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| Nightmare scene from the ancient Egypt adventure series |
She imagined she
saw a dragonfly outside settle on the top of the coffin, comparing its
lead-light window wings with a painted figure of Isis who knelt on the exterior
of the lid, her feathered arms outspread, in protection over the chest of the
‘Osiris’ beneath. She saw the fishes of the darkest deep. An investigating Nile
perch, came up and finned its way under the passing shadow of the case.
Dusk blurred the
line between sky and silvery water as the mummy case moved downstream, the
water almost lapping against a line that marked the edge of the lid, a line
that also separated the girl inside from survival and drowning.
Thinner, meaner
air, robbed of oxygen, choked her. It was filled with the smell of herself, of
hair, stale clothes and fear... was this death? A final smothering absorption
into the odour and essences of yourself?
Coffin... sarcophagus... different words for the same foul, collapsed
black hole of boundedness that became a dead body’s universe, although a
sarcophagus more often referred to the stone variety. The word came from the
Greek meaning ‘flesh-eating’. It was based on the belief that the stone used in
sarcophagi was of a special kind that could consume the flesh of corpses...
