Ismail Kadare - The Pyramid

Encouraged by the sovereign’s silence, they expatiated at greater length than they had foreseen on the fundamental aspect of the question. Without making any slip at all, they explained that, according to their research, and although pyramids were indeed magnificent burial places, the idea of building them had, to begin with, no connection with tombs or with death. It had sprung up on its own, that is to say independently of these two notions, and its association with them had been a matter of the merest chance.

For the first time a twitch in Cheops’s face gave a sign of life. To their great joy he nodded and mumbled: “Strange!”

“Indeed,” the High Priest emphasized. “Many of the things we shall tell you will seem strange to you.”

He took such a deep breath that his bloodless old lungs hurt.

“The idea of the pyramids, your Majesty, was born in a period of crisis.”

The High Priest was aware of the importance of pausing between sentences. Pauses give greater weight and elevation to thoughts, just as the shade on women’s eyelids intensifies the mystery of their glance.

“So it was in a period of crisis,” he continued after a moment. “Pharaonic power, as the chronicles record, had been weakened. It was probably not a new phenomenon. The old papyri are full of such turns of fate. What was new at that time was something quite different. The cause of the crisis was unheard of, strange, indeed quite baffling. An unprecedented, perfidious cause: the crisis had not been provoked by poverty, by late flooding of the Nile, or by pestilence, as had always been the case previously, but, on the contrary, by abundance.”

“By abundance,” Hemiunu repeated. “In other words, by prosperity.”

Cheops raised his eyebrows. An angle of twelve degrees, noted the architect-in-chief. Fifteen. . May heaven help us!

“To begin with, it had proved extremely difficult to get a grip on this cause,” he continued. “Many enlightened minds, many men trusted by the Pharaoh, who had been the first to explain it, were rewarded for their discovery by death or deportation. But the explanation they had given for the crisis— that prosperity, by making people more independent and freer in their minds, also made them more resistant to authority in general and to the power of the Pharaoh in particular — slowly overcame all the objections that had been raised at the start and gradually imposed itself. Day by day, everyone came to share the view that this crisis was more serious than any of those that had preceded it. A single question remained to be answered: How would the solution be found?

“The Pharaoh sent the astrologer-magician Sobekhotep into the Sahara to meditate on the problem in total solitude. Forty days later he returned disfigured, as happened in fact to most people who went to commune with the desert so as to bring back its message. It was more fearful than might have been expected: what had to be done was to eliminate prosperity.

“The Pharaoh, and in his wake the whole palace, plunged into deep thought. Destroy prosperity? But how? Floods, earthquakes, a temporary drying-up of the Nile, such ideas crossed all their minds, but not one of them was within their power. War? That was a double-edged weapon, and could rebound, especially given the circumstances they found themselves in. So what could be done? To do nothing at all in the face of a threat of that kind was simply not possible. One way or another they would have to listen to the voice of the desert, or else they risked falling headlong into disaster.

“Rumor had it that it was Reneferef, the guardian of the harem, who bizarrely suggested looking for some mechanism that would sterilize part of Egypt’s riches. Ambassadors serving in the lands of the Orient reported huge waterworks in Mesopotamia, on a scale out of all proportion, people said, to their economic product. If that was so, and it probably was so, then Egypt also needed to find some means of consuming the excess energy of its population. To launch works colossal beyond imagining, the better to debilitate its inhabitants, to suck them dry. In a word, something exhausting, something that would destroy body and soul, and without any possible utility. Or to put it more precisely, a project as useless to its subjects as it would be indispensable to the State.

“The Pharaoh’s ministers came up with many different ideas at that time: a bottomless pit to be dug in the earth, toward the gates of hell; a rampart around the whole of Egypt; an artificial waterfall… But though they were all inspired by elevated, patriotic, or mystical ideas, they were all rejected by the Pharaoh. The wall would come to an end one day or another, and the hole in the ground, because it was bottomless, would exasperate the people. What had to be found was something else, something that would keep folk busy night and day so that they became oblivious. But it had to be a project that could in principle be completed, without ever reaching completion. In a nutshell, a permanently self-renewing project. And one that would be really visible.

“That is how the sovereign and his ministers, as the papyri attest, slowly came to the idea of a great funerary monument. A master tomb.

“The Pharaoh was fascinated by the idea. Egypt’s main edifice would thus not be a temple or a royal palace, but a tomb. Progressively Egypt would identify itself with it, and it would become identified with Egypt.

“Geometers submitted various sketches of different shapes before finally fixing on the pyramid.

“A pyramid had all the required features. It was based on an utterly sublime idea: the Pharaoh and death, or more precisely his rise to heaven. It was visible, indeed could be seen from far away. The third and conclusive argument in its favor: it was by its nature both finite and infinite. Each Pharaoh would have his own pyramid, so that even before a generation had recovered from the fatigue and stupor of construction, a new Pharaoh, with his own pyramid to build, would subjugate the people afresh. And so on, inexorably, to the end of time…”

The High Priest Hemiunu paused at greater length than before.

“And so, my Pharaoh,” he began again, “a pyramid, before serving the afterworld, has a function in this world. In other words, before being conceived for the soul, it is conceived for the body.”

He fell silent again, then drew breath before speaking at a slower pace.

“In the first place, Majesty, a pyramid is power. It is repression force, and wealth. But it is just as much domination of the rabble; the narrowing of its mind; the weakening of its will; monotony; and waste, O my Pharaoh, it is your most reliable guardian. Your secret police. Your army, Your fleet. Your harem. The higher it is, the tinier your subjects will seem. And the smaller your subjects, the more you rise, O Majesty, to your full height,”

Hemiunu spoke ever more softly, but such was his inner conviction that as his voice fell his words grew more distinct and threatening.

“The pyramid is the pillar that holds power aloft. If it wavers, everything collapses.”

He made a mysterious gesture with his hands, and his eyes went blank as if they really had looked upon a field of ruins.

“So do not think, my Pharaoh, of changing tradition… You would fall and drag us down with you.”

Hemiunu made a different gesture and closed his eyes in such a way as to indicate that he had finished speaking.

The others said much the same thing in the same funereal tone. One of them again mentioned the canals of Mesopotamia, without which the Akkado-Sumerian kingdom would long since have fallen into tatters. Another added that the pyramid was also the country’s long-term memory. One day, with time, everything else would fade away. Papyri and everyday things would age, wars, famines, epidemics, the late flooding of the Nile, alliances, decrees, palace scandals, would all be forgotten, and the haughty pyramid alone, the pyramid that no force, no length of time could ever bury, or damage, or decompose, would rise up in the desert, like unto itself, until the end of time, “It has been thus. Majesty, and so it must always be thus. Nor is its shape an arbitrary one. It is a divine shape inspired in ancient geometers by Providence herself. You are in it in all its parts, at the vertex, the summit, the peak, but also in every one of the nameless blocks of stone supporting you, stuck fast against each other, shoulder to shoulder, O Majesty.”