Ismail Kadare: The Pyramid

As for risking your life for the slightest error, there was another group that had even more reason to fear it: the team working on the interior arrangements of the pyramid, particularly the secret entrances and exits, the device for hermetically sealing the funeral chamber, and the false entrances intended to mislead grave robbers. Ever since the time of the first pyramids, no one was unaware that the members of this group would not grow long in the tooth. All sorts of pretexts were found for convicting and suppressing them, but the real reason for such measures was well known: to bury the secrets with their inventors.

The mystery surrounding the work done by the men belonging to the magician Moremheb in collaboration with the astrologers was even thicken They dealt with something that no one knew, perhaps not even they, if you asked them point-blank, and, what was more, something that no one could even imagine. Rumor had it that it was to do with numbers that, taken together with the pyramid’s orientation, celestial signs, and other temporal coordinates, could reveal the secret and incommunicable message that the pyramid would contain until the end of time.

The only team that seemed to be working without danger was the one concerned with the little pyramid, the satellite pyramid, for the Pharaoh’s kâ , that is to say, his double. Without a coffin or funeral chamber, it required no secret entrances or exits, so that its construction team, unburdened by mysteries, could work without worry. But things were like that only at the beginning. The satellite team soon discovered that the jealousy it engendered was just as harmful, if not even more dangerous, than the menace that secrets carried with them; and so little by little those workers too became just as grumpy as the others.

It goes without saying that those who wore the gloomiest countenance were the members of the central group led by Hemiunu. Messengers came and went night and day through the great vermilion-painted gates. Those arriving were covered in dust, but those leaving were darker still. Every day something new happened, and a good half of what happened had some connection with the pyramid. Its shape was embroidered on young people’s clothes, old men clipped their beards to pyramid points, and who knows how far things would have gone — had the whores of Luxor not taken them just too far by decorating their underwear with a triangle that suggested, even more than a pyramid, the delta of their pubic hair.

They were arrested one evening and taken to the police station, shouting: “Long live the pyramid! Long live whores!” Meanwhile their pimps, together with hoodlums from the rough quarters, put the commotion to use by ransacking the town center stalls.

Such facts were talked about in bars; in private homes, after dinner, they were fearfully deplored. There was talk of numerous functionaries being sent to the remoter regions. According to some rumors, it was not just people being sent to work in the quarries and basalt mines: undesirables were being removed from the city. Pure and simple deportation, people muttered, but, obviously, no one dared to call a spade a spade.

Conversation then turned again to the quarries in the south of the country, to the latest speech by the Treasury vizier, who had mentioned four times over the words “sacrifices” and “economic constraints,” before coming back to the duration of the works, which would be longer than expected. At least fifteen years… “God, but that’s almost a whole existence! And you mean to say they haven’t yet begun?”

Indeed, the pyramid gave no sign of life. It seemed that the more people talked of it, the further it receded. The time came when people thought that the monument would not be built at all and that everything connected with it was just hot air and empty rumor.

At other times it was as if the pyramid was planted in the ground and no one knew when it would germinate. The torment it caused was so great that people were tempted to think that the earth itself was in pain, that it would not stop moaning, and risked being shattered by some tremor if it did not give birth to the pyramid at its term.

ON THE construction site at Giza, not far from the capital, the dust clouds grew ever thicken Crowds gaped at the whirling haze as if they expected a solid shape to emerge from it. But at sundown, after work had halted and the dust had settled, the terrain that was being leveled (the sacred undersquare, as the poets called it) looked the same as before — like any piece of wasteland.

Meanwhile, everywhere else, in temples and at public gatherings, things were said to be going swimmingly. During a meeting with ambassadors, Hemiunu in person declared that construction would start very soon, maybe even before the floods. Apparently the only people to have kept clear minds in the reigning confusion were the members of the architect-in-chief’s team. Just as others could see a shadow that escaped the eyes of mere mortals, so they were able to discern the outline of a monument in that nebulous blur.

However, while the inhabitants of the capital were expecting a sign that would be the pyramid’s first harbinger, something quite different suddenly emerged from the powdery dust.

A very vague rumor ran round one evening. At dawn official carriages dashed through the streets of Memphis with unusual commotion. Temples stayed closed all morning. In the afternoon, the fearful rumor was on everybody’s lips: a conspiracy.

All at once, the city was virtually paralyzed. News that the Akkado-Sumerian army was at the gates of Memphis, or that the Nile had taken offense and abandoned Egypt, would hardly have caused a greater stir.

The main thoroughfares of the capital were deserted before nightfall People were still scurrying about the back-streets, pretending not to know each other, or else actually failing to recognize each other. Whorls of smoke rose from the chimneys of the Sumerian embassy. The spy on watch cried out: A report! and ran like a hare to the police station.

News of the plot spread like wildfire.

It had all begun by chance, like most great disasters, from an apparently innocuous event: a block of basalt that had been forgotten — quite fortuitously, it appeared — in the desert of Saqqara. But it was the night of the full moon, and the basalt emitted a terrifying glow in an evil direction. As it was later discovered, all that had been planned. The block was intended to receive and then be in a position to transmit nefarious rays so that, once in the pyramid, it would draw an ill fate upon it.

Suspicion fell immediately on the magician Horemheb, but while he was waiting to be arrested, the vizier of the warehouses, Sahathor, was put in chains. However, that was just the beginning. The authorities flung into jail, in turn, two counselors, Hotep and Didoumesiou, then, for good measure, the man who was on the face of it the least likely to have been involved in this affair, Reneferef, the guardian of the harem. Moreover, it was only after the arrest of the ministers Antef and Mineptah that it became clear that the affair was not just a matter of a clutch of saboteurs, but a veritable conspiracy against the State.

The entire country trembled in terror, Cheops was dissatisfied with the results of the investigation and demanded that the plot’s full ramifications be brought to light, to their furthest extent. Inspectors and spies were dispatched throughout Egypt and even abroad, especially to the enemy kingdom of Sumer, with which the conspirators were suspected of parleying.

For a fairly long while it seemed as if every other preoccupation had been forgotten, for the plot alone absorbed everyone’s mind. Some opinions went so far as to stress that all the rumors about the pyramid had only been feints, a kind of trap or bluff, as people said nowadays. In fact, Cheops was still young and had no intention of having any pyramid whatsoever built so soon, and the purpose of these tall stories was quite different: they had been a way of rooting out the conspiracy.