The Mummy
"The truth is stranger than any truth could be"
Said the man with jewelled eyes; "He roams the dark, and seeks for his love across this vast and apprehensive golden sea."
We each looked from the midnight desert to cast our eyes upon an empty sarcophagus, upon desecrated symbols and hieroglyphic text
And I heard him give a low laugh and thence replied, but I remained perpetually perplexed.
At the lip of a musty chamber we stood, its darknesses shifting
Shadows welled up from the underworld
To devour the sculpted remnants of theTemple of the Sun at Karnak.
And I gazed with awe as an ancient strand of linen trailed the floor
Unrolled like a crumbling, dirty yellow pennant that threaded underfoot within this dry and parched and ancient burial tor.
He said:
"What if I told you that dead did not mean merely sleeping beneath those ancient Pharaoh's sands
That the timeless gods in their obscure purpose made endless time the least insistent of their sacred demands?
"And" continued he,
"What if the baleful eye harbored the purity of an incendiary and argent flame
And because of that flame eternity had obliterated the very syllables of an unspoken, almost forgotten and bedevilled name?
What if the shell that once contained a beating heart were yet still living
Unto some restless dream and whose nightmare were some equally resentful misgiving
About a future that predicts only torture for the soul-
When there are no joys that remain, nothing that we might praise and worship, exalt or extol?
What if those four and alabaster jars
Crowned with the heads of mythic gods and beasts and encrusted with the glittering metals of vanished supernova stars
Were now but empty as is empty air,
Their viscera steeped in poisoned natron and offered up in ritual to the gods who listen not to useless prayer?
A prayer that could not charm the likes of Thoth
Whose sacred scroll bares testament to human pride and vengeful holy wrath!
What if, when beauty is gone and passed into decay like the petals of a corrupted bloom
He whose love is yet still undying has spoken the ghastly proclamation of his own undying doom.
When the flesh that rots eternal can never know true rest
When blind eyes can never see the sun disk as it sets o'er the boundaries of an unremembered lost world's west,
When the words of some arcane and nether region scroll were once sung to love but fell upon the Typhonian ear of the troubled god Seth
And the remainder of hope and the dark and the damned were sealed within the confines of a terrible flesh eating box called living death?"
I trembled then, and
"Alas, condemned to time absolute!" said he,
"Like a flowing river is his love, propelled by cataclysm and violent motion away from our world of hermetic philosophy-
Lost unto endless night, seeking his love till the solar winds shall cease to blow!"
And a chill rippled over my skin and the man's jewelled eyes flickered silver-blue under the starlight's ultramarine and pewter glow.
I turned my own eyes skyward toward the grand and celestial theatre of colourless space
And my visage was painted then with shadows and the shadows whispered to me of a tenebrous and terrible place,
Where He wandered, the living Mummy, Imhotep, now called Ardeth Bey
Whose magic could not resurrect his love from the elements of water and air, of Vulcan burning fire and formless existential clay.
And here he paused, and vouchsafe, with extended finger an emphatic punctuation, as if to end our strange and unsettling talk
He cackled as if in answer to some horrific absurdity, waving his hand over the Egyptian desert,
"I know," he declared, "I saw him- he went for a little walk!"