The magus had a lot of trouble persuading him not to go. All the same, with an escort of no more than a handful of guards, they did actually go one night to look at the pyramid on site.
It was quite still Moonlight poured down from its vertex onto its sloping sides and illuminated the whole desert.
Cheops gazed at it in silence. He appeared quite serene. Just once he mumbled to the magician: “I think it wants me,”
During the following days Cheops fell into an even deeper state of exhaustion. He babbled to himself for hours on end. At times he would wring his hands like a man trying to justify himself, seeking to explain why he can do absolutely nothing, no really, nothing at all, while his impassive interlocutor doesn’t believe a single word.
He died exactly three years after completion of the building work.
Sixty days later, after the funeral rites had been performed, his embalmed body was encased in a sarcophagus, and tens of thousands of people waited outside for hours on end, watching the great mountain of masonry.
Now that it had received the mummy that it was intended to house, the pyramid seemed to have achieved fulfillment. After consuming so many destinies, after devouring so many lives, it now rose up, haughty and triumphant, and sparkled in the sunlight.
A good part of the crowd that had gathered to gaze at it, and especially those whose sons or husbands had been convicted, recalled their loved ones’ unending anxiety in the expectation of arrest, their last nights before being deported or sent to the quarries, the moments when they had been wrenched away from their families. They had subsequently learned fragments of what the deportees had suffered; interrogations, confessions under torture, dementia. Yet, curiously, that had not given rise to hatred among these people. They felt in a muddled way that as long as the pyramid was there, blocking the horizon of their lives, then neither hate nor love would ever manage to form in their breasts. An unhealthy evenness of temper and a wretched listlessness had taken the place of all other feelings, just as tasteless beans had long since replaced the more succulent dishes of bygone days.
All that they had lost only came to mind in vague and hesitant ways. Gay feasts among friends, love affairs, scandals, crazy poets chasing from one inn to another with their delirious words. All those things had progressively been eradicated from their own lives, blown away like so many shadows. The higher the pyramid had grown, the more distant all those things had become. They were so far away now, lost in nameless deserts and reed beds, that they could never find their way back.
One winter morning the new Pharaoh, Didoufri, announced the commencement of construction of his own pyramid to his ministers and closest advisers. Also present were Cheops’s other son, Chephren, and his only daughter, Hentsen, who for many years had not set foot inside the palace from which she had been banned because of her misdemeanors.
All listened with tense expressions to the Pharaoh’s words. The sovereign made no particular recommendation about the height of the vertex or the length of the arrises, and the assembled company was unable to decide whether that was a good thing or not.
Hentsen did not even try to hide her contempt for the behavior of the others. Latterly, people said, she had taken advantage of her father’s senility to indulge in her latest whim — a pyramid of her own! It was rumored that she had required each of her lovers to supply a certain number of stones, so that people wondered just how many more lovers she would need in order to get her pyramid up.
There was a lot of gossip about this in the capital. People called it all sorts of things — the female pyramid, the shadow of Hentsen’s cunt, its forward projection, the measure of its depth, a phallus demonstrating its receptive capacity, a vaginometer. She had wind of all these comments, but she was not bothered by them. She was even reputed to have declared: “Since the women of Egypt have gone frigid and given up sex, I shall make love for them all! May the pyramid prove that I am not boasting!”
The new Pharaoh was nearing the end of his speech. His younger brother Chephren, with his hairdo that was, to say the least, bizarre, was suffocating with jealousy and resentment. Oh, let my time come soon, he thought, consumed by bitterness. Let it at least come!
The thought of the day when he too could become Pharaoh filled him with melancholy, as when one dreams of unattainable things, and he was within a hair’s breadth of bursting into tears.
Provided the day came for him to have his own pyramid, then people would see what stuff he was made of! He had discovered a very old statuette of a sphinx, which he hung on to like a fetish. When his friends asked him what was the meaning of his new hairstyle, where had he got the idea, and so on, he would just give an enigmatic smile. For it was the sphinx’s coiffure.
He felt intuitively that this hairstyle possessed dark powers. He would do his hair that way for ever more, even when it began to thin out. Later on, for his own pyramid, he would have a giant sphinx carved in stone and placed at the base. A squatting lion with his own face. “Who art thou?” hordes of visitors would ask over the coming millennia. “Art thou Chephren? How didst thou become Pharaoh? What didst thou to Didoufri?”
But as we all know, the sphinx never answers questions.
XII. Profanation
AS THE ancient papyri tell, pyramids played their role as celestial go-betweens most particularly on nights when the moon was full It was then that they would best capture the orb’s wan and eerie glow and pass it on, drop by drop, to the depths of the earth, to the nameless black rocks encased in mud and void, and diamonds blinded by the light that they were unable to shed. The rays would also catch the skulls of the dead, lighting up their eye sockets for a second, before they went black again. Conversely, the tips of these monuments, with their granite pyramidions, spewed out god knows what ghastliness toward the sky— the kind of excrement of which the earth always has a surfeit and must relieve itself from time to time.
They now lay close beside each other over there, just as they had lived together previously in the forbidden city, during their earthly reign.
The pyramid of Cheops. At its base, the pyramid of his double, much smaller in size. The pyramid of Chephren, with its crouching sphinx. The female pyramid, Then, set some way off, the unfinished pyramid of Didoufri.
The female pyramid was the first to be broken into by robbers. It was on a hot and humid night. The crowbars trembled in the robbers’ hands, for it was the first time they had ever tried to get into a monument of this kind. For several nights they had wondered which pyramid they were going to start on. Because it had not been possible to eradicate quite perfectly all trace of the secret entrances, they hesitated between the female pyramid and Didoufri’s, which, as the tomb of a prematurely deceased sovereign, had been left unfinished; as for the former, it had been put up thanks to Hentsen’s lovers, who, despite the fond memories they may have kept of their mistress, seemed not to have taken all the care required (probably because they had had a good part of their stones delivered straight after having slept with the Pharaoh’s daughter, when the passion of even the most ardent lover is somewhat abated).
So they spent a longtime trying to decide. There was not much to choose between them, with as many advantages and as many disadvantages on this side as on that. In the end they decided to profane the female pyramid, which, when all was said and done, looked the less daunting of the two. As they were accustomed to violating women anyway, an attack on the tomb of a woman seemed more natural to them.
They found it much easier than they had expected to locate the place in the wall where the main gallery began, and much easier also to remove the obstructions; as a result, by dawn they were very near to the chamber containing the sarcophagus. They were exhausted, and lay down on the ice-cold flagstones, waiting for dusk.