Ismail Kadare - The Pyramid

The profanation of the female pyramid (the strumpet pyramid, as they called it among themselves) had not yet been discovered, which gave them reason to act fast. But perhaps the robbery would never be noticed, since Hentsen’s last lovers, those of her final years, had long since passed on and turned to dust. The sentries had also met the same fate; in fact, they had abandoned their task even during their lifetimes, since the money to support them had run out. But all the same the rape of the pyramid could come to light for some unforeseeable reason, and that would have made any further robbery very perilous indeed.

They had bolstered their confidence on the eve of the act with the thought that no one was interested in Didoufri’s pyramid any more; otherwise it would not have been left unfinished, Their forefathers for several generations had earned their living as they did, as grave robbers, and had never got involved in politics, except by lending an ear now and again to barroom gossip. For instance, they sometimes picked up the information that this Pharaoh was more greatly honored than that one, though both had long been reduced to mere mummies and encased in their respective pyramids. Then soon after they would hear talk of the opposite. The one who had been more greatly honored was now relegated to oblivion, and people began to make wreaths and raise statues in honor of the one previously disregarded. These changes of tide flowed from matters political, so people said, but the robbers thought it all quite absurd and ridiculous — as if two mummies could get up from their graves, grab at each other’s tunics, and scrap like tinkers!

They gathered in the pitch-black night at the foot of the pyramid and wasted no time in levering up a stone that, according to them, concealed the secret entrance. They had a lot of trouble this time, and they had to shift more than a score of stones. It was almost dawn before they finally found the passageway.

That was the hardest part of their job. Thereafter it all went the same as in the other pyramid. Before opening the coffin they covered their faces with the canvas masks they had made, with openings for their eyes. For a minute they larked around, scaring each other with these hoodlike contraptions.

While the others scooped up the funerary trinkets placed in niches in the walls. One-eye, as usual, lingered over the sarcophagus.

Bronzejaw was the first to look at him.

“So what are you up to with the mummy this time?”

“Come and have a look,” said One-eye.

They came over and saw that One-eye had stripped the linen bandages off the mummy’s face. Toudhalia and the torchbearer screwed up their faces in disgust.

“Just have look at these marks,” One-eye whispered, “You can see right away that the man was strangled.”

“Hm,” muttered Bronzejaw as he leaned over to look more closely. “My word, you’re right. He had his neck wrung like a chicken.”

“What? What are you saying?” the torchbearer exclaimed.

“What are we saying?” Toudhalia repeated. “He had his neck wrung? A Pharaoh had his neck wrung?”

Bronzejaw’s eyes clouded over.

“Listen here,” he said. “We’re just plain robbers, and this has nothing to do with us at all” (His voice trailed off into a tiny whisper.) “These are matters of high politics. None of our business, OK? And you!” he almost roared at One-eye. “It’s not your job to examine mummies’ necks! No one asked you to! Right?”

“Sure, sure,” One-eye conceded. “That’s enough bawling, you’ll rock the pyramid.”

“Ill bawl louder still if I want to, got that? You must know that stuff like that could get us the chop! What did Tut the Hobbler get done in for? Why were Beetroot and his brother strung up? All their lives they jimmied doors and nothing happened to them, then one day, just a hint of politics in some dive, and they were done for. No politics on my patch, you hear that? If it itches, go scratch yourselves somewhere else, but don’t cross with me. Have I made myself plain?”

“All right, all right,” One-eye said. “We’ve got you loud and clear.”

It was still dark when they came to the exit. The stars were beginning to fade. They left their masks inside the gallery and came out in line. It was quite chilly, Toudhalia, who was expert in walking without leaving footprints, also destroyed the traces of.his fellow-robbers’ passage. He could not quite get over what he had just heard. A Pharaoh with his neck wrung… “The bastards,” he muttered to One-eye between his teeth, “They must have squabbled worse than we do over those kinds of jewels.”

Toward daybreak they were trekking alongside the pyramid of Chephren. The sphinx was still shrouded in darkness. Only its hair — the hair that had given rise to so much gossip — was visible in the first rays of daylight.

They quickened their step, for they could not have stood the stare of the sphinx. By the light of the moon, people said, it could drive you out of your mind.

One-eye brought up the rear. His head felt as though it was going to burst. He could not get the marks of strangling on the mummy’s neck out of his mind. They were sure to come back to him in his dreams.

One last time he raised his eyes toward the sphinx. The morning sun had now reached its eyes. Their blank stare froze him as it had never done before. He wanted to shout out: “Sphinx, what didst thou do to thy brother? How didst thou kill him?” But his voice was stifled in his breast.

THE FIRST attack on it came one December afternoon. A solitary shaft of lightning that had escaped for sure from the alien skies of the north fell upon it, but at the last minute, for reasons never properly understood, it split in two and, with an apocalyptic clap, shattered in the surrounding desert.

This first demonstration of its manifestly inviolable pact with the heavens aroused a profound sense of joy in the whole land. No one was aware that what the heavens could not do had been achieved already from below, by the men who had surreptitiously made their way into the pyramid.

The robbery had taken place years before, but since all trace of the profanation had been cunningly hidden, no one had had a clue. Maybe the truth would never have been known, had it not emerged where it was least expected — at a trial of writers.

When a group of scribes was arrested on suspicion that they were elaborating certain unorthodox historical conceptions, everyone expected a particular kind of trial, of the sort usually followed by high society or even by members of the diplomatic corps, in which the men in the dock are less the object of judgment than the ideas that they hold.

While an awkward moment for the educated classes was thought to be in the offing, news broke like a thunderbolt that the Historians’ Affair was not at all a glamorous trial of intellectuals but a case that boiled down to nothing more than an abominable, unprecedented act of burglary…

People hearing the news for the first time went pale and weakened at the knees. Mummies had been stripped and profaned! Evil had scaled new heights. It had entered the realm of shadows. Everyone was gripped by a sense of sinister horror. Death itself had been robbed, so to speak.

It was so serious that many could not bring themselves to believe it was true. Had Egyptian historians sunk so low as to swap their styluses for crowbars? To go in for burglary in the middle of the desert?

But on the heels of this first confused and sensational version of the story came clearer and more precise details. The detectives on the case had found not only that the secret entrances had been dismantled but that the sarcophagi had been opened. The vinegar-soaked masks used by the bandits had been found at the site, as if they had wanted to be rid of them before running away.