I AM THE MUMMY HEB-NEFERT

From Bunting (On Call Back Mountain, p. 138, etc.), a remarkably succinct and knowing "autobiography" of a mummy that provides the essence of life in the Egypt of the pharaohs, and which is strikingly illustrated by Christiana (The First Snow, 1996, etc.). The favored, beautiful daughter of a nomarch dances one evening for the pharaoh's brother, Ti. Soon she is a cherished wife, interrupting her idyllic existence only to revisit the home in which she once lived. Her parents are gone, but a house snake, set to catch grain-thieving mice, remains. "The same snake or another. Who could tell?" Heb-Nefert's ponderings arise from her current museum-display vantage point, a 3,000-year period of mummification in "the silent twilight of the afterlife," taken up "when day changed to eternity" and during which she has seen that all things change. Now she hovers in spirit above the display case at which museum-goers express astonishment that her mummy and the one near it—the mummy of her beloved husband—were once living people. Heb-Nefert thinks them foolish for not foreseeing that soon enough they will be dust and bones while she will remain as she is now, "black as night, stretched as tight as leather on a drum," although, in a stunning final line, there is a proud, immutable, and very human fact: "Once I was beautiful." Christiana provides haunting portraits, hints of a spirit world, and misty glimpses as well as bold scenes of the past. A startling shot of a contemporary child underscores Heb-Nefert's dulcet lament in this compelling work. (Picture book. 6-11)