The Pyramid Page 8

  The only one among them who had no such worries was the Sumerian ambassador. Neither the day’s sweaty heat nor the cold of night, nor even soft-headed messengers, could alter one iota in the clay tablets on which his reports were consigned. If it had not been for the smoking chimney (it had created a new proverb in diplomatic circles: instead of saying, “There’s no smoke without fire,” foreign ministry officials now said, “There’s no smoke without a dispatch”), everything would have been quite perfect.

  All the same, after a week of high tension, the ambassador was now in a very good mood. He had just sent in his last report to the capital, perhaps the best report he had drafted in his whole career. Though it was past midnight and despite the pain in his hands from a couple of burns (the report had been requested with such urgency that he had had to have the tablets crated while they were still hot), he was at last lying beside his wife and, overcome with desire, began to caress her.

  Later, when he had left his wife and lain down beside her, as he usually did after making love, his thoughts turned back to the report he had just dispatched. It crossed his mind that it would be cooling down as it went. Just like his wife. He imagined the desert chill seeping through the crates and into the tablets. And so on, until morning, when the report would be stone cold.

  Who knows why, but, instead of overwhelming him after such labors, sleep evaded the ambassador. It must have been the report that was preventing his brain from finding rest. He tried to clear it out of his head, but it occurred to him straightaway that if he tried to do the opposite,, to recall every last detail of the text, he might well end up asleep.

  It was not an easy thing to do. There were one hundred and twenty-nine tablets in all—a veritable monument, as his assistants had called it. He attempted to remember the first eleven, which contained a general sketch of the situation, but between the third and the seventh he had a vision that came from god knows where of a dead sheep and the dusty mirror in the hall of his uncle’s house near Kyrkyr, not far from the capital, on the afternoon of his suicide.

  The first piece of specific news was in fact set out in tablets fifteen to twenty-one, which informed the Sumerian government that all the evidence suggested that unusual events were to be expected in Egypt. He managed to repeat from’ memory virtually the entire gist of tablet eleven: the significance recently attached to an event as unremarkable as a falling stone, alleged to be the result of enemy action (in fact, observers are firmly of the view that the fall had been engineered by the Security Service itself) supports the idea that a new wave of State terror is about to be unleashed on Egypt.

  The ambassador’s analysis of the causes was a veritable masterpiece. It was expounded on tablets thirty-nine to seventy-two, which also constituted the heart of the report ... Watch out, you fool! he shouted in his mind at the carter driving his heavy load through the night. Every time the ambassador dispatched a message he was tormented by the fear of the cart overturning. He would have been sorry above all if the heart of his report were destroyed ... This point is on the line of the axis ... that place was perhaps where ... the funeral chamber! ,.. O heaven, he groaned to himself, this Egyptian pyramid will make us all ill... However much you may try to rid your mind of it, you can’t help relating everything else to the pyramid ... His wife’s vagina also seemed somewhat frightening when he entered it, like a mysterious place with perhaps, at the very end, a mortuary chamber.

  He turned his thoughts back to the analysis of causes. He had tried to explain as clearly as possible the notion that the completion of the pyramid was apparently responsible for a resurgence of life, which, in its turn, had led to a detente or slackening of discipline that was of serious concern to the Egyptian State, For a period ministers had given way to their bad habit of blaming Sumer for everything and had tried to ascribe this laxness to Babylonian influence. They had even repeated the old analogy between the pharaonic pyramids and the canals of Mesopotamia: though they seemed to have little in common at first sight, or only insofar as stone has some relationship to water, both served the same purpose, that of supporting the structure of a State, These reminders had led to an idea that was very damaging in Egyptian eyes, namely that the canals of Babylon at least brought some benefit to the people by irrigating the land, whereas the pyramids, being unproductive and thus entirely uncompromising, were the ultimate incarnation of unadorned power, etc, So they had tried to account for the situation in those terms and had eventually conceded that the decline came not from Sumerian influence nor from Sumerian canals, but plainly from the pyramid itself. Now that it was on the point of completion, it could not oppress Egypt as it had done up until then, Egypt was seeking to step aside, to come out from under the weight of stone—in a word, it wanted to escape from the pyramid.

  The third part of the report was its high point. Tablets ninety to one hundred and twenty-two. Possible solutions. Snippets from spies inside secret meetings. Rumors that a new pyramid was currently under consideration. About unbuilding and rebuilding one of its parts. About an investigation conducted into a fatal mistake ,,.

  The ambassador shifted onto his elbow so as not to fall asleep. How many times had he imagined as he dozed off that people were trying to take it down! Crowds of men and ghosts each taking hold of a stone and vanishing into the dark,.. The chief magician and the architect were there, imploring it to give birth. But it was barren. Like his own wife, Maybe they intended to build a twin ? How much time would that take, step after step, O heaven!

  It appeared that Egypt could not survive without this hump. That is how the one hundred and twenty-second tablet began, “What was inscribed on it was the idea that if another pyramid were not built, or if the great pyramid were not repaired, then something else would be done. Yes, definitely, they would dismantle it... or else they would have another plan.

