It was probable that many others had gone the same way, but they were buried so far inside the edifice that no observation was feasible. Even when a dull thud was heard from the outside, it was never possible to ascertain the exact position of the implosion nor the specific masonry pieces that had been damaged.
Before the first visible signs of degradation occurred, fourteen stones on the northwestern arris turned a shade of gray, Erosion first became clearly perceptible some two hundred and seventy years later. It was not just the gray blocks that showed signs of weather-beatings but the whole array of which they were a part. It was the side most exposed to the desert wind, so that even though the stones used had been among the hardest available, from the Aswan quarry, the weathering was expected and surprised no one.
One hundred and twenty years later, mauvish-gray streaks appeared on a number of pieces on the south face, some of which also came out in pustule-like blisters. The pattern of streaking was completely irregular, which made it all the more difficult to work out its cause.
Signs of erosion began to be perceptible from a distance after one thousand and fifty years. Not just on the north face, ground down by the prevailing winds, but on the east and even the south face too, there were quite varied symptoms of decay, ranging from spongy patches to cracking, channels, holes, and, here and there, small slippages. That is how people came to talk a great deal about one stone on the north face where erosion had gouged out what looked like human features — a bulge that suggested a cheek, lines that could pass for eyebrows — as if some buried face was trying to get out from inside. Gossip about it even reached the palace, and appropriate measures were carefully considered: whether to intervene (with chisels, or more sophisticated instruments) to make the head emerge at greater speed, as was done at childbirth, or to wait patiently for the face to come out of its own accord.
Since the Pharaoh attached importance to the omen and was impatient to know its meaning, he favored intervening, but the High Priest was of the opposite persuasion: profaning the pyramid in such circumstances could have fatal consequences, he said. They agreed therefore to leave things to follow their natural course and posted sentries near to the stone to watch over it night and day. But as time passed the head began to lose its features, as if the unknown visage had had second thoughts and had decided to pull back into the inner depths. Many people were disappointed, not to say cross; others breathed a sigh of relief.
Notwithstanding these phenomena and their interpretations, people were scarcely conscious of the pyramid’s aging. The first to give voice to such a notion were the members of a Greek mission. On first setting eyes on the monument, without even going close enough to see the details, they declared as one man: “Oh! but it’s begun to grow old!”
It is hard to tell whether they said this with regret, with malice, or with satisfaction. The main point is that their words spread mayhem all about. People suddenly felt as if they could see clearly what they had failed to notice up to then: seen as a whole, the pyramid was no longer white and smooth as it was portrayed on old drawings; its four faces were all wrinkly, as if its skin had been damaged by eczema.
But that was only a fleeting impression. Long after, like a mature woman who proves her vitality by having a child late in life, the pyramid, despite being four thousand years old, began to reseed itself in distant places.
Flashes of light, hazy visions racing over the horizon, impossible ideas jostling each other before being carried far and wide on the wind…
That was when people recalled the dream of a pyramid covered in snow, the dream that had first foretold of the pyramid’s shadow falling on the whole of the terrestrial orb.
XV. Skullstacks
LIKE A reflected image, the first avatar of the pyramid’s afterlife occurred at a different time, in a place many thousands of miles away. In deepest Asia, in the steppe of Isfahan, a potentate called Timur the Lame raised a pyramid just as Cheops had done before him. Though Timur’s was made of severed heads instead of stone, the two pyramids were as like as two peas in a pod.
Like its Egyptian predecessor, Timur’s stack had been built according to a plan, with the same number of faces, and just as the stones for the first pyramid had had to be quarried in several different places, so Timur’s seventy thousand heads, since they could not have been taken from a single war or just one qatl i amm (general massacre), had had to be gathered from the battlefields of Tous and Kara Tourgaj as well as from the slaughters of Aksaraj, Tabriz, and Tatch Kurgan. As in the old days, inspectors examined the heads one by one, since the skullstack was supposed to be made exclusively of the heads of men, though it is probably true that the greedy rummagers who delivered the skulls to the site sometimes tried to cheat by shaving the hair and muddying the faces of murdered women, so as to make them unrecognizable. The builders used mortar, but the architect, Kara Houleg, was not confident that it would suffice to protect the monument from the effects of winter weather and wild animals, so he had the skulls pierced and each row strung together, to prevent them being pulled apart by the wind or by wolves. That was how the first twelve rows were put together one by one, followed by a further twenty-two, and then another score, topped by the seven final rows. But they ran out of heads for constructing the vertex of the pyramid: since the surrounding area was now entirely uninhabited, the organizers were obliged to press for the rapid discovery of a group, even if its activities did not yet quite merit the name of conspiracy. Without waiting for suspicions to be confirmed, they had the alleged conspirators cut down like unripe fruit, and so were able to complete their edifice. It became clear that the architect Kara Houleg was rather better informed about his predecessor Imhotep than might have been supposed, since he undertook to explain to his sovereign that it would be proper, in the light of tradition, to place a pyramidion on the summit. So they set off with great guffaws to find a skull of unusual shape. As they found none, they suddenly thought of one of the camp-followers called Mongka, an idiot with an oversize head. The defective was summoned and told: “We’re going to make you into a prince!” After cutting off his head, they poured molten lead over it to general amusement before sticking it right on top of the stack.
When Timur’s army had moved away from Isfahan, leaving its frightful monument in the midst of the steppe, the whole area seemed even more deserted. Crows and jackdaws wheeled over the skullstack, then swooped down to pick at the eyes of the heads that the builders had taken care to place face outward, as Kara Houleg had instructed.
Freezing temperatures came earlier than expected that year. Rain had long since washed away all trace of blood, and quite soon powdery frost covered the slopes of the stack, especially the northern slope. No damage was done to it by winter storms, except for the lightning that was apparently attracted by the leaded head of the idiot Mongka. To everyone’s amazement it made not the slightest scratch to the head itself but remelted the lead, which spread down to form spikes on each side of the forehead and also trickled into the eye-sockets, giving them that look of cloudy vacuousness characteristic of the faces of the gods.
Snow twice covered the pyramid that winter. Toward the spring, when the March winds restored the stack’s dark hue, head and face hair could be seen once again. Pilgrims trekking across Asia were mostly horrified at the sight, but those who knew the history of the world stated that the hair had not appeared by chance: four thousand years earlier, they said, a prophet and martyr had foretold that the pyramid would one day grow a beard. At least, that was the kind of story that you could hear being put about. There were even songs about it; but no one suspected that the legend originated in the chance discovery of a papyrus used to copy down the inquisitor’s interrogation of Setka the Idiot.