The Pyramid (15 page)

People said “pyramids,” but it was not hard to guess that they meant “Pharaohs,” and they eventually gave free rein to their thoughts by alluding directly to a sovereign. Obviously not to the living sovereign, Mykerinos, but to a dead one.

To begin with, the target of their talk was not at all clear, but soon the buzzing converged, foreseeably enough, on the one whose pile of stone was higher than all the others, namely Cheops. The first graffiti were not particularly inspired
(Hump off Cheops!
), but it was soon realized that the forces of law and order were always too late by the time that they got to the defaced wall. When the clean-up teams came along with their buckets of whitewash, the crowds grew bolder and began to throw blunter insults at the pyramids. It became obvious that, for reasons that the State alone could clarify, a revision of the figure of Cheops was unavoidable. Many thought the required change had been dictated by foreign policy considerations, others believed that it was in order to redirect the surge of discontent onto a corpse, but very few ascribed it to plain and simple jealousy, aroused by the unusual dimensions of Cheops’s pyramid.

In actual fact, far more outrage was expressed about the monument’s size than about Cheops himself. Upper and Lower Egypt alike were in unprecedented turmoil and chaos. Previously placid and slow-witted folk—just ordinary bakers or clothiers—started to wake in a start, in high dudgeon, eyes bulging, bursting with indignation. “I was only a mere strip of a thing when they were building the pyramid, but I came close to using my bare hands to smash stone number two thousand eight hundred and three on the eightieth row!” Others told of their exploits, of how they had cursed row forty-nine, or pissed on row fifty-three, or indeed, of how on one dark night they had muttered “Go to hell!” and so on. In Memphis, in city-center bars, poets recalled the lines they had written and which, they claimed, contained anti-Cheoptic allusions—and the fear they had felt, for that reason, Amenherounemef, his eyes now watery with age, told of the terrible beating he had been given for composing the following couplet:

I saw the gulls leave on the wing

And could not restrain a tear

“When 1 think what I had to go through! I really thought I would go mad, what with my wife who kept going on at me: ‘Retract, or you’ll bring us all down. Can’t you see how the others are keeping their heads down? Look at Nebounenef!’”

A person in the crowd of listeners remembered that it was actually Nebounenef who had been sentenced, on the basis of Amenherounemef’s denunciation of his rival, and was about to open his mouth to remind the poet of this fact when his addled mind suddenly went blank and substituted a remark of a quite different kind, along the lines of “My back’s killing me” or “I’ve been constipated for three whole days,” A moment later he heard the word “gull” again, recalled what he had meant to say, but, being too lackadaisical to interrupt, began to yawn very noticeably while muttering under his breath: “Dog eats dog and I don’t give a damn.”

It was the same scene in every bar and every temple forecourt. Men who had yelled for all their worth, “We are innocent, we have always been loyal to the Pharaoh” before being sentenced to a stretch in the quarries, now shouted from the rooftops, “We were guilty, we wanted to undermine the pyramid, but they didn’t let us!” Some people turned up from far-off provinces, from Aksha, Gebel Barkal, and even the fifth cataract, gave the names of the quarries or the number of the row where their loved ones had been sentenced to labor, as well as the names of the people who had denounced them. They brandished papyri under priests’ noses, yelling: “We don’t want national reconciliation we want the files opened!” And they asked for reparations or for revenge,, indeed for both at the same time.

Woe betide us, will we never escape from the pyramid! sighed the old hands. There they still were, perching on one or another of the slopes, beating their breasts, recalling imaginary exploits and tortures, until one of them, as drunk as a drowned newt, let rip with an old song:

When you sold me to row seven

Your heart must have jingled with joy

You old whore!

The Pharaoh was kept aware of it all. Reports on public opinion grew increasingly gloomy. Informers got earache from such a quantity of eavesdropping, but that didn’t change matters one bit.

One morning a man who had had an important dream was brought before the Pharaoh: a dream of Cheops’s pyramid covered in snow.

No one dared to suggest an interpretation. Everyone was afraid of snow. Mykerinos himself put his head in his hands: he could not manage to work out whether it was a good or a bad omen. Many others recalled the lightning of long ago, which had perhaps been less an act of aggression than an appeal for understanding. But after that first misunderstanding, it seemed, the skies of the cold lands had sent snow.

It was obvious that the pyramid was in relationship with the outer world. If it had managed to attract snow from the fearsome northern regions, that meant that it had long been traveling back and forth between here and there, whether in thought, in dream, or by some means that no man could know.

A
T CLOSE
quarters, and especially if considered from within, each storm-tossed generation possessed its own distinctive features, but to the eye of an outside observer— in the stony eyes of a statue, so to speak—the generations of Egypt were no more different from each other than desert dunes.

Dozens had come and gone beneath the unchanging lordship of the pyramids. They were the essential things that people found at their birth, and the main things that they left behind them. The emotions that the pyramids aroused in men were also cyclical Admiration turned to indifference, hatred, destructive fury, then reverted to indifference, followed by veneration, and so on, ad infinitum. The two broad classes of feeling—favorable ones, and hostile ones—were locked in a millennial duel, as it were, in which neither would ever get the upper hand for good. And so it was with the pyramid of Cheops. Although the rumblings of discontent that it provoked did not prevent other pyramids from being built, they did put a stop to any further growth in their size, and even prompted some reduction. As though they were trying to avoid being drawn onto dangerous ground, later Pharaohs declined to build pyramids as tall as Cheops’s. That was the one that good and evil always stumbled over in the first place—as occurred, for instance, on that fourteenth of February, when a ragged fellow stopped in front of it after wandering about the desert for days on end.

