...of fate

The day when they finally came to announce that it had been completed, he was completely dumbfounded for a moment, and the messengers did not know what to think. They had expected a gracious word, if not an expression of enthusiasm, or at the very least some conventional formula of congratulation. But Cheops did not move his lips. His eyes seemed to go quite blank, then his silence infected the messengers too, and they all stood there together as if they had been plunged into desolation, into the void.

[The Pyramid, Kadare, I.]