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
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
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