The Pyramid

XIII. The Counterpyramid

THE FIRST attack on it came one December afternoon. A solitary shaft of lightning that had escaped for sure from the alien skies of the north fell upon it, but at the last minute, for reasons never properly understood, it split in two and, with an apocalyptic clap, shattered in the surrounding desert.

This first demonstration of its manifestly inviolable pact with the heavens aroused a profound sense of joy in the whole land. No one was aware that what the heavens could not do had been achieved already from below, by the men who had surreptitiously made their way into the pyramid.

The robbery had taken place years before, but since all trace of the profanation had been cunningly hidden, no one had had a clue. Maybe the truth would never have been known, had it not emerged where it was least expected — at a trial of writers.

When a group of scribes was arrested on suspicion that they were elaborating certain unorthodox historical conceptions, everyone expected a particular kind of trial, of the sort usually followed by high society or even by members of the diplomatic corps, in which the men in the dock are less the object of judgment than the ideas that they hold.

While an awkward moment for the educated classes was thought to be in the offing, news broke like a thunderbolt that the Historians’ Affair was not at all a glamorous trial of intellectuals but a case that boiled down to nothing more than an abominable, unprecedented act of burglary…

People hearing the news for the first time went pale and weakened at the knees. Mummies had been stripped and profaned! Evil had scaled new heights. It had entered the realm of shadows. Everyone was gripped by a sense of sinister horror. Death itself had been robbed, so to speak.

It was so serious that many could not bring themselves to believe it was true. Had Egyptian historians sunk so low as to swap their styluses for crowbars? To go in for burglary in the middle of the desert?

But on the heels of this first confused and sensational version of the story came clearer and more precise details. The detectives on the case had found not only that the secret entrances had been dismantled but that the sarcophagi had been opened. The vinegar-soaked masks used by the bandits had been found at the site, as if they had wanted to be rid of them before running away.

The robbers had left the mummies where they were, thank God, but only by fortunate chance. For the mummies themselves must have been the target of the most shameless intention of all. The mere thought of it made people shiver. No one could say exactly what the robbers had planned to do with the mummies. Some thought they had meant to burn them, as barbarians do. Others reckoned that they would have taken the mummies to the far-off lands in the north, to put them on show, on kinds of platforms, and then auction them. In the highest circles, however, it was thought that this affair had more serious ramifications than appeared at first sight.

What aroused public curiosity above all was the way in which the group’s machinations had been brought to light.

In actual fact, a veil of uncertainty periodically enshrouded the case. The accused, like most educated people, were hardly very vigorous; indeed, they were rather rather puny men, so it was not easy to imagine them handling great levers and shifting huge chunks of pyramidal masonry.

The secret police, concerned at people muttering such things, leaked sufficient details to clarify part of the mystery, specifically concerning how the discovery had been made.

It had all begun in a very ordinary way. For some time already the police had been in possession of a file on a group of scribes who were putting about new and rather bizarre ideas about the history of the State, not in accordance with official thinking. Although the authorities had alerted the palace, the affair had apparently not been considered important, so everything had stayed in the air. However, an anonymous letter — thank heavens, papyrus now allowed people to write letters, and, even more importantly, to deliver them with ease, for a Sumerian would have needed ten or fifteen clay tablets, not to mention other peoples who were still carving on stone and would have needed a pair of buffalo to haul their letter to its addressee, leaving aside all the other nuisances, such as the din of hammer and chisel that would have kept a whole neighborhood awake for a week! — an anonymous letter, then, had warned the Pha-raoh, Mykerinos, of this new danger.

That was all that had been needed to get down to work. One spy and two undercover agents who infiltrated the group collected all the material that was needed, so that one fine morning, before daybreak, the ineluctable result occurred: arrests were made.

The inquiry was set up straight away, in utter secrecy, What the detectives were really after was to know where the young historians had first got their idea of questioning the official history of the realm. When after a variety of forms of torture the historians finally admitted that their crime had had its first beginning in a conversation with grave robbers, the upshot of which had led them to revise their conception of History from top to bottom, they were suspected of thumbing their noses at the authorities. They were put on the rack one more time, and were also the first to be subjected to a new truth-extraction device that had only just received its approval certificate. But although they found it difficult to articulate properly because of their swollen tongues (caused by scorpion stings), they mainly repeated what they had already declared: the idea of rewriting history had been suggested to them by an inebriated robber in a sordid bar called The Crab, They were tortured again, but were as pigheaded as ever, repeating their original version of the story (in writing, at this stage, since their speech had become incomprehensible — as bad as Sumerian!) and also gave away the name of the thief, a certain Abd el-Gourna, also known as One-eye.

