However illogical these arguments may seem, more and more often (not just at dusk or in the half-light of dawn, but in broad daylight too) the pyramids appeared to be turning themselves into insubstantial objects made of air. That was now such a frequent impression that many people acquired the habit of looking toward the horizon each morning on wakings apparently uncertain whether the things would still be there.
The notion of immateriality notoriously suggests another, even more serious idea, that of pure and simple absence, Though it still hovered in a state of vagueness, as if it did not quite dare to come together, this latter idea did indeed begin to condense here and there. Could Egypt survive without its pyramids? Could the pyramids disappear? Could space be free of their ghastly protuberance?
People said “pyramids,” but it was not hard to guess that they meant “Pharaohs,” and they eventually gave free rein to their thoughts by alluding directly to a sovereign. Obviously not to the living sovereign, Mykerinos, but to a dead one.
To begin with, the target of their talk was not at all clear, but soon the buzzing converged, foreseeably enough, on the one whose pile of stone was higher than all the others, namely Cheops. The first graffiti were not particularly inspired (Hump off Cheops!), but it was soon realized that the forces of law and order were always too late by the time that they got to the defaced wall. When the clean-up teams came along with their buckets of whitewash, the crowds grew bolder and began to throw blunter insults at the pyramids. It became obvious that, for reasons that the State alone could clarify, a revision of the figure of Cheops was unavoidable. Many thought the required change had been dictated by foreign policy considerations, others believed that it was in order to redirect the surge of discontent onto a corpse, but very few ascribed it to plain and simple jealousy, aroused by the unusual dimensions of Cheops’s pyramid.
In actual fact, far more outrage was expressed about the monument’s size than about Cheops himself. Upper and Lower Egypt alike were in unprecedented turmoil and chaos. Previously placid and slow-witted folk—just ordinary bakers or clothiers—started to wake in a start, in high dudgeon, eyes bulging, bursting with indignation. “I was only a mere strip of a thing when they were building the pyramid, but I came close to using my bare hands to smash stone number two thousand eight hundred and three on the eightieth row!” Others told of their exploits, of how they had cursed row forty-nine, or pissed on row fifty-three, or indeed, of how on one dark night they had muttered “Go to hell!” and so on. In Memphis, in city-center bars, poets recalled the lines they had written and which, they claimed, contained anti-Cheoptic allusions—and the fear they had felt, for that reason, Amenherounemef, his eyes now watery with age, told of the terrible beating he had been given for composing the following couplet:
I saw the gulls leave on the wing
And could not restrain a tear
“When 1 think what I had to go through! I really thought I would go mad, what with my wife who kept going on at me: ‘Retract, or you’ll bring us all down. Can’t you see how the others are keeping their heads down? Look at Nebounenef!’”
A person in the crowd of listeners remembered that it was actually Nebounenef who had been sentenced, on the basis of Amenherounemef’s denunciation of his rival, and was about to open his mouth to remind the poet of this fact when his addled mind suddenly went blank and substituted a remark of a quite different kind, along the lines of “My back’s killing me” or “I’ve been constipated for three whole days,” A moment later he heard the word “gull” again, recalled what he had meant to say, but, being too lackadaisical to interrupt, began to yawn very noticeably while muttering under his breath: “Dog eats dog and I don’t give a damn.”
It was the same scene in every bar and every temple forecourt. Men who had yelled for all their worth, “We are innocent, we have always been loyal to the Pharaoh” before being sentenced to a stretch in the quarries, now shouted from the rooftops, “We were guilty, we wanted to undermine the pyramid, but they didn’t let us!” Some people turned up from far-off provinces, from Aksha, Gebel Barkal, and even the fifth cataract, gave the names of the quarries or the number of the row where their loved ones had been sentenced to labor, as well as the names of the people who had denounced them. They brandished papyri under priests’ noses, yelling: “We don’t want national reconciliation we want the files opened!” And they asked for reparations or for revenge,, indeed for both at the same time.
Woe betide us, will we never escape from the pyramid! sighed the old hands. There they still were, perching on one or another of the slopes, beating their breasts, recalling imaginary exploits and tortures, until one of them, as drunk as a drowned newt, let rip with an old song:
When you sold me to row seven
Your heart must have jingled with joy
You old whore!
The Pharaoh was kept aware of it all. Reports on public opinion grew increasingly gloomy. Informers got earache from such a quantity of eavesdropping, but that didn’t change matters one bit.
One morning a man who had had an important dream was brought before the Pharaoh: a dream of Cheops’s pyramid covered in snow.
No one dared to suggest an interpretation. Everyone was afraid of snow. Mykerinos himself put his head in his hands: he could not manage to work out whether it was a good or a bad omen. Many others recalled the lightning of long ago, which had perhaps been less an act of aggression than an appeal for understanding. But after that first misunderstanding, it seemed, the skies of the cold lands had sent snow.
It was obvious that the pyramid was in relationship with the outer world. If it had managed to attract snow from the fearsome northern regions, that meant that it had long been traveling back and forth between here and there, whether in thought, in dream, or by some means that no man could know.
