Demon Box Read online

  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.

  "Welcome," he says, shouldering his carbine. "Welcome 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?"