They say the same thing about the Mona Lisa: the more that people swarm her, the more poignant is her serene detachment. The effect is even more pronounced here, because the statue was designed to have a life independent of the viewer. It wasn’t made to be an art object. It was a machine for establishing Hatshepsut’s presence in the djet world.

I was more than a bit blinded by the bright lights. But it’s very hard, when you’re in a good light—“Where did you say you work? The New Yorker?!”—to accept that it isn’t you; it’s just light.

This was a sacred space, and it came with its own sacred version of time. Djet it was called, the time of the gods and the time of the dead, the time that governs what is complete, unchanging, perfect, and everlasting. Unlike either the circle or the arrow, djet stands apart from nature and her ever-fluctuating processes. It is the time of

They say that the roots of a tree are every bit as extensive as the branches. The Met is like this, too, with two floors below the galleries exactly as endless as the areas the public knows. Talented guards have internalized the whole of it in three-dimensions, such that they can tell you outside of a basement restroom that Aztec deities are

And, indeed, the atmosphere in the galleries was intensely familiar, though for reasons that had nothing to do with plaid skirts or severe nuns. It was the atmosphere of all those months at Tom’s bedside, one of speechless mystery, beauty, and pain.

Each morning, her priest would have opened her temple’s doors so that the limestone statue would catch the morning light. At that moment, she (the eternal Hatshepsut) would transform into an akh, a radiant being, in communion with her father, the sun. (More precisely, Amun-Re was the power that powered the sun, the invisible creative force behind

Unlike this businessman, unlike most people, I have no ball to push forward, no project to advance, no future I am building toward. I could work at this job for thirty years and I will make no progress, per se. The public will gain no surer sense of where the mummies or the toilets are. They’ll continue to ask me for King Tut’s tomb, and they won’t

“This is our first post, the C post,” Aada announces. “Until ten o’clock we will stand here. Then we will stand there. At eleven we will stand on our A post down there. We will wander a bit, we will pace, but this, my friend, is where we are. Then we will get coffee. I suppose that this is your home section, the old master paintings?” I tell her

I stroll over to the side of the temple to examine the relief carvings. I find the pharaoh—he’s not hard to spot—wearing the dual crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. I wonder who among my fellow onlookers knows that there’s something strange about this particular pharaoh. It isn’t his profile or regalia; those are conventional enough. It’s his name,