Ezra, Part Two: At The Museum

I first met the King when I was young. Just a teenager on a school trip to a museum. We wandered the brightly lit corridors with a tour guide telling us (in a quite animated fashion) about the exhibits. There were paintings and old books and then there was the archaeology exhibit, where they displayed bones and other objects that they had been pulled from the earth.

I wish I could say I was fascinated, but the truth was I was bored. I was not a perfect student -- far from it -- and the only reason I was on this trip was to escape the tedium of the classroom, but that had been replaced by the tedium of the museum.

The archaeology section changed that. I passed arrowheads made of flint and axes that looked like they are been cut out directly from rock until I reached the end of the exhibit where there was a statue sitting on a stone chair.

The statue was of a man, old, his face filled with sadness. There was a stone crown on his head and I wondered why this was here -- after all, the rest of these things seemed like Native American artifacts, things that came from around here, but this looked like some European king. Perhaps it was on loan from some other museum and they had placed him here because they had no other section to put him in?

"He's the Sleeping King," a voice said and I quickly turned. There was a man standing behind me. He wore a black and gray suit and held a cane on his hands. "Also known as the King Under the Mountain."

"Shouldn't he be, I don't know, under a mountain then?" I asked.

"Oh, he is," the man said. "This isn't really him, this is just a statue of him, you understand. His real body is underneath the earth, waiting for the end of days, when the stones will call to him and he will awaken."

"Okay," I said, thinking quite reasonably that this man was a crazy person.

"You can ask him anything," the man said. "Anything at all and he will answer. He cannot tell a lie, not while he sleeps, and he will be sleeping for a very long time. Ask, my boy. Go on."

I didn't ask though. I walked away as fast as I could, trying to catch up to the rest of my class. I avoided that exhibit for the rest of the day and it was only as we were walking out, that I peeked back into it to see the statue one more time.

It was no longer there.