The Pharaoh’s Wake

You were laid low, your body stripped of its regalia and placed central in the tiny room of the museum.  Tomb paintings adorned the walls not made of the sacred stone but of plastic canvas.

The faces staring down at you filter in and out of your vision, melding into a ceaseless mass of onlookers.  Thousands of random voices echo beyond, grossly preventing you from sleeping.  Would they ever be quiet?  You’d like to say a word, to shout, to tear into them with insults, but your lips are pulled back against your teeth, stretched, chapped, split with dryness.

You can’t even raise an arm to vex them; your muscles are atrophied, wasted away into thin sticks of brown flesh.  Your arm stretches out with a grip empty of the royal scepter that marked you with the power of the ruler.  Centuries ago, they would kneel before you, the morning and the evening star, the Pharoah of the golden throne who ruled with a self-proclaimed godship over the kingdoms of Egypt.  You curse the arthritis that ended your mortal reign.  Of all the things for a Pharoah to die of, you murmer.  No one listens, they only gawk at the sunken empty holes where your eyes once were.

Do you remember the obsidian edge that sliced open your belly?  The ebony flint edge slid along the left side of your abdomen spilling intestines and viscera for the embalmer’s art to begin.  Tirelessly, with great care, the Embalmer removed the intestines, liver, and countless other organs pulling them gently away, assuring their place inside you, within your spirit.

To the western lands, you’d journey where the gods would welcome you with open arms, their heavenly son, their earthly king.  But can you make it to the Judgment tripping over your own entrails?  Gone is the golden amulet carefully emblazed with the healing eye of Horus.  It should have healed the wound to your spirit, yet now it sits in a tiny display box to be pondered over like the Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David not entirely unappreciated, but not serving its purpose by your side either.

Suddenly, you realize that you’re naked, your body stripped except for a scrap of white sheet draped over your thighs.  The memory of the warm burial linens and sacred oils bleed away into a dusty casket of glass where the faces watch you still.

“Eternal is the power of Re, Re has fashioned him.”  The guardian, Anubis, reads your name, calling you to your place in the court of Kings, but you are absent.

You’d laugh if you could.  After a four thousand year journey, silence is the only thing you crave.