September 28, Saturday. Paul Krassner's in S.F. I ask Krassner if he observed the Yom Kippur fast. He says he would have but he was too busy eating.
September 29, Sunday. Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost. Krassner's packed and ready. He plans to visit the pyramid with me as part of his conspiracy research, something about using the angle of the Grand Gallery to prove conclusively that the bullet that killed Kennedy could not possibly have come from Jack Ruby's gun.
September 30, Monday. Jack Cherry from Rolling Stone drives Krassner and me to the airport where we are going to fly to Dayton, Ohio, to talk with the great underground pyramid expert, Enoch of Ohio, about the Great Underground Pyramid. Cherry is to fly to New York later to rendezvous with the safari. He speaks Egyptian.
October 1, Tuesday. Succoth, the First Day of Tabernacles. Enoch of Ohio runs a tattoo parlor where he specializes in tattooing women and pierces nipples on the side. The walls of his shop are filled with color Polaroids of his satisfied customers. When we arrive he is buzzing a rendition of Adam and Eve Being Driven from The Garden into the flaccid flank of a forty-year-old housewife from Columbus, wiping aside the ooze of ink and blood every few seconds. Krassner stares as I question the artist.
Enoch tells us, over the whir of the needle and the whine of the housewife, what he knows about the secret underground temple. Enoch of Ohio is a famous Astral Traveler and has visited the Valley of the Kings often in his less corporeal form. He is full of information and predictions. His eyes burn brighter as he talks, and his needle produces more flourishes and blood. The housewife continues to groan and grimace until we can barely hear his prophecies.
"Okay, Sweetmeats, that's enough for today. You look a little pale."
I follow him to the back of his shop where he washes his hands clean of the stain of his trade, still expounding on ancient and future Egypt. A gasp and a crash from the other room rushes us back. But the housewife is fine. Krassner has fainted.
October 2, Wednesday. I throw Lu, The Wanderer, and am ready to move on. But Krassner has had enough of the arcane. "They'd probably search me and find out that I am circumcised," he says and flies back to San Fran.
I buy a creamo '66 Pontiac convertible from a furniture designer and head out to Wendell Berry's in Port Royal, Kentucky, hoping to enlist him in the cause. I hear over the car radio that the earliest frost in fifty years has smitten the Kentucky tobacco crop. Fields on both sides of the road are full of limp leaves and dour farmers. Much as I dislike cigarettes I can't help but be touched by these forlorn figures in overalls and baseball caps. There is a quality timeless and universal about a farmer standing in the aftermath of a killer frost. It could be a hieroglyph, a symbol scratched on a sheet of papyrus depicting that immortal phrase of fruitless frustration: "Stung!"
October 3, Thursday. Birthday of St. Theresa. Another record-breaking cold night. After biscuits and eggs Wendell and I hitch up his two huge-haunched Belgian work mares and gee and haw out into the cold Kentucky morn to see if his sorghum survived. The leaves are dark and drooping but the stalks are still firm. We cut a few samples and head on up to the ridge for the opinion of two old brothers he is acquainted with.
"The Tidwell twins'll know," Wendell allows. "They been farming this area since the year 'ought-one."
The wagon rumbles along the winding, rocky ruts, through thorn thickets and groves of sugar maple and osage and dogwood. We find the brothers working a lofty meadow high above the neighboring spreads. No woe is frosted on the faces of this pair; their tobacco crop is hanging neatly in the barn since well before the cold snap, and they are already disking under the stalks. Erect, alert, and nearing eighty, the picture presented by these two identical Good Old Boys might describe another hieroglyph: Them as Didn't Get Stung.
They examine Wendell's stalk of sorghum and assure him how it ain't hurt in the joint, which is what roorins the crop.
"Don't let no cows into it, though," they warn. "Freeze like that makes prussic acid sorghum. Mought make a animal sickly…"
Listening to these two old American alchemists one can better understand why Wendell Berry, an M.A. from Stanford and a full professor with tenure two days a week at the U of Kentucky, busts his butt the rest of the time farming with the same antiquated methods the land of his forefathers; there is a wisdom in our past that cannot be approached but with the past's appurtenances. Think of Schliemann finding ancient Troy by way of Homer.
On the way back down from the ridge I tell Wendell of the team of scientists from Berkeley who tried probing the pyramids with a newfangled cosmic ray device in search of hidden chambers. "What they found was that there was something about the pyramids that thwarted our most advanced gadgetry. The only thing their ten tons of equipment accomplished was to electrocute a rat that tried to nest in the wiring."
"Killed a rat, did they?" says Wendell, tromping the brake to keep the wagon from overrunning the mares down the steep slope. "For Berkeley scientists, that's a start."
October 4, Friday. Dateline Paris (Kentucky, that is).
Looking for the Bible in the drawer of my ancient hotel room, I find a phone number penciled onto the unfinished wood of the drawer bottom, a dark number, etched deep and certain, after which is penciled even darker this rave review:
EPIK FUCK!
The phone is on the nightstand right next to the drawer and I must admit I'm housed upstairs alone with the classic traveling-salesman horniness. I look at the number again, but farther back in the drawer there's the Bible, after all. Besides, I have hired out to do an article, not an epic.
The passage I am seeking is Isaiah, chapter 19, verses 19 and 20. It is a pivotal quote in the first volume of a four-volume set on pyramidology that I bought in S.F. for sixty bucks, but the author has written the passage in its original Hebrew, fully aware that your usual reader will have to refer to the Bible to find out what is said. The only thing else he lets you know about the passage is that it contains 30 words and 124 Hebrew letters, and that when the numerical value of these ancient words and letters is added up by a process known as gematria the sum total of the passage equals 5,449, which is the height of the Great Pyramid in pyramid inches.
The pyramid inch is a unit so close to our own inch (25 pyramid inches = 25.0265 of our inches) that I will henceforth refer to these units simply as inches: 5,449 is also the weight of the pyramid in tons times 100. Comparisons continue ad infinitum. Compressed within the scope and accuracy of the Great Pyramid's angles and proportions seem to be all the formulas and distances pertinent to our solar system. This is one of the reasons we don't want to switch to the metric system. It'd be like cutting off our feet so we can get Birkenstock transplants.