A Haunting - The Inspiration for The Furies' Bog
My first encounter with archaeology was when I fell in love with Egypt. Ancient, exotic, mysterious land of the pharaohs. A place where history was preserved in the crumpled faces of their mummies. It astonished me that people who had lived 5,000 years ago still clung to that life in the contrasting rich soil of the river and the fine sand of the desert. Their monuments and architectural masterpieces still towered over the land. They weren’t packaged corpses to me; somehow they still spoke.
Fast forward several years and I still love Egypt. But now I also love Rome, Greece, Mesopotamia, and other lands where history dominates. But I never lost my fascination for preserved bodies and the stories they told.
Several years ago I visited the ‘Mysterious Bog People’ traveling exhibit in the Canadian Museum of History.
The 2000-year-old-body of the teenager named the “Yde girl” had particular impact on me and haunts me to this day. I can still picture her face in various stages of remodeling until she looked human, lifelike, almost alive. I was plagued by questions. She was obviously strangled according the archaeologists’ assessment. Why? Was she simply a sacrifice for harvest? Did she have a disability that in that day and age was offensive? She was a beautiful girl who’d been discarded so many years ago but I could still hear her screaming.
Since that time I have frequented the odd traveling exhibit again, feeling delight and amazement at the craftsmanship of ancient man. I stumbled slackjawed through the maze of terracotta warriors in the Montreal Museum of Fine Art. I was humbled by the Greek and Egyptian exhibits in the Ottawa Museum of History, not so much by the trinkets and art, which are awe-inspiring, but by what they expressed: the germination of language, science and philosophy. But none of these left the same impression as the Yde girl.
She wanders through my nightmares and dreams alike. I see her deflated face and I see her whole. She is a single life snuffed out too soon, and all lives everywhere that endure throughout our finite history. And although she plays a very small role in my current book, she is the soul of it. She is the journey....
You may see hints of her as you read. She will peer around a corner, but fleetingly, never in plain sight. She will bob up and down in a tropical swamp, or gaze grotesquely from empty eye sockets. She will pluck confusedly at scientific jargon. Her smile or scream will ripple through assorted characters. And she will emerge, unjustly murdered, from another bog.
