Ken Kesey - Demon Box

"What happened when there were three crops a year instead of one was that the farmers spent a lot more time standing around in the irrigation ditches. So there was a tremendous increase of bilharzia, a parasite that's spread by a little water worm that starts at the foot, so to speak, of the ladder, and climbs to the eyes. It gave Egypt the highest rate of blindness in the world. Over seventy percent of the population had it at one point.

"Peculiarly enough, for all the modernization they were introducing to the Egyptians, the British never quite got around to building any hospitals. The mortality rate from birth to age five was about fifty percent. They have a proverb here, 'Endurance is the best thing.' The British helped emphasize this."

We have reached the other side of the Nile, where Jacky's history of recent Cairo is drowned out by the city's stertorous present. Nowhere else have you heard or imagined anything like it! It has a flavor all its own. Mix in your mind the deep surging roar of a petroleum riptide with the strident squealing of a teenage basketball playoff; fold in air conditioners and sprinkle with vendors' bells and police whistles; pour this into narrow streets greased liberally with people noisily eating sesame cakes fried in olive oil, bubbling huge hookahs, slurping Turkish coffees, playing backgammon as loud as the little markers can be slapped down without breaking them – thousands of people, coughing, spitting, muttering in the shadowy debris next to the buildings, singing, standing, sweeping along in dirty damask gellabias, arguing in the traffic – millions! and all jacked up loud on caffeine. Simmer this recipe at 80 degrees at two in the morning and you have a taste of the Cairo Cacophony.

After blocks with no sign of a letup we turn around. We're tired. Ten thousand miles. On the bridge back, Jack is accosted by a pockmarked man with a tambourine and a purple-assed baboon on a rope.

"Money!" the man cries, holding the tambourine out and the baboon back with a cord ringed into the animal's lower lip. "Money! For momkey pardon me sir, for mom-key!"

Jacky shakes his head. "No. Ana mish awez. Don't want to see monkey dance."

"Momkey not dance, pardon me sir. Not dance!" He has to shout against the traffic; the baboon responds to the shout by rearing hysterically and snarling out his long golden fangs. The man whacks the shrieking beast sharply across the ear with the edge of the tambourine. "Momkey get sick! Rabies! Money" – he whacks him again, jerking his leash – "to get momkey fixed."

The baboon acts like his torment is all our fault. He is backing toward us, stretching the pierced lip as he tries to reach us with a hind hand. His claws are painted crimson. His ass looks like a brain tumor on the wrong end.

"Money for mom -key! Hurr- ee!"

Walking away, 50 piastres poorer, Jack admits that Cairo has come up with some new gimmicks since he was here ten years ago.

As we round the end of the bridge we surprise a young sentry pissing off the abutment of his command. Fumbling with embarrassment, he folds a big black overcoat over his uniform still hanging open-flied.

"Wel-come," he says, shouldering his carbine. "Wel-come to Cairo… Hokay?"

October 14, Monday morning. Jack and I are out early to look up a Dr. Ragar that Enoch of Ohio sent me to see. We find him at last, set like a smoky stone in the wicker chair of his jewelry shop, a rheumy-eyed Egyptian businessman in a sincere serge suit and black tie. We try to explain our project but he doesn't seem as interested in digging up an undiscovered temple as in putting down his assortment of already discovered stuff. He slams a door to a glass display case.

"Junk! I, Dr. Ragar, not lie to you. Most of it, junk! For the tourist who knows nothing, respects nothing, is this junk. But for those I see respect Egypt, I show for them the Egypt I respect . So. From what part of America you come from, my friend?"

I tell him I'm from Oregon. Near California.

"Yes, I know Oregon. So. From what part Oregon?"

I tell him I live in a town called Mt. Nebo.

"Yes. Mt. Nebo I know. I visit your state this summer. With the Rotary. See, is flag?"

It's true; hanging on his wall among many others is a fringed flag from the 1974 Rotary International meeting in Portland, Oregon.

"I know your whole state. I am a doctor, archaeologist! I travel all over your beautiful state. So. What part the town you are living? East Mt. Nebo or West Mt. Nebo?"

"Kind of in the middle," I tell him. Mt. Nebo is your usual wide spot in a two-lane blacktop off a main interstate. "And off a little to the north."

"Yes. North Mt. Nebo. I know very well that section your city, North Mt. Nebo. So. Let me show you something more…"

He checks both ways, then draws his wallet from a secret inner-serge pocket. He opens it to a card embossed with an ancient and arcane symbol.

"You see? Also I am Shriner, thirty-two degrees. You know Masons?"

I tell him I already knew he was a Mason – that was how Enoch knew of him, through a fraternal newspaper – and add that my father is also a Mason of the same degree, now kind of inactive.

"Brother!" He claps his palm tight to mine and looks deep into my soul. He's got a gaze like visual bad breath. "Son of a brother is brother! Come. For you I not show this junk. Come down street next door to my home for some hot tea where it is more quiet. You like Egyptian tea, my brothers? Egyptian essences? Not drugstore perfumes, but the true essences, you know? Of the lotus flower? The jasmine? Come. Because your father, I do you a favor; I give you that scarab you favored."

He clasps my hand again, pressing the gift into my palm. I tell him that's not necessary, but he shakes his head.

"Not a word, Brother. Some day, you do something for me. As Masons say, 'One stone at a time.' "

He holds my hand, boring closer with sincerity. I wonder if there is some kind of eye gargle for cases like this. I try to steer us back to archaeology.

"Speaking of stones, doctor, you know the legend of the missing Giza top stone? Where the Temple of Records is supposed to be hidden?"

He laughs darkly. "Who could better know?" he asks, pulling me after him along the sidewalk. "But first, come, both of you; for refreshment."

Jacky follows but he isn't to be so easily distracted. "Then you've heard of this place, doctor? This hidden temple?"

"Dr. Ragar? – Archaeologist, Shriner? - - hear of the Hidden Temple of Records?" He laughs again. Like that flag from Portland, there is in his laugh a dark insinuation that keeps you guessing. "Everybody hear of the Hidden Temple. Hear this, hear that… but The Truth? Who knows The Truth?"

He stops and holds his Masonic ring out for me to see, not Jacky. "We of the Brotherhood know The Truth, which we cannot by oath tell the uninitiated. But you, my brother son-of-a-brother, to you I can maybe show a little light not allowed others, eh?"

I nod, and he nods back, tugging me on a few steps more to a narrow doorfront.

"First here we are at my factory with excellent spice tea… white sugar – none for me, I must apologize; this holy fast – then we talk. Ibrahim!" he shouts, unlocking the heavy door. "Tea for my friends from America!"

We enter a smaller, fancier version of the other shop. It is hung clear to the ceiling fan with old rugs and tapestry. This muffles the noise of downtown Cairo to a medium squawl. But good Christ, is it stuffy. Doctor turns on the fan but it can barely budge the swaddled air.

"So. While we wait my cousin bring the tea you will smell the true essence of the Nile lotus which no woman can resist ."