Rhinoplantiquity
by Zach Smith
He was an eccentric man who
came from and had a lot of money, and he
collected art that he wasn’t supposed to
have... if what he said was true.
I met him for the exchange at his hunting lodge,
Woodrest Manor, deep in Somerset, England. When
we were alone in his library, he pulled down on a
bust of Lord Baden-Powell, and one of the
bookshelves rotated to reveal a hidden room. This
was the secret place he kept the various
treasures he did not display to the public.
The walls were lined with
shelves and curio cabinets displaying damaged
pottery and statuettes unearthed from dig sights
both attic and biblical. Chunks of marble from
broken statues, chips of porcelain from cracked
and otherwise priceless Ming vases, pagan idols
defaced in Christian purges, and even certain
unmentionable pieces from roman statues “censored”
in the Victorian age.
At least that is what the
collector told me about these things.
He liked to tell his
stories.
I’m not sure why he
believed them.
Yes, these could have been
originals like he claimed, But they could have
been fake too; there really was no way to tell…
which was good for me.
At the center of the
collection, sitting under a bell-jar, was a small
lump of limestone, the presentation of which
indicated that it was perhaps the most valuable
piece in his collection.
“What is that?”
“You wouldn’t
believe me,” he said.
“I might.”
“Very well.”
He lifted the bell jar and
picked up the rock, and hefted it in his hand.
“This is a piece of
the missing nose from the Great Sphinx of Giza.”
That was a dubious claim at
best. Bold. Nearly as difficult to prove as it
was to disprove.
I inspected the rock with a
jeweler’s loop. It fit the color and pattern,
at least from what I’d seen, but still,
limestone was limestone. It could have come from
the Sphinx of Egypt or just as easily from El
Capitan across the pond or the White Cliffs of
Dover right here in merry old England; people
took limestone for granite.
But I agreed that it was
part of the Sphinx’s missing noes, perhaps
the most famous missing noes in history, boosting
the limestone’s provenance, and my
credibility.
“What have you brought
me?” he asked.
I put the chunk of sphinx
nose back under the bell jar, pulled out my
briefcase, opened the crushed velvet bag inside,
and removed the marble lady’s finger.
“What is this?”
he asked.
“This is the left hand,
middle finger, of the Venus De Milo.”
He looked at it for a long
time.
“Your loop please?”
he asked seriously.
“Sure,” I said,
handing him the loop.
He looked at the piece more
thoroughly, then looked at me, the loop still in
his eye, hammering home his words.
“You think I believe
everything people tell me?”
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