Demon Box

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.