The Cairo Museum is a new white-marble museum on an island in Cairo, the first in the world “built on purpose” for the wonders of Thebes and Luxor, finished before any of them arrived. It stands in a militarized square beside the last British barracks in Egypt.
| Type | Museum |
| Spanish entry | Museo del Cairo |
The island
Reached up the Nile from the pyramids, the island holds a square that “will be very famous in posterity,” the museum, and the barracks of the British, their last stronghold in Egypt. The ensemble is “a militarized square.” Alarms sound in Cairo.
The building
Its style is “between Greek and Egyptian.” Inside are columns and a central gallery; at the center a platform “where there would be something of the collection,” ringed by an inner balcony running around the whole structure, with stairways, hanging curtains and galleries of three or more stories. Beneath the balconies is a lower floor. The outer balcony is measured at a hundred feet. The museum is empty.
The battle
The Fever “was entrenched in Cairo, in the area of a new museum, in a militarized square.” Fighters fell to the lower floor, and Ariel and Leplum were trapped in the curtains. During the battle the surrounding ground was “an intense, reflective basalt.” It took place between two and three in the morning.
The emptying city
Cairo is to be evacuated. An earthquake days earlier killed “some people, but not massively,” and the Sphinx of Giza disappeared in it; its pieces, like those of Thebes and Luxor, never reached the museum. Serbian troops, the Montenegrins, lodge at the Shepherd Hotel. There is talk of creatures, “worms from the deepest of life, and of putrid flesh.”
Open questions
- Whether the basalt is permanent or was only of the battle.
- The number of floors; what the lower floor and the platform hold.
- Who operates the alarms and what triggers them.
- What links the earthquake, the Sphinx’s disappearance and the evacuation.
- Whether a confusedly pronounced old name for “Cairo” refers to another place; what the Montenegrins intend.
- The name of the square.