Ismail Kadare - The Pyramid

“Are you are in your right mind, numskull, are you mad, or only pretending? What about all these stones being placed, the road that’s being built, all that money and that labor? All that, you say, is just bluff?”

“Yes, bluff, and worse still, upon my word! You’re the one who’s lost his wits, not I. Think a bit and remember: everyone shouted from the rooftops that a pyramid was to built, but where do we see this pyramid? Nowhere! So you think that’s all just by chance? Well, listen to me, you old dimwit. If the pyramid has not yet begun to rise from the ground, that’s because no one is bothering about it any longer. They may all be shouting pyramid, but in their minds they are thinking plot! ”

Those were the rumors that were going about before Cheops decided to make a speech. Even if it means turning Egypt upside down, he declared, I shall uncover every last root of this conspiracy!

Courtrooms and torture chambers were overflowing. The first sentences had already been passed, and the quarterings and stonings had begun in public places. So you wanted to sabotage the pyramid, did you? the fanatics screamed, still not satisfied at the sight of the piles of stones beneath which the culprit was expiring. Sometimes these heaps looked much like little pyramids, which prompted various macabre jokes, especially when the last twitches of the dying man made the pebbles move.

Most people lived in anguish. Thousands expected to be arrested, while others asked to be sent to the quarries or to join the road-building gangs. Until then they had found every possible pretext for avoiding hard labor — ill health, family commitments, and so on — but now they volunteered, without a word of complaint, in the hope that down there, in those baking and desolate places, they would be forgotten. In fact it took hardly any time at all for the dust, sweat, and terror to alter their faces so profoundly that they did indeed become unrecognizable, even to the investigators.

Who can say how long this nightmare would have lasted without the intervention of Cheops himself?

“So is this pyramid going to get built or not?” is what he was reported to have said to Hemiunu one cold morning. The latter’s reply was also quoted: “But interrogation is also part of the pyramid, Majesty”—though it seems that the formula was actually invented later on.

In fact in the second month of the floods (the plain was submerged beneath the blind waters of the Nile) Hemiunu assembled his team of architects once again, just as before.

The model of the pyramid was still in exactly the place where they had left it after their last meeting. It was covered in that fine coat of dust that signifies abandonment. Nonetheless, even through the grayness, it still gave off a bad light.

Hemiunu’s rod wandered over it, but without the confidence of the earlier days. Nor could the others find their words easily. Something seemed to be holding them back; their minds were clouded, as after an orgy. They talked once again of the ramps to be propped against each face of the pyramid, of the means of blocking off the galleries leading to the funeral chamber, of the quarries that would provide the stone for the first four steps, but, as they did so, their mind’s eyes saw a gruesome picture — the final lists of the conspirators, their plans for getting into Cheops’s palace so as to poison him, and their own wailing pleas for pardon.

They shook their heads to chase away these visions, and partly succeeded, after a while. The weight bearing on the center of the pyramid, the main routes along which the stone would be transported, the false doors, the axis of the monument, all these things were tangled up with the ramifications of the plot, with the mind that was controlling it, with the stratagems intended to camouflage it, according to the suspicions that were entertained by Cheops himself.

At times they felt that they would never escape from this fog and that what they were trying to set up was less a pyramid than a form of plot.

Their minds were so battered that it was only at the end of their third meeting that Hemiunu noticed that the head of the prosecution service and his deputy were present.

The architect-in-chief thought he had at last found the reason for the team’s confusion. His face went white with anger and he asked: “Hey, you! What are you looking for here?” The chief prosecutor shrugged his shoulders as if he had not understood the question. “Out!” yelled the architect. The inquisitor and his deputy walked out in dead silence.

Straight away the flood of convictions and the zealous pursuit of the investigation both slackened, and the pyramid returned to the center of attention. The ceremony for the award of a decoration to Hemiunu (corroborating the rumor that it was he who had first unraveled the plot) was the signal for a period of reduced tension and for a new leap forward.

The immediate consequence was increased speed in all sectors of work on the pyramid. Everywhere you could see feverish activity and commotion. Clouds of dust swirled over the site where workmen were busy setting up at the greatest possible speed the barracks needed for sheltering one hundred thousand men, and especially over the now level terrain to which the first stones were being delivered.

The hour for the start of building work proper was fast approaching. The dust and the heat, instead of wearying people, now seemed to stimulate them. As long as the anxiety is cleared up, they said among themselves, all the rest is bearable! And while their hearts flowed over with gratitude for their savior, the Pharaoh, they dashed about frantically, causing more confusion and raising more sand than was necessary, in the belief that by drowning themselves in hullabaloo and dirt, they would also confound evil and divert it from its path.

Their hopes were short-lived. The day before the first stone was due to be laid, a new plot was uncovered, even more dangerous than the first.

This time, to everyone’s amazement, it was the High Priest Hemiunu who fell into disgrace. After him, it was the turn of Khadrihotep, the head of the secret police, and then of the vizier for foreign affairs, A tumbrel of other high officials followed in their wake. Every morning people learned with a shudder of terror the names of those arrested during the previous night. Everyone expected more raids, and now that Hemiunu himself, the untouchable Hemiunu, had fallen, the arrest of more or less anyone seemed quite natural.

For a while the relatives of those convicted for the first plot raised their heads, thinking that the fall of Hemiunu would lead to their return to favor. But they quickly grasped that nothing of the sort would ensue. During an important meeting, a spokesman for the Pharaoh explained that even if the High Priest had indeed denounced the first plot, that did not mean that the plot itself had not existed, Hemiunu had long known about the first plot but had waited for the right moment before revealing it, so as to hoodwink the Pharaoh and to direct any possible suspicion away from his own plot, which was the more sinister.

The investigation of the new affair took its course over several weeks. Often the names of those to be arrested were known in advance, which only served to increase the general state of anxiety, Curiously, alongside fear, people also felt a morbid kind of satisfaction. They were unhealthily effusive, as if their souls had become as soft as sodden shoes, and they chattered deliriously, casting anathemas on the enemies of the State in a sort of sincere intoxication whose origins they themselves were incapable of seeing, while expressing with no lesser sincerity their adoration of their sovereign and master, the Pharaoh.

Meanwhile extraordinary rumors went around about the pyramid. Some ascribed the slow rate of work and the meager results so far to the machinations of the conspirators. Others maintained that the plan itself was ill-conceived, but they hinted that it would take decades before the flaws would come to light. A third group asserted peremptorily that everything had been done wrong — the site was wrong, the drawings were wrong, the access routes and even the quarries had not been correctly selected — with the net result that the pyramid could never be completed. Appropriate measures were taken to deal with the latter, and they soon shut their mouths. No force in the world could stop the building, it was declared at a further summit meeting. The conspirators had certainly tried to hinder it, but the damage done by them was not of a scale that would jeopardize the outcome. Nothing escaped the eye of Cheops, and however diabolical the plotters might be, they would no longer dare indulge in clumsy sabotage.