The old reprobate was tracked to his lair, but, despite being half-drunk when clapped into irons, he had the wit to make it clear that in reality he had only ever seen the welts on the neck of the mummy of Didoufri in his dreams.
Nonetheless, toward dawn the next day, he finally confessed, and the investigating team took the man in chains back with them to the profaned pyramid. They moved aside the stone that hid the granite panel that blocked the entrance to the main gallery, they went inside, past the vinegar-soaked masks that still lay on the floor, to the funeral chamber where, with bulging eyes, they looked upon the open sarcophagus — when the head palace messenger rushed in after them with an order from the Pharaoh to desist forthwith from inspecting the mummy.
New veils of mystery enshrouded the case thenceforth. But as often happens when too much trouble is taken to keep something secret, the truth trickled out fairly soon, and more or less everything that had been in the historians’ minds became common knowledge. Their plan had indeed been a gruesome one: they had intended laying their hands on all the mummies in the pyramids, transferring them to some discreet lair in Egypt or abroad, and submitting each of their organs to minute examination. From the evidence that they might thus uncover — throttle marks, knife wounds, traces of poison, etc. — they would throw new light on any number of events, whose explanations might then be linked to other prior or subsequent facts, which could reopen the whole established history of the kingdom. History would thus be rewritten into something radically different, and people said that in searching the prisoners’ papers the detectives had come across phrases that might have been intended as book titles or as slogans, such as “History as Revised and Corrected by the Mummies,” “Mummo-History,” or simply “The New History.”
There was a sickness floating in the air. The historians and the grave robber el-Gourna were long since dead and buried, but the disturbance they had caused lived on. Opinions never previously heard of were now uttered in places you would have least expected. At night, for no obvious reason, people with faces painted white wandered around the town. The number of seers and ranters increased dramatically. They could been seen haranguing onlookers in public places for hours on end. The only thing that could shut them up was the sight of the forces of law and order.
Everything was up for grabs, and the pyramids first of all. Now that they had been profaned, it seemed easier to express a view about them. People even began to question the correctness of their stellar orientation, of their locations, of the angles of their slopes. Even more fundamental queries were raised concerning the mysterious numbers and the coded message that they were supposed to contain. If this message was what it was supposed to be, why did it secrete a kind of vertigo?
“Come to your senses,” replied other people — those others who in all times and circumstances take the side of the State, even when they are its victims. “Can one doubt the pyramid? It is the incarnation of Egypt. Without it, Egypt would not be what it is. Egypt might even not be called Egypt.”
Nonsense, replied the doubters, Egypt existed before the pyramids. And has anything so awful befallen the Babylonians, the Greeks, or the Trojans, without their pyramids?
“Shush! Be quiet! You dare to liken the motherland to the handful of peasants that constitute Greece and Troy? If I were you I would ask for a pardon for words like that.”
A time came when the confusion about the pyramids was so great that people began to wonder whether they really existed. They were alleged to be mere phantoms, collective hallucinations, mirages that would simply vanish into thin air one fine day. Some people went in for an even subtler analysis, saying that the pyramids, though they did indeed exist as such, reflected the wrong image of themselves, for there was always either something missing or something extraneous in what could be known of them.
However illogical these arguments may seem, more and more often (not just at dusk or in the half-light of dawn, but in broad daylight too) the pyramids appeared to be turning themselves into insubstantial objects made of air. That was now such a frequent impression that many people acquired the habit of looking toward the horizon each morning on wakings apparently uncertain whether the things would still be there.
The notion of immateriality notoriously suggests another, even more serious idea, that of pure and simple absence, Though it still hovered in a state of vagueness, as if it did not quite dare to come together, this latter idea did indeed begin to condense here and there. Could Egypt survive without its pyramids? Could the pyramids disappear? Could space be free of their ghastly protuberance?
People said “pyramids,” but it was not hard to guess that they meant “Pharaohs,” and they eventually gave free rein to their thoughts by alluding directly to a sovereign. Obviously not to the living sovereign, Mykerinos, but to a dead one.
To begin with, the target of their talk was not at all clear, but soon the buzzing converged, foreseeably enough, on the one whose pile of stone was higher than all the others, namely Cheops. The first graffiti were not particularly inspired (Hump off Cheops!), but it was soon realized that the forces of law and order were always too late by the time that they got to the defaced wall. When the clean-up teams came along with their buckets of whitewash, the crowds grew bolder and began to throw blunter insults at the pyramids. It became obvious that, for reasons that the State alone could clarify, a revision of the figure of Cheops was unavoidable. Many thought the required change had been dictated by foreign policy considerations, others believed that it was in order to redirect the surge of discontent onto a corpse, but very few ascribed it to plain and simple jealousy, aroused by the unusual dimensions of Cheops’s pyramid.
In actual fact, far more outrage was expressed about the monument’s size than about Cheops himself. Upper and Lower Egypt alike were in unprecedented turmoil and chaos. Previously placid and slow-witted folk — just ordinary bakers or clothiers — started to wake in a start, in high dudgeon, eyes bulging, bursting with indignation. “I was only a mere strip of a thing when they were building the pyramid, but I came close to using my bare hands to smash stone number two thousand eight hundred and three on the eightieth row!” Others told of their exploits, of how they had cursed row forty-nine, or pissed on row fifty-three, or indeed, of how on one dark night they had muttered “Go to hell!” and so on. In Memphis, in city-center bars, poets recalled the lines they had written and which, they claimed, contained anti-Cheoptic allusions — and the fear they had felt, for that reason, Amenherounemef, his eyes now watery with age, told of the terrible beating he had been given for composing the following couplet: