"But not cigarette," Marag hastens to add. "It's pipe tobacco. And Finnish!"
The guy's wife steps from the door of the tomb into the moonlight, carrying a copper tray and three glasses. She is traditionally barefooted and pregnant and the fact embarrasses her. When she leans to place the tray on the sand you can feel the blush. Marag makes some crack in Arabic about her girth and she skitters back into the tomb.
The tea is wickedly strong and sweet but the Finnish tobacco, I'm forced to admit by the time we're done with the first round, isn't all that bad. The wife appears with a kettle as the husband is lighting the second joint – spliff, rather – refills our glasses, and disappears again, all in a moment. This round of tea is milder and they are running low on sugar, but right on cue with the third joint she appears to replenish us. Hardly more than hot water. She remains outside, indicating that the goodies are gone; if more is wanted it will require her trotting barefooted to the village. She stands as though weightless for all her swollen condition, the globe of her belly buoying her up. The husband finishes the weak drink and returns the glass to the tray before he shakes his head no; we've had enough.
She leans to take up the tray. This time the young husband reaches to her foot and affectionately squeezes her bare instep. Marag gasps at this most un-Moslemlike display.
"It is as they say." He clucks. "These kids smoke dope and our old ways of behave are forget."
I guess it must be Marag's version of irony, but it's hard to say. That last one did it. The gas light from the tomb hisses back down and the moon moons. We sit for a long time, looking at the stars and listening to the dogs keep each other abreast of the neighborhood night. When it's time to leave, we all three stand at once. The young guard puts the tin box in his pocket and rolls up his carpet. The shadow head on the shadow body nods goodbye and disappears after its mate.
Never a word. Never a chin or cheekbone let stray out in the prying moonlight. But that faceless presence has furnished a circle in the dirt with the grandeur of Araby.
We are scrabbling down into the village, where Marag is going to make another score for me. I'm high like a motherfucker. The Sphinx looks like a big old mouser purring by the path, fat on camels and Fiats.
"My young friend is far from his Bedouin home." Marag feels he must explain, looking back up the dim trail at me. "I get him this position. He is family. I leave that village too, when I am very little, very young. His relative get me position."
He was turned around walking backwards down the steep rut now.
"This young fellow, I think he will not stay long. He will go back to the desert for the birth. When he comes back I will get him another position. It is good, is it not? Having a person like family at the pyramid?"
I can't help wondering what he's trying to promote me into. Maybe I should make it clear that a wealthy globetrotter I am not. It could be years before I can afford to return, decades. He should save his pitch for a better prospect.
I can't go with him to score, he explains. I will wait at his home. I follow him down sandstone paths that get wider and leveler until they become miniature streets crisscrossing between a maze of tiny block dwellings. The streets are too narrow for cars but there's plenty of traffic-nocturnal strollers and striders, men and women, goats and kids. Cronies squatting against the wall grin and wink at Marag whisking past with a big live one in tow.
In the square of light before one of the doorless doorways a knot of kids are playing with homemade clay marbles. A little boy jumps up from the game and scampers after us. He looks about seven, which means he's probably close to eleven if you allow for the protein lag. Marag pretends not to notice him, then gruffly makes as if to swat him away. The kid ducks, laughing, and Marag takes him by the hand.
"This is Mister Sami," he explains, still gruff. "My oldest son. Sami, say hello to my friend Mister Deb-ree."
"Good evening, Mister Deb-ree," the boy says. "Is nice evening?" His handshake is as light as his father's.
We cross a shared yard jammed between four mud huts and enter Marag's home. From the ceiling a single dim bulb gradually coaxes the room from the night. It is only slightly bigger than the guard's tomb. There are two big trunks; one carpet and one grass mat; one big bed and two bunks; no chairs or cupboards; no tables. For decoration there is a hanging tapestry with kids' art pinned to it and a long bundle of sugarcane in the corner, bound with a gay red ribbon.
Marag introduces me to his wife, a tiny woman with one of the milked-over eyes so frequently seen in the Egyptian poor. Also to Mister Ahmed, Missy Shera, Mister Foo-Foo, all younger than Sami.
Marag takes a pillow from the bed and places it on the floor next to the wall and bids me sit. The kids squat in a semicircle and stare at me while Marag helps his wife pump a little white gas burner to hissing flame. I blow my harmonica for the kids and let them play with my compass. The wife begins to prepare tea for us in a little copper kettle.
I ask Sami how he got a crescent scar on his forehead. Grinning, he points toward the pyramid and pantomimes a tumble with his hands.
"It was a bad fall," Marag says. "But maybe it convince him the spirits want him to be an educated, not a pyramid goat. He can read and count and draw pictures now, Mister Sami can." He beams at the boy in unabashed wonder. "He can write."
From the foot of the top bunk he takes down a notebook to show me, the very one that donated a page for that map. He proudly points out the pictures and words.
"Mr. Deb-ree is an artist and doctor, Sami. Maybe he draw for you a picture while I go on an errand."
After Marag leaves with my five-pound note, Sami and I exchange drawings. I do a Mickey Mouse and Sami does the pyramid. I tell him it looks too steep and he turns to the back page. Taped to the inside cover with electrician's tape is a dollar bill. It's taped Great Seal side up, and written beneath it, first in Arabic, then English, in the careful and patient hand of any good grade-school teacher in any language, is the translation of the two Latin slogans: new order of ages and allah has prospered our beginnings.
"Did your daddy give you this the other night?"
Yes, he nods, frowning at the page to remember what else his teacher has told him. "It is Roman lira pound?"
"No," I tell him; "it is Yankee dollar, American simoleon buck." Marag is gone a long time. The wife puts Missy Shera and Mister Ahmed to bed. It must be past midnight but they're still wide-eyed and excited, staring at me from their bunks.
She takes up little Mister Foo-Foo and sits on the edge of the bed and drops one shoulder of her smock. In the dim light she looks withered way beyond her years. But all the kids are healthy, plumper than most of the pyramid pack I've seen. Maybe that's why she's withered.
Foo-Foo roots in. Mom closes her one good eye and rocks gently to and fro on the edge of the bed, humming a monotonous nasal lullaby. Foo-Foo watches me unblinking as he sucks and rocks.