The Pyramid

by Ismail Kadare

  There was always one string of the investigation to tie someone up, to draw him out of his cocoon, and to take him four, seven, or fourteen years back to the time when his errors began. If it failed to tie its victim up straight away, then the victims themselves, in their attempts to escape, got themselves into a tangle, pulled the whole skein toward themselves, and were entrapped. So even as their bodies lay huddled in the warmth of their beds, their terrorized minds were up and out before dawn, just like the host of builders in bygone days, ready to start work under the torrid sun and the whip, in order to repent for their share of guilt.

  Investigations proceeded into the false numbers. As a result, people wandered around the pyramid like blind men, each looking for his own stone or row, ceaselessly climbing up and down, muttering, “No, it’s not this one, I fell at the forty-fourth row.” They would hail each other with sobs, make accusations, and beg each other for pity in muffled tones. Some came up against the false doors and asked in voices that were now quite unrecognizable, “Is anyone there? So this is the kingdom of darkness ... My god, how icy cold it is here!” And strange visions passed before their eyes.

  It was now obvious that the almost-finished pyramid was the source of a dozen times more pain and suffering than it had been when it was an inferno of building work. When they looked upon it from afar in the mornings, and saw it so smooth and shiny, so cold and silent, with its perfect edges and slopes, people could not believe their eyes. How could the sublime form of the pyramid be a machine for crushing people all day and all night long? They came close to suspecting that once darkness fell the pyramid took itself to pieces, that the steps, the supporting masonry, and all the blood-stained and mud-encrusted stones moved out of position, that they threw themselves around in anger and tumult, in an indescribable chaos, to spread mourning and misery all around.

  Meanwhile, the investigation proceeded. The numbers were still just as wrong as before, so that crowds continued to clamber up the pyramid. All around you could hear groaning pleas such as “O seventh row, may you collapse of your own accord!” or “O third row, O third, it was on thee that I was reduced to dust and knew my end!” alternating with noises of people shouting in their sleep: “Make way for number ten thousand two hundred and ninety-five! Mind your backs! Stone number ten thousand two hundred and ninety-five!”

  The pandemonium was at its greatest at the point where the step numbering reversed. Hundreds of people wandered around at that level having quite lost their bearings and their sense of balance; those who looked up suddenly felt as though they were doing a handstand, and so did those who cast their eyes down. They clung to each other in desperation tore each other apart, foaming at the mouth, and ended up bursting into sobs together.

  The ambient chaos and the eddies of dust were so overwhelming that they all dreamed of nothing but order and respect for the rules, at any price. For instance, they thought of stitching onto the sleeves of their tunics, or even onto their backs, the numbers of the rows, or the stones, or the names of the quarries where they or their relatives had labored, so that no one could mistake them, and even the bean vendor would be able to see from his counter and yell: “Hey you there, from step five (or from stone five hundred thousand, or from Gurnet Murai quarry), don’t cut in line!” The vendor or the policeman would be welcome to keep them in order as long as that served to end the haunting suspicion that hovered over every single person, and did so all the more when it came from the local cop who had been looking at you askance all week and, one stifling afternoon, when it became known that all who had worked on step seventy-seven were traitors, looked straight through you as if to ask, So you wouldn’t be one of those dodgers, would you now? With numbered tunics, you could show him your sleeve (or if it were empty, wipe his nose with it) and say: Fm from step forty-one, got that? Find someone else to scare with your cat’s eyes! You can’t get anything on me, because you were still dribbling your mother’s milk when I left my arm under the three hundred thousand two hundred and fifty-ninth stone!

  As they chatted, it seemed as if something kept on forming and then dissolving in their souls, and as it did so, it seemed to change their feelings about the pyramid. One day they bowed down before its perfection and wished only to be integral parts of its system; the next day, they would curse the monument holding it responsible for all their ills; then they would take full responsibility for their suffering onto themselves; then they laid it at the door of fate; and finally swooned with admiration once again, before going pale with hatred the next day, and so on, repeatedly.

  Old legends, some engraved on obelisks but most of them handed down by word of mouth, which said that the pyramid symbolized the balance between heaven and earth, that it drew in the light of the one and the darkness of the other, that it was like a cavern where the two worlds sealed their pact, or their coupling, which was maybe even an incestuous one, or the devil knows what, were now interpreted differently.

  There was not a shadow of doubt that something underhand was going on in there. Just as under the crushing weight of the masonry, light turned first into darkness and then into a prismatic sparkle, so adoration, after being carbonized into hatred, turned itself into something quite different.

  However dulled their minds may have been, people grasped perfectly well that the pyramid was less well adapted to drawing down celestial light or semen than it was to consuming the .whole of Egypt. It had already digested Egypt once before, some people pointed out, during its construction; now it was chewing the cud, like a buffalo munching his hay for the second time.

  Some thought that Egypt’s ingestion by the pyramid was a calamity, others saw it as a blessing. Out of the accumulation of sufferings and their compression, the latter claimed, a new Egypt was being born, a purer land, crystalline and sparkling. Happy are they who will be able to benefit from it, as we do!

