The Pyramid

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.

The architect-in-chief thought he had at last found the reason for the team’s confusion. His face went white with anger and he asked: “Hey, you! What are you looking for here?” The chief prosecutor shrugged his shoulders as if he had not understood the question. “Out!” yelled the architect. The inquisitor and his deputy walked out in dead silence.

Straight away the flood of convictions and the zealous pursuit of the investigation both slackened, and the pyramid returned to the center of attention. The ceremony for the award of a decoration to Hemiunu (corroborating the rumor that it was he who had first unraveled the plot) was the signal for a period of reduced tension and for a new leap forward.

The immediate consequence was increased speed in all sectors of work on the pyramid. Everywhere you could see feverish activity and commotion. Clouds of dust swirled over the site where workmen were busy setting up at the greatest possible speed the barracks needed for sheltering one hundred thousand men, and especially over the now level terrain to which the first stones were being delivered.

The hour for the start of building work proper was fast approaching. The dust and the heat, instead of wearying people, now seemed to stimulate them. As long as the anxiety is cleared up, they said among themselves, all the rest is bearable! And while their hearts flowed over with gratitude for their savior, the Pharaoh, they dashed about frantically, causing more confusion and raising more sand than was necessary, in the belief that by drowning themselves in hullabaloo and dirt, they would also confound evil and divert it from its path.

Their hopes were short-lived. The day before the first stone was due to be laid, a new plot was uncovered, even more dangerous than the first.

This time, to everyone’s amazement, it was the High Priest Hemiunu who fell into disgrace. After him, it was the turn of Khadrihotep, the head of the secret police, and then of the vizier for foreign affairs, A tumbrel of other high officials followed in their wake. Every morning people learned with a shudder of terror the names of those arrested during the previous night. Everyone expected more raids, and now that Hemiunu himself, the untouchable Hemiunu, had fallen, the arrest of more or less anyone seemed quite natural.

For a while the relatives of those convicted for the first plot raised their heads, thinking that the fall of Hemiunu would lead to their return to favor. But they quickly grasped that nothing of the sort would ensue. During an important meeting, a spokesman for the Pharaoh explained that even if the High Priest had indeed denounced the first plot, that did not mean that the plot itself had not existed, Hemiunu had long known about the first plot but had waited for the right moment before revealing it, so as to hoodwink the Pharaoh and to direct any possible suspicion away from his own plot, which was the more sinister.

The investigation of the new affair took its course over several weeks. Often the names of those to be arrested were known in advance, which only served to increase the general state of anxiety, Curiously, alongside fear, people also felt a morbid kind of satisfaction. They were unhealthily effusive, as if their souls had become as soft as sodden shoes, and they chattered deliriously, casting anathemas on the enemies of the State in a sort of sincere intoxication whose origins they themselves were incapable of seeing, while expressing with no lesser sincerity their adoration of their sovereign and master, the Pharaoh.

Meanwhile extraordinary rumors went around about the pyramid. Some ascribed the slow rate of work and the meager results so far to the machinations of the conspirators. Others maintained that the plan itself was ill-conceived, but they hinted that it would take decades before the flaws would come to light. A third group asserted peremptorily that everything had been done wrong — the site was wrong, the drawings were wrong, the access routes and even the quarries had not been correctly selected — with the net result that the pyramid could never be completed. Appropriate measures were taken to deal with the latter, and they soon shut their mouths. No force in the world could stop the building, it was declared at a further summit meeting. The conspirators had certainly tried to hinder it, but the damage done by them was not of a scale that would jeopardize the outcome. Nothing escaped the eye of Cheops, and however diabolical the plotters might be, they would no longer dare indulge in clumsy sabotage.

After losing the last, albeit vague, hope that had renewed their spirits for a time, people returned to their posts in a state of irremediable resignation seeking oblivion in an atmosphere that high summer and desert dust made un-breathable.

A last wave of confusion descended on the plateau. Some people whispered that the day of the inauguration of construction work proper was near. All the same, nobody was able to give any more precise details. One mornings four workmen were crucified (in human memory, no pyramid had ever been built without workmen being sentenced to death), then, suddenly, the next dawn broke to the sound of drums announcing that the great day had finally come.

Cheops attended the ceremony in person. A fair number of new ministers and dignitaries made their first appearance in public. The High Priest Rahotep, Hemiunu’s successor, came at the head of the procession, his pallor making his face look even more rigid. Foreign ambassadors and other guests, lined up on either side of the platform that had been put up for the occasion, craned their necks out of curiosity, to see the Pharaoh. Another group of guests, set behind the first and separated from it by a further line of guards, swayed like reeds in the wind. They were quite far from the rostrum, made more noise than was fitting and criticized the flamboyant hair-dye used by the new ministers, or else exchanged the very latest news, most of which had to do with the pyramid. There was a rumor that the old scribe Sesostris, when he gathered from his invitation what ceremony was involved, had exclaimed: “The pyramid? You mean it’s not finished yet?”

Although this remark was mentioned with pained expressions, everyone was immediately struck by it, reckoning that the old man’s words were by no means entirely misdirected. At one time or another everyone had had the impression that the pyramid had already been, if not completed, then at least more than half-built. It had been on their backs, and, more profoundly, inside them, for such a long time already that they would hardly have been surprised if someone on the rostrum that day were to declare that the pyramid whose construction was about to commence before their eyes was not the pyramid itself, but its double, or its replica.