Pyramidal phenomena occurred in cycles, without it ever being possible to determine precisely the timing of their appearance: for no one has ever been able to establish with certainty whether what happens is the future, or just the past moving backward, like a crab. People ended up accepting that maybe neither the past nor the future were what they were thought to be, since both could reverse their direction of travel, like trams at a terminus.
One morning a fair-haired tourist who was taking photographs of the pyramid made a wish: that the monument should become quite transparent, so that everything inside — the sarcophagi, the mummies, the indecipherable puzzle — would be visible, as through a wall of glass. Day was breaking, the pyramid began to go hazy, and the tourist could feel a shiver in his soul with each passing minute, as if he were at a spiritualist seance and about to take a snapshot of a ghost.
He developed his roll of film the same evening, and the pyramid really did look like a glass house, except that on one edge, near the ninth row on the northeast slope, you could see some kind of blemish. He took the film out of the developer, put it back in… to a depth of a thousand, of four thousand years. . but when he finally took it out, the blemish was still there. It was not, as he had first thought, a fault in the film. It was a bloodstain that neither water nor acid would ever wash clean.
Tirana-Paris, 1988–1992