"Sad," I agreed. "How could they do it?"

"They figured they needed it." Jacky came to the defense of those long-gone Arabs. "For Allah."

"More than just sad," I kept on. "It's insulting… to whoever composed this postcard in stone, and took the trouble to send it to us.

"The Arabs needed the stones to rebuild Cairo. Remember Nasser's construction of the High Dam?"

Jacky was talking about Nasser's flooding of architectural treasures with the construction of a hydroelectric dam. For the sake of the power-poor millions I had seen in Cairo, I was forced to admit that I would have done the same.

"Removing the casing stones is different," Muldoon said. "It's like a goal-tending foul committed before the rule was enacted. Now we don't know; was the shot going to go through or not? Those whoevers that built this thing were trying to transmit information important to everybody, for all time. Like how to square the circle or find the Golden Rectangle. None of the other pyramids convey any of this. Their message is pretty ego-involved, saying essentially: 'Attention, Future: Just a line to remind you that King Whatnuton was the Alltime Greatest Leader, Warrior, Thinker, and Effecter of Stupendous Accomplishments, a few of which are depicted on the surrounding walls. His wife wasn't half bad either.' There's none of that around the Great Pyramid. No bragging hieroglyphs. A much more universal message is suggested."

"Maybe," Jacky said, "it isn't obliterated at all. Maybe in the intervening eons since they sent it we have simply forgotten how to read."

"Or maybe this was just a decoy," I said, "for the Arabs. Maybe the message was never in there in the first place."

I can maybe with anybody.

A patter of gravel drew our attention up the face. A small figure had come out of the entrance tunnel and was working his way down to importune us.

"Come on," Muldoon said. "There's a place back behind the southern face where they don't find you."

Jacky and I followed around the northeastern corner and along the western base to the rear. It was darker, the lights of Cairo being blocked now by the huge structure. Carefully Muldoon led us into the excavated ruins of a minor funerary temple located between the rear of the Great Pyramid and the eastern face of its companion giant, the Pyramid of Chephren.

"See that black ball down there?"

Muldoon pointed off down the hill in the direction of the Giza village. I could make out a spheroid shape a quarter mile away.

"That's the back of the Sphinx's head." He found a seat facing the ominous silhouette.

Jacky located a spot where he could look longingly east toward the twinkle of Cairo After Hours. I picked a rock with a backrest aimed so I could see the whole dim trio of pyramids, called in tour booklets "The Giza Group." Check the picture on a pack of Camels.

Far to the west is little Mykerinos. Much nearer is Chephren. With a crown of casing stones still in place on its summit, Chephren is almost the size of its famous brother. It is in fact some few feet farther above sea level, having been built on a slightly higher plateau than the Great Pyramid. It looks every bit as massive. But – as Muldoon mentioned about the other ruins and edifices – Chephren just doesn't have the chutzpah. The little crown of casing stones that eluded the Arabs actually gives it a quality slightly comic, like a cartoon peak sculpted by a Disneyland architect. Oh, it's also unbelievably big, Chephren is; and you are amazed by the manipulation of all that masonry, and gratified that its top is still there and cased; but it does not hold you. Your eye keeps being drawn back to the topless headliner, the star…

"What's that dark slot?" I ask Muldoon. "Is there a back door in the Great Pyramid?"

"That's what Colonel Howard-Vyse thought, about 1840. He was the guy that blasted open the chambers above the King's Chamber, you know, and disclosed that damned cartouche of Khufu."

It's this name "Khufu" found scratched in an upper attic that goes hardest against the Cayce readings.

"The Colonel was big on blasting, and he had this Arab working for him named Dued who apparently lived on blasting powder and hashish. Years of working with these two combustibles had made Dued deaf but had given him some fine theories about excavation.

Like Vyse, he had a theory that there was another entrance, and he believed that, with the proper combination of his favorite ingredients, he could find it."

The wind had dropped and it had grown very still. For a moment I thought I saw something coming around the southwestern corner toward us, but it vanished in that fathomless shadow.

"One of those blasts in the upper chambers short-fused and the Colonel thought he had lost a prize powder monkey. But after a couple days Dued woke up, with a vision - that there was a back door, situated exactly opposite the front door. The simplicity of the vision interested the good Colonel."

I noticed all the dogs in the village below had stopped barking.

"Not that there are any other southern entrances in any of the other shitload of pyramids, of course, but old Howard-Vyse thought that, just to be on the safe side, they'd go around back and check… knock a couple of kegs' worth."

"Did he find anything?" Jacky wanted to know.

"Just more rock. It is called 'Vyse's Resultless Hole.' "

"Wouldn't ya know it," Jacky said.

"He fired Dued and moved his operations to Mykerinos, where he found a sarcophagus that he claimed held the pharaoh's mummy, but as luck or fate would have it the boat sank on the way back to England and Howard-Vyse lost his trophy. All he had to show for five years of digging and blasting is that resultless hole there and those damned upper chambers. One of which was filled with a mysterious black dust."

"Yeah? What was it?"

"When science progressed enough to analyze it, it was found to be the bodies of millions of dead bugs."

"Terrific." Jacky stood up and straightened his necktie. "I'm inspired to walk back to the hotel and kill mosquitoes. Let me know if you turn up anything resultful."

After Jacky moped off, Muldoon painted in some of his past for me. Raised by parents both ecclesiastical and into the Edgar Cayce readings, Muldoon had grown up pretty blase concerning theories arcane. Enoch of Ohio was his first real turn-on.

"He came to town and set up his tent. During the day he did horoscopes and tattoos, then at night he'd have these meetings. He'd go into a trance and answer questions, as 'Rey-Torl.' Rey-Torl used to be a cobbler in Mu, made Mu shoes, then his business went under so he moved on to Atlantis and became an unlicensed genetic surgeon. He eventually got run out of town and ended up in Egypt, helping Ra-ta build the pyramid."

"Sounds hot. Did Rey tell you any good dirt?"

"Not really. The same thing that Cayce and all the other prophecy brokers say: that the Piscean Age is flopping toward the end of its two-thousand-year run and the Grand Finale is coming up soon, and that it's going to happen in this last quarter of this century. Rey-Torl called it Apodosis. Enoch called it the Shit Storm."

"The last quarter?"

"Give or take a couple of decades. But soon. That's why the Cayce people place so much importance on locating that secret hall. It's supposed to contain records of previous shit storms plus some helpful hints on how to survive them. However --"

I had the feeling this wasn't the sort of stuff Muldoon talked about with fellow Egyptology students at the university.

"- everything has to be exactly right before you can find it: you, the time, the position of the earth, that damned Cat's Paw."

Looking off toward the black lump of the Sphinx's head he quoted by heart the most famous of the Cayce predictions: