Pyramids

'You don't know what it's like,' said Teppic. 'It's like a whole great pyramid. But upside down, you understand? All that history, all those ancestors, all the people, all funnelling down to me. Right at the bottom.'

He slumped on to a coil of rope as Chidder passed the bottle back and said, 'It makes you think, doesn't it? There's all these lost cities and kingdoms around. Like Ee, in the Great Nef. Whole countries, just gone. Just out there somewhere. Maybe people started mucking about with geometry, what do you say?'

Teppic snored.

After some moments Chidder swayed forward, dropped the empty bottle over the side, it went plunk — and for a few seconds a stream of bubbles disturbed the flat calm — and staggered off to bed.

Teppic dreamed.

And in his dream he was standing on a high place, but unsteadily, because he was balancing on the shoulders of his father and mother, and below them he could make out his grandparents, and below them his ancestors stretching away and out in a vast, all right, a vast pyramid of humanity whose base was lost in clouds.

He could hear the murmur of shouted orders and instructions floating up to him.

If you do nothing, we shall never have been.

'This is just a dream,' he said, and stepped out of it into a palace where a small, dark man in a loincloth was sitting on a stone bench, eating figs.

'Of course it's a dream,' he said. 'The world is the dream of the Creator. It's all dreams, different kinds of dreams. They're supposed to tell you things. Like: don't eat lobster last thing at night. Stuff like that. Have you had the one about the seven cows?'

'Yes,' said Teppic, looking around. He'd dreamed quite good architecture. 'One of them was playing a trombone.'

'It was smoking a cigar in my day. Well-known ancestral dream, that dream.'

'What does it mean?'

The little man picked a seed from between his teeth.

'Search me,' he said. 'I'd give my right arm to find out. I don't think we've met, by the way. I'm Khuft. I founded this kingdom. You dream a good fig.'

'I'm dreaming you, too?'

'Damn right. I had a vocabulary of eight hundred words, do you think I'd really be talking like this? If you're expecting a bit of helpful ancestral advice, forget it. This is a dream. I can't tell you anything you don't know yourself.'

'You're the founder?'

'That's me.'

'I . . . thought you'd be different,' said Teppic.

'How d'you mean?'

'Well . . . on the statue . .

Khuft waved a hand impatiently.

'That's just public relations,' he said. 'I mean, look at me. Do I look patriarchal?'

Teppic gave him a critical appraisal. 'Not in that loincloth,' he admitted. 'It's a bit, well, ragged.'

'It's got years of wear left in it,' said Khuft.

'Still, I expect it's all you could grab when you were fleeing from persecution,' said Teppic, anxious to show an understanding nature.

Khuft took another fig and give him a lopsided look. 'How's that again?'

'You were being persecuted,' said Teppic. 'That's why you fled into the desert.'

'Oh, yes. You're right. Damn right. I was being persecuted for my beliefs.'

'That's terrible,' said Teppic.

Khuft spat. 'Damn right. I believed people wouldn't notice I'd sold them camels with plaster teeth until I was well out of town.'

It took a little while for this to sink in, but it managed it with all the aplomb of a concrete block in a quicksand.

'You're a criminal?' said Teppic.

'Well, criminal's a dirty word, know what I mean?' said the little ancestor. 'I'd prefer entrepreneur. I was ahead of my time, that's my trouble.'

'And you were running away?' said Teppic weakly.

'It wouldn't,' said Khuft, 'have been a good idea to hang about.'

'"And Khuft the camel herder became lost in the Desert, and there opened before him, as a Gift from the Gods, a Valley flowing with Milk and Honey»,' quoted Teppic, in a hollow voice. He added, 'I used to think it must have been awfully sticky.'

'There I was, dying of thirst, all the camels kicking up a din, yelling for water, next minute — whoosh — a bloody great river valley, reed beds, hippos, the whole thing. Out of nowhere. I nearly got knocked down in the stampede.'

'No!' said Teppic. 'It wasn't like that! The gods of the valley took pity on you and showed you the way in, didn't they?' He shut up, surprised at the tones of pleading in his own voice.

Khuft sneered. 'Oh, yes? And I just happened to stumble across a hundred miles of river in the middle of the desert that everyone else had missed. Easy thing to miss, a hundred miles of river valley in the middle of a desert, isn't it? Not that I was going to look a gift camel in the mouth, you understand, I went and brought my family and the rest of the lads in soon enough. Never looked back.'

'One minute it wasn't there, the next minute it was?' said Teppic.

'Right enough. Hard to believe, isn't it?'