

I thought she was having lunch. Staggering to keep from stepping in her beans or on her knees, I managed quite a dance before I could catch my balance and hop off. I saw then that instead of food the cloth had been spread with what looked like some kind of Egyptian tarot. She gathered the cards prudently out of my way, glaring up at me in an expression both enticing and curious.

I apologized and explained about my coin, and that I meant nothing disrespectful, jumping on her.

"I mean on your cards. Can I see them?"

"You bet!" The grin flashed and the two golden incisors winked out at me. "Sure!"

When I was comfortable on a sack of cement, she smoothed the linen back out and began spreading the cards in rows for me to see. They weren't tarot after all. They were her personal collection of those saccharoidal "posecards" that you see sold at all the knick-knack stands. Only these are for the natives, not the tourists. They display Egyptian fashion models, male and female, in stiffly tailored romantic poses. Mostly of marriage and courtship. Instead of a major arcanum like The Lovers, for instance, you have Handsome Young Couple at the Girl's Door Saying Goodnight with Soulful Looks or Fiancee Alone, Beaming Wet-Eyed at Her Mailbox by the Flowery Gate with a Letter from Him - all always in Cairo's latest hair and haberdashery, all always beautiful, loving, beaming. In short, sickening. But I was impressed by the way she presented her presentation.

She reverently dealt the last one, her favorite (Beautiful Young Couple Still in Wedding Finery Alone for the First Time at Last or So They Think for We See in the Windowpanes Behind Them the Wedding Party Watching, as He Lifts Her Veil, Tenderly, and as She Touches His Mustache, Provocatively), then lifted her lashes to me with a look asking, in any language, What are you waiting for, fool? I responded by inviting her to drop into my cabana when she got her next break, I'd show her my Polaroid negatives -

Now she's accepted, traipsed into my cell with an armload of fresh folded damask and let the door blow closed behind her. Preliminary rites have been observed; we've exchanged pictures and she's taken the persimmon from the dish. Nothing remains but for me to incant some key words, unlock the doors of our delight. And all I can say is Hot today.

"What is you write?" Dripping on my notebooks, here.

"Nothing. Notes. To remember what happened…"

All for lack of simple courage, for fear of international faux I sit gnawing my tongue until she mercifully takes us off the hook.

"Ya Salam!"

Photos traded, fruit gone, there is nothing left for a maid to do but check the time on her wrist how it flies! She thanks me in a rush and scoops up her unrumpled linen, peeks a quick check both ways out my door, and is off to her cart, sucking on the seed.

When she has traded all the clean laundry on her cart for soiled she comes wheeling back past my open door and inquires in at live, "Is yet hot to you, the day?" I tell her yes, yet hot. She encourages me to brace up; the winds change any day now.

"All will pass." She smiles. "Even the diarrheas."

And wheels on, leaving me tongue-tied like a hick fool indeed. What a low blow from a linen maid! Nevertheless, better toss the little filly a nice tip when you check out. How nice? Real nice. This is why the help in foreign realms always like us Americans best: we can always be expected to tip more, because we are always so inadequate of what is expected.

October 23, Wednesday. The mosquitoes and scarabs have pinned Jacky Cherry up against his cabana wall. Also Yasir Arafat is taking a side trip from the Moslem convention in Cairo to visit the historic pyramids. He was allegedly seen lunching in a private portico off the main dining room. A sinister-looking coterie of bodyguards and lieutenants is spotted darkly around to make sure the Holy Land tour members don't start anything. This doesn't make Jacky any more comfortable. He catches the 900 bus into Cairo to see if he can't get lodging with fewer pests.

I walk up the hill, stopping at the shop nearest the pyramid to buy a miniature hookah I've had my eye on. The shop is an orderly little side cranny of a building labeled Poor Children's Hospital. I ask the proprietor how he happens to have a place so close to the pyramid. He says because the profits help the hospital cure the Poor Children. I ask him what it is exactly that these Poor Children are sent out here, to the base of the Great Pyramid, to be cured of. After struggling to find a name for the disease he finally points back toward the city.

"Of the pray-sure – eh? – of the city Cairo, they come to be cure. You understanding?"

I take the hookah, nodding, and go out to seek my own cure. I had thought to find a private place somewhere on the pyramid's outskirts, but there is a big crowd of tourists. I climb up to the third course and sit on the casing stones and watch the hustlers descend on each new shipment of live ones. They are merciless. One poor woman actually breaks into tears.

"Seven years I saved for this, damn you! Leave me alone!"

The dapper camel-panderer, backing away for fear of perpetrating a coronary, gets tangled in his animal's rope and falls into a heap of fresh camel manure. He stares at the stain on his fresh white gellabia with such dejection I think he might cry himself.

I wonder if they have a similar hospital in Cairo to take care of pyramid pressure casualties…

October 24, Thursday late. Just wobbled down from a bizarre bar scene where I finally made contact with my resident pyramid colleagues, the cosmic ray scientists. All of them (except for the Egyptian students) proved to be very learned and equally drunk. The new Mena Lounge is a terrible bar, pretentious and expensive. I stalked in wearing my British walking shorts and pith helmet (a dusty day at the digs) and splurged on one of their overpriced gin-and-tonics-for tradition's sake – just as a real Englishman complete with muttonchops and ascot came reeling over from one of the tables behind the plastic arabesque. "Be-ah, please," he enunciated. "And some pea-nuts." In a voice so high-handed it's no mystery why the British were kicked out of all their colonies.

The dour Egyptian behind the bar bit his tongue and obeyed. I told the Englishman he hadn't better use that tone on a bartender in Oregon.

"Unlikely one would bloody ever be in Oregon," he said, finally focusing on me. "But see our outfit. Monty's Dynasty, what? That Rommel campaign? By God's wound one has to agree with the professor – this great grimy crude pot of a place does serve up specimens from every period."

