The Time Travelers' Handbook (9 page)

The air is thick with smoke and you can hear a crackling noise and raised voices close by. It's morning and for a second you think the red sky is the glow of dawn, but it's not—it's flames! The date is September 2, 1666, and the city of London is on fire.

A man shoves a long iron pole with a hook on the end into your hands and orders you to follow him. There's no time for introductions as you're about to join one of the teams of people fighting desperately to stop the fire before it destroys the whole city.

Fighting Fire

Ahead, you see people using axes, ropes, and hooks to pull down a row of houses. They are attempting to make a big enough gap in the buildings that the fire can't leap across it. It's tough work and as the fire gets closer, you can feel the intense heat.

The plan isn't working, and the fire is jumping the gaps as quickly as they are created. You suggest calling the fire department, but everyone just looks at you as if you are mad. In 1666, there is no fire department. Each neighborhood has some basic equipment to stop fires, such as leather buckets for water, as well as axes, hooks, and ladders. There is even something called a fire squirt that pumps water, but against this blaze, it is about as much use as a giant water pistol.

Fear Fighting

Rumor has it that the fire started this morning at a bakery in Pudding Lane. London at this time is full of wooden houses all crammed together, so the fire is spreading quickly, leaping from building to building, destroying everything in its path. To make things worse, there are lots of storehouses in the area filled with oil, pitch, and tar—all of which catch fire very easily.

The man tells you that people have been slow to realize how bad the fire is. They're refusing to let their homes be pulled down because of the cost of rebuilding them.

You stick around to help out and by the end of the second day, you see lots of Londoners forced to leave their homes. Thieves and looters use this as an opportunity to help themselves to things in abandoned houses. Many owners of carts and riverboats also take advantage of people trying to escape the fire by charging huge amounts to carry them to safety.

Soldiers and sailors have to be called in to help. They use gunpowder to blast rows of houses out of the way to stop the fire spreading. Eventually, this begins to work, and after four days, the fire is finally put out. Though huge areas of the city have been leveled by the fire, amazingly it is reported that only eight people died in the blaze. You wonder how this can be possible with London seeming to be so crowded, and the speed at which the fire spread. Now the cleanup can begin, but this doesn't look quite as exciting as fighting the fire, so you decide to hit EJECT.

It's hot, there's a sparkly sea, olive trees, and green hills—and you realize you have landed on the beautiful island of Crete, the largest of the Greek Islands. What you don't know is that you are about to witness one of the most spectacular and dangerous sports of all time. It is a sport that tests not only a man's strength, speed, and agility, but also his courage (or stupidity, depending on how you look at it).

A boy wearing a tunic approaches and asks if you'd like to follow him. He is a Minoan, a member of the great civilization that live on Crete and on islands all around the Aegean Sea in 1500
BC
.

He leads you to the edge of a field where you see an enormous, angry bull scratching at the ground with one of its hooves. In front of it stands a young man who seems to be taunting it, wanting the bull to charge at him. The man is known as a leaper and what he wants to do is leap over the bull in a sport that is part dance, part acrobatics, and totally crazy.

The Bull Leaper

You watch the bull lunge toward the leaper. Amazingly, instead of running away, the young man stands still. As the bull reaches him, the leaper reaches out and grabs its horns. Immediately, the bull tosses back his head, throwing the man into the air and over his back. The leaper then lets go of the horns and lands expertly on both feet on top of the bull's back. From here, he leaps into the air, performing a perfect somersault, and lands safely behind the bull.

Bulls are very important to the Minoan people. The people are called Minoan after a king from long ago named Minos. Legend has it that King Minos built a huge maze to contain a monster that was half man and half bull. This monster was called the Minotaur.

The Minotaur terrorized the island and had to be fed with human flesh until it was eventually killed by a brave hero from Athens named Theseus.

Mega Mistake

As you watch the leaper, you begin to appreciate the beauty of the sport. It's graceful and gymnastic, and the leapers seem extremely brave. Perhaps you have been watching for too long, because one of the leapers asks you if you would like a turn. Before you know it, you are face-to-face with the biggest and angriest bull of all. Having been leapt over so many times, he looks ready to trample someone.

