As they chatted, it seemed as if something kept on forming and then dissolving in their souls, and as it did so, it seemed to change their feelings about the pyramid. One day they bowed down before its perfection and wished only to be integral parts of its system; the next day, they would curse the monument holding it responsible for all their ills; then they would take full responsibility for their suffering onto themselves; then they laid it at the door of fate; and finally swooned with admiration once again, before going pale with hatred the next day, and so on, repeatedly.
Old legends, some engraved on obelisks but most of them handed down by word of mouth, which said that the pyramid symbolized the balance between heaven and earth, that it drew in the light of the one and the darkness of the other, that it was like a cavern where the two worlds sealed their pact, or their coupling, which was maybe even an incestuous one, or the devil knows what, were now interpreted differently.
There was not a shadow of doubt that something underhand was going on in there. Just as under the crushing weight of the masonry, light turned first into darkness and then into a prismatic sparkle, so adoration, after being carbonized into hatred, turned itself into something quite different.
However dulled their minds may have been, people grasped perfectly well that the pyramid was less well adapted to drawing down celestial light or semen than it was to consuming the.whole of Egypt. It had already digested Egypt once before, some people pointed out, during its construction; now it was chewing the cud, like a buffalo munching his hay for the second time.
Some thought that Egypt’s ingestion by the pyramid was a calamity, others saw it as a blessing. Out of the accumulation of sufferings and their compression, the latter claimed, a new Egypt was being born, a purer land, crystalline and sparkling. Happy are they who will be able to benefit from it, as we do!
Meanwhile the investigation proceeded, and, in keeping with ancient custom, blind horses were used to take the scrolls and the chests in which statements were filed to the temple of Amun, whence they were dispatched before sundown to the investigators’ offices. There was supposed to be a vast muddle of the most disparate objects lying there: still undeciphered reports from the Trojan messengers, decayed teeth, the iron needles that the old woman Bent Anat used to abort prostitutes, stones from the very bottom step, all the names of the builders of the twelfth step (three thousand eight hundred of them), the piece of rope that the Sumerian ambassador used to hang himself long ago, crushed scorpions, palm leaves, poems with double meanings, sand from the oasis of Farafra, which was where the magician Sa Aset was suspected of having cursed Egypt the night before he left, and even the bones of that infamous jackal, the one that had howled after the stone — the stone whose name and origin were still equally and entirely unknown — on that unforgettable mid-October night when all this horror had begun.
Nobody, not even the investigators themselves, quite understood the criteria used for selecting and sorting the evidence. For instance, it was impossible to know why the crate containing the wheel recovered from the swamp at Behedet (the wheel was suspected of having belonged to the carriage of the Babylonian ambassador the one who had delivered the vials of poison to the treacherous vizier Horemuya) also contained the poem The Old Quarry, by Nebounenef, together with the malicious interpretation of it written by his fellow-poet Amenherounemef, who claimed that the author’s exaggerated liking for the old quarry of Luxor (where the stone of the first four’steps had been hewn) was but an expression of his discontent, not to say of his resentment against the State, sentiments expressed transparently in the following lines:
Now all alone beneath the light of the moon
You recall once again the days of your youth
When you gave birth to pyramids…
But even if that was pretty unintelligible, it was even harder to understand why they had put in the same file as the poem the Sumerian ambassador’s wife’s underwear, as well as the papyrus used to record the results of the investigation of the poor fool Setka, in particular his allegedly ambiguous claims about the hair that was supposed to grow on. the pyramid one day, together with the investigating magistrate’s questions: “So, now we have pulled all your hairs out, will you still not confess?” and the mental defective’s replies: “I’ve nothing to add, I’ve said all I had to say, and as for that thing, it’ll grow not just a beard, but eyes and teeth too!” Upon which his eyes and teeth were pulled out, which might not have occurred had the idiot not suggested it himself.
X. Topping Out
The Pyramid Demands Its Mummy
WHEN news broke that the pyramid was finished, the inhabitants of the capital, who were the first to hear it, were dumbfounded, A fair number cupped their hands to their ears.
“You said the investigation was finished?”
“No, not the investigation, the pyramid!”
“Oh, that pyramid…”
The dirt of a quite different kind of construction was still on their backs; their ears were still full of the echoes of relentless interrogations: You maintain that you never were on row eighty-one? that you said nothing to the hauler of stone number fifteen hundred and two? But why don’t you confess? We know it all anyway! As a result, for a long while few people had cared very much about what was going on on the ground at Giza.
Yet work on the pyramid had proceeded as in a dream, without a hitch. Dressed stone slabs were placed on the upper part of the north slope, and the other slopes that had inexplicably been left bare until then were also finished with limestone panels, progressively concealing the raw masonry blocks that had been hauled there from distant places under clouds of dust and secrecy; then workers set the four very last blocks that had been delayed for so long (the order was brought one afternoon by a black-veiled messenger); and finally, they raised the pyramidion to the vertex of the monument, It was the kingstone, dressed in gold leaf that sparkled even before moonrise, and it aroused an uncanny kind of commiseration. From the moment it was put into place until the dawn of the following day, people expected the sky to redden and bleed from being scratched by the pyramidion’s tip: blood-rain should have trickled down the steps: but nothing of the sort came to pass. Without delay, as if they were cutting a newborn child’s umbilical cord, workers dismantled the hoisting ramp that had served to raise the final stones, and thus removed the last remaining link between the ground and the vertex.
Although public attention had mostly been fixed on what was happening on the outside and at the top, far more extensive work had been going on lower down inside the pyramid. The black granite doors were locked shut, as were the false doors that people might have suspected of being real, as well as other entry ways that it would have been wiser to consider as giving onto dead-end galleries had they ever been reopened, and so on, The “dead men,” as the inside workers were called, suffered from incessant-migraines, They pretended that they did not know the secret of the false sliding doors, nor of the ones believed to be real but which it was preferable to consider false, unless it was the other way round — and as a result they were permanently confused, and had no real idea, in the end, of what was what. They could not decide whether it would be better for them to take some initiative, or on the contrary to leave things to their fate; they would pace up and down., grinning, sighing, and scowling, as if they were demented, pretending not to be pretending., and eventually, at their wits’ end, they would break down.