Pyramid Texts Read online

  Some of them went over in their minds reports of the alarms to which wayfarers were subject—a sudden sinking of the ground, the emergence of an ogre carrying a sword who cut off the heads of any who went beyond a certain point inside the pyramid (though which point was not clear and, indeed, was said to differ from person to person), or the sudden rising, from the center of the pyramid, of winds that swept all before them, reaching into its tiniest crannies and destroying all who had been daring enough to enter. The gentle, soft, refreshing current of air that blew incessantly and steadily, moving with a force that neither waxed nor waned, puzzled them. It would from time to time strengthen, but in no case made any sound. They feared that it would shift so as to blow them all away. Their leader kept from them his foreboding and his fear of that good wind, whose delicate soughing aroused in him a secret shudder. He had no information as to how long it would last and had seen no mention of it in any of the authorities he had read, while none of those who claimed to have knowledge of the secret and the hidden had spoken of it to him. This, however, was but a detail. They were now at a crucial fork in the path; henceforth would be a different form of penetration, steps of a different kind. The narrowness of the ascent was another spur to a feeling of confinement and regression. The bending had been painful to start with but they had grown used to it, especially since they had learned to move their limbs in a certain way. Then, at a certain point, their speed had increased and they had felt as though some force was propelling them, or that the ground was being pulled along beneath their feet.

  At a certain moment, their sense that they were ascending started to diminish. All became certain that a degree of decline had set in. The slope was imperceptible at the beginning but as it increased their leader demonstrated caution, and like him they were compelled to try to slow down and to cling on, holding onto the blank sides.

  Despite the pressure of time, its heavy pace, and the strain, this seemed to last only minutes. Soon they found themselves on a platform of level stone. Tall walls allowed them to straighten up—insofar as they could, given that their bodies had become somewhat accustomed to the narrowness of the ascents and the position, almost doubled over, that they were obliged to adopt. There was no apparent source for the light, which had increased in intensity.

  To the right a false door.

  To the left another, opposite the first.

  The shadow and its original. Alike in appearance, facing one another, like sound and echo. On the walls were barely identifiable figures in red paint. They all paused around the circular aperture that led directly downwards. Had it always been present in the middle of the stone platform, or had it just then appeared?

  There was no explanation. But what was the point of being sure, if choice did not exist?

  The leader turned to the others. All maintained their silence. Some of what he had predicted had come to pass with the length of their silences and the loss of their desire for speech. Once a shaykh from Morocco, who had come from the Furthest West to observe the pyramids, had told him of the danger of silence, especially if it occurred on leaving or on setting off to fight for God’s cause, for it was a sign of misfortune. The Moroccan, with his brown skin, triangular beard, and brilliant smile—he could see him before him now—told him that he had gone out one day with a band of his companions into the southern desert on some business, he being their leader, appointed by his shaykh. Circumstances compelled them to stay at an isolated place close to a small spring, waiting for help that did not come. He feared the effect of the waiting on them and ordered them to clean the sand. They showed astonishment but he insisted, asserting that these were the instructions of the shaykh and could not be refused. When their time of waiting was over, he informed them of the reason that had impelled him to give such a strange command, saying that had he let them be, each would have been left to commune with himself, and thus would have been carried away by his thoughts, departed in a moment of homesickness, and become too weak to continue. They nodded their heads and not one of them scoffed.

  But the difference was plain. The Moroccan had been in the desert and they had stayed where they were, but inside the pyramid it is beyond any man to do anything but progress, move, walk, advance, in the hope of attaining that goal that is different for each individual—for some enter seeking buried treasure, some come searching for ancient sciences, others desire to inform themselves as to the unknown, though in all cases it is impossible for one who has entered the pyramid to draw back, to halt; he must continue or abandon the attempt. The pyramid is like a bridge and bridges are for crossing, not for settling on. Thus every traveler presses on in agitation, with a degree of insecurity, security being ever reserved for the destination, not the journey.

  All they could do was descend, so long as it was not in their power to break through the solid wall or that imaginary door that led to nothing. All that they could do was move onwards through the tunnels, slopes, and chasms made to plans drawn up in an era of which they were ignorant by others whom they would never encounter.

  At every edge, every entrance, they would recall what they had lost, and especially their companion. Where, they wondered, might he be now?

  They did not know what had happened to him. They had no indication as to his fate. How could they?

  If any decided to return, what certainty would he have that the path he had followed on coming was the same that would lead him back, would lead him to the same beginning? As they had seen with their own eyes, there were openings that appeared without warning, hallways that went on for longer than they had estimated, so what could guarantee them a safe path of return?

  In the first chamber one had said laughingly, “Can it be that to leave the pyramid is the same as to enter it?”