  Meanwhile the investigation proceeded, and, in keeping with ancient custom, blind horses were used to take the scrolls and the chests in which statements were filed to the temple of Amun, whence they were dispatched before sundown to the investigators’ offices. There was supposed to be a vast muddle of the most disparate objects lying there: still undeciphered reports from the Trojan messengers, decayed teeth, the iron needles that the old woman Bent Anat used to abort prostitutes, stones from the very bottom step, all the names of the builders of the twelfth step (three thousand eight hundred of them), the piece of rope that the Sumerian ambassador used to hang himself long ago, crushed scorpions, palm leaves, poems with double meanings, sand from the oasis of Farafra, which was where the magician Sa Aset was suspected of having cursed Egypt the night before he left, and even the bones of that infamous jackal, the one that had howled after the stone—the stone whose name and origin were still equally and entirely unknown—on that unforgettable mid-October night when all this horror had begun.

  Nobody, not even the investigators themselves, quite understood the criteria used for selecting and sorting the evidence. For instance, it was impossible to know why the crate containing the wheel recovered from the swamp at Behedet (the wheel was suspected of having belonged to the carriage of the Babylonian ambassador the one who had delivered the vials of poison to the treacherous vizier Horemuya) also contained the poem The Old Quarry, by Nebounenef, together with the malicious interpretation of it written by his fellow-poet Amenherounemef, who claimed that the author’s exaggerated liking for the old quarry of Luxor (where the stone of the first four’steps had been hewn) was but an expression of his discontent, not to say of his resentment against the State, sentiments expressed transparently in the following lines:

  Now all alone beneath the light of the moon

  You recall once again the days of your youth

  When you gave birth to pyramids ...

  But even if that was pretty unintelligible, it was even harder to understand why they had put in the same file as the poem the Sumerian ambassador’s wife’s underwear, as well as the papyrus used to record
the results of the investigation of the poor fool Setka, in particular his allegedly ambiguous claims about the hair that was supposed to grow on. the pyramid one day, together with the investigating magistrate’s questions: “So, now we have pulled all your hairs out, will you still not confess?” and the mental defective’s replies: “I’ve nothing to add, I’ve said all I had to say, and as for that thing, it’ll grow not just a beard, but eyes and teeth too!” Upon which his eyes and teeth were pulled out, which might not have occurred had the idiot not suggested it himself.

  X

  Topping Out

  The Pyramid Demands Its Mummy

  WHEN news broke that the pyramid was finished, the inhabitants of the capital, who were the first to hear it, were dumbfounded, A fair number cupped their hands to their ears.

  “You said the investigation was finished?”

  “No, not the investigation, the pyramid!”

  “Oh, that pyramid.. ,”

  The dirt of a quite different kind of construction was still on their backs; their ears were still full of the echoes of relentless interrogations: You maintain that you never were on row eighty-one? that you said nothing to the hauler of stone number fifteen hundred and two? But why don’t you confess? We know it all anyway! As a result, for a long while few people had cared very much about what was going on on the ground at Giza.

  Yet work on the pyramid had proceeded as in a dream, without a hitch. Dressed stone slabs were placed on the upper part of the north slope, and the other slopes that had inexplicably been left bare until then were also finished with limestone panels, progressively concealing the raw masonry blocks that had been hauled there from distant places under clouds of dust and secrecy; then workers set the four very last blocks that had been delayed for so long (the order was brought one afternoon by a black-veiled messenger); and finally, they raised the pyramidion to the vertex of the monument, It was the kingstone, dressed in gold leaf that sparkled even before moonrise, and it aroused an uncanny kind of commiseration. From the moment it was put into place until the dawn of the following day, people expected the sky to redden and bleed from being scratched by the pyramidion’s tip: blood-rain should have trickled down the steps: but nothing of the sort came to pass. Without delay, as if they were cutting a newborn child’s umbilical cord, workers dismantled the hoisting ramp that had served to raise the final stones, and thus removed the last remaining link between the ground and the vertex.

  Although public attention had mostly been fixed on what was happening on the outside and at the top, far more extensive work had been going on lower down inside the pyramid. The black granite doors were locked shut, as were the false doors that people might have suspected of being real, as well as other entry ways that it would have been wiser to consider as giving onto dead-end galleries had they ever been reopened, and so on, The “dead men,” as the inside workers were called, suffered from incessant-migraines, They pretended that they did not know the secret of the false sliding doors, nor of the ones believed to be real but which it was preferable to consider false,, unless it was the other way round—and as a result they were permanently confused, and had no real idea, in the end, of what was what. They could not decide whether it would be better for them to take some initiative, or on the contrary to leave things to their fate; they would pace up and down., grinning, sighing, and scowling, as if they were demented, pretending not to be pretending., and eventually, at their wits’ end, they would break down.

