‘And somehow – I don’t know exactly how – somehow it all descends to me. Somehow this intensely magical, other-worldly, imaginary country comes to me, is revealed to me, in Kentucky, through books of different kinds, through the goddamn air maybe. But at the same time I knew about the actual historical Egypt too, about which real knowledge has been accumulating through the centuries; I knew about mummies and King Tut and Ra and Isis and Osiris and the Nile rising and all those slaves hauling blocks of stone. So what it seemed like to me was that there were two different countries, somehow near
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