"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.

The book falls open to Psalm 91 – "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty" – which is one of the Egyptian verses written, according to the Urantia Book, by that first great teacher of monotheism, King Akhnoten, who, according to Enoch, was schooled personally by Melchizedec himself, who, according to Cayce blah blah, you see what I mean? The path to this pyramid can lead you down endless alleys of rumination. On to Isaiah.

Here it is, chapter 19, and underlined in the same dark pencil as was used to record the phone number on the drawer bottom:

19 In that day shall there be an altar to the lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar at the border thereof to the lord.

20 And it shall be for a sign and for a witness unto the lord of hosts in the land of Egypt; for they shall cry unto the lord because of the oppressors, and he shall send them a saviour, and a great one, and he shall deliver them -

Wait a minute. That way lies the musclebound madness one sees caged behind the isometric eyes of the Jesus freaks – not the way I wish to wander in this quest. I don't need a course in spiritual dynamic tension. I return the gift of the Gideons to its drawer and shut it away along with the secret gematria of the Epik Fuck. All very interesting but I don't need it. Being raised a hard-shell Baptist jock I consider myself still fairly fit faithwise. Besides, going to the Great Pyramid to find God strikes me as something of an insult to all the other temples I have visited over the years, an affront to the words of spiritual teachers like St. Houlihan and St. Lao-tzu and St. Dorothy who, perhaps best of all, sums it up: "If you can't find God in your backyard in Kansas you probably can't find him in the Great Pyramid in Egypt, either."

In fact (I may as well tell it now) this expedition is not aimed at the Great Pyramid of Giza at all, nor any of the other dozens of already-studied and profusely interpreted temples lining the west bank of the mighty Nile, but another marvel, as yet undisclosed and said to contain in its magnificent halls all the mysteries of the past – explained!

Like just how did they cut those stones so hard and move them so far and fit them so tight? And what was the device that once crowned the summit of Cheops with such power that it echoes all the way down to the back of our Yankee dollar? Where did those builders come from? Where do we come from and, more important, as our nation's worth leaks away and the gears of this cycle's trip grind from Pisces to Aquarius in approach of the promised shifting of the poles, where are we bound?

This expedition is going to try to find the edifice called by John the Apostle the New Jerusalem and by Enoch of Ohio the Secret Temple of Secrets and by Edgar Cayce, in countless readings that prophesy the discovery of this hidden wonder sometime between 1958 and 1998, the Hall of Records.

Next stop: The A.R.E. Library, the Association for Research and Enlightenment, in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

October 5, 6, 7, 8. Research at Cayce's A.R.E. Library.

As the great accusing aftermath that followed the French Revolution dragged on and the lines of heads scheduled to be lopped off grew too long to be serviced by Dr. Guillotine's nifty machine, the overflow of minor-league aristocrats was relegated to a more cut-rate end. When their time came they were grasped by the arms and hustled indecorously from their cells to an open field where a burly nonunion executioner held aloft a simple sword.

To alleviate the boredoms of these day-in day-out heads-offs, the head hostlers developed this simple sport: just before the sword came down they would hiss in the ear of the trembling wretch they were holding bent forward, "You are free, mon ami: run!" and release his arms. Then the spectators would bet on how many steps the headless body would run before toppling. Seven steps was not unusual; twelve was par for a particularly spirited specimen. The record was set by a woman – twenty-four strides and no sign of falter before the sightless body encountered a parked manure wagon.