Moon Tiger

by Penelope Lively

There was once a city in Egypt called Memphis. I shall devote a good deal of space to Memphis, in my history of the world; it is a salutary tale, the fate of Memphis, it nicely demonstrates the fragility of places. In pharaonic times Memphis was a sprawling acreage of houses, temples, workshops – an administrative and religious centre, the seat of government, a magnet for artists and craftsmen: Washington, Paris and Rome all rolled together on the banks of the Nile. Dikes protected it from the inundations of the river. It sounds paradisial – a city of palms and greenery on the richest silt where Upper and Lower Egypt meet, with majestic temples and sphinx-lined boulevards; the hub of an intelligent complex society completely out of step with the rest of the world, constructing ashlar buildings when Europe was living in caves, recording itself in the most decorative script ever known, practising one of the most imaginative, impenetrable and perverse religions of all time. And what is Memphis now? A series of barely discernible irregularities in the cultivation and an immense prone statue of Rameses the Second. How indeed are the mighty fallen.