  Tablets one hundred and twenty-three and one hundred and twenty-four followed on in his mind. Then tablet one hundred and twenty-five, hinting at false hope that made the rest seem all the more depressing. Number one hundred and twenty-seven was of that kind, and a little overbaked; the penultimate tablet was just as implacable, with a black stripe from the oven right across it, like a mourning armband. And the whole thing concluded with the main point, a veritable pyramidion, cut into the last tablet, that Egypt could be expected to have a winter of unprecedented terror.

  The ambassador laid his head on the pillow, but it felt like a piece of earthenware that shattered on contact, destroying once again any chance of sleep. His mind went back to the wagon rushing across the Sinai desert. The clay tablets must have cooled down by now, and his whole report would be as cold as a corpse.

  IX

  The Winter of Universal Suspicion

  ALTHOUGH no season was entirely free of mistrust, only that year’s winter was and always would be known as “the winter of universal suspicion.” The name became so firmly attached that at one point it almost seemed to be part of the season itself and to have taken the very place of the thing it described. In fact, that is nearly what occurred. Allegedly, when people looked up at the sky toward the end of the autumn, instead of observing, “Well, winter’s here to stay,” they would say, “Suspicious weather, isn’t it?” or “Don’t you think suspicion has come rather early this year?” Schoolteachers were even supposed to have had the children chanting out loud, “There are four seasons in the year. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Suspicion”; and so on. Thus, in spite of the preventive measures proposed by the scholar A. K., that is probably what would have happened. In his third letter of denunciation, A. K. stressed that it was his rival Jaqub Har who had first put about the idea of substituting the name for the things and that he possessed definite evidence,, which he reserved the right to submit to the sovereign once it was complete, which showed that the degenerate linguist was about to make a pernicious proposal for redesignating not just winter, but time in general—in other words, that the word time should be replaced by the word suspicion. The third letter of d
enunciation went on to say that after the repeated failure of his efforts to make his wife pregnant, the incorrigible Jaqub Har had come to think that time itself was worn out in this world, and that since it was now living outside of time, humanity would soon be obliged to adopt a time from another world, presumably from hell, unless it was to purloin the time zone of dogs and jackals. That was therefore what would have happened despite all the preventive measures proposed by A. K. (of these, the eleventh recommendation was the emasculation of Jaqub Har), had investigations in hand not been pursued with redoubled intensity during the spring, with the result that, since the winter had been defined as the season of universal suspicion, the spring should have been called the season of hypersuspi-cion—and as for the summer, the climate became so much more oppressive that no epithet could be found to describe it, and that was even more the case in the following autumn, which was so much later than usual that people feared it would never come, a fear exacerbated, in the view of A. K., by the sinister theories of Jaqub Har.

  That winter remained the only season to be designated in that way simply because, as usually happens, people tended to remember not the height of a curse but its two termini, that is to say its start and its end, but as in this case there was no sign of an end, what was mostly registered in collective memory was the brink of the abyss.

  Normally, the greater the scope of an investigation, the greater need it had of deep foundations, just like a building, The gravity of an inquiry depended on the time and place of the crime. Though promptness could be impressive, investigating an offense that had been committed only two or three weeks before could easily make the facts seem merely ephemeral things. At the other extreme, inquiries into crimes committed forty years ago may well be superficially impressive as evidence of the great rigor of a State that lets nothing pass even if it has a half-century’s silt laid over it, but, like an earthquake with a distant epicenter, they run the risk of diffusing anxiety and making it less intense.

  That winter’s investigation was of middling scope. It went back about seven years, on average, fully sufficient to terrify at least two generations.

  What was most curious about it was its localization in space. Whereas the minutes of investigations normally referred to two kinds of space, the real kind (the tomb with the corpse, the scene of the murder, etc), and the unreal kind, also called impossible space (the rantings of a demented mother-in-law, nightmares, and so on), the new inquiry was located neither in the one nor the other, but in both at the same time.

  In brief, according to the official announcement the clue to the puzzle that the investigation was seeking to elucidate was to be found inside the pyramid, at a point located roughly between the one hundredth and the one hundred and third steps, to the right of the vertical axis, in the heart of the darkness where the stones were heaped upon each other in a boundless agony that neither human reason nor unreason could properly imagine.

  The puzzle seemed both decipherable and indecipherable at the same time. It appeared inaccessible, since dismantling the pyramid was inconceivable—for most people, at any rate. It is true that some said: “What if, one fine morning, what with all the heat and the boredom, Cheops decided, just like that, to do the unthinkable, to do what no Pharaoh before him had ever dared? What if he gave the order for the pyramid to be taken down, step by step, until the evil was laid bare?”

  The ambivalence of the puzzle terrified every living soul. It was only a few yards away, right there, under its stone cowl. It was in between the two forms of life, but not entirely in either one, like the unburied dead, or like a living person walking through the market arm in arm with his ghost, of whom you could hardly decide which one made the more terrifying sight.