As the bull is thundering closer and closer, you decide this is not the time to try a new sport, and that it would make sense to go back to the future and get some practice first. So, just as you can feel the bull's breath on your cheek, you hit EJECT.

How To Play Leaping Bulls

To practice your bull-leaping skills in a park or yard, you will need two teams. The following instructions are for teams with three members, but the more the merrier.

Measure out a course 25 yards long, with a clearly marked start and finish line. (The course will need to be longer if you have more than three people in a team.)

Each team has one leaper and the rest of its members are bulls. The bulls in each team line up along the length of the course, Team A standing 5 yards away from Team B. The first bull in each team stands about 4 yards from the starting line and the second bull stands 4 yards farther along the course and so on.

All the bulls must stand sideways to the finish line. They bend over, putting their elbows on their thighs, and tucking their heads into their chests with their index fingers pointing upward either side of their head. These are the bulls' horns.

The two leapers stand on the starting line. When the game begins, the leapers run toward the first bull in their line. They place their hands in the center of the bull's back and leap over. They repeat this over each of the bulls until they have leapt the last one. The leapers then bend over to become bulls themselves and the first bull in the row becomes the leaper.

Continue until the first leaper has leapt twice then sprinted to the finish line. The first team with a leaper over the line wins.

The room you've just landed in has two people in it, but only one of them is alive—fortunately, that's you. The other person is a man lying flat out on a stone slab, looking very, very dead.

Your head is buzzing with questions—who is he, what's he doing there, and, most of all, should you hit EJECT and head home? Just then, a man comes in and he has all the answers. He explains that you've landed in the workshop of an Ancient Egyptian embalmer. He is the chief embalmer, and he invites you to stay and help.

His job is making the bodies of dead rich people into mummies, so that they don't rot away inside their tombs. He and his team are about to get started on this one.

Embalming

A word of warning here: Making an Egyptian mummy is not just about wrapping a few bandages around a dead body. A lot of grisly stuff goes on first. So, if you're the sort who feels a bit queasy seeing one tiny drop of blood, you'd better toughen up—and fast—or hit EJECT. You decide to stay and the embalmer starts to give you instructions.

1.
Push a long hook up the dead man's nose. This breaks up his brain so that you can pull it out through his nose.

5.
The chief embalmer tells you that the body must now be left covered in the natron for around 40 days, until it is completely dried out. After that time, it will look much thinner and darker. The embalmers will then stuff the body to make it a normal shape again, and sew up the slit you made in the side of the body. It's now ready for wrapping.

Get Wrapping

The workshop contains bodies that are at various stages of the mummification process. So now, you are told to get to work wrapping a body that was embalmed 40 days earlier. The chief embalmer tells you it's precise, painstaking work. It must be done extremely neatly, because the dead man you are wrapping has a rich and powerful family who are very fussy.

You start by helping to crisscross bandages across the body, starting with the head and then individually wrapping the fingers and toes. The bandages are wrapped in layers, and some of them are decorated with prayers. You're as careful as you can be, but it's tricky work and you get a little confused, so they decide to give you the job of sprinkling incense instead.

You sprinkle strong-smelling incense, such as frankincense and myrrh, between each layer of bandages. You place pieces of jewelry, called amulets, between the layers to ward off evil.

Journey To The Underworld

While they bandage, the embalmers explain that they believe the dead man's spirit is about to go on a long journey through the underworld. At the end of it, he'll meet Osiris, who is the lord of the underworld. If Osiris thinks the man has been good, his spirit will be reunited with his body and he'll live in the afterlife.

People believe that the afterlife will be a better version of the world they live in now. So, the dead man's family and friends do all they can to help him on his journey. They write messages and inscriptions on his coffin, and put lots of things in the tomb they think he might need in the afterlife, such as food, clothes, furniture, and even underwear. They put small figurines of his servants in his tomb—these are called
Ushabtis
. They put the Book of the Dead in too, which is sort of a travel guide to the afterlife.

Finally, the chief embalmer puts a mask over the mummy's face. And, because it's hard to tell who's who when they're covered head to foot in bandages, he attaches a label saying who is inside. He doesn't want the mummy to go off to the wrong funeral.

Now, you are finished, and it's time to get away from the stinky workshop, so you hit EJECT.