Demon Box

When she has traded all the clean laundry on her cart for soiled she comes wheeling back past my open door and inquires in at live, “Is yet hot to you, the day?” I tell her yes, yet hot. She encourages me to brace up; the winds change any day now.

“All will pass.” She smiles. “Even the diarrheas.”

And wheels on, leaving me tongue-tied like a hick fool indeed. What a low blow from a linen maid! Nevertheless, better toss the little filly a nice tip when you check out. How nice? Real nice. This is why the help in foreign realms always like us Americans best: we can always be expected to tip more, because we are always so inadequate of what is expected.

October 23, Wednesday. The mosquitoes and scarabs have pinned Jacky Cherry up against his cabana wall. Also Yasir Arafat is taking a side trip from the Moslem convention in Cairo to visit the historic pyramids. He was allegedly seen lunching in a private portico off the main dining room. A sinister-looking coterie of bodyguards and lieutenants is spotted darkly around to make sure the Holy Land tour members don’t start anything. This doesn’t make Jacky any more comfortable. He catches the 900 bus into Cairo to see if he can’t get lodging with fewer pests.

I walk up the hill, stopping at the shop nearest the pyramid to buy a miniature hookah I’ve had my eye on. The shop is an orderly little side cranny of a building labeled Poor Children’s Hospital. I ask the proprietor how he happens to have a place so close to the pyramid. He says because the profits help the hospital cure the Poor Children. I ask him what it is exactly that these Poor Children are sent out here, to the base of the Great Pyramid, to be cured of. After struggling to find a name for the disease he finally points back toward the city.

“Of the pray-sure—eh?—of the city Cairo, they come to be cure. You understanding?”

I take the hookah, nodding, and go out to seek my own cure. I had thought to find a private place somewhere on the pyramid’s outskirts, but there is a big crowd of tourists. I climb up to the third course and sit on the casing stones and watch the hustlers descend on each new shipment of live ones. They are merciless. One poor woman actually breaks into tears.

“Seven years I saved for this, damn you! Leave me alone!”

The dapper camel-panderer, backing away for fear of perpetrating a coronary, gets tangled in his animal’s rope and falls into a heap of fresh camel manure. He stares at the stain on his fresh white gellabia with such dejection I think he might cry himself.

I wonder if they have a similar hospital in Cairo to take care of pyramid pressure casualties…

October 24, Thursday late. Just wobbled down from a bizarre bar scene where I finally made contact with my resident pyramid colleagues, the cosmic ray scientists. All of them (except for the Egyptian students) proved to be very learned and equally drunk. The new Mena Lounge is a terrible bar, pretentious and expensive. I stalked in wearing my British walking shorts and pith helmet (a dusty day at the digs) and splurged on one of their overpriced gin-and-tonics-for tradition’s sake—just as a real Englishman complete with muttonchops and ascot came reeling over from one of the tables behind the plastic arabesque. “Be-ah, please,” he enunciated. “And some pea–nuts.” In a voice so high-handed it’s no mystery why the British were kicked out of all their colonies.

The dour Egyptian behind the bar bit his tongue and obeyed. I told the Englishman he hadn’t better use that tone on a bartender in Oregon.

“Unlikely one would bloody ever be in Oregon,” he said, finally focusing on me. “But see our outfit. Monty’s Dynasty, what? That Rommel campaign? By God’s wound one has to agree with the professor—this great grimy crude pot of a place does serve up specimens from every period.”

He’d been pointed out to me previously as one of the ray experts here with the new spark chamber specially constructed for another try at probing the pyramid. I told him I’d also come to this great pot of possibilities in search of hidden chambers.

“This is what I thought one was supposed to wear.”

“Great pot of nonsense, you want my inebriated expert’s opinion. On the other hand, if you demand sober-er-er experts, come…”

He picked up his beer and peanuts, then hooked my arm to tow me back to his table, introducing me as the renowned fellow pyra-midiot, Sir Hidden Chambers-Pott. “On with our pith helmet, Sir Hidden; give these loutish clods an eyeful of the real archaeological élan!”