Dedicated
to
THEM
Sitting or standing, as the mood or the ritual occasion dictated when they posed for the royal sculptors millennia ago, they stare pleasantly out upon the long green snake of Egypt—which they called Kemet, “the Black Land”—and the desert wastes of “the Red Land” beyond.
They have been there, some of them, five thousand years and more.
If there is an Earth five thousand years from now, some of them will doubtless be there still.
Smiling, happy, confident, serene, ravaged no longer by the fierce ambitions and violent passions that often moved behind those deliberately impervious formal masks, they have a satisfaction, not given to many, which they will never know but seldom doubted:
They always said they would live forever.
And as forever goes in the lives of men, they have.
***