Are you here with the living? Are you back with the dead?

[sovay]

The dead who were buried in boats, among sex and sand:

As the Chinese archaeologists dug through the five layers of burials, Dr. Mair recounted, they came across almost 200 poles, each 13 feet tall. Many had flat blades, painted black and red, like the oars from some great galley that had foundered beneath the waves of sand.

"A Host of Mummies, a Forest of Secrets."

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Such a strange mixture of the alien and familiar. While I hesitate to say that there's nothing more tantalizing than a dessicated corpse, they seem to be the brink of telling their secrets in a way that mere bones never do.

[sovay]

While I hesitate to say that there's nothing more tantalizing than a dessicated corpse,

Nah. Everybody feels that way sometimes.

they seem to be the brink of telling their secrets in a way that mere bones never do.

Because they still have faces? Or because there is so much more of their life around them—material culture, physically—it seems they should be like us, where skeletons are only us at the most mineral level?