Ken Kesey - Demon Box

Some things keep going farther than others. "A spirited lass, that one…"

This same ongoing spirit surrounds the big white A.R.E. building that houses the 49,135 pages of verbatim psychic readings given by the unassuming little man known as the Sleeping Prophet.

What I learn after four days' research is that hundreds have preceded me in this search for Cayce's Secret Pyramid. The most noteworthy is a certain Muldoon Greggor. Scholar Greggor has written a book on the subject, called The Hidden Records, and is in fact at present in Cairo, according to his brother, continuing his research. Has he unearthed anything new?

"He can be found at the university," the brother advises me without looking up from his research. "Why don't you wait until you get to Cairo and ask him? Myself, I'm into almonds."

October 9, Wednesday. New York City. I'm in this raging Babylon not half an hour and my car gets towed away. It takes me the rest of the day and 75 bucks to get it back. A little girl waiting with her daddy in the angry line at the redeeming pier tells me their car was stolen, too, and is probably crying after the abduction.

"They drag them away by their hind foot, you know."

October 10, 11. More museums and libraries. I think I've got the information to piece the history together. I had planned to write my assimilation of all this material during these few days before Jacky Cherry arrives for our departure, but this city is too overpowering. Awful and awesome. It is here that the leak is most evident, a constant hiss of escaping economy. When you stand near the New Jersey Turnpike you can feel a great protein wind blowing from all over the nation into Long Island and right on out into the ocean to the ten-mile square of floating garbage.

Jack is here and we fly to Cairo tomorrow. My next filing will be from the other side of the globe.

October 13. Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost. Our 747 comes wallowing down out of the clouds into the Amsterdam airport like a flying pig, bellying in to the trough.

Three big trucks swarm out to service her, to see carefully to her comfort. In turn, this pampered porker spares no expense when it comes to the comfort of her clientele. We are lavished with it. Refreshments are served constantly by an ample staff of smiling nubilians. For entertainment you have stereo music, in-flight movies, and a free magazine. Passengers are invited to take this free piece of worthless printed crap home. Of course, there is the very latest in sanitation: everything that comes in human contact is incinerated afterwards.

What a difference when we deplane in Ankara, Turkey, and board the dowdy old DC-8 that will carry us on to Cairo. The plane is smelly as a subway, jammed to the gunwales with every sort of heavy-lidded heathen.

"No wonder the terminal search took so long," Jacky whispers. "Everybody looks like a terrorist."

He says he recognizes the tongues of Turks, Serbs, Kurds, Arabs, Berbers, and, he thinks, some Nurds-all flying to the climax of their month-long religious observance, all sweating and singing and noisily spattering each other with their various dialects and languages that sound, as Jack the language gourmet puts it, "like popcorn popping."

We unload a bunch at Istanbul, more than half. Oddly enough, the plane gets even noisier, swarthier. The remaining passengers look Jack and me over with new respect. "You? You go to Cairo?" We tell them yes, we are going to Cairo. They roll their eyes.

"Ya latif! Ya latif!"

In the air again, I ask Jack what it means. "Ya latif is the Arab equivalent for Far Out. To the devout it means, 'Nice Allah, making for me more surprises.' "

As we cross the Suez we break from the clouds into open night. Out the window thunderheads stand like bored sentries, the shoulders of their rumpled uniforms laced round with rusty stars. They are rolling little balls of heat lightning back and forth, just to keep awake. They wave us on through…

Sunday midnight. Cairo. The turmoil at the airport is unbelievable, tumultuous, teeming – that's the word: teeming – with pilgrims coming and going and relatives, waiting for pilgrims, coming and going. Porters wait on passengers; ragged runners wait on the porters. Customs officials bustle and soldiers in old earth-colored uniforms stroll and yawn. Hustlers of every age and ilk hit you up from every angle known to man. Jacky takes the action in suave stride.

"My year in the Near East," he tells me, "I saw all the gimmicks."

We work our way through, filling forms and getting stamped, moving our bags through a circle of hands – this guy hands the stuff to this next guy who wheels it to this next guy who unloads it by the desk of this next guy – all expecting tips – until we finally make it outside into the welcome desert wind.

The hustler's runner's porter who has attached himself to us runs down a taxi and hustles us in. He tells us, Do not worry, is great driver, and sends us careening terrifically down an unlit four-lane boulevard teeming from curb to curb with bicycles, tricycles, motorcycles, sidehackers, motorscooters, motorbikes, buses dribbling passengers from every hole and handhold, rigs, gigs, wheelchairs, biers, wheelbarrows, wagons, pushcarts, army troop trucks where smooth-chopped soldier boys giggle and goose each other with machine guns… rickshaws, buckboards, hacks both horse- and camel- and human-drawn, donkey-riders and -pullers and -drivers, oxcarts, fruitcarts, legless beggars in thighcarts, laundry ladies with balanced bundles, a brightblack farm lad in a patched nightshirt prodding a greatballed Holstein bull (into town at midnight to what? to butcher? to trade for beans?) plus a huge honking multitude of other taxis, all careening, all without head- or taillights ever showing except for the occasional blink-blink-honk-blink signal to let the dim mass rolling ahead know that, by the Eight Cylinders of Allah, this Great Driver is coming through!

Miraculously, we make it through the clotted city center and across the Nile to the steps of our hotel, the Omar Khayyam. The Omar Khayyam is now somewhat faded in splendor from its heyday, when its statues still had all their noses and nipples, and the lords and colonels and territorial governors still raised their lime squashes in terse toasts to the Empire that the bloody sun would never set on!

We are shown to our room and unpack. It's after two in the morning but the incredible hubbub from across the river calls us back out into the night. As we walk through that obsolete colonial lobby, Jack fills me in on some of the other wonderful things the British did for the Egyptians.

"They introduced the rulers of Egypt to the idea of buying things on credit. Egypt as a result immediately went into stupendous debt, so the British were honorably obliged to come in and clear up their finances for them. This task took seventy years.

"The British plan was to convert Egypt to a single-export economy – cotton. To encourage this they started building dams on the Nile. It bothered the British that the country got so flippin' flooded every year.

"Without the yearly flood that had always brought new soil to replenish the land, the Egyptians were soon dependent on wonderful fertilizers. Also, now that they didn't have to worry about those nasty floods, the British didn't see any reason why they shouldn't get two crops a year instead of one. Perhaps even three! The rulers, none of whom were Egyptian-born or even spoke Arabic, thought it was all wonderful. Albanians, I believe, and they were throwing incredible sums of money around, building Victorian-style mosques, importing things, and paying European creditors absurd rates of interest…