Meanwhile, the wild beasts of the steppes prowled about at night, and by day, their snouts stuffed with clumps of hair snatched from Timur’s pyramid, they raced with the howling wind across the plateau of Turkmenistan through the sands of Kandahar, and even farther afield, into the vast Mongolian plain.
He got used to the sight, and on every plain where he set up camp a pile of heads was hastily made. Then, like a Pharaoh, he empowered his sons and grandsons to have their own pyramids, and eventually gave this right to all the generals of his army. As a result many hundreds were made, and they spread such terror as to become an indispensable feature of every campaign that was launched. When each new heap was made—as they were still endowed with eyes, they were called head piles—-the older ones, made two or three years before, had already been transformed into skullstacks. However, though the skulls had only sockets for eyes, they kept their teeth, just as the prophecy had foretold.
In the myriad tents of the army, and even more in the cities and states that it threatened, people spoke of the Isfahan pyramid with such fear and loathing that many reckoned that, even if it was hardly up to the stonestack of Cheops in terms of its size, the time it had taken to build, and its lack of antiquity, it was nonetheless the real thing, the Egyptians’ old heap being nothing but a paltry, overblown imitation.
The Isfahan pyramid was the one that possessed a straight, firm, and living character. Timur’s stack spread instant panic like a thunderclap. It was unaffected by rumors or by flattery, it consumed men’s heads in a few hours, in the time it took for a qatl i amm, instead of dragging things out over years or decades and making people wade through files and investigations beyond countings not to mention cuts in the bread ration, anguish, and despair. Its diaman-tine density gave it its sparkle, its brilliance was in the idea that had governed its construction: and the upshot of all this was that the rhapsodists and subsequently the scholars of Samarkand eventually proclaimed that the first authentic pyramid had arisen in the Isfahan steppe, and that its Egyptian rival was a crude replica of later date. Although this claim may at first have sounded somewhat bizarre, close attention to the ballads of the shamans would have informed you that, since no one could say whether time flowed forward or backward, no one could be sure of the ages of people and things, and thus their order of appearance was even less fixed. In other words, who can tell who is the father and who the son? And so on.
During one of his long marches Timur remembered that Isfahan was not far away from one of-his army’s flanks, and a sense of foreboding made him want to set eyes upon his pyramid one more time. It now looked a little shriveled. Part of the leaden head of the mental defective had split, and all the tufts of hair on the lower rows had been torn out by wild beasts. But the jawbones were clamped together more tightly than ever. As if the pyramid was threatening, or alternatively provoking, the whole world. He cast a melancholy gaze at the first signs of its decline, and when he was told that it might stay up for another four or maybe five years, but not longer, he sighed. An empty shell far away, somewhere in Egypt, could keep on going after four millennia, and was going to last another forty, whereas this treasure would have a life as short that of as his son Djahangjir, and had but four more years to go.
He turned his head toward where Egypt was supposed to be, and nodded slowly. Patience, he thought. One day he would set out to sweep that state off the face of the earth, together with all its stonestacks. He would dismantle them, especially the tallest, Cheops’s stack, and he would replace that grotesque edifice with a skullstack of equal volume, to show everyone which pile was the true pyramid, and which one just a piece of scenery on the world’s stage.
But he could not set off just yet. He was intent on his Chinese campaign, and the winter had set in early that year. It was the Year of the Dog, a year he had never liked very much. The Sir Daria was already half frozen over, and he was not feeling at his best. His mind wandered toward impossible projects—for instance, to the time when, a few years earlier, during the Siberian campaign, despite the magicians’ terrified prayers, night would not fall, because of what people called the northern lights. That was during a Year of the Rat, and he racked his brains trying to work out the complexities of the calendar; yet his own days and nights had become as misshapen as embryos from incestuous couplings.
