The Pyramid (13 page)

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.

A
S 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.

When at long last the night seemed to them to be thick enough, Bronzejaw (so named because he was the eldest) made the first attempt at operating the heaviest lever of the doorway’s mechanism. But the black granite mass did not budge an inch.

“Go on, bitch!” he grunted as he gave another shove.

Unlocking the mechanism and the effort they then had to make to move the door panel drained them to such an extent that when they finally fell into the funeral chamber they barely had enough strength left to stay upright.

Bronzejaw was the first to stand up; then Toudhalia and One-eye followed suit. They knew from experience that torchlight always makes ornaments look more precious than they really are, so they held back from exulting prematurely. Bronzejaw ran his hand over the treasures in turn, saying only, between his teeth:
“
Whore! You whore!” After surveying all that was around him, he came back to study the sarcophagus. The others stood and watched as he slid his crowbar into a crack.

As they had predicted, the most valuable adornments were indeed inside the coffin. After they had gathered up all the precious objects and stowed them away in leather bags, the coffin and its mummy looked pretty dull and poor.

“Don’t move the light about like that!” shouted Toudhalia to the torchbearer, for he could not bear to see the mummy’s face. As a grave robber, he knew that once tombs have been opened, mummies sometimes ignite and burn to a cinder straight away, but he could not get used to it.

While he and Bronzejaw tapped the walls, hoping to find another door, leading perhaps to the chamber of offerings, One-eye leaned over the open coffin.

“What are you up to in there?” Bronzejaw enquired.

One-eye’s one eye twinkled.

“I want to remove the swaddling to see her cunt,” he said gruffly. “I’ve so often wondered what it was like, for people to make a whole legend out of it!”

“ A whore’s cunt, nothing more, nothing less,” Bronzejaw grunted without turning round. “You’d do better to come and help us find the other door.”

“What are you trying to do?” Toudhalia screamed in horror, believing that One-eye, still leaning over the mummy, was really going to remove the strips of linen.

“Her face is slowly turning black,” One-eye observed. “I didn’t think that happened to royal mummies.”

“For heaven’s sake, leave that mummy alone and get over here!” Toudhalia said.

He kept a close eye on his fellow-robber, fearing he was about to grapple with the corpse at any moment. But One-eye had got hold of a burned-out torch-end and was using it to scrawl obscene words and images on the walls.

“What a nutcase!” Bronzejaw exclaimed as he continued to probe the wall.

When they got to the opposite side of the room, covered with One-eye’s graffiti, they found two lines of hieroglyphs over a crudely stylized representation of male genitalia, half-phallus and half-pyramid.

“What’s he written?” Bronzejaw asked, for he could not read.

Toudhalia moved closer so as to decipher the script.

“Er ... Ha-ha! One-eye is a funny devil!”

“Just read it to me, will you? You can giggle later!”

“Hee-hee,” the other robber went on, “It’s just smut. It says that the Pharaoh’s daughter only liked pricks the size of a pyramid.”

“He’s a real nutcase,” Bronzejaw remarked.

“It’s an old quip,” the torchbearer explained. “Do you remember Shabaka, who would dash off a rhyme for a drink? I think he made up that joke.”

“You’re both crazy!” Bronzejaw shouted. “Leave the graffiti and the quips alone, will you? Let’s get on with the job, we’ve been moldering away in here for too long already.”

Since they had turned around, they saw One-eye leaning on the coffin with one hand in the posture of a man about to vomit. He was as pale as a shroud.

“What’s wrong?” Toudhalia asked.

One-eye looked as though he was about to faint.

“I’m not feeling very well.”

“Then move away from there,” Bronzejaw ordered. “You know the smell of mummies makes you want to throw up. It turns my guts too, you know.”

“Let’s get out of here, anyway. We can wait in the gallery.”

“That’s right. Come on, pick up the tools.”

A moment later, they scuttled out. On the threshold, One-eye turned toward the sarcophagus one last time. “You old tart,” he muttered sourly. “You only just got away with it.”

For a long while their steps echoed in the gallery.

Although they swore to themselves that they would never go into a pyramid again, less than two full seasons had passed before they realized that they could think of nothing else, They had acquired a taste for it, like tigers who, once they have had a morsel of human flesh, prefer it to all other meat. Ordinary tombs no longer satisfied them.

This time, apart from sharpening their crowbars and making all their other preparations, they also sewed several pieces of canvas into the shape of masks. They would soak them in vinegar and put them on their faces when the sarcophagus was opened. It was the only way to guard against the terrible sickness that came on when you got close to a mummy.

The profanation of the female pyramid (the strumpet pyramid, as they called it among themselves) had not yet been discovered, which gave them reason to act fast. But perhaps the robbery would never be noticed, since Hentsen’s last lovers, those of her final years, had long since passed on and turned to dust. The sentries had also met the same fate; in fact, they had abandoned their task even during their lifetimes, since the money to support them had run out. But all the same the rape of the pyramid could come to light for some unforeseeable reason, and that would have made any further robbery very perilous indeed.

They had bolstered their confidence on the eve of the act with the thought that no one was interested in Didoufri’s pyramid any more; otherwise it would not have been left unfinished, Their forefathers for several generations had earned their living as they did, as grave robbers, and had never got involved in politics, except by lending an ear now and again to barroom gossip. For instance, they sometimes picked up the information that this Pharaoh was more greatly honored than that one, though both had long been reduced to mere mummies and encased in their respective pyramids. Then soon after they would hear talk of the opposite . The one who had been more greatly honored was now relegated to oblivion, and people began to make wreaths and raise statues in honor of the one previously disregarded. These changes of tide flowed from matters political, so people said, but the robbers thought it all quite absurd and ridiculous—as if two mummies could get up from their graves, grab at each other’s tunics, and scrap like tinkers!