The Pyramid

XI. Sadness

PEOPLE spoke that way because they did not know what was going on in the Pharaoh’s mind. Cheops was despondent. In the past, and on more than one occasion, he had had his black moods. Sometimes it only takes a single misfortune, such as the wrong turning taken by his daughter to bring a man to his knees, but the Pharaoh’s present torment was of a different kind. It was not just a bout of dejection, but a sadness as vast as the Sahara — and every single grain of its sand made him groan.

For a long time he pretended not to have any idea of what had thrown him into this state, and even denied its existence. Then one fine day he stopped hiding it from himself. His atrocious unhappiness was caused by the pyramid.

Now the thing was finished, it attracted him. He felt that he had no option but to be drawn toward it. At night, especially, he would wake up in a sweat, shouting repeatedly: “To depart, O, to depart!” But where would he go? The pyramid was so tall that it could be seen from everywhere, From the distance it seemed to be on the point of calling out and saying: “Hey, Cheops! Where do you think you’re going? Come back!”

He had had people punished on charges of delaying the building work. Then he had had others sentenced for the opposite reason, because they had speeded the work up. Then again for the first reason. And thereafter for no reason at all The day when they finally came to announce that it had been completed, he was completely dumbfounded for a moment, and the messengers did not know what to think. They had expected a gracious word, if not an expression of enthusiasm, or at the very least some conventional formula of congratulation. But Cheops did not move his lips. His eyes seemed to go quite blank, then his silence infected the messengers too, and they all stood there together as if they had been plunged into desolation, into the void.

No one dared ask him if he would go and see it. Little by little the palace went into mournings as if there had been a bereavement. For several days no one ventured to speak of the pyramid in front of Cheops again.

The Pharaoh had contradictory feelings about the pyramid: he could feel its attraction while at the same time hating the thing. Because of the pyramid he had begun to detest his own palace. But he was not keen on moving into the pyramid either. He considered himself too young to go over to the other side, but not young enough to go on belonging to this one.

On some days, however, he had a muddled and insidious feeling that it was calling him. He changed his sleeping quarters several times, but wherever he went he could not escape its rays.

During the full moon he shut himself up for nights on end with the magician Djedi. In muffled tones, as if he was trying to lull him to sleep, Djedi told him all about a man’s double, his kâ. And about his bâ, another kind of double that appears to a dead person in the shape of a bird. Then, in an even more trailing voice, he spoke of shadows and of names. A man’s shadow was the first thing to leave its master, and his name was the last: in fact, the latter was the most faithful of all his possessions.

Cheops tried not to miss a word of what the magician was saying, but his attention wandered. At one point he muttered: “With my own hands I have prepared my own annihilation.” But the magician did not seem at all impressed by this statement. “That’s what we all do, my son,” he remarked. “ We think we spend our time living, whereas in fact we are dying. And indeed, the more intensely we live, the faster we die. If you have built the hugest tomb in the world, it’s because your life promises to be the longest ever known on earth. No other place of burial would have been big enough for you.”

“I am in distress,” Cheops said. The magician’s breathing grew heavy, as if before a storm. Djedi began to confess his own torments to the Pharaoh. “I am unable ever to forget anything,” he said. “I even remember things that it is forbidden to recall. I can still see the darkness inside my mother’s womb. And the claws I had when I was a wild beast. Instead of growing outward, as it does on all animals, my fur grew inward, into my flesh. I hear the call of the caves. I am alone in knowing what I suffer, my son,1 confide in no one. Your pain belongs to a different universe. Your torment is henceforth the torment of a star. You don’t know what earthbound torment is. May you never know it!”

“I do not wish to know any other torment, even the torment of a star,” Cheops interrupted. “Anyway I’ve begun to get cross with the stars.”

“Well, that’s hardly surprising,” the magician replied. “That’s something you are free to do. You are of the same race as they are. You’ll have quarrels and then make it up. You’re among your own kind.”

Cheops cracked the joints of his fingers out of irritation. He began to speak again, but what he had to say was not very clear. He went on beating around the bush until in the end, all ofa sudden, he asked the fearful questions “Couldn’t we cheat the pyramid by putting in a different mummy?”

The magician’s eyes opened wide with fright. But the Pharaoh still had enough of his wits about him to justify his question. He had been thinking of the possibility that his enemies might one day exchange his mummy for another, he explained. But he kept his cloudy gaze all the while on the magician’s neck, and Djedi felt as if the Pharaoh was going to seize him by the throat strangle him, and then wrap him in strips of linen cloth according to the embalming ritual.

The Pharaoh went on for a while about the risk of an exchange of mummies in the future. As if in a feverish dream, one question kept on recurring: Could the pyramid never be deceived? But the more he tried to justify the question, the more the magician became convinced that the sovereign was planning to put someone else to death and to put his mummy to rest in the pyramid, in place of his own.

The magician stared hard and long at Cheops, hoping to dispel his own anxiety, Then, in a deep, whispering voice he said: “The pyramid is not in a hurry, Majesty, It can wait.”