He'd been pointed out to me previously as one of the ray experts here with the new spark chamber specially constructed for another try at probing the pyramid. I told him I'd also come to this great pot of possibilities in search of hidden chambers.

"This is what I thought one was supposed to wear."

"Great pot of nonsense, you want my inebriated expert's opinion. On the other hand, if you demand sober-er-er experts, come…"

He picked up his beer and peanuts, then hooked my arm to tow me back to his table, introducing me as the renowned fellow pyra-midiot, Sir Hidden Chambers-Pott. "On with our pith helmet, Sir Hidden; give these loutish clods an eyeful of the real archaeological élan!"

They were five in all: the Real Englishman, a burly black-bearded American about my age, a suave old German wearing tinted glasses and a white linen suit, and two apprentice experts from the University of Cairo. The loutish clods barely noticed me, for all my élan. They went right back to their interrupted conversation concerning the deeply significant sociopolitical, teleological, and religious ramifications of the upcoming heavyweight title fight in Zaire.

"I don't care if Ali takes up Tibetan Yoga and learns to levitate," the American proclaimed. "Foreman is still going to waste him. Kayo-pow! Guar-an-teed."

He had a virile delivery and build, burly arms and neck squeezed into a T-shirt. A stencil across the chest declared him a member of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Computer Spacewar Team, their motto: Never Say Hyper!

"Sure, Ali was great, a goddamned saint of a fighter. But what made him great wasn't his faith. It was number one his speed – which has slowed considerably – and number two his needle. If anything esoteric gave him special powers it was his goddamn needle, right?"

"Just so," said the Real Englishman. "His bloody needling blacky's mouth -"

"But he tries to pull his needle on this man – 'Yo' gonna fall in nine, you honky-lovin shine!' – it simply is not going to work. Not on Big George. This ain't no Uncle Liston! This ain't no paranoid cub scout Floyd Patterson! This is a bona fide bright-eyed one-track-minded Jeezus freak and could give less a shit about what the black crowd thinks of him."

He was speaking toward the two students, but I had the impression that it was really for the benefit of the older man.

"So if Ali can't psyche him then what's it come back to? Physical ability. Speed, size, and strength. And Foreman is faster bigger younger. I don't care what country he's fighting in."

"Just so," agreed the Englishman. "Modern tactics over heathen superstition. Guaranteed kayo."

This stirred the German professor to rebuttal. "So?" He chuckled softly and shook his head at the Englishman. "Just so like your modern British tactics kayoed the heathen Nasser?"

"Not fair!" the Englishman flared back, stung. "But for that bloody Eisenhower we would have -"

"I must again remind you young gentlemen: this battle will be taking place in the middle of the African continent at three in the morning under the full Scorpio moon."

The American told the old man he'd been reading too much Joseph Conrad. "Maybe a few years ago Ali could've put the whammy on Foreman, but this is 1974. Things've changed, as old Ali's gonna find out. Just because the guy he's fighting is black ain't no guarantee anymore the African whammy's gonna work on him."

"Neither is being Christian a guarantee of the certain kayo," the professor reminded them, smiling. "As we in Germany found out."

"Been a mystery to me ever since, now you bring it up," the Real Englishman said, pouting over his peanuts. "Damned unlike him, meddling in over here."

"Unlike Ali? Not really, not if you followed Ali's career. Ali's style -"

"Not Ali, you Yankee dimwit," the Englishman snapped. "Eisenhower!"

This provoked such a fit of mirth that the American tipped over his drink, laughing. Then, scooting back to avoid the spill, he fell out of his chair. The students helped him back up and set him in his chair, still laughing. This time he drew the German's sting; the moment the tinted glasses fixed him the giggle hushed. The German took off his coat and folded it in his lap deliberately. A tense quiet fell over our table – over the entire room, in fact. The drinkers at the other table sipped in thoughtful silence while the Moslems moved their lips, thanking Allah for forbidding them the evil of alcohol.

True, all three scientists were soused to their Ph.D.s, but that didn't explain the tension. After a minute I asked how the cosmic ray probe was coming. "Very satisfactory," the American told me. "On Chephren and Mykerinos, damned satisfactory!" He took a drink of my gin-and-tonic and hulked again over the table, attempting to rally from the old German's strange sting. He admitted they'd found nothing earthshaking in these two, but for the Great Pyramid they had great expectations.

"Going to scan from the outside, this time, goddammit! Set the receiver up inside the Queen's Chamber. The holiday crowds should have dwindled enough to install it by tomorrow afternoon, the next day for certain!"

The Real Englishman disagreed. "Device worth upwards a million pounds sterling? Want some camel driver micturating in it? These people are wild! Unpredictable!"

I asked them what they hoped to find, their best hope? The American said what he wanted was a chamber of filthy hieroglyphs. The German said he also hoped to find a chamber, but one containing that dream of every Egyptologist: an unrobbed coffin. The students said the same. The Englishman, regaining some of his puff, said that what he hoped to find was an end to all this bloody tommyrot and twaddle, once and for all.

"Likely all we'll grub out of that sanctified hill of beans will be a couple of carved geegaws worth about three and six on the geegaw market. But at least that'll be an end to it."

"So why risk it?" I had to ask. "A device worth a million pounds sterling? What justifies such an investment?"

"Careful." The German laid his kindly smile on me like the tip of a whip. "This is not the kind of question to ask in the field."

"True enough," the American agreed. "That's the kind of question that'll be asked a-plenty back at the home office. For what it's costing to send me over here Stanford could build a pyramid."

"Exactly! What's the home office's best hope? Why do -" I didn't finish. The German's linen jacket had slid from his lap, disclosing the explanation for the table's mysterious vibes: he was holding not only the American's beefy paw in one of his long-nailed hands, he was also holding the hand of the Egyptian student seated next to him in the other. All eyes averted diplomatically from the little hand show, to drinks, peanuts, etc. The Englishman chose to turn his attention to me and my question.

