The Search for the Secret Pyramid

He spent the next week or so contacting other occult sources around the country, including the Cayceite Association for Research and Enlightenment, in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and someone in the Midwest named Enoch, who had never been to Egypt. We hooked up in New York and flew together to Cairo.

After one night at a decaying hotel on an island in the Nile, we took a cab to Gîza, the Cairo suburb where the Great Pyramid is located, and checked into the Mena House Hotel, just two minutes' walk away. Kesey determinedly talked them into giving us a room, although we didn't have a reservation, but we were clearly told it would be for only two nights.

The next morning, Kesey threw the I Ching and concluded it was time to have our first real look at the pyramid. Terrific recommendation, I Ching. It was a Muslim holiday, and on holidays the poor people of Cairo tend to party at the base of the pyramid (Cairo is short of parks, and it's a cheap bus ride). The place was crowded with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Cairenes, picnicking and dancing in party clothes, which they traditionally dye lurid Day-Glo colors.

Kesey had been overwhelmed by the seething mob scene that is Cairo ever since we'd arrived. Clambering up the huge stones of the pyramid, surrounded by hordes of people dressed in science-fiction hues, he seemed even more overwhelmed than usual. Then I heard some kids shout, "Elkhawaga byidukh! El-khawaga byidukh!" ("The foreign gentleman is dizzy! The foreign gentleman is dizzy!")

In Arabic "dizzy" is a polite way of saying "throwing up." And so he was — in a sort of vitamin-laden christening, the foreign gentleman was recycling his breakfast orange juice onto the pyramid. Later, Kesey told me he'd taken a little LSD that morning to heighten his perceptions.

That wasn't the only moment he'd regret dropping that acid. A few minutes later, still not suspecting his sensitive condition, I suggested that we go into the pyramid. Kesey raised his eyes to the mob standing in line, a look of mute struggle on his face. The Universe had just laid down a challenge to him; he sighed and said yes, of course we had to go in.

The internal passageways of the Great Pyramid are steep and narrow, not designed to hold scores of people at a time. We found ourselves in a sweating, lurching crush of people struggling in both directions at the same time, panicky from lack of oxygen. I'm not surprised Kesey concluded the pyramid was not a tomb but a place of initiation.

The next day the hotel reminded us we had to turn our rooms over to the people who had reserved them. Kesey refused to leave the vicinity of the pyramid, though. The management, used to the perennial Egyptian housing shortage, eventually threw up its hands and offered to let us sleep in the changing rooms at the swimming pool.

These proved to be the worst accommodations I've ever had. If you closed the windows to keep out the mosquitoes, you could either leave the air conditioning off and suffocate or leave it on and catch cold. I chose the final option and in two days had to go back to Cairo to find a decent hotel room and the kind of ferocious antibiotics that the USDA hesitates to allow Americans to buy but you can easily find, I'm glad to say, in countries where it's possible to get really sick. I left Kesey on his own.

When I got back to San Francisco, I was given the chance to put in my two cents on the edit of Kesey's reports — which wound up running to five installments — but I declined. Kesey had explained to me his theory that it's more important for a writer to discover his personal myth than to relate facts, and from the narrow, fact-bound viewpoint of a reporter, I'd have had to point out where he played fast and loose with quotations (most of the things he has me say in the story are, let's say, literature) and plain old facts.

But go ahead and read about the Great Pyramid. Something may be revealed after all.

[From Issue 632 — June 11, 1992]