"It is not enough," King Khufu said of his Great Pyramid ... What did his ominous words mean?

The esoteric Anson Hunter archaeological mystery thriller

Hemiunu, the architect and genius responsible for erecting the Great Pyramid, quaked. The king’s words still rang in his ears, drowning out the clamour of the pyramid’s construction in the heat and dust haze of the plateau. “It is not enough...” the King said. Not enough? What did the King’s ominous words mean? Hemiunu, a well-fed, formidable man in a kilt and skullcap, abandoned his customary self-control and scratched his nose, a feature in his fleshy face that was as sharp as his mind and curved like the beak of Thoth, for he was also a high priest of the sacred ibis, the god of reckoning, wisdom, writing and magic. Both Vizier and Chief Architect - head of the king’s works - Hemiunu sat shielded from the blinding glare beside his divine uncle the pharaoh Khufu, in a shaded palanquin of ebony with poles of carob wood, resting in the desert. They were close enough to watch the progress on the mighty construction, yet far enough away to avoid the reek of human labour that attracted the flies, mixed in with the breath of raw onions in the workers’ diet, and limestone dust. Workers swarmed around the base of the pyramid and on the growing ramps the way termites boiled over their earthen towers. One third of the pyramid’s volume now clambered into view, the largest volume of stone that would be required for the building as it tapered progressively to an apex. Millions of blocks had been quarried, cut, transported and moved into place by a rotating workforce of twenty thousand men, hundreds of whom lost their lives each year through accidents, strain and injuries when the skill of physicians could no longer patch them together again, as the Horizon of Khufu went on relentlessly blocking out the sky. Now this? Not enough? Was the king wearying of his stairway to the sky, the greatest and most sublime funerary construction in human history and a project into which Hemiunu had poured thirteen years of his life-blood and spirit? He wondered if Khufu, like Sneferu, the king’s father, was to become a serial pyramid builder, building not one, but three huge pyramids. They would be known to future generations as the Meidum pyramid, the Bent Pyramid, and the Red Pyramid of Dahshur. The abandonment of this enterprise would be a national calamity. Was the pyramid not the organizing principle behind the Egyptian state and its bureaucracy? The very shape of Egypt’s society, a pyramid with levels, slaves at the bottom, then peasants, craftsmen, merchants, scribes, soldiers, government officials and at the apex, the shining capstone, Pharaoh himself? What could have changed Khufu’s heart? Perhaps the length of time taken over the project’s construction, which Khufu had commenced soon after his ascension to the throne at the age of twenty, even though work had proceeded in a fury. “Your Majesty’s Horizon will quicken in its climb as the pyramid narrows to its peak,” Hemiunu promised the King. He did not mention that a shrinking work surface on the rising monument would mean that fewer men at a time could work on the pyramid, especially when it came to sheathing the monument with smooth Tura limestone on its completion, nor did he mention that his assurance to the king would require the overseers to drive the workforce even harder. “It is not the speed of construction that concerns me, Nephew, for I am used to observing its snail-like creep across the horizon after more than a dozen years. No. I have had a dream.” A dream? A vision of some greater enterprise than this one? Hemiunu felt another quake in his lower region. "THE GREAT PYRAMID Pandora's Box' - an Anson Hunter Archaeology Thriller. Available at Amazon Kindle