"You mean what's it worth, don't you, duck? What's in the pot? Right-o, then; let's put our pyramid stakes on the table." He swept a space clear of shells.

"First, let me list some of the Known Negotiable Assets: It's a multidimensional bureau of standards, omnilingual and universal, constructed to both incorporate and communicate such absolutes as the bloody inch (a convenient ten million of which equals our polar axis) plus our bloody damned circumference, our weight, the bloody length not only of our solar year and our sidereal year but also our catch-up or leap year… not to mention the bloody distance of our swing around our sun, or the error in our spin that produces the wobble at our polar point that gives us the 26,920-year Procession of the bloody Equinoxes. This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius, you see.

"Digging deeper in our stone safe we find deposited such blue-chip securities as the rudiments of plane geometry, solid geometry, the beginnings of trigonometry, and – probably more valuable than all these mundane directions and distances and weights put together – the three mightiest mathematical tricks of them all: first being of course pi, that constant though apparently inconclusive key to the circle. Second, phi, the Golden Rectangle transmission box of our aesthetics enabling us to shift harmoniously and endlessly without stripping gears so long as 2 is to 3 as 3 is to 5 as 5 is to 8 as 8 is to 13. Get it? And, third, the Pythagorean theorem, which is really just an astute amalgam of the first two shortcuts and about as attributable to Pythagoras as soul is to Eric Clapton."

"Bravo," the German applauded, but the Englishman's blood was up and he was not to be distracted.

"In Accounts Probable, the dividends look equally inviting. Based on the admission that so far we have been able to comprehend and appreciate the pyramid's info in terms of and thus only up to our own, then how much must be contained in this bloody five-sided box that we cannot yet see? Wouldn't a folk who knew enough about the sun to utilize its rays and reflections – even its periodic sunspots and their effects – be likely to have a suggestion or so for us about solar power? Hut! Call the Minister of Energy! And mightn't an astronomy so accurate as to aim a stone tunnel in pure parallel with our axis at a starless space in space, or point a radius from the center of the earth through the summit of this stone pointer at the star in Pleiades-that is indicated by drawings gleaned from centuries as the center star about which the other six of the constellation are orbiting and perhaps our sun as well! -- have some helpful hints for NASA? Call them, I say – hut hut – the Home Office, the UN, the Pentagon. What's a few billion in research to the Pentagon if they can get their hands on a ray so precise as to cut granite to watchwork accuracy yet so powerful as to sink a whole bloody continent from the face of the waters to the mud and mire of mythology?"

"It's as viable as research on the fusion bomb," the American encouraged.

"But let us speak frankly, mates. The aforementioned is all just collateral, just bloody pignoration compiled to get us bonded by the bureaucrats. The real treasure, as all Pyramidiots passionately know in their secretmost chamber of hearts, whether they mention it in their prospectus or not, lies in Accounts Receivable."

The vision of this priceless prize brought him unsteadily to his feet. He stood weaving a moment, his chin trembling, then spread his arms as though he addressed all creation.

"Something is owed us. The debt is clearly implied by the scar of its erasure. We've been shortchanged and the books have been brazenly juggled. It's obvious to even the densest bleeding auditor: they are trying to cover up our fall! A whole long column has been rubbed out and written over and the embezzlement assiduously concealed by fraudulent bookkeepers from Herodotus to Arnold Toynbee! But for all their artfulness the debt still shows, a bloody eighteen-and-a-half-minute buzzing gap marking the removal of something important – no, of something imperative! – to this court's search for our dues. How much has been pilfered from us, mates? How much of our minds, our souls? How is it that the same species responsible for that great temple out there is now administering this bloody bushwah tourist trap featuring flat beer and unpredictable hoodlums strolling the grounds outside my window wearing dark glasses and revolvers?"

He had found his focus again. His voice rang through the lobby like Olivier in a Shakespearean tirade.

"I demand an explanation! As a human being I am owed an accurate accounting, by the heavens, owed an honest audit!"

It was a cry for the benefit of all the shortchanged everywhere, spoken out of a caldron of social outrage and cosmic inspiration and flat beer. He did not let his eyes drop back to us. He turned on his heel and strode from the lobby in his stateliest stagger. There was actual clapping.

When the reviews of the Englishman's speech subsided I hoped to find out more about their ray results, but the mention of the Mena House's new gun-toting tenants had led instead to the topic of Arafat. Not a man much loved, I gathered; even the Moslem students had bad things to say about the Palestinian guerrilla leader. The German was scathing.

"Storm trooper at heart, a filthy terrorist with a limousine." He took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. "I was at the Munich games when they murdered those fine young Israeli athletes. Wrestlers, as I remember. Filthy! I will confess to you all: If given the opportunity I would sprinkle ground glass in his Turkish coffee when they wheel the cart past in the hall."

The American said he would use LSD instead. "It'd be a gasser watching Yasir on a bummer. Clean up his Karma, too, heh heh. If we just knew where to get a hit…"

I excused myself and bought a beer and carried it back here to my cabana. I suppose I could have given them my Murine bottle; I'm sure not using it. But I'm against dosing. We just don't have the right to launder other people's Karmas, no matter how filthy. Besides, those desert gunsels? Who knows what they might do with the jams kicked out. Watching them prowl around with their revolver butts showing, I too find myself thankful their prophet forbade them booze: they're wild enough sober. As the Englishman said, unpredictable.

October 27, Sunday. It's all looking less and less resultful to Jacky. This morning we found a fence had been put up around the Sphinx.

"Little like closing the barn door," Jacky observed, "after the Turks have already shot off the Sphinx's nose."