The Pharaoh began to shake. Icy beads of sweat trickled down his forehead, “No,” he groaned. “No, my magician, it cannot wait!”

The Pharaoh’s mental derangement was kept secret to the end. Some days he remained completely prostrated and said nothing to anyone at all; but on other days, and particularly on other nights, he lost his mind completely. It was on one of those nights that he gave Djedi the magician a most terrible fright. Cheops declared that he proposed to go to the pyramid. On his own, and alive. So as to ask it what was making it howl like that in the dark, what was making it so impatient.

The magus had a lot of trouble persuading him not to go. All the same, with an escort of no more than a handful of guards, they did actually go one night to look at the pyramid on site.

It was quite still Moonlight poured down from its vertex onto its sloping sides and illuminated the whole desert.

Cheops gazed at it in silence. He appeared quite serene. Just once he mumbled to the magician: “I think it wants me,”

During the following days Cheops fell into an even deeper state of exhaustion. He babbled to himself for hours on end. At times he would wring his hands like a man trying to justify himself, seeking to explain why he can do absolutely nothing, no really, nothing at all, while his impassive interlocutor doesn’t believe a single word.

He died exactly three years after completion of the building work.

Sixty days later, after the funeral rites had been performed, his embalmed body was encased in a sarcophagus, and tens of thousands of people waited outside for hours on end, watching the great mountain of masonry.

Now that it had received the mummy that it was intended to house, the pyramid seemed to have achieved fulfillment. After consuming so many destinies, after devouring so many lives, it now rose up, haughty and triumphant, and sparkled in the sunlight.

A good part of the crowd that had gathered to gaze at it, and especially those whose sons or husbands had been convicted, recalled their loved ones’ unending anxiety in the expectation of arrest, their last nights before being deported or sent to the quarries, the moments when they had been wrenched away from their families. They had subsequently learned fragments of what the deportees had suffered; interrogations, confessions under torture, dementia. Yet, curiously, that had not given rise to hatred among these people. They felt in a muddled way that as long as the pyramid was there, blocking the horizon of their lives, then neither hate nor love would ever manage to form in their breasts. An unhealthy evenness of temper and a wretched listlessness had taken the place of all other feelings, just as tasteless beans had long since replaced the more succulent dishes of bygone days.

All that they had lost only came to mind in vague and hesitant ways. Gay feasts among friends, love affairs, scandals, crazy poets chasing from one inn to another with their delirious words. All those things had progressively been eradicated from their own lives, blown away like so many shadows. The higher the pyramid had grown, the more distant all those things had become. They were so far away now, lost in nameless deserts and reed beds, that they could never find their way back.

One winter morning the new Pharaoh, Didoufri, announced the commencement of construction of his own pyramid to his ministers and closest advisers. Also present were Cheops’s other son, Chephren, and his only daughter, Hentsen, who for many years had not set foot inside the palace from which she had been banned because of her misdemeanors.

All listened with tense expressions to the Pharaoh’s words. The sovereign made no particular recommendation about the height of the vertex or the length of the arrises, and the assembled company was unable to decide whether that was a good thing or not.

Hentsen did not even try to hide her contempt for the behavior of the others. Latterly, people said, she had taken advantage of her father’s senility to indulge in her latest whim — a pyramid of her own! It was rumored that she had required each of her lovers to supply a certain number of stones, so that people wondered just how many more lovers she would need in order to get her pyramid up.

There was a lot of gossip about this in the capital. People called it all sorts of things — the female pyramid, the shadow of Hentsen’s cunt, its forward projection, the measure of its depth, a phallus demonstrating its receptive capacity, a vaginometer. She had wind of all these comments, but she was not bothered by them. She was even reputed to have declared: “Since the women of Egypt have gone frigid and given up sex, I shall make love for them all! May the pyramid prove that I am not boasting!”

The new Pharaoh was nearing the end of his speech. His younger brother Chephren, with his hairdo that was, to say the least, bizarre, was suffocating with jealousy and resentment. Oh, let my time come soon, he thought, consumed by bitterness. Let it at least come!

The thought of the day when he too could become Pharaoh filled him with melancholy, as when one dreams of unattainable things, and he was within a hair’s breadth of bursting into tears.

Provided the day came for him to have his own pyramid, then people would see what stuff he was made of! He had discovered a very old statuette of a sphinx, which he hung on to like a fetish. When his friends asked him what was the meaning of his new hairstyle, where had he got the idea, and so on, he would just give an enigmatic smile. For it was the sphinx’s coiffure.

He felt intuitively that this hairstyle possessed dark powers. He would do his hair that way for ever more, even when it began to thin out. Later on, for his own pyramid, he would have a giant sphinx carved in stone and placed at the base. A squatting lion with his own face. “Who art thou?” hordes of visitors would ask over the coming millennia. “Art thou Chephren? How didst thou become Pharaoh? What didst thou to Didoufri?”

But as we all know, the sphinx never answers questions.