The Pyramid Read Online Free PDF Page A

arrangements, or the team of sculptors—they would certainly have retorted sourly, but those are just girlish tasks, hair-splitting fancy-work! The pyramid is where dust gets under your skin, where heat and death bear down on you at every step. But the architects themselves would have snarled at the shippers in the same way, especially those who pored over their drawings of the galleries, doors, and secret passages, or busied themselves with the mysterious inner chambers, forgetting entirely that at the same time the haulers were covering half of Egypt with dust: a common porter’s job!
    Perhaps the very nature of each guild’s task led it to think that it was the main one. That was the case for the architects, for instance, who strove to fix the right orientation for the pyramid, and for whom the local expression “to make night into a new day” had much more than a symbolic meaning. In practice, they did a good part of their work at nighty when they would go to the plateau on which the pyramid was to be built, not without casting rather disdainful glances on the trench-digging team. Although it had been decided irrevocably that in order to avoid all possibility of error the monument would be oriented in relation to a fixed star, a star from the Great Bear (but absolutely not the polestar), they continued to go almost every evening to the site at the hour when the workmen were laying down their tools, Ah, the workers thought, to have business with the stars, that’s what you call keeping your hands clean! Those chaps don’t know what calumny and betrayal are! But just try getting this right (and they stamped the ground with their heels) at the final inspection. You can be just a couple of fingers higher or lower than the level prescribed, and your head’s on the block!
    As for risking your life for the slightest error, there was another group that had even more reason to fear it: the team working on the interior arrangements of the pyramid, particularly the secret entrances and exits, the device for hermetically sealing the funeral chamber, and the false entrances intended to mislead grave robbers. Ever since the time of the first pyramids, no one was unaware that the members of this group would not grow long in the tooth. All sorts of pretexts were found for convicting and suppressing them, but the real reason for such measures was well known: to bury the secrets with their inventors.
    The mystery surrounding the work done by the men belonging to the magician Moremheb in collaboration with the astrologers was even thicken They dealt with something that no one knew, perhaps not even they, if you asked them point-blank, and, what was more, something that no one could even imagine. Rumor had it that it was to do with numbers that, taken together with the pyramid’s orientation, celestial signs, and other temporal coordinates, could reveal the secret and incommunicable message that the pyramid would contain until the end of time.
    The only team that seemed to be working without danger was the one concerned with the little pyramid, the satellite pyramid, for the Pharaoh’s kâ , that is to say, his double. Without a coffin or funeral chamber, it required no secret entrances or exits, so that its construction team, unburdened by mysteries, could work without worry. But things were like that only at the beginning. The satellite team soon discovered that the jealousy it engendered was just as harmful, if not even more dangerous, than the menace that secrets carried with them; and so little by little those workers too became just as grumpy as the others.
    It goes without saying that those who wore the gloomiest countenance were the members of the central group led by Hemiunu. Messengers came and went night and day through the great vermilion-painted gates. Those arriving were covered in dust, but those leaving were darker still. Every day something new happened, and a good half of what happened had some connection with the