The room before the temple is a relatively narrow one, more of a hallway than anything else. It is lined with huge stone coffins, the lids of some propped open. Inside one of the coffins is a model mummy, and even though she knows that the mummy is not real, it makes her uncomfortable. It is not really the mummy itself that bothers her, but the idea of being mummified, of being wrapped and wrapped and wrapped and trapped forever inside that thick, dark layer like some unforgiving skin, strong enough to hold your shape even after you are nothing more than dust inside. She looks at the dust motes coasting the air in the stark white light coming in through the window along the side of the room. This is the kind of dust she’d rather be. She lingers for a moment more before the mummy, and as she passes on she cannot help but run her hand along the cool stone of the coffin, as if in touching a spot that ancient hands have also touched she is touching the past, reaching into it instead of merely observing it from a distance.

She stands in the doorway of the final room and gazes at it all: the high, high ceiling, the wall of glass, the pool in the middle of the room. And then, behind the pool, guarded by sphinxes, the small set of stairs leading up to the ancient temple reconstructed with its massive bricks. She imagines the narrow hallways and small, ceilingless rooms of the temple, the sandstone bricks marked with the graffiti of nineteenth-century wanderers who didn’t know what they had found, the graffiti itself another layer of history now. She likes how small and safe it makes her feel to be surrounded by these bricks, to be inside a room within a building within a room within a building, so many layers between her and the world.

She feels a hand on her shoulder, and she jumps.

“It’s time,” she hears her mother say. “We should find the classroom.” Isabelle breathes out loudly as reality comes flooding back. She had forgotten about the art class entirely. She steps out from beneath her mother’s hand and turns around. Her mother raises a paper bag from the museum gift shop. “I stopped for Christmas cards,” she says. Isabelle feels her mouth flatten in irritation that her mother has been to the gift shop already without her. “Well,” her mother says. “Ready?” Her mother turns and begins to walk away. No, she thinks, but she follows.