Pyramid Texts

by Gamal al-Ghitani

  Al-Ma’mun nodded. He appeared to understand the matter fully, as though he had been aware beforehand of what Ibn al-Shihna referred to. Those present could not tell if he were truly informed as to the cause of Ibn al-Shihna’s doubts, or whether they were witnessing an example of the habit of monarchs of not displaying surprise on hearing strange things, as though it was to be taken for granted that they were informed of everything.

  Quietly the caliph asked, “And what do you need to do?”

  Ibn al-Shihna turned to the pyramid before saying, “I need to measure the sides at the midpoint.”

  Al-Ma’mun made a gesture with his hand. “That is granted you. But take with you one who knows well how to climb it.”

  They brought him one of those who knew, who were well informed as to the ascending paths, of a family that lived close by and whose members had made a specialty of climbing the pyramids from ancient times before the coming of the Arabs to Egypt. Al-Ma’mun commanded him to accompany Ibn al-Shihna, to guide him and keep from him nothing of what he knew.

  Ibn al-Shihna was then in his fifties, capable of climbing, albeit slowly. He was unique among his kind, widely reputed among those concerned with the business of measurement, possessed of great ability.

  At the forenoon he appeared, and at noon astonishment appeared on the faces of all as they noticed him repeat what he was doing, vanishing from one face only to appear on another. Some fidgeted, but al-Ma’mun remained steadfast, showing no restlessness or irritation. On the contrary, he turned to them to quieten and reassure them, saying:

  “Have patience with him. The matter is fraught.”

  Before sunset Ibn al-Shihna appeared before him. He seemed exhausted by the effort he had made. Hesitantly and in confusion, he said, “Commander of the Faithful, I fear you will not believe me.”

  The caliph regarded him with a calm face, so that even those close by could not deduce what was passing through his mind then said, “Say what you have to say.”

  Ibn al-Shihna the Measurer said, “The width at the midpoint is equal to that at its base. Neither more nor less. The length of each side is four hundred spans. My lord, there is no slope and no decrease.”

  After a few seconds of silence, Ibn al-Shihna repeated, “It is puzzling. It is puzzling.”

  Some of those standing there openly displayed their doubt. The general of the army who had shown his zeal in quelling the unrest appeared yet more daring and declared, “He is a liar, O Lord and Commander of the Faithful. He wants our minds to credit the opposite of what our eyes behold.”

  Ibn al-Shihna looked at al-Ma’mun: “I swear by God that that is what I found, Commander of the Faithful,” he declared.

  The caliph seemed calm, as though listening to his own thoughts and not what was being told him by others. He spoke and asked, “Can you measure the length of the sides at the summit?”

  Ibn al-Shihna contemplated the so conspicuous apex. That night, he had private audience with al-Ma’mun for an hour and then he left for the place where he slept. He could not, however, sleep, and with the rising of the sun was on his way up the paths both secret and visible, preceded by his guide. Time passed slowly but al-Ma’mun showed no sign of irritation. Even when night fell and the pyramids were swallowed up in the darkness, he did not leave his place; indeed, some say he did not leave his horse’s saddle. The whole of the following day he spent watching Ibn al-Shihna’s steady progress around the top, there at the highest point, till the sun of the third day fell and the ancient guide appeared, tired, frightened. Pointing to the summit he said, “At first, like him, I did not believe. But I was convinced after he showed me. And when he disappeared from my sight at the moment when he was turning toward the west, I thought he must have become tired and sat down to rest. But I could not see him anywhere and I grew scared and came back.”

  The caliph turned to the leaders of his army and the closest of his companions and gave the order to sound the trumpet for departure, and he retraced his steps without halting once. And all men were at a loss, both those who were there and those who read about it in later times, but no man could arrive at any definite conclusion despite the proliferation of explanations and the multiplicity of reports.

