A cop in a white uniform comes clambering up the stones, belt in his hand. He lays into the kids who have been climbing up to observe us. They flee screeching with delight. He stops, breathing hard. Jacky asks him why such a fuss about the kids. He explains in Arabic, then heads off after another batch of climbing kids, leather belt twirling.
"He says a kid fell yesterday and died. Today they got ten cops patrolling each face."
"I can't see that it's that dangerous. Some kid just horsing around, probably."
"No. He said there has been a kid killed on the pyramid on Ramadan feast every year for thirty years. That last year there were nine killed. He respectfully requests that we move down or go inside before we lure any others to their doom."
At the hole the tickets are 50 piastres apiece. This is the tunnel known as El-Mamoun's. We move in as far as the granite plugs and wait while the stairs empty of sweat-soaked pilgrims streaming down wild-eyed. You must remember: these are all Egyptians, not tourists, and it is probably 90° outside compared to the famous constant 68° you know it to be inside. Nobody outside was sweating.
You also know from your research that the ascending passage is 26° 17', up a tunnel about four foot square. But you have no notion how steep this is, or how small, until halfway up another stream coming down has to push past you. No wonder the sweat and wild eyes. It's too small a place for this many people! Not enough oxygen and nobody in charge and everybody knows it, just like those early rock shows – nobody in control.
Pushing hysteria upward, you break at last into the lofty relief of the Grand Gallery. The crowd behind goes gasping on up. You know, though, that you only have to continue on horizontally through the spur tunnel to the Queen's Chamber to find fresh air. None of the natives seem so researched.
"Ahhh," breathes Jacky. "Unbelievable. And none of the other pyramids have ventilation like this?"
"Nope. That's why this one is considered to be maybe something other than a tomb!"
"Right. The dead don't need ventilation."
"I think it was another Howard-Vyse breakthrough. He figured because there were vents at these points in the King's Chamber above, maybe there was something similar here in the Queen's Chamber. So he calculated where they ought to be, gave a good knock, and there they were, within inches of coming all the way through."
"Weird."
"Not the weirdest, though. Look here…" I run my hand over the wall, like I'm showing a classmate around the family attic. "This stuff on the walls and ceiling? It's salt, and only in the Queen's Chamber and passages – crystallized sea salt."
"How do the Egyptologists explain that?"
"They don't. There's no way to explain it except that this whole chamber was once filled with seawater… by some ancient plumber for some unknown reason, or by a tidal wave."
"Let's go." Jacky has had enough. "Let's get outta here back to the hotel for a sensible beer."
"One more stop," I reassure him, ducking back into the passage out of the Queen's Chamber.
We reach the Grand Gallery and resume our climb, still as steep, but there is nothing oppressive in this vaulted room. More than ever I am assured that these were initiatory walkways; when lit by torches instead of these fluorescent tubes, the Grand Gallery would appear to lift eternally above one's head.
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."