Vanessa stood looking at the desiccated head of the mummy through the thick glass of the display case, staring through her own ghostly reflection at the grotesque face of a man who'd been dead for over four thousand years. The bandages had been carefully peeled back around the neck to expose his head, and that along with the thin grizzled neck gave him the appearance of an ancient vulture, his bare head emerging through a ruff of dirty feathers.
Vultures were sacred to the Egyptians, Vanessa remembered, as intermediaries who could bring the flesh of the dead to heaven where their bodies could be reassembled to join the great god Re in his solar bark in his glorious journey across the skies.
She read the name again on the display case though she knew it by heart: Sekhmenahmet, a minor Pharaoh of the third dynasty, about 4200 years old. Not for him the crude burial that depended on the vultures to gather his remains to the gods. He had been interred with full honors and glory as befit a King of Egypt.
He had been Pharaoh, the link between earth and heaven in a world where every eye could see god appear each morning in the East, sail through the heavens across the course of a day and disappear in a blaze of color in the West, where he would battle the demons and evils of the darkness in the underworld. Hard to imagine that this mummy's skin, now no more than a leather-colored peeling, once was alive and vibrant, and that he was caressed by lovers who longed for his touch, who whispered things to him in the darkness: words and promises probably not very different from the things lovers still whispered to one another today.
"Come my beloved, let us lie together. Come let us fuck in my bed beneath the stars. Let me take pleasure in your body. Put your mouth on me, touch me, suck me, make me come."
Vanessa caught herself, realizing that she was arousing herself with these thoughts, and that they were completely out of place in front of the dried corpse of a man who'd lived and died so many long centuries ago.
Everything about ancient Egypt seemed to have the same erotic fascination for her since her divorce, and she was powerless to explain it. The art spoke to her with a vivid immediacy that made the ancient, formalized paintings come alive to her, and looking at a scroll or frieze mounted on the museum's walls, she could imagine the roar of the chariots' wheels, the cries of battle; or in another hear the soft murmurs of the servants as they prepared the Master's meal and served it beside the ornamental pool in the coolness of the ancient evening. There was a placidity and sense of order she felt when she contemplated these scenes that she found calming and deeply satisfying, and that had helped her immeasurably over the most tumultuous times in her break-up.
No doubt the permanence and sense of order of Egypt had appealed to her as her own world fell apart. Her affair with this ancient world had begun just when her divorce had been finalized, on the very day, in fact, that she had signed the lawyers' papers. The ugly maneuvering of the lawyers and Brian's own anger and contempt had so upset her that she had left the office and simply walked, not seeing where she was going until she had found herself here, in front of the museum, and walked directly to the Egyptian exhibit.
Almost immediately she had felt soothed by the art and artifacts of the Egyptian collection, as if she had found the one cool place in a city of intense heat. The grandeur and sense of permanence of ancient Egyptian culture seemed to speak to her and told her something that she very much needed to hear, and she had been coming back ever since, drawn to the calm and quiet of the museum. She found that the dignity of the sculpture, the spare, elegant lines of the art, reached out to her with a message that was both profound and deeply soothing. She had never been one for art, had never seen the point, but now it seemed that the formal poses of the kings and their queens, the unvarying representations of strange gods and indecipherable hieroglyphics was all she could understand, and she understood it intuitively, without having to think about it.
Ancient Egypt made sense to her in a way her own life and world never would. Everything about it felt right, as if these people had really understood the world they lived in and were both satisfied and in love with it, and they had expressed their understanding in an art and architecture that was complete and consistent in itself, and had remained perfect and unchanged for thousands of years.
And within this formalized triumph of human understanding was something else: the compelling feeling of a great wisdom lost. Their art had not only grace and beauty, but great power as well. These were people whose gods still communed with them and guided them, who were never far away, who touched every aspect of their lives. She loved Egypt, and Egypt haunted her
She was daydreaming. The closing bell for the museum had sounded, and she was still standing transfixed in front of the display case. She wasn't worried. Since this obsession with Egypt had begun some months ago, she had become a regular at the museum, familiar to the staff and curators, and she knew that she still had time left before they got serious about clearing everyone out. She would end today's session with the book of spells called The Opening of the Way to the North. She always saved this scroll for last, so that she could leave the museum with it fresh in her mind.
She hiked her bag up on her shoulder and walked slowly back and away from the central hall, towards the end of the gallery. A few visitors passed her, heading for the exits. One woman, struggling with a crying infant in a stroller and a cranky toddler as well, stopped to smile at her. "I think they're closing." she offered, as if that explained the difficulty she was having with her children.
Vanessa forced an automatic smile. "Yes, I know. Thank you."
As the woman dragged her family away, the boy whined "That lady's staying! I wanna stay!"
"That woman probably works here." the woman said. She grabbed the boy's hand and she smiled apologetically as she dragged him away.
In her work clothes, Vanessa might be mistaken for a museum employee. No matter. She didn't bother to explain. Other visitors only distracted her and she was glad to see them go. This was the best time of day. Alone with Egypt.
The scroll was mounted unrolled in all its five feet of polychromatic glory behind a thick pane of Lucite, and even through the plastic it seemed alive with some sort of truly potent force. She couldn't read hieroglyphics, nor could she understand what the images were meant to represent, but still she responded to the power that had made them. She knew that it was a book of spells and magical incantations associated with preserving the Pharaoh's authority, but it seemed more to her than just that. There was some message it sent her, something it was saying that she could almost but not quite make out. It was as if someone were shouting to her from behind a thick door: she could hear their urgency but she couldn't understand the words.
The one image that always drew her most intense interest and curiosity was the central image of the Pharaoh as the Risen Osiris, the resurrected god, Master of Life and Death and source of all fecundity, all potency. The god was shown in the image of his living mummy, the lesser gods all around him paying homage. Strangely, he was leaning backwards, his body forming the hypotenuse of a right triangle. Craig had told her that this was the 3,4,5 right triangle with angles of sixty and thirty degrees, sacred to the Egyptians. He wore the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt and was surrounded by the symbols of power.
Most notable, though, was that his phallus was erect, and not only erect but in the act of ejaculating. The spurt of semen was clearly and deliberately depicted in the image in a graceful arc, just about to begin its descent. His cock was complete and proportionate, even his testicles were shown.
The first time she'd seen it, she had been frankly shocked at the idea of a sexual god of any kind, but as her infatuation with all things Egyptian grew, she began to see how necessary it was and how absurd and impoverished the idea of a non-sexual god really was. We are deeply sexual beings: sexuality permeates our lives, whether we want to admit it or not, and she suspected that it was always so. It was one of the great mysteries of human life, and unlike those other mysteries that begin and end our human lives, it was always with us.
As she'd become more comfortable with all things Egyptian, and as she compared Egyptian life to the life she knew today, it seemed more and more absurd to think that the religion she had been brought up in had practically nothing to say about sex: no insights, no wisdom, no explanation, no understanding other than the crudest moral guide that basically said: don't.
She became aware of foot steps approaching, echoing off the hard marble floor of the gallery floor. She recognized his step even before she shifted her focus to the Lucite and saw the ghostly reflection of Dr Robbins approaching her. His dark beard and curly hair shot with gray made him instantly recognizable