He felt feverish, as he had done during the northern lights. He would have liked to concentrate his mind on simpler things, such as remembering to avoid having the first skirmish during a rainstorm, so as not to suffer the consequences that arose at the battle of Sijabkir, when his archers could not target correctly with sodden bows. His mind was drawn to dozens of other concrete and visible topics, but the skull-stack interfered with his thinking. He was less obsessed with the dense glint of lead on the idiot’s head than with the wire thread that ran through all the skulls, and especially with the lightning that, according to the reports he had received, had darted all the way through, faster than a snake ...
A thought that connected the wire that linked the heads to lightning and to his own orders was struggling to take shape in his brain, but, as during the Siberian campaign, it never quite managed to come together.
No doubt about it, he had a fever. He expected that death would await him at Otrar, but it could be no more than the mask of death. The death he feared above all others was the one that habitually pursued him on the far edges of his empire, in the untilled lands, the great swampy deserts where reeds were as thinly spread as Mongolian monks.
XVI
Epilogue
Of a Transparent Kind
AFTER Timur’s funeral no one cared any longer about restoring his heaps of skulls. There were more than nine such piles, constituted of about one million heads, and they vanished entirely within a few years. Decomposition of the soft parts of the heads first caused fissures in the mortar, then the wires rusted, and when they snapped they brought about the collapse of the whole structure. Winter hurricanes and more particularly wild animals tore the rows down one by one, until nothing was left at all. Once they had been reduced to naught, these edifices became ever taller and more fearsome in the memory of men. And so it became possible to judge just how much the mother of them all, the pyramid of Cheops, had lost by being spared from destruction.
It remained a prolific childbearer beneath the scorching sun, but its offspring were not easy to discern. Descendants cropped up in other countries and in other periods, as regimes or historical monuments, but it was hard to believe they had first been conceived in the middle of the Egyptian desert. They always took on false names, and only on two occasions did they make the mistake of declaring themselves openly, like a man removing or accidentally dropping his terrifying mask. The first was Timur the Lame’s skullstacks; their second reappearance took place six hundred years later, in the land that had previously belonged to the Illyrians and had now been handed down to their descendants under the name of Albania. Like the product of a cosmic copulation such as the Ancients might have imagined—in which sperm and eggs are dispersed in huge abandon and engender a multitude of creatures or celestial bodies—the old pyramid spawned not thousands, but hundreds of thousands of little ones. They were called bunkers, and each of them, however tiny it may have been in comparison transmitted all the terror that the mother of all pyramids had inspired., and all the madness too. Steel rods were planted in the concrete, following the principle invented long before by Kara Houleg, The word Unity was often inscribed on their loins, showing that these bunkers were indeed related both to the mother-pyramid and to the skullstacks, and that the old dream of connecting all brains to each other by a single idea could only be achieved by such rods of iron running through people’s heads and making of them a united entity.
Pyramidal phenomena occurred in cycles, without it ever being possible to determine precisely the timing of their appearance: for no one has ever been able to establish with certainty whether what happens is the future, or just the past moving backward, like a
crab. People ended up accepting that maybe neither the past nor the future were what they were thought to be, since both could reverse their direction of travel, like trams at a terminus.
One morning a fair-haired tourist who was taking photographs of the pyramid made a wish: that the monument should become quite transparent, so that everything inside—the sarcophagi, the mummies, the indecipherable puzzle—would be visible, as through a wall of glass. Day was breaking, the pyramid began to go hazy, and the tourist could feel a shiver in his soul with each passing minute, as if he were at a spiritualist seance and about to take a snapshot of a ghost.
He developed his roll of film the same evening, and the pyramid really did look like a glass house, except that on one edge, near the ninth row on the northeast slope, you could see some kind of blemish. He took the film out of the developer, put it back in... to a depth of a thousand, of four thousand years . . . but when he finally took it out, the blemish was still there. It was not, as he had first thought, a fault in the film. It was a bloodstain that neither water nor acid would ever wash clean.
Tirana-Paris, 1988-1992
Ismail Kadare, The Pyramid
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