  What had been a jest seemed tragic now. Under the influence of the exertion, the mysterious light and the fear, each recognized his companion with difficulty. Each held of the other two images: one, conserved in the mind’s eye, went back to before the time of their entry, and a second, which was what their eyes now beheld, was magnified by the conditions of the place, the emptiness, the coursing of the air, and all that came or went via the secret tunnels of which no living creature had knowledge.

  There was no alternative but to go on.

  In the days when they were preparing and equipping themselves, before their passing through the breach, their leader had told them of three who had entered in an ancient age and of whom all news had been lost, so that their people had thought that they had perished, and how after forty whole years one of them had appeared close to the desert of Abu Sir. It is said that he came out through an unknown hole now covered by deposits of Nile silt. He had refused to speak and had divulged nothing.

  Who knows?

  He threw the rope down and descended from it dangling. The five waited for his signal. They were not left standing there for long. Their stout-hearted leader pulled on the rope. When they came to rest next to him, they realized that they had moved from one state of confusion to another.

  The space was strange.

  They had not stood in its like before. It was impossible to say whether it was round or square, for it combined forms they had never seen. What was disturbing to them was to see, for the first time, the confusion of their leader. They knew him as one who was steady, capable, one of whom it was not only impossible to say what was passing through his mind but who also concealed from them his pains and vexations. Following his puzzled look, they understood what was making him alarmed and agitated.

  Which way, and how?

  For the first time, they faced two openings that seemed to have been cleft that very moment, at the same instant, and were identical. The first was on the right, the other on the left, but this itself was relative and only by analogy with their hands and eyes, for no direction could be exactly determined at this depth within the pyramid; what one considered right another might consider left. Directions inside the pyramid have their own altogether distinct criteria
, yet to be understood.

  It was the first time that they had been obliged to follow two paths, or so he, who was to that point still the leader of them all, in the end, decided. He said this after pointing to the two openings and saying that each was an invitation, and that both invitations must be obeyed. He did not appear to expend any effort in choosing. He seemed hurried, disposed to swift action, uninterested in discussion.

  They divided. After pointing to the one standing closest to him and the one next to him, he asked the three others to appoint themselves a leader. Then, before they could discuss or start taking a decision, he advanced—a resolute act, as though he had arranged it all beforehand, as though he had prepared for a moment like this. No embrace made, no words uttered. Just a slight gesture with his hands.

  An ellipsoid passageway lined with a yellowish white stone. Despite the fatigue, and the cramping of their muscles due to the forced bending, progress was faster than in the preceding stages. The leader appeared confident, even though all that lay ahead of them was unknown.

  Each of the three thought about his other companions. How far had they gone? What had they found? Separation was a spur to extended grief and to an attempt to recover some of what had been, especially since each was now seized by a sure intimation of the impossibility of their ever meeting again, and that what had once been would never return. Had a party ever split before inside the pyramid and met up again? Had they ever heard the like of that?

  As their progress through ellipsoid hallways, deep chasms, and suddenly appearing openings continued, all those who had gone slipped from their minds. They penetrated ever deeper. Their leader averred that these passageways and apertures would lead them to a conclusion. Every book of invocations and spells that he had consulted confirmed that.

  They were less capable now of exchanging words. All thought of their other colleagues or of previous stages, with regard to which each had a different sense, had vanished. One certainty, however, enveloped them; it concerned time and affirmed that its rhythm was increasing in speed the further in they went, that to distinguish between night and day had become problematic, and that sunset and sunrise no longer took place outside, but rather inside, them. Thus the old question “Is it night now or day?” no longer had meaning. Each could identify what he himself was experiencing, and they all lived the same moment together; for one, however, that moment might be night, for another day. A further certainty concerned place; it was absolutely sure that the ascending stages were over and that they were now moving through a pyramidal abyss that led downwards, whereby they might even have passed below the level of the ground on which they had so long trod before their entry into these depths. What sometimes puzzled them were the sources of those hidden winds and their courses, and likewise the degrees of light and its wellsprings, and the plunging haste manifested by their leader, who no longer looked at them.

  From chasm to chasm they passed, from passageway to passageway, from triangular to rectangular to circular, from funnel-shaped to spiral, from octagonal to hexagonal to square, to forms that defied description.

  The rooms through which they passed no longer excited their curiosity, they were so many. With each step, older steps were dismissed, to vanish altogether from the memory and be erased from the imagination, till everything became mixed together in their minds. One of them doubted the existence of his former comrades, the second believed that he had long known the interior of the pyramid and was merely expending effort recapturing what he already knew.

  On reaching a certain point in time and space, the leader stopped and raised his hands before his face, taken by surprise by a sudden effulgence that left him almost blind.

