ABSTRACT

On a table carved into the shape of a lion lies a corpse, surrounded by four men. The masks on their faces have beaks like those of sparrowhawks. One now raises a sharpened stone and cuts into the side of the body. In keeping with the ritual of embalming he then flees, bystanders pursuing him angrily and hurling stones. With this fundamental violation accomplished and acknowledged, the remaining embalmers draw out the brains and the organs of the trunk.1 Cavities are washed in Phoenician wine and treated with cinnamon, myrrh and cassia. In all the process lasts several weeks. Finally the body, wrapped in gum-soaked linen bandages, is returned to relatives, who presently inter it in a tomb around twelve miles from Cairo. Time passes. Homer, Plato, and Alexander the Great come and go. The Roman Empire rises and falls. Some time in the early sixteenth century money changes hands, and Arab guides begin to dig away the sand blocking the entrance to the burial chambers.2 A shaft of sunlight knifes cleanly through the soft accumulated shadows of time and death. Men slide down on ropes. Tapers flare. The crack of hatchets echoes down the tunnels as first coffins, then bodies themselves are broken open. At this point the dead man escapes the plunder. In fact, guarded by a particularly

large and nasty set of bats who happen to have made their home nearby, he survives undisturbed until 1581. To be fair, he is soon settled back in the darkness once again. Immured in the hold of an English merchant ship he is of no interest to the grey tomcat padding softly over his coffin, its nostrils diverted by the far stronger smell of pepper and ginger which pierces through nearby canvas sacking. On deck the captain raises his spyglass one last time, tilting it beyond the teeming babel of the quayside and back toward Cairo, that great mercantile whirlpool of Christians, Armenians,

Abexins, Turks, Moors, Jews, Indians, Medians, Persians, and Arabians. He glances briefly at a crocodile sunning itself along the river bank, and at two half-naked men wrestling before a small crowd, their oiled bodies shining in the dry glitter of Egyptian light. A few vital words with the first mate establish that all the appropriate parties have been bribed, and that no rice has been allowed on board.3 It is now late afternoon, and time to leave, as none but the most inexperienced smuggler would ever seek to steal away in darkness. Ropes slither; sails pucker and tighten. The captain closes his eyes on the bright confusion of tongues and clothing, and with a supreme effort of will summons up a momentary vision that soothes his eyes and anoints his sun-cracked brain: England … cool, damp, and – above all – green.4