VIII. Hearing the Summit
AS THE hot season set in, the view of the pyramid rapidly altered. The ramps were taken down one by one, laying bare the dizzyingly steep sides of the monument itself. Only one hoisting track was left in place, the one that would be used for the last four stones and for the king-piece itself, the pyramidion.
In due course the area surrounding the base was cleared. The barracks that had served as the stonelayers’ sleeping quarters were dismantled, as were the redundant storerooms, messes, and stalls. Broken stones were gathered up and carted away every day together with reed-ropes, planks, broken winches, grappling tools, and all sorts of now useless rubbish.
The dust cloud over the building site began to lighten. But the sense of relief that resulted was not caused by the color of the sky alone. A new brightness spread in stages to the surrounding area, reached the capital, and even pushed on farther, to those remote provinces that good news, unlike bad, never reaches very fast.
Meanwhile the first taverns reopened, if rather hesitantly. Here and there, houses began to sport their numbers again. (It was rumored at the start that they had been removed to stop people finding their friends’ dwellings, and so to prevent the holding of dinner parties.) It became increasingly normal to see charcoal graffiti saying, ”We’ve built the pyramid! Now let’s have some fun!”
Passersby nodded their heads. About time too, they said.
The flame of joy flickered but would not crackle, as if the logs in the hearth were still too green.
A single stone that had come adrift and tumbled down from the penultimate step had been enough to bring everything to a halt. Even without the investigation that the accident caused, those would have been very gloomy times. People felt that ancient, probably already dead afternoons had returned to cast their drab and guilt-laden light over them. Others imagined they were reliving a previous season. But even then they did not doubt that once the pyramid had been completed their field of vision would grow clearer and that things would find their right places again.
All the same the order to hoist up the last four pieces had still not come. Nor was there any mention of setting the pyramidion. It was allegedly being covered in gold leaf in some secret temple.
At dusk the ramp that would be used to push it up to the vertex looked like a fragile wire along which only spirits could travel.
Around the hut where the last four pieces had been stored and which was now guarded by sentries, god knows why, people could barely hide their amusement. To be sure, these stones were more important than the others, since the pyramidion itself would stand directly on them, but all the same, they were only bits of stone, not ministers, to be guarded like that! Others thought quite the opposite, that ministers were only transitory things, whereas those blocks of stone would live on until the end of time.
The four last stones and the pyramidion were referred to as if they were living people. The quarry of origin of one of them was even kept secret. On its delivery, so the story went, it was still bloodstained from the body of a man it had crushed on the way. So what, some people said, even if it has killed a man! We all know that the journey from a quarry to the pyramid is not an afternoon stroll!
People with business in the capital came back full of news. New bars had opened, there was more and more writing on the walls. Today’s youngsters, they said, young lads born at about the time construction started, were almost fearless. They had still been kids when the first step had been laid, so they had no knowledge of the first and most terrible stage of the work, before the pyramid had become visible.
Most people thought that that earliest phase was indeed the one that had been the most soul-destroying. Thereafter, as it came out of the depths, the pyramid had become less fearsome. It was even so obvious that when the youngsters reproached their parents for having been over-fearful, the older generation replied: “ You are only saying that because you have no idea of what a pyramid is like before it can be seen.” The young folk shook their heads in disbelief. They would have found the opposite more credible.
The notion that the pyramid had become less frightening as it had become more visible was perhaps the source of a wave of nostalgia for the first phase of the building work that spread among the stalwarts of the State, and particularly among old pyramid hands. Young people enjoyed poking fun at the veterans’ hopes that the good old days would return, “So are you waiting for the pyramid to go invisible?” they would ask, with snorts of laughter.
The old hands smiled back. But not without irony.
The idea of building another pyramid at first seemed so crazy that it was attributed less to wistful veterans than to the ravings of Setka, the idiot who had bepn allowed to hang around the monument ever since the foreman had declared that there was no building site in the world that didn’t have a cretin attached to it. But later on people recalled old facts that had seemed puzzling at the time and whose significance was now becoming clear. For instance, that the Pharaoh Zoser, after completing his own pyramid, had had four giant stairways added, thereby extending the construction work by seven years. Or that Seneferu had had three pyramids built, without ever revealing which of the three contained his tomb. From this it could easily be inferred that the imminent completion of one pyramid automatically gave rise to the idea that another one was about to be started from scratch. But a firm speech by the architect-in-chief referring in particular to the rumor about the possible birth of a new pyramid made it absolutely clear that the Pharaoh would entertain no such notion.
A fortnight later, the unbuilding of a part of the pyramid (there was talk in bars of reconstructing the topmost part, or even a whole slope, as a piece of cloth might be unpicked and resewn) was denounced with equal firmness, and it became quite clear that not a single stone of the pyramid would be touched.
All that the disappointed veterans could do now was to dream of the pyramid returning to the dust and muddle of its youth, but that seemed as unlikely as their own rejuvenation At the same time, and to the great displeasure of the old-timers, the taverns where young folk gathered grew noisier; and, as if that was not enough, perfume sellers’ stalls that had long been closed were allowed to reopen one by one.