But others objected: “How can we be responsible? We were just carrying out orders. If there has been a mistake, others are to blame.”
“But we are all guilty,” the former maintained. “In one way or another we are all involved in this nasty business.”
Having said that, they raised their eyes mechanically toward the sky. It was not just the pyramid, but also their own bodies and their very fates that were being siphoned upward by the celestial void.
VI
Dust of Kings
THE SKY was overcast, Cheops paced back and forth on the upper floor of his palace, feeling tense. Though he was trying not to look anywhere at all, he could not prevent his head from turning toward the west, toward the spiraling tornadoes of dust, blacker than any seen before. It looked as if a sandstorm were brewing for the afternoon. But the pyramid’s dust cloud could be seen from everywhere, running ahead of the hurricane. Cheops felt as if his own tomb were galloping across the sky like a bolting horse. The vision had not left him for years. He consoled himself with the thought that it was his fate as a monarch, that there was no one to whom he could complain, but it made him melancholic just the same.
Two sets of scrolls were laid out on a marble shelf. One was thick and weighty and contained the biography of his father Seneferu, recently completed by a team of historians. Cheops had asked to look at it before choosing the layout of his own biography, which would soon be started. The other set of scrolls contained the current affairs of state.
He would wait for another day before unrolling his father’s life: today his soul was too much like a sea of bitterness, And he almost had to do violence to himself to pause in front of the shelf. The manuscript was in two parts: the first, dealing with life on earth, was encased in red leather; the second, colored sky blue, dealt with the afterlife.
He thought that he knew more or less what the first scroll would consist of. The king’s youth, his coronation as Pharaoh, first military campaigns, reforms, then alliances with neighboring states, major decrees, conspiracies unraveled, wars, hymns written by poets. But the second whetted his curiosity. He went through it slowly, and his eyes rested on one of the papyri: “The day of Seneferu, After the day, the night of Seneferu, Then again the day of Seneferu, Then the night again. After which the day. After the day, the night of Seneferu, Then after the night, another day of Seneferu, After this day, the night,,,”
Good god! he groaned. He imagined himself inside his sarcophagus, alone in the mortuary chamber. He put his own name in the place of his father’s: Day of Cheops; night of Cheops.,, His dismay was so great that it stopped his anger short. That was what his posthumous biography would be like . , . The first papyrus was entitled The First Three Hundred Years. But if the first three hundred were as monotonous as that, there was no reason to expect any change in the following centuries.
He unrolled the scroll further. He found the same words, and, again, replaced his father’s name with his own: Day of Cheops. Night of Cheops. Day of Cheops after the night of Cheops, Another night of Cheops ...
The idiots! he growled. They had apparently counted out the days and nights of the first three hundred years, thinking they could get away with such fiddlesome listings.
He seized the manuscript as if he were grabbing a woman by the hair before throwing her to the ground, maybe even before trampling on her, when all of a sudden, at a place where he had made a tear, a different wording caught his eye.
He tore out the passage and was so surprised that his anger subsided at once. An event! he almost shouted out loud. In this uninhabited void an event., rarer than an oasis in the desert, had sprung forth. He drank in the hieroglyphs with ardor: “In the morning the highest dignitaries of the state arrived in turn. Then the High Priest of Egypt, all the ministers, and last of all the Queen presented their congratulations to the Pharaoh, At the end of the ceremony, the dignitaries having retired, he lay down in his sarcophagus, Afternoon of Seneferu, Then the afternoon of Seneferu was followed by a night of Seneferu, Then day of Seneferu.” Day of Cheops ...
He ran through the document feverishly until his eye alighted once more on an event. Significant facts were extremely rare, as if lost among a myriad of stars. Commemorations of the Pharaoh’s coronation. Celebrations of his own birthdays. Some religious ceremony. So that was what his life would be in the afterworld, compared to which his present life constituted only an infinitesimal fragment. Heavens! he groaned again. These happenings were like distant posts in a desert, like the domes of temples seen on the horizon. He thought he had had a vision of this kind once before. Ah yes, it was two years previously, in a report from the security service about the philosophers of Memphis, giving a detailed reconstruction of their judgments about time. Some of them thought that time now was not what it should be, that it had lost its original quality. It had lost all restraint, it had, so to speak, gone flabby, got dilated—in a word, it had run down. According to them, real time should be very dense. For instance, the time of a human life in this world should be measured as the sum of its orgasms. All the rest was emptiness and vanity.
Cheops had only a vague memory of the arguments of the opposing faction. All he recalled was that they stood firmly by the contrary view, in other words, they defended time’s need to relax. According to them, if humanity persisted in living so intensely, then it would end up losing its reason.