Ignoring the mixed metaphor, the big cat-thing kept on glowering, over our heads past the squalor of Nazlet el-Samman, toward the Nile.

This afternoon things look a bit better to Jack. He's struck up an acquaintance with Kefoozalum, even had room service bring them two rum Cokes.

"She's not a Moslem, she's a Copt. The Copts are a sect of Egyptian Christians, tolerated because of their tiny size and their seniority. In fact they claim to be the first Christians, the people who cared for Joseph, Mary, and the Kid while they were in Egypt escaping Herod. Some even say they are the last remnants of the Essenes, thus actually preceding Christ as Christians by dint of second sight and signs and visions supposedly indigenous to their faith."

"That could explain her stare," I mused; the traditional Moslem woman is never supposed to look into any man's eyes but her father's, brother's, or husband's. "So frank and forward."

"Could be," Jacky said. "She buses into Cairo every Sunday morning to attend church, the very church, she told me, that housed the holy family twenty centuries ago. A place most miraculous. Just a few years ago, she said, a workman saw a woman on the roof. He went inside and got the Coptic minister, who came out and ordered her down. Then he noticed a light emitting from her: 'Holy Mary Mother of God,' he exclaims, 'it's the Virgin!' Or something to that effect.

"Anyway, the whole congregation came out and saw her, and next Sunday saw her again. The next Sunday the churchyard was packed – Moslems, Christians, agnostics – everybody saw her! It went on for two months. Thousands witnessed her weekly appearance."

Jacky smiled and raised his brows.

"The crowds finally got so big the Egyptian government put a wall around the place and charged twenty-five piastres at the turnstile. The apparition immediately stopped appearing."

"Far out," I say. "I wouldn't have stood for it either. Not when they're getting fifty piastres a head to look at those empty bull coffins."

October 28, Monday. Jacky finally lands a room in Cairo. I go in with him and check at the KLM office. I can get a plane out this coming Thursday morning, or Monday night November 4. I tell the coiffed Dutchess to book me on the Thursday morn flight.

Now that he's been accepted back into metropolitan civilization, Jacky wants to stay another week. "Why not take a room with me in Cairo? Wait and catch the November fourth flight? See some belly boogie? That way you could spend Halloween night at the tombs."

I tell him I'd rather spend the eve with the kids in Oregon, passing out popcorn balls to mummies in rubber masks. He shrugs. "Whatever. But do you think Thursday gives you enough time to find – to finish your pieces?"

I appreciated his mid-sentence alteration. I would have been forced to concede it was highly unlikely that I will be able to "find it" by Thursday, or by Monday for that matter. The closer I've looked the less I've seen. The pyramid disappears within itself as you approach it. The longer you look the more your theories become dwarfed by the blunt actuality of the puzzle.

I walk the ruins around the Giza plateau largely unaccosted now. I have learned a trick of bending down to pick up a rock as soon as I detect an approaching hustle. I then examine it through the little sighting lens on my engineer's compass, and the hustlers back off respectfully. "Shh. Observe. The Yankee doctor has found a clue. Observe the manner he thoughtfully scratch his great bald puzzle piece."

Little do they know. I'm just drifting. Peter O'Toole crossing the desert on his camel, watching his shadow ripple hypnotically over the sand. Omar Sharif rides up from behind and swats him with his camel crop. What?

You were drifting.

Oh, no! I was thinking.

I was -

You were drifting.

After a solitary supper I shuffle back to my cabana. I can't rest or write. Rest from what? Write what? I have less an idea of what I'm looking for than when I left Oregon a month ago. My poke's about played out and the cards have been cold or crooked, like that Marag and his five-pound fake map.

And my ace in the hole? The Murine bottle that I had promised myself to use should all else fail? Out of the question. As Muldoon Greggor expressed it, "I wouldn't want to try to divine its secret with acid. Soon as your armor was blasted away, these watchmen and hustlers would crawl all over you. They wouldn't leave anything but a dry husk."

I do have one of those five hash fingers left. That's safer. Perhaps, if I could get a place on the back side in one of those tombs, under the stars in sight of the Sphinx… bound to afford more inspiration than this cinderblock cell. So I gather my paraphernalia and strike out into the night.

It's late. The road is empty of cabs. The sentries nod me past. The searchlights and speakers of the evening's Sound and Light are shut away in their tombs and bolt-locked, but there's plenty of illumination: the moon heralded new by that Ramadan cannon two weeks ago is now nearing full; the Great Pyramid shines mournfully under it for lack of anything better to do.

On the moony slope I find the seat where we were brought by Muldoon that first night. There's more wind than I thought. I roll a page from my notebook and light it with my last match. I didn't twist it tight enough and it flares up but I'm determined to get one hit, sucking so frantically at the hookah mouth tube that I'm unaware I have company.

"Good evening, Mr. D'bree."

I see his little face glittering so close that I think at first it's the flame itself. Hash sparks fly everywhere.

"You have trouble with hubble-bubble this good evening?" I tell him not anymore, no. With the last flicker we both can see the bowl is empty. I toss the ash into darkness. He tells me he is most sorry, but to come, follow him, for a more nicer smoke than hubble-bubble. Does he mean a joint? This hash and hookah business is very ritzy but a joint would be nice…

Marag takes me to one of the tombs down the slope where the limestone plateau just begins to drop away toward the village. There is a faint rectangle of light hissing from the tomb's door; Marag stops me with a feathery hand on my arm before we get too close.

"This is my friend," he whispers. "A young desert boy but already guard this corner. Very good position! Still, he is not at ease, it is not his home. You got hashish?"

"You're not gonna mix it with tobacco? I don't smoke, and cigarettes hit me harsh."

"No. No harsh cigarette. Good stuff, from Finland. You'll see." He reaches the door of the tomb just as a faceless form is coming out with a carbine to check on the noise. The light hisses brighter and they stand talking in it. Our desert boy wears a mask of shadows. I can see the rifle is an ancient American Springfield.30-.06 left over from the battle of Bordeaux, and I can see the way his hands fondle it, but his face I can't see.