  This was what was predicted, albeit only in vague hints, in certain ancient manuscripts. No one had described it in full because its attainment had remained in the sphere of the impossible. No created being had recorded with any precision this blending, this permeation. Now they were harvesting the fruits of their striving, their patience, their endeavor. Now he could speak frankly to his companions and tell them that their struggle, their boldness, their efforts had not been in vain. Inside him was an overabundance that he could scarcely contain.

  He no longer cared whether their motion was upwards or downwards. All directions were the same to him; all the passageways led to him and for all of them he was the way-mark; all began with him and ended with him. The stones in their courses passed through him and he passed through and was distributed among and across them. He had now arrived at the fluid, incandescent, constant essence of the pyramid, which no human had described before—beyond image, beyond depiction, beyond gesture, beyond words, beyond movement.

  He had entered the pyramid and the significance of that penetration had now caught up with him. He was but created atoms. He was he. Here was there and there was he. His circuit was completed, point had met point, and henceforth all turned on itself.

  He must tell his colleagues. He must apprise them. He must see what they were about.

  In vain, however, he searched for a sight of them. Before him was nothing but himself. He was utterly solitary, severed, subjected.

  One who came this far could only be alone, freed of all attachments. This instant, at this distance within the fathomless depths of the pyramid, brooked no companion.

  A Third Text

  Annihilation

  . . . Of an old family, much noted, mentioned in manuscripts that have yet to be printed. He personally was well known, much in demand in the town and elsewhere.

  Those with experience in climbing its four corners assert that his extraordinary gifts were obvious. His steps over the stones had a distinct rhythm and, despite his forefathers’ long history, he brought to the climb something that no one before him had, for no one before him had ever reached the summit by night.

  And when? On dark nights when there was no moon at all and the stars were extinguished!

  Everyone who had anything to do with such things knew him—the specialists in antiquities, the officers and policemen on duty or who came on some transient mission (usually the guarding of important personages making the customary tour), the owners of tourist companies, the senior guides and cicerones, the translators, and the foreigners from divers parts who visited the pyramids more than once and were drawn to him.

  Presidents, kings, and princes, international and local stars of the cinema, fashion designers, perfume experts, and wealthy people with boats, some passing through, some moored there long-term, all made a point of seeing him. In the guest parlor of his house he hung a letter from the office of the president thanking him for the extraordinary effort he had displayed in climbing the Great Pyramid seven times in succession without a break before Indonesian president Ahmad Sukarno, guest of the state.

  Praise was nothing new to his forefathers. Al-Balawi in his History mentions that Ibn Tulun praised and admired one of them and al-Maqrizi included an account of one in his Rhymed Biographies, a not insignificant part of which is lost. Al-Maqrizi says that Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad used to make excursions to Giza specially to see him and follow his progress. Napoleon Bonaparte advised the scholars of his expedition to sketch his great-great-grandfather but they failed because he was so fast, so agile, that he dazzled the eye.

  It was a family deeply versed in the skill, through which knowledge of the routes leading to the summit had been long passed down. At a certain age, perhaps seven, the father would instruct his son in the first steps and then bit by bit he would be drawn in until it became his never-ending aspiration to shorten the time.

  Some of those knowledgeable in secret marks and talismans claim that the pyramids grow smaller by one degree every hundred years. This was not something to dismiss lightly. The mere dislodgment of a stone from its place or the crumbling of the edge of another could lengthen or shorten the distance. In short, it might call for a new path to be found.

  What he made bold to do, what he eventually achieved, made him an example to be cited and a mode
l to be emulated by those who would come after him, for he was able to shorten the time twice in ten years, from eight minutes to seven and a half, and then to seven—a record nowhere to be found in the works of reference, ancient or modern. His accomplishment became iconic of the achievement of a difficult goal in a short time.

  His renown spread. People took a liking to him and greatly praised him.

  He was an only child, coming after a wait of many years during which his parents had submitted to God’s decree and fate. When he arrived, they feared for him from the evil eye and the envy of men, and protected him with anxious care. He never wore brightly colored clothes but was wrapped in black. Circular tattoos were drawn on his forehead in dark coffee grounds, and on his cheeks and on the tip of his chin. Despite his mother’s care lest he be exposed to a flutter of wind, a passing breeze, she refused to call him by a girl’s name or to hide his maleness in girls’ clothes as was the custom of those with few children—though had she done so, none of her relatives would have been any the wiser, for the boy had a round face, wide, deep-set eyes, and pretty features. All who saw him averred that he kept his gaze fixed on the pyramids, on the west, and that when his mother picked him up, he would twist around, and when she turned him aside, he would cry loudly. With time she came to understand this and would only suckle him seated with her back to the pyramids. Then his lips would fasten on her breast, and when he had had enough he would fall into a deep sleep.