XIV
Aging
A Pretense
AT CLOSE quarters, and especially if considered from within, each storm-tossed generation possessed its own distinctive features, but to the eye of an outside observer— in the stony eyes of a statue, so to speak—the generations of Egypt were no more different from each other than desert dunes.
Dozens had come and gone beneath the unchanging lordship of the pyramids. They were the essential things that people found at their birth, and the main things that they left behind them. The emotions that the pyramids aroused in men were also cyclical Admiration turned to indifference, hatred, destructive fury, then reverted to indifference, followed by veneration, and so on, ad infinitum. The two broad classes of feeling—favorable ones, and hostile ones—were locked in a millennial duel, as it were, in which neither would ever get the upper hand for good. And so it was with the pyramid of Cheops. Although the rumblings of discontent that it provoked did not prevent other pyramids from being built, they did put a stop to any further growth in their size, and even prompted some reduction. As though they were trying to avoid being drawn onto dangerous ground, later Pharaohs declined to build pyramids as tall as Cheops’s. That was the one that good and evil always stumbled over in the first place—as occurred, for instance, on that fourteenth of February, when a ragged fellow stopped in front of it after wandering about the desert for days on end.
For all the pages of transcription of the fellow’s speeches that they made, the inquisitors never managed to establish who he really was. Was he just one of those nameless vagabonds who shift and vanish like waves of sand, or an unthroned Pharaoh, a eunuch, a mathematician, an epileptic, or a ragged astrologer on the run from an asylum?
He went on howling at the pyramid for a good while, hammered and head-butted the ground, screamed with laughter, pulled faces, and then smoothed out the sand with the flat of his hand and began to trace geometric figures in it with demented intensity. He sketched numbers beside the drawings and plunged into endless arithmetical calculations.
He obstinately rejected the accusation that he had wanted to damage the pyramid: his sole intention, he maintained, was to b
ury it. It was dead, don’t you see? You could tell from a long way off that it was nothing more than a corpse. And like all corpses it had to be buried.
By his own account, he had spent hour after hour working out the dimensions of the trench that would have to be dug in order to bury the pyramid, the amounts of earth that would need to be shifted, the number of men needed for the excavation, the time the job would take, and so on. It would require more time than it had taken to build the things so that a new dictatorship could well take advantage of the dismantling of a pyramid, just as the old dictatorships had made use of its construction.
Not one single time did he answer precisely the questions that were put to him on the meaning of these last remarks. Nor did he ever explain what he meant by a dead pyramid.
“Stop laughing at us!” the inquisitors screamed, though the man was not really laughing at all, despite the twisted look that his torturers had put on his face. You could see straight off that it had stopped living, he kept on saying, “Just have a look at it from a distance. The idea that gave it life has gone, don’t you see?”
He used the wall of his prison cell to carry on with his calculations, concentrating now on the natural wastage of the pyramid. The sums were even more complicated than before, because he had to allow for the gradual wind erosion that would affect each of the faces at different rates, for the variation between maximum and minimum temperatures, the levels of atmospheric humidity deriving from the close proximity of the Nile, right down to bird droppings and reptile friction, which, despite the relative infrequency of snakes, would nonetheless play a part in weakening the stone over about a million years—for that was the approximate length of time that it would probably take for the pyramid to crumble to nothing.
“Time!” he mumbled, as he slumped to the foot of his cell wall in sheer mental exhaustion, “Time alone will rub you off the face of the earth!”
In truth the pyramid was aging, but at an infinitesimal pace. Its changes were not visible to the naked eye, apart from the rapid loss of its white sheen, which soon turned a dull pink, The first wrinkles appeared after eight hundred years, A stone on the west face was the first to split right through, one December afternoon Six others, lower down in the supporting structure, had shattered before it.
It was probable that many others had gone the same way, but they were buried so far inside the edifice that no observation was feasible. Even when a dull thud was heard from the outside, it was never possible to ascertain the exact position of the implosion nor the specific masonry pieces that had been damaged.
Before the first visible signs of degradation occurred, fourteen stones on the northwestern arris turned a shade of gray, Erosion first became clearly perceptible some two hundred and seventy years later. It was not just the gray blocks that showed signs of weather-beatings but the whole array of which they were a part. It was the side most exposed to the desert wind, so that even though the stones used had been among the hardest available, from the Aswan quarry, the weathering was expected and surprised no one.
One hundred and twenty years later, mauvish-gray streaks appeared on a number of pieces on the south face, some of which also came out in pustule-like blisters. The pattern of streaking was completely irregular, which made it all the more difficult to work out its cause.
Signs of erosion began to be perceptible from a distance after one thousand and fifty years. Not just on the north face, ground down by the prevailing winds, but on the east and even the south face too, there were quite varied symptoms of decay, ranging from spongy patches to cracking, channels, holes, and, here and there, small slippages. That is how people came to talk a great deal about one stone on the north face where erosion had gouged out what looked like human features—a bulge that suggested a cheek, lines that could pass for eyebrows—as if some buried face was trying to get out from inside. Gossip about it even reached the palace, and appropriate measures were carefully considered: whether to intervene (with chisels, or more sophisticated instruments) to make the head emerge at greater speed, as was done at childbirth, or to wait patiently for the face to come out of its own accord.