Marag brings him over. He tells him my name but not me his; nor do we shake hands. He doesn't speak. The turban he has cowling his face is patched and frayed with age, though I judge him some years short of twenty. But not a boy; probably never a boy.

I get some kind of pass from this phantom because he lowers the.30-.06 and trades it for a carpet. He unrolls the carpet on the sand and nods us to sit. From his gellabia pocket he takes a tin box and opens it. Marag reaches again for my hashish and I relinquish it reluctantly.

The phantom carefully heats and crumbles the hash into the box. Nobody says anything. He's very meticulous and takes a very long time to roll three big sticks. We could have been smoking the first one while he practiced but nobody says anything. He finally lights and passes it to me.

"It is tobacco all right!"

"But not cigarette," Marag hastens to add. "It's pipe tobacco. And Finnish!"

The guy's wife steps from the door of the tomb into the moonlight, carrying a copper tray and three glasses. She is traditionally barefooted and pregnant and the fact embarrasses her. When she leans to place the tray on the sand you can feel the blush. Marag makes some crack in Arabic about her girth and she skitters back into the tomb.

The tea is wickedly strong and sweet but the Finnish tobacco, I'm forced to admit by the time we're done with the first round, isn't all that bad. The wife appears with a kettle as the husband is lighting the second joint – spliff, rather – refills our glasses, and disappears again, all in a moment. This round of tea is milder and they are running low on sugar, but right on cue with the third joint she appears to replenish us. Hardly more than hot water. She remains outside, indicating that the goodies are gone; if more is wanted it will require her trotting barefooted to the village. She stands as though weightless for all her swollen condition, the globe of her belly buoying her up. The husband finishes the weak drink and returns the glass to the tray before he shakes his head no; we've had enough.

She leans to take up the tray. This time the young husband reaches to her foot and affectionately squeezes her bare instep. Marag gasps at this most un-Moslemlike display.

"It is as they say." He clucks. "These kids smoke dope and our old ways of behave are forget."

I guess it must be Marag's version of irony, but it's hard to say. That last one did it. The gas light from the tomb hisses back down and the moon moons. We sit for a long time, looking at the stars and listening to the dogs keep each other abreast of the neighborhood night. When it's time to leave, we all three stand at once. The young guard puts the tin box in his pocket and rolls up his carpet. The shadow head on the shadow body nods goodbye and disappears after its mate.

Never a word. Never a chin or cheekbone let stray out in the prying moonlight. But that faceless presence has furnished a circle in the dirt with the grandeur of Araby.

We are scrabbling down into the village, where Marag is going to make another score for me. I'm high like a motherfucker. The Sphinx looks like a big old mouser purring by the path, fat on camels and Fiats.

"My young friend is far from his Bedouin home." Marag feels he must explain, looking back up the dim trail at me. "I get him this position. He is family. I leave that village too, when I am very little, very young. His relative get me position."

He was turned around walking backwards down the steep rut now.

"This young fellow, I think he will not stay long. He will go back to the desert for the birth. When he comes back I will get him another position. It is good, is it not? Having a person like family at the pyramid?"

I can't help wondering what he's trying to promote me into. Maybe I should make it clear that a wealthy globetrotter I am not. It could be years before I can afford to return, decades. He should save his pitch for a better prospect.

I can't go with him to score, he explains. I will wait at his home. I follow him down sandstone paths that get wider and leveler until they become miniature streets crisscrossing between a maze of tiny block dwellings. The streets are too narrow for cars but there's plenty of traffic-nocturnal strollers and striders, men and women, goats and kids. Cronies squatting against the wall grin and wink at Marag whisking past with a big live one in tow.

In the square of light before one of the doorless doorways a knot of kids are playing with homemade clay marbles. A little boy jumps up from the game and scampers after us. He looks about seven, which means he's probably close to eleven if you allow for the protein lag. Marag pretends not to notice him, then gruffly makes as if to swat him away. The kid ducks, laughing, and Marag takes him by the hand.

"This is Mister Sami," he explains, still gruff. "My oldest son. Sami, say hello to my friend Mister Deb-ree."

"Good evening, Mister Deb-ree," the boy says. "Is nice evening?" His handshake is as light as his father's.

We cross a shared yard jammed between four mud huts and enter Marag's home. From the ceiling a single dim bulb gradually coaxes the room from the night. It is only slightly bigger than the guard's tomb. There are two big trunks; one carpet and one grass mat; one big bed and two bunks; no chairs or cupboards; no tables. For decoration there is a hanging tapestry with kids' art pinned to it and a long bundle of sugarcane in the corner, bound with a gay red ribbon.

Marag introduces me to his wife, a tiny woman with one of the milked-over eyes so frequently seen in the Egyptian poor. Also to Mister Ahmed, Missy Shera, Mister Foo-Foo, all younger than Sami.

Marag takes a pillow from the bed and places it on the floor next to the wall and bids me sit. The kids squat in a semicircle and stare at me while Marag helps his wife pump a little white gas burner to hissing flame. I blow my harmonica for the kids and let them play with my compass. The wife begins to prepare tea for us in a little copper kettle.

I ask Sami how he got a crescent scar on his forehead. Grinning, he points toward the pyramid and pantomimes a tumble with his hands.

"It was a bad fall," Marag says. "But maybe it convince him the spirits want him to be an educated, not a pyramid goat. He can read and count and draw pictures now, Mister Sami can." He beams at the boy in unabashed wonder. "He can write."

From the foot of the top bunk he takes down a notebook to show me, the very one that donated a page for that map. He proudly points out the pictures and words.

"Mr. Deb-ree is an artist and doctor, Sami. Maybe he draw for you a picture while I go on an errand."

