Down the hall past red granite sarcophagi and cracked ceramics inscribed with hieroglyphs: ouroboros, ankh, lotus, and the eye of Horus stolen and broken by Set into fractions, puzzle pieced back together by Thoth so we can read his writings and summon their civilization, down the hall past Perneb’s tomb and then through the threshold to ferry across the mediterranean great hall to Greece and Rome, walk up to the wounded warrior and other petrified figures of antiquity standing as if socializing in bacchanalian stages of undress, dark patina, lucky if they have all appendages, through the marble crowd and around the fluted Ionic column with its mid-section preserved from the Temple of Artemis, past the wide-eyed faces of Zeus and Alexander the Great, and into a larger room with mythic scenes of gods on earth interacting and having relations with mortals, Hercules next to an anonymous athlete with deep-drilled curls above the victorious fillet band around his forehead, commemoration for his performance during the olympiad of his prime, every four years the soldiers laid down their arms and offered truce to compete as athletes and were joined by poets, artists, and the leaders of state, who conducted diplomacy at the games and united the Hellenic world in Pax Romana which eventually descended, concurrently with the games into barbaric chaos necessitating a new God and the end of pagantry, but this marble olympian won glory for his country during the anus mirabiles when the structure of civilization stabilized, so his figure was solidified and placed on a pedestal to endure for ages, now his ideal form cracked and crumbling, broken at the joints, weak links in our frame, lost limbs found or remade and reattached by careful restorative touch of a sculptor, metamorphoses of bodies into new forms…
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