The old reprobate was tracked to his lair, but, despite being half-drunk when clapped into irons, he had the wit to make it clear that in reality he had only ever seen the welts on the neck of the mummy of Didoufri in his dreams.

Nonetheless, toward dawn the next day, he finally confessed, and the investigating team took the man in chains back with them to the profaned pyramid. They moved aside the stone that hid the granite panel that blocked the entrance to the main gallery, they went inside, past the vinegar-soaked masks that still lay on the floor, to the funeral chamber where, with bulging eyes, they looked upon the open sarcophagus — when the head palace messenger rushed in after them with an order from the Pharaoh to desist forthwith from inspecting the mummy.

New veils of mystery enshrouded the case thenceforth. But as often happens when too much trouble is taken to keep something secret, the truth trickled out fairly soon, and more or less everything that had been in the historians’ minds became common knowledge. Their plan had indeed been a gruesome one: they had intended laying their hands on all the mummies in the pyramids, transferring them to some discreet lair in Egypt or abroad, and submitting each of their organs to minute examination. From the evidence that they might thus uncover — throttle marks, knife wounds, traces of poison, etc. — they would throw new light on any number of events, whose explanations might then be linked to other prior or subsequent facts, which could reopen the whole established history of the kingdom. History would thus be rewritten into something radically different, and people said that in searching the prisoners’ papers the detectives had come across phrases that might have been intended as book titles or as slogans, such as “History as Revised and Corrected by the Mummies,” “Mummo-History,” or simply “The New History.”

There was a sickness floating in the air. The historians and the grave robber el-Gourna were long since dead and buried, but the disturbance they had caused lived on. Opinions never previously heard of were now uttered in places you would have least expected. At night, for no obvious reason, people with faces painted white wandered around the town. The number of seers and ranters increased dramatically. They could been seen haranguing onlookers in public places for hours on end. The only thing that could shut them up was the sight of the forces of law and order.

Everything was up for grabs, and the pyramids first of all. Now that they had been profaned, it seemed easier to express a view about them. People even began to question the correctness of their stellar orientation, of their locations, of the angles of their slopes. Even more fundamental queries were raised concerning the mysterious numbers and the coded message that they were supposed to contain. If this message was what it was supposed to be, why did it secrete a kind of vertigo?

“Come to your senses,” replied other people — those others who in all times and circumstances take the side of the State, even when they are its victims. “Can one doubt the pyramid? It is the incarnation of Egypt. Without it, Egypt would not be what it is. Egypt might even not be called Egypt.”

Nonsense, replied the doubters, Egypt existed before the pyramids. And has anything so awful befallen the Babylonians, the Greeks, or the Trojans, without their pyramids?

“Shush! Be quiet! You dare to liken the motherland to the handful of peasants that constitute Greece and Troy? If I were you I would ask for a pardon for words like that.”

A time came when the confusion about the pyramids was so great that people began to wonder whether they really existed. They were alleged to be mere phantoms, collective hallucinations, mirages that would simply vanish into thin air one fine day. Some people went in for an even subtler analysis, saying that the pyramids, though they did indeed exist as such, reflected the wrong image of themselves, for there was always either something missing or something extraneous in what could be known of them.

However illogical these arguments may seem, more and more often (not just at dusk or in the half-light of dawn, but in broad daylight too) the pyramids appeared to be turning themselves into insubstantial objects made of air. That was now such a frequent impression that many people acquired the habit of looking toward the horizon each morning on wakings apparently uncertain whether the things would still be there.

The notion of immateriality notoriously suggests another, even more serious idea, that of pure and simple absence, Though it still hovered in a state of vagueness, as if it did not quite dare to come together, this latter idea did indeed begin to condense here and there. Could Egypt survive without its pyramids? Could the pyramids disappear? Could space be free of their ghastly protuberance?

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.