After Marag leaves with my five-pound note, Sami and I exchange drawings. I do a Mickey Mouse and Sami does the pyramid. I tell him it looks too steep and he turns to the back page. Taped to the inside cover with electrician's tape is a dollar bill. It's taped Great Seal side up, and written beneath it, first in Arabic, then English, in the careful and patient hand of any good grade-school teacher in any language, is the translation of the two Latin slogans: new order of ages and allah has prospered our beginnings.

"Did your daddy give you this the other night?"

Yes, he nods, frowning at the page to remember what else his teacher has told him. "It is Roman lira pound?"

"No," I tell him; "it is Yankee dollar, American simoleon buck." Marag is gone a long time. The wife puts Missy Shera and Mister Ahmed to bed. It must be past midnight but they're still wide-eyed and excited, staring at me from their bunks.

She takes up little Mister Foo-Foo and sits on the edge of the bed and drops one shoulder of her smock. In the dim light she looks withered way beyond her years. But all the kids are healthy, plumper than most of the pyramid pack I've seen. Maybe that's why she's withered.

Foo-Foo roots in. Mom closes her one good eye and rocks gently to and fro on the edge of the bed, humming a monotonous nasal lullaby. Foo-Foo watches me unblinking as he sucks and rocks.

A scrawny turkey chick wanders in the open door and Sami shoos it back outside. In a corner of the yard I see a very old woman milking a goat. She grins at Sami shooing the chick and calls something in Arabic.

"Mother-my-father," he explains. "Is right?"

"Grandmother, we say. Sami's grandmother." After she finishes she rubs the goat's bag with oil from a jar and brings the bucket of milk in. She doesn't acknowledge me at all. She pours half the milk into the copper kettle on the cold gas burner and covers the rest with a cloth over the top of the bucket. She unties a long stalk of sugarcane from the bundle in the corner. She takes up her half bucket and shuffles out. The stalk brushes the bulb and the shadows rock back and forth. The humming never stops and all the little eyes are still wide in the dreamy light swinging, watching me, even the goat's square pupils in the yard outside, glowing yellow at me as she chomps the cane…

Back at the cabana. I fell asleep on Marag's floor and had a hell of a dream, that the village had been struck by a sandstorm. I couldn't see. In despair I tried to call but sand filled my throat. All I could make out was the rising din of thousands of impatient horns.

When Marag returned and woke me I was sweating and panting. So was he, after his run. But this time he had only one little taped cartridge to show for his hours of effort. He handed it to me, apologizing. It lay in my hand in the dim light and both of us felt very sad.

As he guided me from his house through the tiny thoroughfares to Sphinx Street, he continued to apologize and promise to make things good. I told him the deal was cool and not to worry over it! It was just a little burn.

"The deal is not cool!" he insisted. "Is a bad burn. I bring the rest of the deal tonight, eight o'clock at Mena House – guaranteed!"

He kept on and on about it in a distracted tirade. I finally got him off the subject by telling him what a nice family he had.

"You are kind saying so. What about Sami, you like Sami? Is smart boy, my Mister Sami?"

I told him yeah, I liked Sami, he was plenty smart.

"Smart enough to catch up in one of your modern schools?"

"Sure. He's a bright kid. Personable and alert and bright, like his daddy. I bet he would be up with the other kids in a matter of weeks."

"I bet, too," he said, pleased.

I told him good night at the Sphinx. I was over the hill and nearing the hotel before I finally put it together. Marag hadn't been promoting himself – it was Sami. Like any father he has his dream: the son is taken back to the Land of Opportunity by some gentleman, raised in a modern home, sent to a modern United States school. The kids get a chance to break into the twentieth century; the gentleman gets a permanent liaison with the past…"A friend always at the pyramid." Not a bad scam. No wonder you were so upset about that hash; you had bigger deals wheeling. For all your light touch and soft sell, Marag, you're a stone hustler…

October 29. Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, 300th day. Slept till Muldoon and Jacky wake me just in time to see the sun going down. They push me into the shower and send a pool boy to bring a pot of coffee. Jacky has reservations at the Auberge to see Zizi Mustafa, the most famous dancer of them all, and Muldoon has news of a hot archeological find in Ethiopia.

"An abdomen that ought to be put in the Louvre!" Jacky promises.

"A human skull that pushes us millions of years back further than Leakey's find!" says Muldoon. "And no monkey business about it; this cranium is human! Darwin was full of crap!"

"Maybe," says Jacky, always a little reluctant to reorient his thinking or his anatomical focus. "On the other hand, maybe his evolutionary theory was right but his time scale was slightly off. That we still come from monkeys only it took us longer."

"That's not the question, Jacky." I'm out of the cold shower and hot into the discussion. "The question is did we or did we not fall!" As we are walking through the lobby I suddenly remember Marag's resolve to meet me at eight with the rest of my purchase.

"Eight in Egyptian means somewhere between nine and midnight," Jacky translates. "That's if he shows up at all."

I leave word at the desk to have Marag go on down to my cabana if he shows up before I return. I go back and unlock the door just in case and leave the hookah on the nightstand.

After we eat the elaborate Auberge supper we find that the dancer doesn't come on until nine. At ten they say midnight. Muldoon says he's in the middle of exams and can't wait any longer. I talk Jacky into coming back out to the Mena House with me; we can check out Marag and still make it back for the dancer. We get a cab, drop Muldoon at his place, and head back to Giza. By the time we get to the Mena House it is after eleven and no sign of Marag. The door to my cabana is ajar but nothing is waiting for me on the nightstand. We walk out to the street while Jacky regales me with some Arabic wisdom regarding gullibility. The doorman signals for a cab, then asks in a hazy afterthought, "By the way, sir, are you not Mister Deb-ree?"

I tell him I am called so by some.

