Demon Box

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.”