Free Endless Things by John Crowley Page A

and you could reach it again by going back from here along either horn?
    It, the real country. Not Ægypt but Egypt.
    Maybe there was indeed something of Egypt—the place where actual men and women had lived and died and prayed and thought for centuries—preserved in the conversazione of Florentine Platonists, in the rituals and costumes of Freemasons. Not all that they thought there was, of course, but more than the scholars he'd been reading would allow. The real arcana of the real priests of Thoth and Asclæpius might have lived on, a slight, slim thread but never broken, tangled up in Hermes, passing down to Bruno and to Mozart and George Washington and the French Revolution, down to the Thursday night rituals in the halls of midwestern cities, the bankers and businessmen with their trowels and embroidered aprons, their eyeglasses and dentures.
    Another thing Barr had once said to him. Strange, he'd said, strange how the past continually enlarges, rather than shrinking with distance.
    Maybe that's because we actually move toward it rather than away. There is no world of tomorrow, no such thing: we move always toward what we were, to know it again. He did, anyway.
    What about that for an ending to his nonexistent book, the revelation that sober historians of the new age had made old Ægypt real again, and proved mad Bruno right. And they had done that because the making of new ages—in past as well as future—is what we do with the dark backward and abysm of time. Cosmopoeia. If he were a historian, he thought, a real historian, that's what he'd do, or help to do.
    * * * *
    Meanwhile Frank Walker Barr went down along the wide stream of travelers, thinking too: thinking of the basements of the library at Noate, a day a couple of months before when he'd sat at one of the long scarred wooden tables there, with a box open before him, one of the boxes that the Noate library used to store fragile and ephemeral things, worth it or otherwise, always worth it if you happened to be in search of one such, as Barr on that day was.
    He'd been reading those new polemical accounts of Egyptian and Greek history, which exposed the old standard histories as having a bias toward the North and the light-skinned peoples, against the South and the dark-skinned. Understandable but long unchallenged. He, Barr, though always glad to see the past reimagined, and older visions brought forward again in the course of time, hadn't himself made up his mind on the issues; but a note referring to a surprising source had struck him. W. M. F. Petrie, “Historical References in the Hermetic Writings,” Transactions of the Third International Congress of the History of Religions (1908), pp. 196-225.
    The library didn't have that volume, but it had, here in the basement, the same paper in pamphlet form, from a time when intellectual and political controversy was carried on by means of publications like these, gray cheap paper not meant to last, salvos or squibs. Ancient smell as of tomb dust or cerements. Petrie's argument for an early date for the so-called Hermetica was based on the fact that the Greek conquerors, or inheritors, of Pharaonic Egypt were demonstrably fascinated by the Egyptian past, and restored many temples and religious sites, and collected codices. He thought that the Hermetica were simply a small part of the copying of ancient Egyptian sacred manuscripts that the Greeks did. Most of those manuscripts were then lost, and the Greek copies lost too, lost with so much of everything. But not these. Found and not lost; not all.
    Barr had put down the pamphlet then, captured by the sudden unfolding of an inward image: desert, and a buried temple uncovered. A familiar image, an image he had been profoundly gratified and thrilled by once, as he was gratified by it now. From where had he acquired it to store it away untasted for so long? From the movies, of course, but which one? Movie sand, wind-disturbed, moving away to show the tips of