The Mummy Congress
EXCERPT
"I reached Silkeborg rather late in the day, frayed and travelworn from an early morning flight from Amsterdam and a dawdling milk-run trip by train from Copenhagen, but I was anxious to see Tollund Man. I dumped my bags at my hotel and went hurrying off down the street to the museum, a spacious eighteenth-century manor house painted bright egg-yolk yellow. I arrived just twenty minutes before closing. The staff were clearly surprised to see a foreign traveller pitching up so late in the day, but they were too polite to say so, and the woman collecting admissions hastily gave me directions to the room where Tollund Man was enshrined. With a map scrunched in my hand, I hustled down the echoing corridors. It was a memorable twenty minutes. I had become adept at bobbing and weaving around the thick crowds that inevitably formed in front of mummies. This room was completely empty. I circled the glass case, paying my silent respects to Tollund Man, but as I did so, I had a strange, unsettling sensation. I felt as if someone was peering at me intently as I peered at Tollund Man.
The next morning, I returned to spend more time and to chat with the museum's amiable director. Christian Fischer had been knighted by the Danish government for his loving care of the museum's famous charge and for his scholarship on Denmark's bog bodies. As we talked in Fischer's airy office, I discovered why I had felt so uneasy the day before. No one, it turns out, is ever alone with Tollund Man. The museum has installed three video surveillance cameras around his tomb. Tollund Man himself rests in a bulletproof case. Over the years, explained Fischer sadly, wandering psychiatric patients had become greatly distressed at the sight of the dead man, and after one or two disturbing incidents, the museum had reluctantly invested in a bulletproof case for its most famous resident. As safe as Tollund Man now seemed, however, these measures had not entirely allayed Fischer's fears. He worried that one day his charge would be kidnapped by thieves intent on ransom. This was not some personal paranoia. When Fischer recently squired a visiting Israeli professor around the museum, his guest was startled by the security in Tollund Man's room -- not that it was too much, but that it was far too lax. 'Where is the gunman?' the Israeli scientist asked Fischer in astonishment. 'Where is the gunman?' "