After twenty years baking in the hot desert sun, drying until my skin was sandpaper and my bones were brittle, my whole life devoted to this single goal, I have attained it.
I have found the pyramid.
I don’t remember the name of the king it houses. I don’t care, as my entire goal has been only to find it. I used to have some other goal, but I can’t remember, and it doesn’t matter. I’m almost dead.
But I’ve found the pyramid.
Small; perfect in every way. Stones baked by the sun. Inside the gaping chasm of its entrance lies the cool breeze of ten thousand nights, and also my goal, whatever it was. I don’t remember. All this time in the unbearable sun, and you forget things you ought to know. Your age, your name, they’re all just words and numbers.  A jumble; a strand of memory; nothing more.
Inside the pyramid, a single stone hallway with torches unlit for aeons descends gradually downward. No creatures stirred in this place, neither the smallest of spiders nor the meekest of rats.
For this is a place of death.
Perhaps. But it was also my goal. And to be afraid of what was ahead, to turn back, that was madness. Not after all this time.
I shambled slowly into the final chamber. It was an unremarkable stone room, some five meters on any side. In the middle was a sarcophagus, and behind it, an embroidered and cracked mirror. Was this my goal? This ancient king? Why had I cared to find him; to see his weathered face; to touch his ancient skin? What benefit was there? But all the same, I wished to see what was in this ancient coffin.
With my old and dying skeleton, skin but draped on, I wrapped my fingers around the lid of the coffin and pried it open to reveal whatever may be inside. However, there was nothing but a pile of bandages, weathered by time. Is this what I had come to see? I couldn’t remember; no, I shouldn’t remember. I had the implacable urge to leave there and die somewhere else, anywhere but in this godforsaken place. But I stayed where I was. I was so tired – I could scarce move. With every breath I groaned. I couldn’t understand what I was looking for, why I had come here. And then I looked up at the mirror.
My flesh was all but gone in places, hugging to my bones like a mold. Wrapped around me, loosely, were some bandages. My skin was a horrid gray color and every breath I took showed every one of my ribs as if they were part of some macabre collection. My eyes were but hollows, and with them I saw that I wore the crown of a king; a pharaoh.
Even though my people had planned for my return, and appeased the gods that I should rise again, there was some cruel humor in their actions, for I returned to an empty civilization who died out hundreds of years ago. There was nothing but bones swept by the sands. Knowing this and disregarding it, I searched, for one more who was loyal to me, one more who would call me king.
But there were none. And now I return once more to my people.