"No." He is wagging the light from side to side. "No photo." I figure it must be some religious taboo, like certain natives guarding their souls, like me with Annie Liebovitz.
"I can dig it. I'll just snap a shot of that skyline dawn across the Nile."
"No photo!"
"Hey, I wasn't aiming anywhere near you." I start to stomp away, down the wall. "I'll shoot from somewhere else if you're so -"
"No photo!"
Slowly I take my eye from the viewfinder. The flashlight has been put aside on the wall to leave both hands available for the carbine. Too late I realize that it is the bridge he is guarding, not his soul.
I put the camera away, apologizing. He stands looking at me, suspicious and insulted. There is nothing more for us to say, even if we could understand each other. Finally, to regain a more customary relationship, he puts two fingers to his lips and asks, "Seegrat?"
I tell him I don't smoke. He thinks I'm lying, sore about the picture. There is nothing to say. I sigh. The puzzle of Cairo shuffles off to stand in token attention on the abutment, his collar up and his back turned stiffly toward me.
The light is coming fast through the mist. The wind dies away for a moment and a sharp reek fogs up around me. Looking down I see I have stomped into a puddle of piss.
October 16. The Ramadan holiday. Erstwhile Egyptologist Muldoon Greggor calls, tells us to come over to his place; he'll go with us to the pyramid tonight after his classes.
"Check out of that morgue right now!" he shouts through the phone static. "I've reserved rooms at the Mena House!"
So it's outta that rundown Rudyard Kipling pipedream through the surging holiday streets up seven floors to the address Greggor gives us. A shy girl lets us in a ghetto penthouse. Jacky and I spend the rest of the afternoon drinking the man's cold Stella beers, watching the multitudes below parade past in their gayest Ramadan gladrags. The shadows have stretched out long before Muldoon Greggor comes rushing in with a load of books. We barely shake hands before he hustles us down to catch a cab.
"Mena House, Pyramid Road! We want to get there before dark."
So it is at dusty sundown that I see it at last: first from the window of the cab; then closer, from the hotel turnaround; then through the date palms walking up the hill; then – Great God in Heaven Whatever Your Name or Names! – here it is before me: mankind's mightiest wedge, sliced perfect from a starblue sky – the Great Pyramid of Giza.
III: INSIDE THE THRONE
Imagine the usual tourist approaching for his first hit: relieved to be finally off the plane and out of that airport, a bit anxious on the tour bus through that crazy Cairo traffic but still adequately protected by the reinforced steel of the modern machine, laughing and pointing with his fellow tour members at the incongruous panorama of the Giza outskirts – donkeys drawing broken-down Fiats, mud huts stuck like dirt-dauber nests to the sides of the most modern condominiums – "Pathetic, but you gotta admit, Cynthia: very picturesque" – fiddling with his camera, tilting back in his seat a little sleepy from the sun; when, suddenly, the air brakes grab and the door hisses open and he is ejected from his climatized shell into the merciless maw of the parking lot at the bottom of Pyramid Hill.
A hungry swarm of his first real Egyptians comes clamoring after him: buggy drivers and camel hasselers and purveyors of the finest Arabian saddle steeds. And guides? Lord, the guides! of every conceit and canon:
"Wel-come, mister, wel-come; you are fine, yes?"
The handshake, the twinkle, the ravenous cumin-winded come-on:
"You like Cairo, yes? You like Egypt? You like Egyptian people? You like to see authentic hidden mummy the late King Koo-Foo? I am a guide!"
Or, even worse, the Not-Guides:
"Oh, pardon sir if I cannot help but notice you are being bothered by these phony fellaheen. Understand please; I am not a guide, being official watchman, in employ the Department of Antiquities in Cairo. You come with me. I keep these nuisances away from your holiday. I am Not-Guide!"
Our poor pilgrim fights his way through the swarm up the curving walk to the aouda (a big limestone lot in front of the northern base of the pyramid, swarming with more of the same), presses on to the monstrous stack of stone blocks which are perched all over with more damned guides and Not-Guides grinning like gargoyles… pays his piastres for the tickets that allow him and his nose-wrinkled wife to crawl up a cramped and airless torture chamber to a stone room about the size of the men's room of the bus terminal back home – and smellier! – then hightails it back to the relief of the bus:
"But tell me the truth, Cyn, wasn't that thing unbelievable big like nothing you ever saw in your life? I can't wait to see these shots projected on the screen at the lodge."
Unbelievable big doesn't come close. It is inconceivably big, incomprehensibly big, brutal against the very heavens it's so big. If you come after the rush hour and are allowed to stroll unsolicited to it, you witness a phenomenon as striking as its size. As you cross the limestone lot the huge triangle begins to elongate into your peripheries – to flatten. The base line stretches, the sloping sides lengthen, and those sharpening corners – the northwest corner in the corner of your right eye; the northeast corner in your left – begin to wrap around you!
Consequently the vertex is getting shorter, the summit angle flatter; when you finally reach the bottom course of base stones and raise your eyes up its fifty-degree face even the two-dimensional triangle has disappeared! The plane of it diminishes away with such perfection that it is difficult to conceive of it as a plane. When it was still dressed smooth in its original casing stones the effect must have been beyond the senses' ability to resist; it must have turned into a seamless white line – a phenomenon of the first dimension.
Even in its present peeled condition, the illusion still disorients you. You tell your senses, "Look maybe I ain't seen the other sides but I did see this one so it's gotta be at least a plane." But planes are something we know, like airfields and shopping center parking lots, hence horizontal. This makes it seem that you could walk right out on it if you just lean back enough to get on the perpendicular. Ooog. It makes you stumble and reel…
To calm my stomach I leaned against one of the casing stones. It was smooth to my cheek; it made me feel cool, and a little melancholy.
"It's sad, isn't it?" Muldoon said. "Seeing the old place so rundown and stripped."
Muldoon Greggor wasn't the tweedy old Egyptologist we had expected. He was a little past twenty, wearing patched Levi's and a T-shirt, and a look in his eyes that still smoldered from some psychedelic scorcher that had made him swear off forever.
"It's eroded more in the six centuries since the Arabs stripped it than it did in the forty centuries before – if you accept the view of the accepted Egyptologists – or in the hundred and seventy centuries – if you go for the Cayce readings."
"Sad," I agreed. "How could they do it?"
"They figured they needed it." Jacky came to the defense of those long-gone Arabs. "For Allah."
"More than just sad," I kept on. "It's insulting… to whoever composed this postcard in stone, and took the trouble to send it to us.
"The Arabs needed the stones to rebuild Cairo. Remember Nasser's construction of the High Dam?"