Gobbledygook! Cheops thought. It had been an inspired idea to send half of them off to the Abusir quarries. If people would stop bothering themselves with such nonsense then the affairs of state would run all the more smoothly. But they were incorrigible. After wracking their brains with all sorts of visions, the Egyptians were now doing their best to unhinge the rest of the world. That’s what his ambassador in Crete had reported. The Foreign Minister had brought the dispatch to him, puffing with pride. The other viziers were also glowing: the Egyptians’ worldwide impact was steadily increasing. Crete, and, beyond that island, the Pelasgians and the peoples who had settled there just recently, had been struck by a great confusion. They had learned from the Egyptians that another life existed, and it had quite turned their heads. We were ignoramuses, they said, we were blind, thinking life was so short and simple, whereas it is infinite!
The ambassador had reported just how excited the Cretans were. They were grateful to Egypt for a miracle that they held to be the most important discovery ever made by mankind. From now on everything would change—ideas, mentalities, even the earth’s dimensions. It was no trifle, no, it was not a mere appendage or outbuilding tacked on to life. No, what had at last been brought to light was life a hundredfold, a thousandfold, not to say everlasting.
Cheops listened to his ministers in silence. To begin with, even he had not understood whence came the chill that he felt. Then when they had left he went out on the balcony of his palace and gazed for a time at the dust rising from the building site. The thought came to’ him, more clearly than before, that if Egypt had not made the discovery that so bedazzled the rest of the world, then there would be no pyramid either. There would be no pyramids, he thought again and again. And that horrible dust cloud would not darken his days.
Two decades previously an inner voice had advised him not to have this kind of tomb built. But his ministers had ended up convincing him of the opposite. Now, even if he had wanted, he could no longer detach himself from his pyramid.
“I did it for you!” he was about to shout out loud. “I have sacrificed myself for you!” Now they had left him alone with his pyramid, while they did nothing but banquet and carouse. Yes, he was alone before his tomb, swelling up and crouching down by turns before leaping high as if to take possession of the whole sky.
For a long while he tried to think of nothing at all. Then he felt drawn once again to the scrolls. He hoped that the sky-blue one would help to dispel his gloomy thoughts, but it was the scroll he was trying to avoid that attracted him irresistibly. He knew what was in it. But he raised its leather casing with the
kind of sudden start that you use to open a door onto a group of whispering detractors.
They were there as they always were, in their insatiable thousands. From robbers and street urchins’ to educated ladies and lounge lizards, whose venom was all the more intolerable. Informers had faithfully copied down everything, and these unordered inventories of things said in vulgar and in polished language gave a more accurate picture by far than any report of the degree of Egyptians’ loyalty to their state, and of their disaffection ... It sucks, I swear, it sucks up everything, it ain’t never satisfied, the black widow, it’s left our stomachs in our sandals, it’s squeezed the seeds out of us, and not just the seeds, it’s all down to that thing, you can’t have a laugh any more, or have fun, on my mother’s soul the devil take Egypt, let me never hear its name again, not Egypt’s nor the name of that bloody pyramid!... People are damned right to claim that the building of this new temple is impoverishing everything, even life itself. Half of the taverns have been closed since construction work began, dwellings have gotten smaller, men’s love of their craft and their pleasure in entertainment have been extinguished, fear has spoiled and shriveled every kind of thing, and only one has grown: the line at the bean seller’s stall. People have now realized that the pyramid not only devours everyday life, but is consuming the whole of Egypt. Its blocks of masonry have crushed the palm trees and the autumn moon, the excitement of the early evening in the city, laughter, dinner parties, and feminine sensuality . . . Even if the pyramid were to swallow it whole, Egypt should consider itself lucky to make such a sacrifice! ... But hang on, there’s no point in crying wolf! The pyramid may have petrified our existence, but one day it could also depetrify it, bring liberation, release us from the weight of its stones . . . Hell, that’s just daydreaming! Have people lost their wits? Can a witch regurgitate all that she has eaten? To make her do so you have to put her to torture, cut her up into little pieces—come on, witch, spit it all up, or 111 knock up your mother too! But that’s just nonsense. Supposing you did get hold of it and squeeze it hard, what would come out of it?—A huge fart and nothing more.
Cheops’s jawbone hurt For a second he felt completely empty. Then he blinked. They don’t like you, he said aloud, It wasn’t yet compassion that he felt. All the same, now that people were foulmouthing the pyramid, he felt less ill-disposed toward it.
He was naturally entitled to despise it. He could even detest it. But they had no right... no right to go so far ...
He had fallen into the grip of some devilish tool. It was hard for him to understand what he should like and what he should abhor. Sometimes he felt as though it were he himself who bore that horrible lump on his back, yet it was the others who were complaining of it.
He felt no bitterness. He and his ugly hump stood together, together against the world.
Cheops raised his eyes. What he could see spread out against the sky was his own dust. That’s what it was. The dust of kings. Alas! he sighed. Sometimes he regretted not having adopted another means of crucifying Egypt. One of those immemorial devices that his ministers had come up with from the ancient archives, about twenty years ago, on that unforgettable November morning. He could have set people to digging that great underground hole that would have been undetectable on the surface ... Involuntarily, he often found himself thinking of how such a hole could be designed. First darkness, second darkness. On down to the fifth, the seventh darkness, the darkness of darknesses. Pitch dark. That’s what the Egyptians deserved. They weren’t worthy of his uprightness. They had always preferred shameless manipulation and occult oppression. Whereas his own pyramid rose up right there, in the very heart of the State, as if to say: Here I am!