  What was now generally understood was the way it had all started seven years earlier, with the howling of a jackal on the night of a full moon. The animal had followed the block of stone from the quarry at Abusir, across the Saqqara desert, to the outskirts of Memphis, and the itinerary, as well as some other details, had now been corroborated by more than one witness. The magician Gezerkareseneb had spent a whole night wandering about the face of the pyramid with a flickering torch in order to make out the exact position of the stone, the place where its journey had finally come to an end. Comparisons between the data that he collected and statements by witnesses, and especially a study of the quarry’s delivery notes, of the stone’s bill of lading in the archives of the Ferries and Waterways Department, of the first and second control certificates, and the results of various complicated calculations that apparently had nothing to do with these documents, established the fact beyond any possibility of error that the fatal stone was the two hundred and four thousand and ninety-third piece in the south slope, or, in the recording system used in the general inventory, stone n° 92 308 130393 6.

  The figure looked rather bizarre, but everyone paid much more attention to what might be hidden in the pyramid than to the block’s actual number.

  Most people imagined it was a papyrus, in other words a secret document containing some threat or blackmail attempt, or else a warning for the future in case time suddenly changed its direction or its speed, as Jaqub Har had supposedly foretold.

  Despite the oddness of its number, the formal identification of the stone nonetheless damped down the general level of anxiety. At least people knew that they were dealing with a piece of stone that had been hewn from a quarry, cut and shaped by stonemasons, inspected by a benevolent or threatening inspector, certified by a seal placed on it by a warehouse official, loaded onto an eight-oared ferry, then hauled on a buffalo cart whose drivers, like all their fellow hauler, had bellowed, spat, and sworn the whole journey long, had got drunk or else had pushed some peasant girl into a muddy field by the wayside. (Sometimes, the attackers got themselves so covered in mud from head to toe that they could not tell who was who any more and ended up raping each other,) Then it had been past the officials who recorded goods arriving at and leaving from the central depots more inspectors., dockers (who “docked” the stone by securing it onto the dolly that slid up and down the ramp), pullers and pushers, and superintendents., before finally reaching the stonelayers.

  Scarcely more than four hundred men had had to do with it, six hundred at the outside. Since the stone had been hewn and placed seven years earlier, half of the unfortunate men who had taken a part in the laying of that stone were no longer of this world. So even if they arrested all the survivors, together with their families, acquaintances, and drinking companions, even going so far as to include their mistresses and those who had infected them with the clap, they would have bagged no more than two or three thousand people, a mere trifle in the human anthill of Egypt.

  But such consoling reflections did not last very long. The original worries resurfaced, because of the number of the stone. To begin with it was noticed that the number contained two digits that were intended to exclude or perhaps to assimilate entirely the two pieces on either side of the accursed piece. But that was nothing compared to the misfortunes that followed: in all probability, the stone’s official number was quite unrelated to reality. To put it another way, it was perfectly obvious which stone was involved, but for easily imaginable reasons (secrecy, disinformation to confuse the enemy, etc.) the number given was completely wrong. As was the row where it was believed to be situated. And also its coordinates of location with respect to the vertical axis and the plane.

  That was enough to make it seem within a few days as if the whole of Egypt had been smitten with apoplexy. Fresh rumors emerged only tentatively, made their way with difficulty along the tendrils of the grapevine. There was talk of a different number. Some people said that, according to the latest leak, the stone had been buried much lower down, in step fifteen, somewhere near the level of the sovereign’s funeral chamber. Then it was alleged that it was not just one stone that was involved, but a whole row, row number one hundred and four, or so it seemed. Then other blocks of stone were mentioned, then other ro
ws or half-rows, all of which served to make everyone feel unsafe. Men who had been only too happy to reminisce complacently about the time when they had worked at the Abu Gurob quarry on stones for the tenth or the ninetieth row, or in the false door workshops, for there was nothing they could be reproached with (“Ha! in our time it was all good honest work, the suspicious stuff didn’t start until later!”) now ran away to hide as soon as they heard that the investigation was approaching their rows, or wrapped their heads in wet towels for fear of losing their minds.

  Nobody was arrested meanwhile, but that was not a good sign either. The only thing that remained unchanged was that the streets and the markets were deserted. As always, the perfume shops were the first to be closed, followed in turn by the tanneries, the bars, and the inns.

  “I see Egypt, but where have all the Egyptians gone?” was what the Sumerian foreign minister was supposed to have exclaimed, riding through the town in a horse-drawn carriage after a reception given by Cheops.

  Since passersby gave him the slip, he ended up putting his question to Youyou the drunkard, the only person who would agree to converse with him.

  “You want to know where the Egyptians have gone?” Youyou answered at last, his tear-filled eyes fixed longingly on the patio of the bar that had been closed. “Up my asshole, that’s where. Where else do you want them to be?”

  He made a charming sign to the minister’s wife, then, after yelling at the coachman, made off with a wobbly gait.

  Little by little, one by one, the investigation cast its net over them all, and they became a multitude greater than ever before. People who had never even worked on the pyramid, people who for health reasons had never set foot in a quarry or stepped onto a row, aged and twitching aristocrats who were now virtually incapacitated, society ladies who never rose before noon—all were now roped into the same fetid atmosphere and the same dust, all mixed in and muddled up with people who really had worked on the building site.