  When they emerged pasty-faced on the last day of their work, and saw the soldiers waiting for them outside with axes in their hands, they understood how pointless had been all their meanderings in the pyramid’s inner labyrinths, all their cunning, all their deceptions and their feigned gullibility at the sight of false doors, or of real ones that led to dummy passages, and so on. They finally realized that their fate had been sealed twenty years earlier, on that November day when the architect-in-chief, Hemiunu, had sketched the first draft of the pyramid’s plan on a piece of papyrus. Height, orientation, gradient, axis, the distribution of the enormous weight of the masonry, and so on, had all been jotted down, and among all the many numbers and formulas there must also have been an unremarkable little sign, something like the letter D, for instance, D for “Dead,” meaning them. Without their deaths, the self-enclosed, secure, and eternally impenetrable system that had been planned would not have been quite perfect. Which implied that their deaths had been inscribed from the start in the sacred formulas of the pyramid.

  Perhaps each hoped even as he knelt before the soldier’s axe, perhaps he hoped until the very last moment that he would benefit from a stay of execution so as to join that small handful of men who would open the secret passage on the day the Pharaoh’s body would be laid to rest in the pyramid. The architect-in-chief selected the reprieved with a wave of his hand. They were made to stand to one side, eleven men in all. All hope now lost, the others bowed their heads. Some left messages for their loved ones; most of them shouted “Long live the Pharaoh!” Only two yelled out “Death be upon thee, Cheops!”

  People had expected blood to flow from the vertex because of the pyramidion scratching the sky, but instead it welled up at the foot of the mountain of stones.

  At dawn the reprieved were taken in covered wagons to an unknown destination; As they drew away from the pyramid, their eyes remained fixed on a point near the summit where the exit shaft was located, the spot where, on the day of Cheops’s funeral, after locking each of the doors from the inside, they would emerge into the light. They knew that they would meet death the very moment their heads came out of the shaft, but the summit was so high that the crowds amassed for the funeral ceremony would not be able to make out a thing, and certainly not the blood that would stain the top of one of the pyramid’s four faces.

  Anyway, that day was still far off. The idea that until then their lives would be tied to the Pharaoh’s as by a chain of gold made them feel so joyful that they began to sing. Or rather, they thought they were singing. In reality, the sound that came from their lips was a terrifying croak.

  No official ceremony was organized, but most of the inhabitants of the capital as well as foreign legations came to look at the finished pyramid. While the foreigners oohed and aahed (“How majestic it is! How tall!”), locals shrugged their shoulders, exchanged nods and winks, restrained themselves from saying quite the opposite. In truth, compared to the other pyramid, the one they were in, whose stones and suffocating heat made them wilt and whose endless passageways they would have to wander for god knew how long yet, the one that rose up before their eyes looked stunted and far too smooth a thing, like a kind of wax doll—the kind that hints at the invisible and mysterious powers of demons.

  They no longer knew which one was the real pyramid and which one was only its ghost. They would have been just as unable to say which one had engendered its likeness, and even less which one was in control of the other.

  Nonetheless most people believed that the main pyramid was the other one, their own one, the one that was as murky as a column of smoke of unknown height and girth. But now and again, as they looked at its waxwork image, the blood froze in their veins and they almost burst into tears, Apparently each was as evil as the other. They must have been born that way, like twins, even if one of them was visible and the other was not.

  Those who had had an opportunity to glimpse the model were even more horror-struck. As if to torture them, the pyramid now appeared all of a sudden in every possible shape. Until then, they had seen it continually changing its shape, like a nightmare vision. It had been born like a whirl of smoke, like a hallucination. Then it had condensed into the form of a model Whereupon it had once more dilated, before changing into a black cloud and a conspiracy. And now here it was again, cooled and contracted, in the shape of a model. The devil only knew what shape it would take on next. Would it perhaps begin to jump back and forth in time, as in a witch’s mirror, where real things cannot be told from their reflecti
ons?

  Festivities had been expected for the evening of the inauguration, then on the following day, and thereafter until the end of the week. However, in place of invitations to the celebration dinner, the families of the reprieved received their relatives’ excised tongues.

  The capital shuddered. What horrified people was not so much the excision of tongues—a quite frequent practice, and a requirement for various high-ranking posts, notably in the police archives and in the palace service—as the delivery of the excised tongues by messenger, and, even more, the fact that the organs came wrapped in a papyrus bearing the pharaonic emblem.

  Nobody failed to appreciate that what had been sent out was another warning.

  As you might expect, Memphis was plunged into even denser silence.

  The habit of keeping quiet reached such proportions that, according to a further report from A. K., Jaqub Har, the linguist, forecast that if the present trend continued, then half of the Egyptian language would have disappeared within three years, and within a decade there would be barely three hundred words extant, which could be learned even by dogs.

  In fact the general buttoning up of lips was not based solely on fear. For a long while now things had become much more discreet, and even the bureaus whose job it was to spread rumors and induce panic seemed to have become tongue-tied. The royal herald’s drum, even the creaking of a door or the clank of chains, now seemed not to make the sound expected of them. People complained of illnesses going back greater or lesser lengths of time. Some tossed in their sleep, unable to bear the thought that the pyramid’s funeral chamber was still empty. Others groaned as they thought of the eternal imprisonment that the stones were suffering. They bewailed the stones’ agony uninterruptedly, as if the tails of their tunics had been caught under one of them and were stopping them from ever moving away.