They don’t like you, he repeated silently. His exasperation with the pyramid had now given way to a kind of pity for it. “But I’ll show them . . . I’ll show them . . . No, you don’t need them to like you!”
He would not force them to love the pyramid, though that would not have been very difficult. He would get his own back on them in another way. He would get them to spin out paeans of praise for the pyramid in exact proportion to their hatred of it. He would thus degrade them remorselessly, humiliate them in each other’s eyes, in the eyes of their wives and children as well, and in their own consciences. He would destroy them little by little and in the end turn them into nothing more than worms.
Cheops realized, he was going round in circles like a lunatic. He got a grip on himself, and though his knees had not stopped trembling with repressed rage, he managed to keep himself still. Since he had come back to the marble shelf, he naturally decided to calm down by reading the biography of his father’s afterlife. But to his amazement his hands failed to reach out for the sky-blue scroll but went instead once again toward the other. He had heard that drunks who wake up with a hangover ask for another cup of what had put them in that state, because oddly enough it was the drink most likely to clear their heads.
The word postpyramidal, which caught his eye in passing, gave him the same kind of fright as the sight of a snake in years gone by. He had expected it to return ever since he came across it in the report before last. It hadn’t been a chance occurrence ... Another era ... The postpyramidal period ...
So he wasn’t the only person to be racking his brains about what would happen after the completion of the pyramid. Others had thought about it before him seriously enough to forge a whole new word for it.
All of a sudden Cheops saw the silver platter laden with excised tongues that the High Priest Hemiunu had brought to his father Seneferu one morning. At the time he was only thirteen, and his father explained to him that the tongues had belonged to people who had spoken ill of the State. “It made you go pale,” Seneferu remarked, “but you will do the same one day. If you don’t cut them off, in the end those tongues will have the better of you and your reign.”
But it was now probably too late for it. Wicked tongues had proliferated to such an extent that even a thousand platters would not suffice.
He raised his head, intending to bring his perusal of the reports to an end.
He could not take his eyes from the column of dust. He had hated its sinister dance to the heavens, not thinking that one day he would miss it. Even now, and in spite of his still undiminished revulsion for it, he was already horrified to imagine that one day it would not be there. Together he and his tomb had wielded power in concert, and now, after twenty years, the tomb was on the point of completion. Soon its infernal animation would cease. It would begin to cool day by day beneath its polished limestone facing panels before congealing forever. It would have begun by clearing out of the sky (Cheops felt almost at fault now for having sworn at all that dust) and then after taking leave of the sky it would take leave of life.
Cheops took in a sharp and painful breath. So the pyramid will leave me alone and abandoned in this vale of tears . . . An ice-cold stiletto of anxiety churned his stomach.
He went up to the marble shelf and rang the bronze bell to summon the head magician.
Without looking at him or even turning around, Cheops asked the magician if he had heard the latest rumors.
“ Ah yes ... Postpyramidal era ... an ugly phrase, like so many you hear nowadays ... I’ve spoken to the head of the security service about it.. .”
In Cheops’s mind the silver platter glinted lugubriously before running with blood.
“I know,” he said. “I also know what he thinks of the matter . . . But, even if it dismays us, there will be a post-pyramidal era one day, won’t there?”
“Hm. I’m not sure what to say about that,” the magician replied.
Cheops was tempted to remind him that he had opened his heart to him once before, twenty years previously, and the magician had told him that the pyramid was the pillar of the State, light condensed into stone, and so on. But he also recalled simultaneously that all those who had witnessed the scene were now rotting in the ground. How time passes! he thought.
“Well, what will
happen when it... I mean, when the postpyramidal era comes?”
“Hm . . . Majesty, allow me to make one objection . . . There will be no postpyramidal era, for the simple reason that the pyramid will always still be there.”
Cheops turned around abruptly.
“Djedi, don’t evade the question,” he said very quietly, though his words echoed in the magician’s ears as painfully as a scream. “You know perfectly well that the current weariness and, so to speak, the dissolution of Egypt are due to the fact that the pyramid is nearing completion.”
“A pyramid is never completed, Majesty,” the magician replied.
“What’s that?” This time Cheops really had screamed. “Am I going to have to build another one, as my father did? Or demolish half of this one so that it can be rebuilt?”
“No, Majesty! When I said that pyramids have no end, I was thinking of yours and none other. It has no need of a twin. Nor any need of rebuilding.”
“All the same it is nearly finished.”
He looked up to see if he could find the dust cloud on the horizon.
“Its body will be finished, but not its soul!” the magician continued.
He went on for a long while in such an even voice that Cheops very nearly dozed off.
“How many steps are there left to build before reaching the vertex?” he asked in a muffled whisper.
“Five, Majesty,” the master-magician answered. “But the Minister for the Pyramid was explaining to me yesterday that they get smaller as they go on. There are no more than two hundred and fifty stones left to lay, maybe even fewer.”