Friday was the coolest, most overcast day so far, with steel-colored clouds dimming the skies.  The weather was what I had envisioned for London.  We were not at all perturbed, as the wind brought no rain and our destination was close to our hotel.
The proximity of the British Museum increased its intrinsic allure.
 

          Some sections of the Assyrian galleries that had been closed on Tuesday, when we made our initial visit, had been reopened.  A series of friezes from the royal palace at Nineveh included bird-headed guardian deities.  This one would have dipped a pine cone into a bucket of water, to sprinkle water on the king as part of a purification ritual.

          The Great Court had been an open space until 2000, when it was roofed. At that time, an incongruous cylindrical center structure was built to provide space for special exhibition galleries and a restaurant. 

          Among our discoveries on the upper floor were rooms that contained Mesopotamian artifacts of staggering antiquity. The Ram in the Thicket was a work familiar to me from art history books.  I was thrilled to find the original sculpture, which I now associate with the story of Abraham.


          The Reading Room opened in 1857 and is the nucleus of the museum.  Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde and many other literary luminaries all read, ruminated and wrote in the circular library.

           As it was our last evening in London, we wished to have drinks at a British pub once we left the British Museum.  We stayed to sample the fare in the Bloomsbury Tavern.  There we toasted our good fortune, past, present, and yet to come.