The sharpest minds tried to clarify the causes of this all-pervading decline. The exhaustion and the misleading glow in which everything was now suffused was obviously not easy to explain. Everything was unwinding and drawing back as if before a ghost. But the hardest task was to track down the lever or cog responsible for the sluggishness of a machine that was supposed to know no rest, that is to say the intelligence service. And it was even harder to pierce the reasons for this dense and alien silence that had enveloped both camps, persecutors and persecuted alike.
Some nodded skeptically. Don’t go looking for explanations when there aren’t any, they objected. It’s the silence of the tomb, and nothing more. Every grave has its silence underground. The pyramid has its silence right up there.
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.