Richard Dansky

Originally this month’s piece was going to be a followup to last month’s piece, but then I got myself stranded in London by volcanic action. So, here’s a little something inspired by that instead.

Enjoy.

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Follow the sign.

It’s small, and it’s brown, and it’s really not designed in the slightest to catch the eye. It almost apologizes as it sits there, letting you know diffidently that yes, there is in fact a museum down this way, and by the way it’s terribly sorry to have bothered you with that information.

The tourist seeking the big names will ignore the sign. He will consult his dearly-bought walking map, figure out that the British Museum is thataway, or the Victoria and Albert is over yonder, or that if he’s willing to risk being run over by a fleet of black taxis painted up like Jack Daniels labels, he can make it into the relative safety of Regent’s Park where all he has to worry about is being brained by an errant soccer ball.

Of which, incidentally, there are plenty.

But if you follow the sign, it leads you away from the busy thoroughfare of Euston Street. It takes you down something narrower, and suddenly on the left there’s a university, magnificent and stereotypical, all carved columns in soot-stained white stone, and students lounging in the  quad pretending to study. Surely, here is where the apologetic museum can be found, on the grounds of an institute of higher learning.

And it can, sort of. Not here, though. The way is blocked. No way through the stolid edifices where knowledge is housed, kept, and tamed. Instead, a small map, cousin to the sign, gently suggests that if one were in fact interested in seeing said museum, one might want to…walk around, perhaps? To the other side of the campus?

If a map could cough with embarrassment, this one would.

So it’s off down Gower Street again, and then a left onto Torrington, and don’t you let yourself get distracted by the thrumming hive of bookery that is the original Waterstone’s lurking there. Plenty of time for that later, yes there will be. Just remember the prices are in pounds and that your suitcase is already full to bursting, and you may escape with your arms unburdened and wallet intact.

But that’s for later. Because on the left is Malet. Malet Place, officially, though it’s not a place, it’s an alley. And if it is not a dark alley, it is certainly an insufficiently illuminated one. It’s not narrow, but the buildings on either side are tall and utterly disinterested in letting light through. There’s construction here, too, and all the detritus that goes with that, and a definite sense of who belongs here and who doesn’t. If you are not a student, if you are not helping build this place, then you do not belong here. The rest of the city beckons. Why here?

It’s something to think about. A museum that tries this hard to hide itself, surely one can respect its wishes. There are museums glad of visitors. The Wellcome Center flings its doors wide, positively exhibitionistic about its collection of death masks and artificial limbs and Darwinian knick-knacks. The British Library practically demands you come see the Magna Carta and Beatles lyrics scrambled on the backs of birthday cards. Why press on?

Because toward the end of the alley, you see a flag over a doorway, or perhaps a banner. It announces that the museum is in fact here, that you have in fact found it, and that the rattling dream of your youth when you wandered, alone and utterly entranced, among the pieces of ancient Egyptiana in the Univeristy of Pennsylvania’s dim-lit and hoary collection, can be dusted off and refreshed. Here, now, is a proper museum of Egyptology. Here is a museum of Egyptology that in concept dredges up jerky footage of Howard Carter looting the Valley of the Kings and every bad pulp story about a mummy, ever. It is irresistible.

There’s a smaller sign on the door. It says, in so many words, that, yes, the Museum is here and that it’s up the steps and for the love of God, what are you doing hanging around the doorway, anyway? Overhead, a scrap of breeze catches the banner. It waves once or twice. It’s a sign, or at least a suggestion.

The stairs, on the other hand, are not promising. They are concrete. They are grey – not gray, but in fact laden with an ineffable Britishness that strips the unwary “a” from the word and replaces it with a proper, dignified “e”. One suspects that any further discussion leads to use of the word “colour”, and from there, things will go rapidly downhill.

The museum, though, is uphill. Three or so flights uphill, to be honest, the stairwell unmarked with any signage or encouragement that the curious traveler is indeed headed in the right direction.

And then, at the top, a small note, and a door. The museum is through here, the note says, though the door looks forbidding. Stuck, even. It takes two pulls, and the act of exertion for the second is vaguely awkward, as if the whole thing is too mannered to be despoiled by a proletariat grunt.

Behind the door, a desk. A small one, and sitting at it, a very surprised-looking woman of later years. She is wearing glasses, there is something complicated-looking on her desk, and the first thing out of her mouth is “Are you from the British Musuem?”

This is a moment to savor. After all, how often does one get mistaken for someone from the British Museum? In North Carolina, for example, it happens very, very rarely. Why exactly one has been identified wrongly as being from the British Museum is another question – surely it isn’t the GDC Speaker T-shirt (tasteful black, of course); maybe it’s the glasses. Or maybe it’s the dimly glimpsed tour group in the room beyond, and one is assumed to be a straggler from that assemblage simply because precious few other folks ever make it this far.

Of course, the honorable thing is to admit that one’s origins are humbler, indeed, that one is a tourist.

“A tourist!” she says, happily and with surprise. “We don’t get a lot of those in here.” The faintest of nods indicates the doorway through which the exhibits can be found. It’s dim on the other side, and there are large display cases made of dark wood whose shelves can just be seen. They look full. They look very full.

That, then, is the liminal moment. To step through the doorway and actually see what the interior of this place holds, the realization of a hundred bad movies and overheated histories and two-fisted pulp stories about tough guys with Archaeology degrees raiding Arks of all varieties, lost and found. It’s all the imagined fussy British archaeologists in pith helmets taking time out from the dig for tea and the crumbling treasure of doom-shadowed Dunsanian Meroe, all the stereotypes and archetypes and reproduced sepia-toned daguerrotypes waiting at that doorway, but not beyond it. All the stories, real and sort-of-real and utterly, deliriously fictional, as mismatched as the Great Sphinx’s anatomy and yet all of a piece.

Beyond it is facts. Beyond it is specimens in neatly – or densely – arranged shelves, with labels and dates and explanations. Beyond it is what is, explanations of which pigments are indicators of the Ninth Dynasty and well-reasoned hypotheses as to what each and every scrap of porcelain might have been used for. It is right, and proper, and appropriate.

In the doorway, though, are the stories, the ones that might have led someone small away from his tour group in another museum three thousand miles distant, or down a crowded alley, or away from the hustle and bustle and much more famous attractions of the London street. The stories will all fall away once the threshold is crossed and the cold truth is seen, but that, too, makes sense. After all, stories have endings, and in their endings, pave the way for their successors. Stories – residual influences and inescapable curiosity – have led errant footsteps here. – which has, of course, become a story for that very wanderer to tell in turn. Squint hard enough, and it’s a means of self-perpetuation for a thousand narratives, made unrecognizable from generation to generation of inspired tales. It works for them, though; who are we to argue.

Meanwhile, somewhere nearby, someone is looking at a brown-and-white sign that suggests diffidently the location of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. They are staring, and shrugging, and moving on toward something a bit better known. And that’s their story, born of their stories, and they are welcome to it.