"Boy, how can you think it wise to truck with this culture of death?" Even at ten I knew the correct answer to that cataclysmic catechism: "Right you are, Father. Much better to stick with the life-embracing imagery of a cult that worships a bleeding corpse nailed to bits of wood." ... Egypt was not -- I must repeat for Readers who still do not know it -- a culture of death, for all the mummies and bottled lungs, the jackal-men and cobra-queens. The Egyptians were the inventors of immortality, the first men who saw they could live forever."