Demon Box Page 13

  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 manana," 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 solst
ice 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 90deg outside compared to the famous constant 68deg you know it to be inside. Nobody outside was sweating.

  You also know from your research that the ascending passage is 26deg 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 d
on'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."