For all the pages of transcription of the fellow’s speeches that they made, the inquisitors never managed to establish who he really was. Was he just one of those nameless vagabonds who shift and vanish like waves of sand, or an unthroned Pharaoh, a eunuch, a mathematician, an epileptic, or a ragged astrologer on the run from an asylum?

He went on howling at the pyramid for a good while, hammered and head-butted the ground, screamed with laughter, pulled faces, and then smoothed out the sand with the flat of his hand and began to trace geometric figures in it with demented intensity. He sketched numbers beside the drawings and plunged into endless arithmetical calculations.

He obstinately rejected the accusation that he had wanted to damage the pyramid: his sole intention, he maintained, was to bury it. It was dead, don’t you see? You could tell from a long way off that it was nothing more than a corpse. And like all corpses it had to be buried.

By his own account, he had spent hour after hour working out the dimensions of the trench that would have to be dug in order to bury the pyramid, the amounts of earth that would need to be shifted, the number of men needed for the excavation, the time the job would take, and so on. It would require more time than it had taken to build the things so that a new dictatorship could well take advantage of the dismantling of a pyramid, just as the old dictatorships had made use of its construction.

Not one single time did he answer precisely the questions that were put to him on the meaning of these last remarks. Nor did he ever explain what he meant by a dead pyramid.

“Stop laughing at us!” the inquisitors screamed, though the man was not really laughing at all, despite the twisted look that his torturers had put on his face. You could see straight off that it had stopped living, he kept on saying, “Just have a look at it from a distance. The idea that gave it life has gone, don’t you see?”

He used the wall of his prison cell to carry on with his calculations, concentrating now on the natural wastage of the pyramid. The sums were even more complicated than before, because he had to allow for the gradual wind erosion that would affect each of the faces at different rates, for the variation between maximum and minimum temperatures, the levels of atmospheric humidity deriving from the close proximity of the Nile, right down to bird droppings and reptile friction, which, despite the relative infrequency of snakes, would nonetheless play a part in weakening the stone over about a million years—for that was the approximate length of time that it would probably take for the pyramid to crumble to nothing.

“Time!” he mumbled, as he slumped to the foot of his cell wall in sheer mental exhaustion, “Time alone will rub you off the face of the earth!”

In truth the pyramid was aging, but at an infinitesimal pace. Its changes were not visible to the naked eye, apart from the rapid loss of its white sheen, which soon turned a dull pink, The first wrinkles appeared after eight hundred years, A stone on the west face was the first to split right through, one December afternoon Six others, lower down in the supporting structure, had shattered before it.

It was probable that many others had gone the same way, but they were buried so far inside the edifice that no observation was feasible. Even when a dull thud was heard from the outside, it was never possible to ascertain the exact position of the implosion nor the specific masonry pieces that had been damaged.

Before the first visible signs of degradation occurred, fourteen stones on the northwestern arris turned a shade of gray, Erosion first became clearly perceptible some two hundred and seventy years later. It was not just the gray blocks that showed signs of weather-beatings but the whole array of which they were a part. It was the side most exposed to the desert wind, so that even though the stones used had been among the hardest available, from the Aswan quarry, the weathering was expected and surprised no one.

One hundred and twenty years later, mauvish-gray streaks appeared on a number of pieces on the south face, some of which also came out in pustule-like blisters. The pattern of streaking was completely irregular, which made it all the more difficult to work out its cause.

Signs of erosion began to be perceptible from a distance after one thousand and fifty years. Not just on the north face, ground down by the prevailing winds, but on the east and even the south face too, there were quite varied symptoms of decay, ranging from spongy patches to cracking, channels, holes, and, here and there, small slippages. That is how people came to talk a great deal about one stone on the north face where erosion had gouged out what looked like human features—a bulge that suggested a cheek, lines that could pass for eyebrows—as if some buried face was trying to get out from inside. Gossip about it even reached the palace, and appropriate measures were carefully considered: whether to intervene (with chisels, or more sophisticated instruments) to make the head emerge at greater speed, as was done at childbirth, or to wait patiently for the face to come out of its own accord.

Since the Pharaoh attached importance to the omen and was impatient to know its meaning, he favored intervening, but the High Priest was of the opposite persuasion: profaning the pyramid in such circumstances could have fatal consequences, he said. They agreed therefore to leave things to follow their natural course and posted sentries near to the stone to watch over it night and day. But as time passed the head began to lose its features, as if the unknown visage had had second thoughts and had decided to pull back into the inner depths. Many people were disappointed, not to say cross; others breathed a sigh of relief.

Notwithstanding these phenomena and their interpretations, people were scarcely conscious of the pyramid’s aging. The first to give voice to such a notion were the members of a Greek mission. On first setting eyes on the monument, without even going close enough to see the details, they declared as one man: “Oh! but it’s begun to grow old!”

It is hard to tell whether they said this with regret, with malice, or with satisfaction. The main point is that their words spread mayhem all about. People suddenly felt as if they could see clearly what they had failed to notice up to then: seen as a whole, the pyramid was no longer white and smooth as it was portrayed on old drawings; its four faces were all wrinkly, as if its skin had been damaged by eczema.

But that was only a fleeting impression. Long after, like a mature woman who proves her vitality by having a child late in life, the pyramid, despite being four thousand years old, began to reseed itself in distant places.