Since the Pharaoh attached importance to the omen and was impatient to know its meaning, he favored intervening, but the High Priest was of the opposite persuasion: profaning the pyramid in such circumstances could have fatal consequences, he said. They agreed therefore to leave things to follow their natural course and posted sentries near to the stone to watch over it night and day. But as time passed the head began to lose its features, as if the unknown visage had had second thoughts and had decided to pull back into the inner depths. Many people were disappointed, not to say cross; others breathed a sigh of relief.
Notwithstanding these phenomena and their interpretations, people were scarcely conscious of the pyramid’s aging. The first to give voice to such a notion were the members of a Greek mission. On first setting eyes on the monument, without even going close enough to see the details, they declared as one man: “Oh! but it’s begun to grow old!”
It is hard to tell whether they said this with regret, with malice, or with satisfaction. The main point is that their words spread mayhem all about. People suddenly felt as if they could see clearly what they had failed to notice up to then: seen as a whole, the pyramid was no longer white and smooth as it was portrayed on old drawings; its four faces were all wrinkly, as if its skin had been damaged by eczema.
But that was only a fleeting impression. Long after, like a mature woman who proves her vitality by having a child late in life, the pyramid, despite being four thousand years old, began to reseed itself in distant places.
Flashes of light, hazy visions racing over the horizon, impossible ideas jostling each other before being carried far and wide on the wind ...
That was when people recalled the dream of a pyramid covered in snow, the dream that had first foretold of the pyramid’s shadow falling on the whole of the terrestrial orb.
XV
Skullstacks
LIKE A reflected image, the first avatar of the pyramid’s afterlife occurred at a different time, in a place many thousands of miles away. In deepest Asia, in the steppe of Isfahan, a potentate called Timur the Lame raised a pyramid just as Cheops had done before him. Though Timur’s was made of severed heads instead of stone, the two pyramids were as like as two peas in a pod.
Like its Egyptian predecessor, Timur’s stack had been built according to a plan, with the same number of faces, and just as the stones for the first pyramid had had to be quarried in several different places, so Timur’s seventy thousand heads, since they could not have been taken from a single war or just one qatl i amm (general massacre), had had to be gathered from the battlefields of Tous and Kara Tourgaj as well as from the slaughters of Aksaraj, Tabriz, and Tatch Kurgan. As in the old days, inspectors examined the heads one by one, since the skullstack was supposed to be made exclusively of the heads of men, though it is probably true that the greedy rummagers who delivered the skulls to the site sometimes tried to cheat by shaving the hair and muddying the faces of murdered women, so as to make them unrecognizable. The builders used mortar, but the architect, Kara Houleg, was not confident that it would suffice to protect the monument from the effects of winter weather and wild animals, so he had the skulls pierced and each row strung together, to prevent them being pulled apart by the wind or by wolves. That was how the first twelve rows were put together one by one, followed by a further twenty-two, and then another score, topped by the seven final rows. But they ran out of heads for constructing the vertex of the pyramid: since the surrounding area was now entirely uninhabited, the organizers were obliged to press for the rapid discovery of a group, even if its activities did not yet quite merit the name of conspiracy. Without waiting for suspicions to be confirmed, they had the alleged conspirators cut down like unripe fruit, and so were able to complete their edifice. It became clear that the architect Kara Houleg was rather better informed about his predecessor Imhotep than might h
ave been supposed, since he undertook to explain to his sovereign that it would be proper, in the light of tradition, to place a pyramidion on the summit. So they set off with great guffaws to find a skull of unusual shape. As they found none, they suddenly thought of one of the camp-followers called Mongka, an idiot with an oversize head. The defective was summoned and told: “We’re going to make you into a prince!” After cutting off his head, they poured molten lead over it to general amusement before sticking it right on top of the stack.
When Timur’s army had moved away from Isfahan, leaving its frightful monument in the midst of the steppe, the whole area seemed even more deserted. Crows and jackdaws wheeled over the skullstack, then swooped down to pick at the eyes of the heads that the builders had taken care to place face outward, as Kara Houleg had instructed.
Freezing temperatures came earlier than expected that year. Rain had long since washed away all trace of blood, and quite soon powdery frost covered the slopes of the stack, especially the northern slope. No damage was done to it by winter storms, except for the lightning that was apparently attracted by the leaded head of the idiot Mongka. To everyone’s amazement it made not the slightest scratch to the head itself but remelted the lead, which spread down to form spikes on each side of the forehead and also trickled into the eye-sockets, giving them that look of cloudy vacuousness characteristic of the faces of the gods.
Snow twice covered the pyramid that winter. Toward the spring, when the March winds restored the stack’s dark hue, head and face hair could be seen once again. Pilgrims trekking across Asia were mostly horrified at the sight, but those who knew the history of the world stated that the hair had not appeared by chance: four thousand years earlier, they said, a prophet and martyr had foretold that the pyramid would one day grow a beard. At least, that was the kind of story that you could hear being put about. There were even songs about it; but no one suspected that the legend originated in the chance discovery of a papyrus used to copy down the inquisitor’s interrogation of Setka the Idiot.