Treasure

Imagine, you're a British explorer. You are one of the sixty-eight British explorers that can be found on Wikipedia. King George IV gave you a ship to sail the seas of the world. On that ship, together with a crew of a hundred men, you sail away on the Thames. Even before reaching the Northsea to sail down the coast of France, you enter a big storm. You realise that this trip won't be easy.

For days, you and your crew sail southwards. When you've reached the southern part of Spain, you can see Morocco from afar, and you turn to the East. You know this area, you've been here before. This time, you go on, to the Nile delta. There, you go ashore and you work on the preparations of an expedition for weeks. You hire carriers, mules and materials and finally you can leave. In the unbearable heat, that seizes you every day and makes you wonder if you're even going to see the Big Ben again, you travel to the desert.
The stories about geometrical buildings already reached England a few years before, but it took some years before the king finally raised all the money from the conquerred areas in France in order to pay for this expedition. You know what you should be looking for, but when the triangles appear in a far distance, you finally understand what people were talking about. the closer you get, the bigger they become, and the smaller you feel. These are real miracles!
When you reach your destination, you put up your camp on the base of on one of the piramids. The strange scientist, who was also on a mission for the king, and who hadn't said anything during the trip, started his work. He orders some of the men to force one of the doors and enters the magical building. You are scared that he won't come back, but after several hours, he returns with the men. They carry strange attributes and keep going back into the black hole to bring out more stuff. You wait for weeks and let the scientist do his job. Then, you break up the camp and start with the long journey back to the ship. The men carry all the stuff that the collected from the piramids on your ship. Not only vases and spoons, but also dead animals and tombs are brought on board. You put everything in the hold below the deck. You don't think about it, you just want to return home, to see your wife.
You sail back as fast as you can, to get rid of this strange freight. At night, you dream of the looks of the egyptians who stood besides the road where you and your men passed through their villages. Sometimes they were frightened, sometimes aggressive. You didn't understand the things they said, but you know what they meant.
Back in London, you offer the king the treasure you found. You shake the hand of the scientist and hurry back home where you kiss your wife.

It was this scenario I had to think about, when I saw all those treasures in the Brittish Museum. While the public slowly passed the showcases, and whispered jokes about the teeth of the mummy, I stood there for ten minutes, wondering how it was possible that I was looking at a dead person, who ate a loaf of bread about three thousand years ago. A person that died and, in hope of an after life, had its body embalmed. Now he was lying there: in a showcase of glass, in a huge museum in a rainy land in Northern Europe. I don't think this was the idea of incarnation that they were thinking about: the after life of the twenty first century.