Ismail Kadare - The Pyramid

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.