Hippopotamus

I should explain about the legs.

You will have noticed that I stand very correctly on all four, but three of them are not entirely mine. When they found me in a tomb in Middle Egypt, those three had been broken. Some people think this was done on purpose, at the burial, so that I could not trample the person I had been put there to accompany. I take no offence. In life my kind overturned boats and killed men in the shallows of the river. A sensible family wants a hippopotamus in the tomb, for all that he stands for, and wants him unable to walk. The museum has since mended me, and now I stand forever on legs I cannot use to go anywhere.

I was made in the Twelfth Dynasty, somewhere between 1961 and 1878 BC, during the reigns of the kings called Senwosret and Amenemhat. I am faience: crushed quartz, shaped in a mould, glazed, fired until I came out this colour, which is the colour of the river when the sun is directly over it, or of a kingfisher’s back. Someone with a fine brush painted my body before the firing. Lotus flowers open across my back and flanks. Buds rise on long stems along my sides. Leaves lie over my shoulders. I wear the marsh I lived in, so that wherever I am taken, I am still standing in it.

My nostrils are raised, my small eyes set high, my ears pricked, because that is how we look when we lie in the water with nearly all of us hidden. My mouth is shut. Visitors tell each other I am smiling, which says more about visitors.

As for the name. For nearly four thousand years I had none that anyone remembers. Then in 1931 an English magazine called Punch printed a piece about a family who kept a colour print of me at home, consulted me as an oracle, and called me William. The name stuck to me like river mud. That was about ninety-five years ago. Children say it in the gallery the way they greet a neighbour’s dog.

I am twenty centimetres long. I was meant for darkness and a single companion. Instead I have a glass case, a gift shop full of my likeness, and a name from a joke in a magazine. I find I do not mind.