And he holds out my red handkerchief. Inside are the other four taped cardboard cartridges and my Uni pen.
October 30, Wednesday. My last day in Egypt.
I feel shitty about Marag. No luck at all trying to locate his house in the labyrinth of that village. Nor with the tomb where the young Bedouin couple were living. They left in the night, a new watchman tells me. Does he know Marag? Everyone knows Marag. Held the World Record Up-and-down Pyramid, Marag. Where does he live? Somewhere in village. When does he come on duty? Sometimes late night, sometimes early morning, sometimes not for days… Oh, a man of unpredictable moods, Marag, many of them dark.
In Cairo I smoke a cartridge with Jacky and Muldoon and give one to each. I have to be clean on the plane back. I give Muldoon my four-volume PYRAMIDOLOGY by Rutherford. We mumble goodbyes and I hurry back out to Giza. Still no Marag on the dark aouda. My plane isn't until 10 a.m. but I leave word at the desk to wake me at 6.
VI
October 31, Halloween morn. Up before the sun. I recheck my packing (three girls from Oregon are right now serving a life sentence for dope in Turkey, where my plane lands after Cairo); nothing but the last ball of hash. And the Murine bottle. The hash I can swallow at the airport, but what about this stuff? Just flush it down the toilet? That's like carrying the key all the long battle to the castle and up the wall to the maiden locked behind the massive tower door, then chickening out for fear she'll be a bitch and tossing it in the moat.
I've got to try. Never get another chance. There's not enough time left to swallow it – it would be flight time before I took off – but if I bang it…
So I'm headed again up the hill for one last desperate attempt, the Murine bottle in my shoulder bag, the insulin outfit in my pocket. By the time I reach the aouda I'm shaking all over with trepidation. I lean against the casing stones to reinforce my resolve but I keep shivering. It's chilly and gray. A whirlwind comes winding across the empty aouda, gathering a fanatical congregation of scraps. The wind spins, like the spirit of a new messiah, inspiring corn husks, cigarette packs, the shells of yesterday's pumpkin seeds… lifting newspapers, gum papers, toilet papers high and higher. What a following! Then the spirit evaporates and the wind unwinds. The Zealots drift back to the limestone.
"Good morning, Mr. Deb-ree… is a nice morning?"
"Good morning, Marag." I had planned to apologize for the fuck-up at the hotel; now I realize again there is nothing to say. "It's not a bad morning. A little chilly."
"A new season comes. The winds will now blow from the desert, more cooler and full of sand."
"No more tourists for a season?"
He shrugs. "As long as great Khufu stands there will be tourists." His bright little eyes are already chipping away at my chill. "Maybe my friend Mister Deb-ree want a guide take him to the top? Guide most reliable? You know how much?"
"Five pounds," I say, reaching for my wallet. "Let's go."
Marag tucks his gellabia in the top of his shorts and leads the way like a lizard. It's like climbing up 200 big kitchen ranges, one after another. I have to call a stop to him three times. His tiny eyes needle merrily at me gasping for breath.
"Mister Deb-ree, are you not healthy? Do you not get good nourishment in your country?"
"Just admiring the view, Marag; go on."
We finally reach the top and flush the ravens off. They circle darkly, calling us all kinds of names before they sail off through the brightening morn toward the rich fields below. What a valley. What a river to carve it so!
"Come, friend." Marag beckons me to the wooden pole in the center of the square of limestone blocks. "Marag show you little pyramid trick."
He has me reach as high as I can up the pole with a chip of rock and scratch a mark. I notice a number of similar scratches at various heights. "Now have a seat and breathe awhile this air. Is magic, this air on top pyramid. You will see."
I sit at the base of the pole, glad for a breather. "How does it affect you, this magic pyramid air?"
"It affect you to shrink," he says, grinning. "Breathe deep. You'll see."
Now that he calls it to mind I remember noticing that most of the pyramid sealers are indeed men of unusually slight stature. I breathe deep, watching the sun trying to push through the clouded horizon. After a minute he tells me to stand with my stone and scratch again. It's hard to tell, with all the marks of previous experiments, but it looks to me like I'm scratching exactly next to my first mark. I'm about to tell him his pyramid air is just more of his bull when I find myself flashing.
It's an old trick. I used to use it myself as a way to get an audience off. I tell them to take fifteen deep breaths, hold the last lungful and stand, then everybody om together as the flash comes on. Hyperventilation. Every junior-high weirdo knows it. But the business with the scratch and the magic air was so slick I didn't make the connection, even when I felt the familiar faint coming on.
I grab the pole for support, impressed. Marag has positioned himself in front of me, hands on his hips, grinning skyward. He's done this before. He flaps a moment, then the breeze stills. I follow his gaze up into the milky sky and see what he has been waiting for: the thumb of God. I see it come down out of the haze and settle on top of Marag's head, bowing him like a deck of cards until his face snaps, revealing another behind it, and another, and another, face after face snapping and fanning upward in an accelerating riffle – some familiar, from the village, the aouda, some famous (I remember distinctly two widely known musicians who I will not name in case it might bring them hamper), but mostly faces I've never seen. Women and men, black, brown, red, and whatever, most of them looking at least past the half-century mark in earthly years. The expressions completely individual and various – bemused, patient, mischievous, stern – but there is a singular quality uniting them alclass="underline" each face is kind, entirely, profoundly, unshakingly benevolent. The fan spreads up and up, like the deck at the climax of Disney's Alice in Wonderland, clear to the clouds. From a distance these two vast triangles would resemble an hourglass, the bottom filled with grains of limestone, the top with face cards.
At the last there are a number of blanks, positions available for those willing and qualified. When the last blank is snapped away there is a hole left in the shape of Marag's slight body. Through this hole I can see the Sphinx, and beyond his paws those lanes of huts housing these faithful sentries who have for thousands of years guarded the treasury of all our climbs and all our falls. It is not buried. It is hidden on the very surface, in the cramped comings and goings, the sharing of goat's milk and sugercane, in the everlasting hustle by the grace of which this ancient society has managed to survive. For thousands of years this people has defended this irreplaceable treasury and its temple with little more than their hustle and bustle and their bladders.
As long as there's piss in the King's Coffin there isn't going to be a pair of McDonald's arches on the aouda.
"What you think, Mister Deb-ree?" Marag snaps back into the space before me. "Is a good trick?"
"Is a good trick, Marag. Is a great trick."
Back on the aouda I give him gifts for his family. Handkerchiefs, shoulder-bag stuff. My harmonica for Sami, and I will talk to my wife about the boy coming to Oregon for a year of school. To Marag I give my canteen, my compass, and a page from my notebook inscribed This man Marag is a servant who can be relied upon. Signed with my name and gooped over with my Polaroid fixative to preserve it. We shake hands a last time and I hurry down to check out.