Medley of the Cut

The column of the commander yielded to our first sweep. Even the water jar for our diggers we set on the south wall of the general’s tomb without knowing it. So we began. His armies retook Nubia, Libya, and the Levant, lost under the sway-bellied lantern-jawed Sun King. Overseer of all scribes, Overseer of the priests of Horus, Grain-giver to all lands, Royal chief of staff, Regent, the general had himself carried on his palanquin through the wailing processions to oversee the work on this place. And so carved, thus: one of his men punches a Nubian in the face. The general was low-born; everything had counted and he knew what counted most. His platoons lift open palms towards Tutankhamun. The general towers as a sway-girdled go-between at court for beseeching Libyans. Only the pearl-handled revolvers do not figure here, or the comeback challenge Nuts! in the Ardennes winter forest. He had himself carried beyond the busy streets of the dead in the city of the dead sloping back from the bluff to a higher, private terrace looking across to Memphis. But then he rose to Pharaoh. So he is not here. Instead his first wife lay here, and then his queen also. At his own royal tomb in the Valley, where the designs remained uncarved, sketching idea along stone, he does not rest either. The fine picklock hand got past Anubis and the reared serpents, and got to him, the Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt. It got past Truth with her high feather, which moved at the slightest disturbance. The general did deep obeisance to her. He is not here. What at last moves the heart? So much already moved, even in his own century, architects prying loose mud bricks of the core for new tombs. Cult funded in perpetuity gone in two generations. So Coleridge, who was indisposed that day, prudently remained in the circle of lime trees while his friends went off on their walk through the countryside. He followed them in his mind. That way no one would have to dismantle Horeheb’s outer court to secure bricks for the statuary room, and facing stones. He cast his mind outward, a net over his dear ones, sending them at pace through the middle distance of steeples, hill lines, and the murder of Lamb’s mother by his sister, a brief madness, thus through the appropriately middle distance where such things are built and performed in fact, no closer, no farther, then on out to the cleansing rim of apocalypse, evening in the bath of waning fire, one bird stitching the whole veil of showings tight along its upper hem— though he was not there, he could tell them that none the less he was next to his words and his word was with them, even unto the rim of their wandering and their turning back. One dome of air and fire. But he was not there. Nor I here. What removes the heart from what moves it? As if I were the lecturer before a congress of doctors, his clinching point approaching, when suddenly he stared out in silence, and at last said, Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed colleagues, the only thing I can see at this moment inside my brain, such as it is, is a little white mouse chasing a little white ball.