Demon Box

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“Thud”—I tried to make contact over a more universal frequency—“you trite pile of outdated camel shit, you’re driving too fast!”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.