facesWhen I entered the seventh room of the Cheops pyramid, I had to bend and crawl onwards; usually people give up here theie voyage to the mystery of the pharaohs. But I was not people, nor a tourist, I was a kid with an Egyptian name and some kind of irrational but deep and emotional understanding of of the Arab culture. What i really could smell as a white skinned blue eyed red haired alien was the injustice and fear. i smelled it among the jasmine stinking with sweet odor trees and in the frightened and sly eyes of the locals who didn’t want to meddle with me, the foreigner. During the nights i could hear voices, in a dissonant choir, voices of those killed by the God of Injustice, or kept as undead in some kind of prison of death. One night i stole out of my home through a tree that reached my balcony and pursued those voices with a battery lamp. I didn’t see any thing that could calm me but I made sure it came form the underworld.
When i entered that pyramid and when the gown ups left me crawling onwards I knew what I was looking for. The voices. Then I saw the faces: hey they were not stuck to the walls together with the hieroglyphs, together with the gods, demigods and their servants. they were floating loudly pushing each other fighting for the narrow niche in space and time
They were just common people, from al these centuries, built in the wisdom of pyramids and their system of secular injustice. Pharaoh’s slaves, then thieves through centuries who came to rob the sarcophagi, then tourist through decades who tried to reach the end of the tunnel, then fantasy freaks like myself who could see all those things that history turned into sand and wind.
That’s Talib, the fourth face from the left in the third row: remember the pharaoh’s servant whose girlfriend was poisoned in an orgy and he still had to keep his mouth shut in order not to be castrated. look at his mouth, it is bitter, it is shut…Than there is small Nef: that’ s his girlfriend, she died not actually of poisoning but of strangling in that orgy, for the ultimate pleasure of the pharaoh: the god the king the poet the madman but her mother dares not tell her boyfriend… so small Nef is dark blue in her face pretending it is all make up…