Mummy Read Free Page A

into another room. Emlyn loved his vague unease. He was not suspicious of her, he was just aware.
    If you knew … thought Emlyn, and she was deeply, wonderfully happy.
    She studied the mummy again, reading the old, tired cards that lay beneath the glass next to the mummy.
    In the Egyptian Room, the cards themselves were historic; probably written eighty or a hundred years ago. In square, spidery writing, the ink slowly losing its color, some ancient curator told everything he knew.
    The mummy’s genealogy was unclear. Who were her parents? To what pharaoh was she related? In what era had she been born?
    It was known that in 1898, an American traveler purchased Amaral-Re in a street bazaar in Cairo. This, said the card, was common. Mummies were everywhere, under the sand, tucked in tombs, sold on streets.
    In England, the wealthy liked to have mummy parties, and the mummy would be hacked open after dinner, presumably with much laughter and delight, and the amulets found inside the wrappings would be distributed as party favors, and the broken bones and linen would be tossed in the garbage.
    Amaral-Re, however, had been kept on a pedestal on the balcony of the American’s mansion. When he died, he gave both the mansion and the possessions to start a museum. The museum’s collection had long ago outgrown the mansion, which was now merely a quaint office wing attached to the real museum.
    Amaral-Re was no longer on her balcony. The donor’s will required that the mummy be displayed so that the children of the city might forever find the fascination that he had found in her mysterious eternity.
    A second card explained that because the mummy needed her body in the afterlife, she had been dried out so she would last. Her lungs and stomach had gone into separate jars. She’d been cleaned with palm wine, and then for seventy days covered with a salt called natron, until she was a dry, stiff husk.
    Amaral-Re had been only four feet eleven inches tall. There was a painted stick standing next to the mummy, so living children could measure themselves and compare.
    Suppose, thought Emlyn, that in life Amaral weighed one hundred pounds. If a body is seventy percent water, and if the embalmers dried all water out of her, there would be thirty pounds left.
    Thirty pounds was the weight of the scull Emlyn rowed and carried easily from the boathouse. So carrying her won’t be a problem, thought Emlyn. Only hiding her.
    Emlyn’s fingers actually itched from the desire to touch the mummy, and she had to rub her hands together, as if to soothe a rash.
    After Amaral’s body was dried out, the card continued, she had been washed with hot resin, an oil from trees, to keep her soft. (Emlyn imagined this as maple syrup.) Then came hundreds of yards of bandages. With every wrap, the linen was brushed with more sticky resin, which glued the layers together and made them stiffen. Her linen was high quality; she was no common housewife wrapped in old, torn clothes.
    The guard was drifting her way again. Emlyn did not want him to remember her, so she moved ahead of him, slowly taking herself into Birds. Just why Birds was adjacent to Egypt, Emlyn did not know. Birds was a hideous room. Most little children would not even go into it, and those who were dragged in began to sob right away.
    Three hundred thirty-one different stuffed birds. How evil they were: glass eyes glittering, beaks apart. Even friendly birds, like robins, were stiff and hostile on their twigs. What would they do if they knew she was going to steal their neighbor?
    Would they sing and fly with sweet abandon, thrilled that at least somebody was going to be set free? Or would they attack with sharp beaks and vicious claws?
    Stop it! she said to herself. They are stuffed animals, and that mummy is a stuffed person. They have no emotion. They have no meaning.
    The guard continued his circuit on into the next room, so Emlyn went back to Egypt. She stared at a dusty diorama opposite