Pyramid Texts: A Modern Arabic Novel

By Gamal al-Ghitani

With its Sufistic parables of the human condition, rendered in a style redolent of both the austere meditations of Borges and the dark engorged ruminations of Arthur C. Clark, Pyramid Texts engages the mind and beguiles the imagination. In a series of chapters each shorter than the last so that, like their subjects, they taper ultimately into nothingness the author evokes the obsessions that have drawn men over the centuries to the brooding presence of mankind's most ancient and mysterious monuments. Among others in a procession of exotic characters, a Moroccan seeker after knowledge spends years contemplating the pyramids in the hope that one day he will understand the mysterious writing that fitfully appears on their sides. Another waits patiently for the moment when the shadow of one will diverge from its accustomed path and bestow immortality, and the Sphinx performs a celestial dance. Pyramid Texts leads us into a world of endless passages and mysterious sighing winds, a world whose claustrophobic and shadowy spaces may be illuminated by flashes of ecstasy leading to scintillating transfigurations and dizzying annihilations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781617971488

Gamal al-Ghitani

Gamal al-Ghitani (1945–2015) is one of Egypt's greatest writers. He was born in 1945 and educated as a tapestry-maker in rural Cairo. He wrote his first work when he was sixteen and became a war reporter at the age of twenty-three. He has written thirteen novels and six collections of short stories, including his best known work, Zayni Barakat (AUC Press, 2004) and The Zafarani Files (AUC Press, 2009). Ghitani’s many honors include the Egyptian State Prize for the Novel, the French Chevalier de l’Order des Arts et des Lettres, the Egyptian State Prize for Literature, and Egypt’s Nile Award in Literature.

Book preview

A First Text

Anticipation

When the boy first came to know him, the man was still at the beginning of his quest, though the boy only became fully informed as to his story once it was over. Between the beginning and the end long years elapsed, years that continue to echo and stretch ahead, like the man’s presence, even though he ceased to be there beyond a shadow of a doubt from that moment at which it became no longer possible to meet with him and talk to him.

In spite of this, he is certain that the man is there, that he can go at any time and will find him. At widely separated, unconnected instants, the man haunts his memory, his presence so strong his hands can almost touch him and his ears almost hear him. He is, however, most closely tied to certain places, which the boy cannot pass without sensing him.

The memory cannot recall a given moment disassociated from a given place

There are moments during a day in winter, or in the fall, or in summer, at which he appears, smiling gently, his body well-built, his back straight, his chest out. During all the long years, he never changed the way he sat, or the direction of his eyes and his gaze, even when talking to others, or that expression of amazement that was always bursting unbidden from his lips, as though he had just that moment beheld a wonder.

Many places evoked him, the most important among them al-Azhar and its surroundings—the sidewalk next to the Barbers’ Gate, which led to the broad space that contained the courtyard; the surrounding columns; the sundial on the west side; the overlooking halls of the different student nations; the shadows; the awesome dignity of the passing shaykhs; and the breath of the Righteous Ones who, having known, had stayed and loved.

Love without knowledge is impossible

The moments themselves stretch back to his boyhood, to his earliest time, when all was promise and looking forward was natural, what everybody did. To that sidewalk he came as a boy of fewer than ten years, crossing to reach it the square of al-Husayn. There was no barrier then dividing the street and the place was all of one piece and more deeply familiar. Nearby ended the line of the No.19 streetcars, with their frowning and melancholy exteriors, which stare out at him now from a place deep within his over-burdened memory—their paint a pale yellow, the wheels black, the headlights deep-set.

How did he discover the way to him?

He cannot specify exactly how, or be sure of anything. Perhaps it happened while he was roaming with his companions after leaving the nearby intermediate school. Crossing the square of al-Husayn, or that of the House of the Judge, they would start exploring the world, but when they came to al-Ataba Square or the Opera House, they dared go no further unless accompanied by their parents and relatives, though those places were close enough by their present standards.

Everything is relative

If he were to measure the wonder he felt then against what he feels today, his crossing of al-Azhar Street would be the equivalent of going to the North Pole now, or to the edges of Siberia, or the Bering Straits. Indeed, scarcely any power today exists that can provoke in him the shudders of yearning and apprehension that he used then to feel on traversing any mysterious passageway.

Beginnings are always of great moment, and are never repeated

Beginnings are an instant, one containing place and time. Certain points can be fixed; others get lost in the totality of the dissolving structure. That is why it is impossible to specify a particular day for his first sight of Shaykh Tuhami. How did he find his way to him? There is no sure answer, except to say that he was one of the first he had contact with and dealt with without intermediary, at that early age. The shaykh displayed old books for sale, arranging them next to the ancient gray wall, books with many different titles—books of law, commentaries and histories, novels printed in this century or the last. He sat on stacks of books secured with strong cord, the palms of his hands touching between his knees. He would write the prices in pencil on the back covers and he never argued or discussed, but if the customer proposed a lower price, and this seemed to be due to a lack of means, he would simply nod and give him the book for whatever he could pay. If, however, he detected any sign of disdain, he would give him a harsh look.

Day is born of night and night emerges from day

He would regard him in silence, kindly. Having satisfied himself as to the seriousness, despite his young age, of the boy’s interest, the man would suggest something to him, guide him. The boy would take the book, sit down on the other side, and not get up again until he had finished. Often imaginary worlds would consume him and he would not come to his senses again until the waning of the light, the setting of the sun, and the approach of the men charged with lighting the high lamps that looked down on the street, who would prop up their slender ladders and climb quickly to the top holding long sticks that ended in a kind of globe. Every day he followed their progress with interest, and never has he looked upon a street lamp in any city he was visiting or on any bridge he was crossing without immediately recalling the features of those anonymous fleeting figures.

They are for visiting, not for dwelling in

Such moments never come to him without his recalling the shaykh’s posture, his mysterious smile, and how he would gaze westwards as though waiting for news, or expecting something to come to him from that quarter, or following some matter hidden to all but him. In those days the sky over the city was clear, sharp, and someone standing on the Muqattam Hills could, if his eyesight were good, count the stones of the pyramids.

The pyramids—Shaykh Tuhami’s goal, the center of his interest, the focus of his thoughts, the reason for his presence in the city. In this spot, from his place on the sidewalk, he would circumambulate them and scrutinize their features, indifferent to the numerous buildings erected in the intervening space that prevented his eyes from actually falling on the towering structures.

Sometimes the mind will see what the eye cannot, and sometimes the eye will grasp what the mind cannot

Often he would see sundry presences, even though these were distant and lay beyond the compass of the eye. Often he would be unaware of the manifestations of the physical world, even though these stayed long before him. He was not alone in this, nor was it something peculiar to him; indeed, it is common

Reviews for Pyramid Texts

[greeniezona · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Random discovery in the used book section at the bookstore, and given my growing interests in Cairo and the pyramids, I had to pick it up.

A series of chapters that are really short stories but read like a novel - all linked by an obsession with or a dependence on the pyramids. Scholars, explorers, lovers, and climbers. What secrets are revealed to them about/through the pyramids?

This was lovely. Each chapter tended to be shorter and shorter, until the final chapters were more like poetry. Mystical and mysterious - a good find.