“Come and have a look,” said One-eye.
They came over and saw that One-eye had stripped the linen bandages off the mummy’s face. Toudhalia and the torchbearer screwed up their faces in disgust.
“Just have look at these marks,” One-eye whispered, “You can see right away that the man was strangled.”
“Hm,” muttered Bronzejaw as he leaned over to look more closely. “My word, you’re right. He had his neck wrung like a chicken.”
“What? What are you saying?” the torchbearer exclaimed.
“What are we saying?” Toudhalia repeated. “He had his neck wrung? A Pharaoh had his neck wrung?”
Bronzejaw’s eyes clouded over.
“Listen here,” he said. “We’re just plain robbers, and this has nothing to do with us at all” (His voice trailed off into a tiny whisper.) “These are matters of high politics. None of our business, OK? And you!” he almost roared at One-eye. “It’s not your job to examine mummies’ necks! No one asked you to! Right?”
“Sure, sure,” One-eye conceded. “That’s enough bawling, you’ll rock the pyramid.”
“Ill bawl louder still if I want to, got that? You must know that stuff like that could get us the chop! What did Tut the Hobbler get done in for? Why were Beetroot and his brother strung up? All their lives they jimmied doors and nothing happened to them, then one day, just a hint of politics in some dive, and they were done for. No politics on my patch, you hear that? If it itches, go scratch yourselves somewhere else, but don’t cross with me. Have I made myself plain?”
“All right, all right,” One-eye said. “We’ve got you loud and clear.”
It was still dark when they came to the exit. The stars were beginning to fade. They left their masks inside the gallery and came out in line. It was quite chilly, Toudhalia, who was expert in walking without leaving footprints, also destroyed the traces of.his fellow-robbers’ passage. He could not quite get over what he had just heard. A Pharaoh with his neck wrung… “The bastards,” he muttered to One-eye between his teeth, “They must have squabbled worse than we do over those kinds of jewels.”
Toward daybreak they were trekking alongside the pyramid of Chephren. The sphinx was still shrouded in darkness. Only its hair — the hair that had given rise to so much gossip — was visible in the first rays of daylight.
They quickened their step, for they could not have stood the stare of the sphinx. By the light of the moon, people said, it could drive you out of your mind.
One-eye brought up the rear. His head felt as though it was going to burst. He could not get the marks of strangling on the mummy’s neck out of his mind. They were sure to come back to him in his dreams.
One last time he raised his eyes toward the sphinx. The morning sun had now reached its eyes. Their blank stare froze him as it had never done before. He wanted to shout out: “Sphinx, what didst thou do to thy brother? How didst thou kill him?” But his voice was stifled in his breast.
XIII. The Counterpyramid
THE FIRST attack on it came one December afternoon. A solitary shaft of lightning that had escaped for sure from the alien skies of the north fell upon it, but at the last minute, for reasons never properly understood, it split in two and, with an apocalyptic clap, shattered in the surrounding desert.
This first demonstration of its manifestly inviolable pact with the heavens aroused a profound sense of joy in the whole land. No one was aware that what the heavens could not do had been achieved already from below, by the men who had surreptitiously made their way into the pyramid.
The robbery had taken place years before, but since all trace of the profanation had been cunningly hidden, no one had had a clue. Maybe the truth would never have been known, had it not emerged where it was least expected — at a trial of writers.
When a group of scribes was arrested on suspicion that they were elaborating certain unorthodox historical conceptions, everyone expected a particular kind of trial, of the sort usually followed by high society or even by members of the diplomatic corps, in which the men in the dock are less the object of judgment than the ideas that they hold.
While an awkward moment for the educated classes was thought to be in the offing, news broke like a thunderbolt that the Historians’ Affair was not at all a glamorous trial of intellectuals but a case that boiled down to nothing more than an abominable, unprecedented act of burglary…
People hearing the news for the first time went pale and weakened at the knees. Mummies had been stripped and profaned! Evil had scaled new heights. It had entered the realm of shadows. Everyone was gripped by a sense of sinister horror. Death itself had been robbed, so to speak.
It was so serious that many could not bring themselves to believe it was true. Had Egyptian historians sunk so low as to swap their styluses for crowbars? To go in for burglary in the middle of the desert?
But on the heels of this first confused and sensational version of the story came clearer and more precise details. The detectives on the case had found not only that the secret entrances had been dismantled but that the sarcophagi had been opened. The vinegar-soaked masks used by the bandits had been found at the site, as if they had wanted to be rid of them before running away.
The robbers had left the mummies where they were, thank God, but only by fortunate chance. For the mummies themselves must have been the target of the most shameless intention of all. The mere thought of it made people shiver. No one could say exactly what the robbers had planned to do with the mummies. Some thought they had meant to burn them, as barbarians do. Others reckoned that they would have taken the mummies to the far-off lands in the north, to put them on show, on kinds of platforms, and then auction them. In the highest circles, however, it was thought that this affair had more serious ramifications than appeared at first sight.
What aroused public curiosity above all was the way in which the group’s machinations had been brought to light.
In actual fact, a veil of uncertainty periodically enshrouded the case. The accused, like most educated people, were hardly very vigorous; indeed, they were rather rather puny men, so it was not easy to imagine them handling great levers and shifting huge chunks of pyramidal masonry.
The secret police, concerned at people muttering such things, leaked sufficient details to clarify part of the mystery, specifically concerning how the discovery had been made.
It had all begun in a very ordinary way. For some time already the police had been in possession of a file on a group of scribes who were putting about new and rather bizarre ideas about the history of the State, not in accordance with official thinking. Although the authorities had alerted the palace, the affair had apparently not been considered important, so everything had stayed in the air. However, an anonymous letter — thank heavens, papyrus now allowed people to write letters, and, even more importantly, to deliver them with ease, for a Sumerian would have needed ten or fifteen clay tablets, not to mention other peoples who were still carving on stone and would have needed a pair of buffalo to haul their letter to its addressee, leaving aside all the other nuisances, such as the din of hammer and chisel that would have kept a whole neighborhood awake for a week! — an anonymous letter, then, had warned the Pha-raoh, Mykerinos, of this new danger.
That was all that had been needed to get down to work. One spy and two undercover agents who infiltrated the group collected all the material that was needed, so that one fine morning, before daybreak, the ineluctable result occurred: arrests were made.
The inquiry was set up straight away, in utter secrecy, What the detectives were really after was to know where the young historians had first got their idea of questioning the official history of the realm. When after a variety of forms of torture the historians finally admitted that their crime had had its first beginning in a conversation with grave robbers, the upshot of which had led them to revise their conception of History from top to bottom, they were suspected of thumbing their noses at the authorities. They were put on the rack one more time, and were also the first to be subjected to a new truth-extraction device that had only just received its approval certificate. But although they found it difficult to articulate properly because of their swollen tongues (caused by scorpion stings), they mainly repeated what they had already declared: the idea of rewriting history had been suggested to them by an inebriated robber in a sordid bar called The Crab, They were tortured again, but were as pigheaded as ever, repeating their original version of the story (in writing, at this stage, since their speech had become incomprehensible — as bad as Sumerian!) and also gave away the name of the thief, a certain Abd el-Gourna, also known as One-eye.