The Egyptian Queen

On the fourteenth day, as they broke the door to the chamber, there came
a soft gonging from somewhere deep; the ground beneath their feet

rippled, enough to coat their boots with dust. And, touch by touch,
   the light...
Canoptic jars, grave dolls, small flasks that once held honey. The
   catafalque

cracked under their hands; and, when they shifted the lid, a cloud of bees
came out, although...came forth...was what she wrote, the only woman

to see this: unmarried, a known hysteric, soon sent home to 'rest
and repair' , her journal somehow lost. The gateway stela gave clues:

I FED TO THE WOLVES SMALL CATTLE...[lacuna]...CLEANSE ME...
[lacuna]...TEARS OF RA...the locals knocked up a basic counter-
   weight gantry,

then worked through the night by Tilley-lamp to crate
the smaller stuff, before chiseling the image of Anubis off the frieze.

The flasks were etched with a hieroglyph depicting a bee,
which does mean 'bee'...came forth the queen, dark-eyed and tremulous.

- David Harsent



Anyway. Busy working. Should have some original blog action tomorrow.

On the motorway that cuts through the moors and hills across the spine of England between the west coast and York, there are elegant powerful spans of slender concrete designed (I think) purely for the access of sheep.

If you are travelling west into the setting sun, the deep grey mists which, on the journey out, hid the moors, now glow like gold in the falling light so that it looks like the motorway and everyone on it is evaporating, or disappearing into fire.

The colour and proportions of British Motorway Signage are probably one of the most powerful shamanic tools in the national psyche. They embody a distant, vaguely beneficent neutrality. The road diagrams are glyphs.