  A Fifth Text

  Ecstasy

  Because she spoke to many, most of them workers from the area such as guards, vendors, guides, men from the Antiquities Authority, no one knew for sure how or when she agreed with him that they would enter the pyramid at sunrise. Many men had wanted to do such a thing: women came there from divers quarters of the world, of all different ages, their features and their personalities diverse, but the way in which this young girl appeared was different. She was like a foreigner in looks but, with her vivacity, her charm, her quickness of wit, and that special flirtatiousness, she was like an Egyptian in spirit—and that is not to mention her command of Arabic, which, even though she had learned it in her own country, she spoke as though she’d been born in al-Gamaliya and lived all her life in Bulaq or Imbaba.

  Later, especially after she became more frequent a visitor and people started talking of her, her appearance came to be considered a sign. She possessed an overwhelming femininity, a figure like a sesban tree, and hair as long and flowing as the boughs of a willow. Her mouth was a rich, soft entrance to an invisible world. She walked the earth gaily, she was a roamer, and she told anyone who would listen that she was making a journey around the world, the longest portion of which she had set aside for looking at the wonders of Egypt, of which the foremost was, of course, the pyramids. She would start with the Great Pyramid, then move to the Middle, then the Small. Then she would progress to the oldest—Abu Sir, Abu al-Namus, Saqqara, Dahshur, Maydum, al-Lahun. She wouldn’t leave the country until she had seen them all, observed them, compared them, and written everything down.

  She started to be seen more often. Her smile was everywhere, every day. Word of her beauty spread, her features became known to all, everyone talked. She came from the center of the city, where she lived in one of those old hotels patronized by foreigners of limited means and budgets.

  Her face always held a welcome. She rebuffed no one, embarrassed no one who showed friendliness or admiration, but equally never behaved in a vulgar way. There was something in her look, in her voice, in her bearing, that would suddenly flash out and set a limit, halting any who sought to step beyond the bounds.

  Everyone who saw him walking ahead of her just before sunset, near the entrance, wished he might be in his place, to go before and serve her—a woman of such animal grace, such overflowing bounty, such a garden of erupting curves that she blinded the beholder to all else and superceded all else. As for him, he was accomplished, of a well-bred and powerful family, admired by all for his skills—a solid sportsman, a master of Japanese martial arts who had obtained his black belt at the age of ten. He had close relationships with all who worked there, Egyptians and foreigners, and was well known to the mindful.

  He was blazingly handsome, with features as open as if he had just stepped down from the wall of a temple whose colors and drawings had remained as fresh as they were when first executed. He was known for his modesty and his indifference to the foreign women who lusted after the young sons of those who lived there. The temptations to which he was exposed, from hints of admiration to frank proposals and attractive offers of work in distant lands, were no secret. More than one woman offered him a proper contract, and one of them, a woman of Arab origin who lived in Canada where she owned land, gas stations, a house on a lake, and a yacht moored in a bay, asked him to name any figure just to go with her and be close to her. But he refused.

  His friends called him a fool, wishing that they might receive such offers, that the opportunities that came so prodigally to him might be theirs. Some said he was stupid, others that he was clever, and one of them whispered, “He’s hiding something”; but no one was able to impugn his manliness or find anything to report that might touch his honor. Fathers wanted him as a h
usband for their daughters and merchants as a partner in their businesses but he held fast to the last wishes of this father—that he make his own way in the world and follow his own destiny, though with the condition that he not stray far from the pyramids.

  He was of excellent reputation, and left a happy impression on all who talked with him or heard of him. Even the letters he received became proverbial, the people saying, “He received so much mail the stamp dealers asked to buy his letters—but he put them off because he was too busy.”

  When did he meet the slim-waisted girl?

  Where did they make their agreement?

  That no one knows.

  Was it he who made the approach? Or did she choose him?

  It is impossible to be certain.

  They were first seen on the morning of that day making their way over the huge stones near the entrance. She was wearing a blue shirt, yellow trousers through which the outline of her undergarments could be seen, and red shoes. An old watchman asserts that he heard them talking in a language that was strange to him and which he had never heard from any foreigner. He had a good knowledge of English, French, Italian, Greek, and Russian, and knew some Japanese, but what they were speaking bore no resemblance to any of those.

