Toot. But Not Sweet.

It’s coming to light that the Tutankhamun exhibition coming to London in November of this year will not include the precious funerary death mask. The show has attracted more that three million visitors on the American leg of the world tour; and the non-appearance of the golden mask is attracting rage from ticket holders.

Like many young children, I was fascinated with King Tut, the Pyramids, and the Pharaohs; but having no conception of travelling from Scotland, I made my parents life a nagging misery when the treasures visited London in 1972, culpa Blue Peter.

I have seen the death mask twice since then. Firstly, on its last excursion from Egypt, in a breathless Köln Messe in 1982; and then later in The Egyptian Museum in Cairo in 1992.

I chose my time to visit carefully in Cairo, toured the other galleries of the Museum the preceding day, and ascertained the location of the Tutankhamun mask without actually seeing it. I enjoyed a heated argument with an Egyptian historian about why, if the ancients could make steel as he claimed, they had chosen not to document this among the impressive records of their artisan building skills. Then I went out into the sun.

I returned a few minutes before the Museum opened the next day, went straight to the room in which the mask resided, and was rewarded with almost an hour alone with the dead King of Kings. He is shockingly beautiful; the opulence of the gold fades quickly and you find yourself just longing to kiss those lips. The serenity of his almond eyes mesmerise you, as the vulture and cobra in his crown wait to strike. His features are not those of any race, not identifiably Arabic, African, or Asian; and they are completely androgynous too. I very slowly began to feel, as his servants intended, that I was looking at the Face of God.

I left a changed man.

Drew Mishmash