The Pyramid

by Ismail Kadare

  Hemiunu sighed with relief. “And what’s that arrow, there?” the Pharaoh asked, pointing the rod he held in his hand toward a sign.

  For a short interval the architect held his tongue.

  “That is the gallery that leads to the funeral chamber, Majesty,” he replied without looking at Cheops.

  The Pharaoh touched the sign with the tip of his rod.

  “And where is the chamber itself?”

  “It has not been included in the model, Majesty. It has no place in it, because it is situated outside of the pyramid. It is buried underground. One hundred feet deep, maybe more ... At a point where the weight of the pyramid is no longer felt...”

  Cheops’s eyes wandered for a moment to the abyss where they planned to place his coffin. He recalled a dream he had had a few days before. He had seen his own mummy floating in the void like the body of a drowned man.

  “That is how the great Zoser and the unforgettable Seneferu, your father, were placed,” said Hemiunu, lowering his voice.

  Cheops did not reply. He hardly felt at his ease, but made an effort not to let it show. Only the rod in his hand trembled.

  “Such matters are your business,” he blurted out in the end, and then turned on his heels. His last words: “Start your work,” which he uttered once he had crossed the threshold and without turning his head, reached the architects as if enveloped in an echo: Sta-start you-your wo-work!

  Those left behind kept quiet for a moment, like the followers of a sect who had seen some miracle. Approval had finally been granted. The model, the seed of the future pyramid, which only yesterday they had handled and treated without ceremony, now seemed untouchable. Its cold chalky lightness seemed to needle them, and not just them, but the whole world.

  The access roads were built according to the rules, that is to say simultaneously from different points in the kingdom. All trace of the old routes leading to the previous pyramids had disappeared a long time ago. Here and there, you could make out barely a few remnants, the scars of wounds healed years before. But even if they had survived they would not have been easy to use for the new pyramid. Each one had its own routes, which depended in some cases on the state of the old quarries and on the new quarries that had to be opened, on the kind of granite used (whether it was Aswan or Harnoub stone), on the choice of alabaster or basalt for interior decoration or for the summit, called the pyramidion, as well as on the material from which the sarcophagus would be carved—hard rock, red granite, or basalt The other materials that would be brought to the site ready-made—the granite buffers for blocking the entrances, the pedestals and plaques that would bear the inscriptions—could of course be conveyed along the old roads, but sometimes also needed new ones. Everything depended on the place where they were manufactured.

  All that no doubt made up the most precious and elaborate part of the project, but the main thing was’the stones. Dozens of high officials in charge of works lost sleep over their extraction and haulage. As if it was not enough to have to devote most of their energies to these myriad nameless lumps, they were obliged in addition to spend days and nights on drafts and endless calculations of all kinds.

  It was not just a matter of determining the exact number of stones needed, nor the average number of man-hours required for the extraction and loading of each block. After loading came haulage, and that was where everything went awry. Since it was indispensable to use the Nile for moving masonry and other materials, all their plans had to take account of the water level and of the possibility of spates. In earlier times, for reasons of security, people had tried to do without the Nile, but calculations had shown that recourse to other means of movement would have doubled, not to say tripled, the length of the journeys, so that (keep your voice down!) the Pharaoh risked dying before his pyramid was finished.

  In this as in all else, the Nile turned out to be irreplaceable, However, it was not at all easy to predict exactly how far rafts laden with stone or granite could travel in this or that season. You had to consider all the possibilities, especially when planning long journeys beginning as far away as Elephantine, or even further from Dogola or Gebel Barkal.

  Deep in their calculations, the high officials and the shippers entrusted with the transportation of building materials considered justifiably that the main responsibility for the pyramid lay with them; and if someone had pointed out to them that at the same time other guilds were also losing sleep over the plans for the pyramid—for example, the architects, who had not yet solved some of the problems, such as the pyramid’s gradient and its orientation with respect to the stars, or the team in charge of interior arrangements, or the team of sculptors—they would certainly have retorted sourly, but those are just girlish tasks, hair-splitting fancy-work! The pyramid is where dust gets under your skin, where heat and death bear down on you at every step. But the architects themselves would have snarled at the shippers in the same way, especially those who pored over their drawings of the galleries, doors, and secret passages, or busied themselves with the mysterious inner chambers, forgetting entirely that at the same time the haulers were covering half of Egypt with dust: a common porter’s job!

  Perhaps the very nature of each guild’s task led it to think that it was the main one. That was the case for the architects, for instance, who strove to fix the right orientation for the pyramid, and for whom the local expression “to make night into a new day” had much more than a symbolic meaning. In practice, they did a good part of their work at nighty when they would go to the plateau on which the pyramid was to be built, not without casting rather disdainful glances on the trench-digging team. Although it had been decided irrevocably that in order to avoid all possibility of error the monument would be oriented in relation to a fixed star, a star from the Great Bear (but absolutely not the polestar), they continued to go almost every evening to the site at the hour when the workmen were laying down their tools, Ah, the workers thought, to have business with the stars, that’s what you call keeping your hands clean! Those chaps don’t know what calumny and betrayal are! But just try getting this right (and they stamped the ground with their heels) at the final inspection. You can be just a couple of fingers higher or lower than the level prescribed, and your head’s on the block!

  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 we
re 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.

  III

  Conspiracy

  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.

  “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.