  The guard who took her ticket and tore it in half said she seemed to burst with light, dazzling and provoking any who looked at her. She held the young man in a passionate gaze, not merely looking at him but seemingly devouring him, reveling in him, while he appeared unchanged. Perhaps that was what made her love him.

  Divers accounts provide numerous details, some of them attributed to specific sources, but all agree that they passed through the breach at the moment of sunrise.

  Him, and her walking in his footsteps.

  As she bent over slightly to enter the hall, the outlines of her body were revealed—firm, defined, articulate, provocative, agitating.

  They entered the ascending first passageway, and the upward-sloping second. Then . . . then the third of which no precise description exists but about which each man holds a different surmise. Many are the references to it in the books of both ancients and moderns, but the matter remains enigmatic and confusing, like the real nature of the Sphinx, or the talismans of the jinn that guard hidden treasures, or the hidden well-springs of the harm that seizes any who violate the secrets of the dead or perform an evil deed in their vicinity.

  The opening to that hallway, or passageway, or hidden door, appears only on certain occasions, spaced far apart or close together, and thereafter its appearance may be repeated frequently, or years may pass during which no one hears word of it and it is blocked, of a piece with the blank stone walls.

  Who opens it?

  Who closes it?

  For what reasons and under the influence of what factors?

  No one can say, not even those who have obliterated long years in study and examination, who have fondled every stone and thrust their fingers into every hole and crack.

  All that is certain of what people relate is that when this point is reached, a terrible force flares up inside the man or the woman, a degree of desire that none can describe.

  Was he aware of what he was doing when he passed through?

  They say that the scent of the young woman obliterated everything else in his world, so that he did not care, or even that he passed through the opening without noticing. He did not look behind him, or to the right or the left, but moved within her field and turned only at that certain point at which he became aware of the scorching touch of her warmth. All he could see of her was her soft, piercing, burning eyes, whose vital force flooded all life. A mighty shudder swept through him; her special zephyr, the fragrance of her femininity, entered and overwhelmed him, and he was lost. He turned, and the encounter commenced.

  Her whole being was focused on him, readied for him. He was both receiver and sender, from her and to her. Their gazes joined. Little by little, a warm sap started flowing within each. Each fixing his gaze upon the other, they moved toward one another.

  A new state, for him as for her, a state of incandescence, or efflorescence, of desire entirely different from anything they had known or experienced. At what point did their remaking occur, and then, when did their fusion commence?

  Their limbs intertwined. Neither of them was any longer aware of their fingers or their hands or of the inclinations of their shoulders, or of whence those tremors and groans emanated, or of whose tongue it was that explored the other’s, or of how their positions shifted; indeed, their very pores began to blend. At the moment of their interpenetration, they turned into heavenly objects.

  The escalation, the growth of ecstasy, the conflagration of desire knew no limit. Annihilated were all the images, moments, sights, and thoughts that they had known. Their beings no longer extended into and had reality in the past, or were conceivable in the future. They simply became absorbed into a mysterious instant that proceeded from an order of time of which neither had knowledge, an instant that was not before or after, but unconnected to, all else, cut off from all things, foreign to any familiar context. There was no limit to the quenching of their thirst, only an eternal, ever escalating conflagration, which, in the absence of any precedent, must remain beyond description.

  Their essences intermingled. As their limited physical beings failed to tolerate or absorb that imperious lust that knew no bounds, their limbs started slowly to turn a dark black streaked with fiery red. Then each bodily vessel was overwhelmed and crumbled into something both like and unlike cinders.