"Ah, then, there was waiting for you a person. But he has left."

When? Ah, sir, minutes ago, sir; he waited a long time. Where? In utility room, sir, out of sight. Didn't you tell this person to go on down to my cabana as I instructed? Oh, no, sir; that we cannot do! They would be bothering our guests, these persons… They! Who the hell do you think you are? Official doorman, sir. How long did this person wait for me? Oh, that we could not say; the person was sitting waiting when we came on duty at seven thirty.

"But when he left," he says, finally dragging his fist free of his gaudy pocket, "he gave for you me this package."

And he holds out my red handkerchief. Inside are the other four taped cardboard cartridges and my Uni pen.

October 30, Wednesday. My last day in Egypt.

I feel shitty about Marag. No luck at all trying to locate his house in the labyrinth of that village. Nor with the tomb where the young Bedouin couple were living. They left in the night, a new watchman tells me. Does he know Marag? Everyone knows Marag. Held the World Record Up-and-down Pyramid, Marag. Where does he live? Somewhere in village. When does he come on duty? Sometimes late night, sometimes early morning, sometimes not for days… Oh, a man of unpredictable moods, Marag, many of them dark.

In Cairo I smoke a cartridge with Jacky and Muldoon and give one to each. I have to be clean on the plane back. I give Muldoon my four-volume PYRAMIDOLOGY by Rutherford. We mumble goodbyes and I hurry back out to Giza. Still no Marag on the dark aouda. My plane isn't until 10 a.m. but I leave word at the desk to wake me at 6.

VI

October 31, Halloween morn. Up before the sun. I recheck my packing (three girls from Oregon are right now serving a life sentence for dope in Turkey, where my plane lands after Cairo); nothing but the last ball of hash. And the Murine bottle. The hash I can swallow at the airport, but what about this stuff? Just flush it down the toilet? That's like carrying the key all the long battle to the castle and up the wall to the maiden locked behind the massive tower door, then chickening out for fear she'll be a bitch and tossing it in the moat.

I've got to try. Never get another chance. There's not enough time left to swallow it – it would be flight time before I took off – but if I bang it…

So I'm headed again up the hill for one last desperate attempt, the Murine bottle in my shoulder bag, the insulin outfit in my pocket. By the time I reach the aouda I'm shaking all over with trepidation. I lean against the casing stones to reinforce my resolve but I keep shivering. It's chilly and gray. A whirlwind comes winding across the empty aouda, gathering a fanatical congregation of scraps. The wind spins, like the spirit of a new messiah, inspiring corn husks, cigarette packs, the shells of yesterday's pumpkin seeds… lifting newspapers, gum papers, toilet papers high and higher. What a following! Then the spirit evaporates and the wind unwinds. The Zealots drift back to the limestone.

"Good morning, Mr. Deb-ree… is a nice morning?"

"Good morning, Marag." I had planned to apologize for the fuck-up at the hotel; now I realize again there is nothing to say. "It's not a bad morning. A little chilly."

"A new season comes. The winds will now blow from the desert, more cooler and full of sand."

"No more tourists for a season?"

He shrugs. "As long as great Khufu stands there will be tourists." His bright little eyes are already chipping away at my chill. "Maybe my friend Mister Deb-ree want a guide take him to the top? Guide most reliable? You know how much?"

"Five pounds," I say, reaching for my wallet. "Let's go."

Marag tucks his gellabia in the top of his shorts and leads the way like a lizard. It's like climbing up 200 big kitchen ranges, one after another. I have to call a stop to him three times. His tiny eyes needle merrily at me gasping for breath.

"Mister Deb-ree, are you not healthy? Do you not get good nourishment in your country?"

"Just admiring the view, Marag; go on."

We finally reach the top and flush the ravens off. They circle darkly, calling us all kinds of names before they sail off through the brightening morn toward the rich fields below. What a valley. What a river to carve it so!

"Come, friend." Marag beckons me to the wooden pole in the center of the square of limestone blocks. "Marag show you little pyramid trick."

He has me reach as high as I can up the pole with a chip of rock and scratch a mark. I notice a number of similar scratches at various heights. "Now have a seat and breathe awhile this air. Is magic, this air on top pyramid. You will see."

I sit at the base of the pole, glad for a breather. "How does it affect you, this magic pyramid air?"

"It affect you to shrink," he says, grinning. "Breathe deep. You'll see."

Now that he calls it to mind I remember noticing that most of the pyramid sealers are indeed men of unusually slight stature. I breathe deep, watching the sun trying to push through the clouded horizon. After a minute he tells me to stand with my stone and scratch again. It's hard to tell, with all the marks of previous experiments, but it looks to me like I'm scratching exactly next to my first mark. I'm about to tell him his pyramid air is just more of his bull when I find myself flashing.

It's an old trick. I used to use it myself as a way to get an audience off. I tell them to take fifteen deep breaths, hold the last lungful and stand, then everybody om together as the flash comes on. Hyperventilation. Every junior-high weirdo knows it. But the business with the scratch and the magic air was so slick I didn't make the connection, even when I felt the familiar faint coming on.

I grab the pole for support, impressed. Marag has positioned himself in front of me, hands on his hips, grinning skyward. He's done this before. He flaps a moment, then the breeze stills. I follow his gaze up into the milky sky and see what he has been waiting for: the thumb of God. I see it come down out of the haze and settle on top of Marag's head, bowing him like a deck of cards until his face snaps, revealing another behind it, and another, and another, face after face snapping and fanning upward in an accelerating riffle – some familiar, from the village, the aouda, some famous (I remember distinctly two widely known musicians who I will not name in case it might bring them hamper), but mostly faces I've never seen. Women and men, black, brown, red, and whatever, most of them looking at least past the half-century mark in earthly years. The expressions completely individual and various – bemused, patient, mischievous, stern – but there is a singular quality uniting them all: each face is kind, entirely, profoundly, unshakingly benevolent. The fan spreads up and up, like the deck at the climax of Disney's Alice in Wonderland, clear to the clouds. From a distance these two vast triangles would resemble an hourglass, the bottom filled with grains of limestone, the top with face cards.

