The hexagonal pavers have turned into red bricks, and soon Isabelle sees steps beneath her feet, and her heart quickens almost against her will with excitement, not for the art class, but because she knows that they are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Before she can stop herself, she looks up, and she is not even angry at herself for lifting her eyes, because there before her are the huge columns of the Met, the banners for exhibits flapping large and heavy in the wind. She looks up the many stairs and past the people sitting there even in the cold with their pretzels and hot dogs and soda, toward the glass doors behind which she knows is a whole other world, like a good dream, but one you can return to.

The vast lobby of the museum is crowded and warm. It smells old, and Isabelle breathes in deeply, listening to the muffled echo of voices and the sound of heels on the marble floor. Her mother gets in line at the coat check; Isabelle hands her coat to her and points toward the Egyptian wing just off the lobby, at the end of which is the Temple of Dendur, her favorite part of the museum.

“You going off?” her mother asks.

Isabelle nods, and her mother looks at the clock on the wall above the door. “The class doesn’t begin for another twenty minutes, but don’t go where I can’t find you. Just to the temple.”

Isabelle nods and hurries away.

The getting there is as good as the temple itself. She passes through rooms filled with all kinds of ancient Egyptian artifacts: gold cups and chalices, ornate masks, the elaborate jewelry of pharoahs, slabs of wall taken from the insides of pyramids and marked with hieroglyphs. Isabelle peers closely at these markings. The Egyptian alphabet, she thinks, is far more beautiful than their own; one marking is a lion, another an owl, another a hawk, another a snake. There is something appealing about writing in pictures, about pictures standing for sound, about the way words and images and sound fuse as seamlessly as they do in hieroglyphics. She’d like to learn to write this way herself; before they leave, she thinks, she’ll stop at the museum bookstore to see if there are any books on hieroglyphics.