  A Sixth Text

  Shadow

  For years people talked of and swapped information about him, some providing precise descriptions and accounts. Nor was this restricted to the villages, Bedouin camps, and hamlets close to the Giza shore; it extended to many far-flung places, and scholars of such matters, as well as journalists, travelers, and the consuls of foreign nations (who write in their reports of every matter, great and small) referred to him. All those who saw him close up with their own eyes or spoke with him and left an account agree that he came from far away, though they differ over where that was and the town to which he belonged. Some say he was on his way from Morocco to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca and that he turned aside from and abandoned his traveling companions after a certain book upon which none has gazed fell into his hands, or when some hidden voice told him something that caused him to turn from the track and change his course.

  He came from Samarqand!

  No! He set off from Bukhara!

  No! It’s certain he’s from Khwarizm!

  Whatever the case, he came from the east and entered the country on foot. Those involved were convinced that he was a seeker after knowledge, concerned with the relics left behind by the first people. He made for the area between Abu Sir and Dahshur, close to the dividing line between the green and the yellow, between the sown and the unsown, between the fertile valley and the silent wastes of the desert. He showed an interest in the smaller pyramid located to the north, which the local people say the Great Pyramid of Giza calls “Father” in reference to its greater age and seniority and in indirect confirmation of the claim by scholars that it was built by Snefru, father of Khufu. A minority assert that he showed a nostalgia for the sea, meaning that he belonged to one of the countries thereon, but this is not sure. What is certain is that he was not of Egypt and that he was less than twenty when he entered it, for the first time that he was seen he was a youth, in blooming health, able to dig on his own and lift heavy objects, and that he split a palm tree in half to make from it a sort of wall to protect him from the scouring winds of night. Never, however, did he seek refuge there by day, for the moment the sun arose, or even before its disc appeared, he would make for the place specified in the book, that to which its lines pointed and which its words identified.

  He would stay, unmoving but following with extreme attention and alert eyes the movement around him of the shade, waiting for the pyramid’s shadow to reach a certai
n point on the ground from which arose the trunk of an ancient tree possessed of three roots that clung to the earth. A worm-eaten tree from whose thin remaining branches sprouted at regular intervals small leaves of a brilliant shade of green.

  To this he constantly directed his gaze, at this he stared for hours, and to this he cleaved at night, especially after the shadows had blended and all contrast had been obliterated.

  It was impossible to talk with him or to get him to listen until after the final setting of the sun, for by day he remained focused, unswerving. None saw him eat and no one’s eye ever fell on the remains of food nearby, so that the people who started to settle in his vicinity, building houses of mud brick or stone, cutting small channels in the season of the Nile’s lowest ebb and scooping into them water from the lake that started to form in the summer and on whose surface swayed the reflection of the three nearby pyramids, were at a loss.

  They were experts in the planting and care of the palm, in its treatment against pests, in its fertilization at the appropriate season, in climbing it and gathering its pollen-bearing “tears.” There were a great many palms on the edge of the desert, and the dates would sprout, ripen, and fall to the ground with no one to collect them. So it was that these people established themselves and multiplied. Some of them would travel to distant places to treat palms.

  Because, when they made their way there, they found him already present, at the dividing line between the valley and the desert, they respected his silence and his fixed gaze. In time some of them came to believe in him, seeking his advice and, later, his blessing. Somehow they knew what he was doing, even though people differed in their interpretations.

  Some said he was waiting for a sign, which would appear only to him, to him and no one else, after which the pyramids would reveal secrets such as none had ever heard before, from which inevitably they would benefit. This is why they always sought him out, and he rebuffed no one. He was smiling, delicate, gentle; his ways were easy and he showed aversion to no one. All he asked of them was that they should come to him at night and leave him by day to his prolonged waiting, which might end suddenly at any moment, when the shadow of the pyramid left its course and connected to that spot. Then all secrets would be revealed to him, the bases of the sciences, the keys to symbols. It might be that he would then have access to all that had proved intractable to men, arrive at a knowledge of things that had long been hidden and protected, that lay beyond men’s capacity to discover. If obliged to sit with others by day, he would retreat within himself, especially if one of their great men came to him, making a show of humility and seeking to draw close to him in hope of blessing or to advance some business of his own.