At the last there are a number of blanks, positions available for those willing and qualified. When the last blank is snapped away there is a hole left in the shape of Marag's slight body. Through this hole I can see the Sphinx, and beyond his paws those lanes of huts housing these faithful sentries who have for thousands of years guarded the treasury of all our climbs and all our falls. It is not buried. It is hidden on the very surface, in the cramped comings and goings, the sharing of goat's milk and sugercane, in the everlasting hustle by the grace of which this ancient society has managed to survive. For thousands of years this people has defended this irreplaceable treasury and its temple with little more than their hustle and bustle and their bladders.

As long as there's piss in the King's Coffin there isn't going to be a pair of McDonald's arches on the aouda.

"What you think, Mister Deb-ree?" Marag snaps back into the space before me. "Is a good trick?"

"Is a good trick, Marag. Is a great trick."

Back on the aouda I give him gifts for his family. Handkerchiefs, shoulder-bag stuff. My harmonica for Sami, and I will talk to my wife about the boy coming to Oregon for a year of school. To Marag I give my canteen, my compass, and a page from my notebook inscribed This man Marag is a servant who can be relied upon. Signed with my name and gooped over with my Polaroid fixative to preserve it. We shake hands a last time and I hurry down to check out.

My cabana door is open. Sitting on my bed is Dr. Ragar.

"Brother! I have brought for you the map of the Hidden Hall, known only to Masons of many degrees."

I begin to laugh. I'm delighted to see him. I wonder, was he one of the faces? I can't remember.

"Sorry, Doctor, I've already seen the Secret Hall. What else have you got?"

He misunderstands my exuberance. He thinks I am ridiculing him. His eyes take on a wronged look, whimpering from beneath his dark brow like two whipped dogs.

"I Dr. Ragar do have," he says in a hurt voice, "a formula for a blend of healing oils. Used by the Essenes, it is said for the feet of your Jesus. The usual price of this formula is five pounds, but, my brother, for you -"

"Five pounds is perfect! I'll take it."

He helps me carry my bags and shares the taxi as far as Cairo. He is reluctant to leave me. He knows something more than money is up for grabs, but not what. He keeps running that rancid glim over me sidelong. When he gets out we shake hands and I press the Murine bottle into his palm.

"In return for all you've done for me, Brother Ragar, please to accept this rare American elixir. One drop in each eye will clear away the cobwebs; two in each will open the third; three if you wish to see God as he appeared in San Francisco in 1965. I would not divulge this powerful stuff but for the fact that my father, you recall, was a Mason. I think he would want it so. Please, be so kind…"

He studies me, wondering if I'm drunk at nine in the morning, then takes the bottle. "Thank you," he says uncertainly, blinking thickly at the gift.

"One stone at a time," I tell him.

Epilogue. Nine forty-four by the cabbie's watch. He's finding holes no Fiat ever fit through before but I'll never make it. They said to allow at least one hour for getting through Cairo customs. Look at that mob of tourists! Like rats panicked at a sinking porthole. Nine fifty. Nobody's going to make it.

But the plane is delayed because an old pilgrim had a heart attack and they had to unload him. The guy I strap in next to tells me about it.

"Right there trying to put his camera bag in the overhead and the Lord took 'im. Happens all the time on these Holy Land hops."

The guy is a preacher from Pennsylvania and a tour host himself: very, very tired.

"Wasn't part of my group thank the Lord. But I'm due. Y'see there's so many of them that are Senior Citizens, old folks that have saved enough to take a gander at the Holy Land even if it's the last thing they do."

The engines are finally running and we taxi to the end of our runway. The spirit on board lightens. Nervous chatter is heard. Just before we take off somebody yells, Hey, who won the fight last night?

What fight? somebody calls back.

Between the Heathen and the Infidel.

Everybody laughs, even the Turks and Nurds, but nobody knows who won. The stewardess says she'll ask the captain and report back. We blast off. When we level out the Pennsylvania preacher says, "It wasn't Foreman. I don't care what she reports back." I thought he was sound asleep. I say what? and he repeats the statement without opening his eyes: "I said Foreman didn't win, no matter what the outcome." When he doesn't elaborate I turn back to my window.

We're banking right over Cairo. There's the bridge crossing the Nile to the Omar Khayyam. There's the Statue of Isis Awakening, lifting her veil to watch us leave. There's Pyramid Boulevard… The Mena House… Giza village… but I don't see… could I have overlooked it in this haze? There! No wonder; even from up here you don't see it because you're looking for something smaller. But you don't overlook it. You can't. You underlook it.

"And you wanna know why?" the preacher has rolled his head to ask. "Because he's got a discrepancy is why! How can he be the good Christian he claims to be and still be hitting people for money?"

He fixes me with eyes worn red and raw from two weeks' keeping track of his rattled flock.

"That's what does it, the thing really gets these Holy Landers. It's not the age, not the heart. It's the discrepancy!"

His eyes close. His mouth falls open. I turn back to the window. The airplane's shadow flits across the golden ripples of the Sahara. We level out. The speaker pops on and the pilot addresses us in sophisticated Amsterdam English.

"This is your captain, Simon Vinkenoog. It appears we have to take a little detour in our routing to Istanbul, west of the Nile delta, because of… political reasons. We do not estimate much time loss. Lean back relax. The weather in Istanbul is clear and cool. The report from Zaire last night – before a crowd of ten thousand Muhammad Ali knocked out George Foreman in the eighth round, regaining the World Heavyweight Championship. Have a pleasant flight home."