Word: plasterers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...When he refuses to admit that old Enderby may have been done in, Miss Marple swings her cloak 'round her shoulder like a Caesar crossed and announces imperiously, "I shall have to investigate this myself!") and does not retrieve it until the last bit of evidence--symbolized by the plaster of paris mold she carries in her pocket--has fallen into place...
...very existence, says Professor André Bataille, director of the institute, to the fact that during the 2nd and 3rd centuries B.C. wood was too expensive to be used in mummy cases for average Egyptians. As a result, funeral directors enclosed corpses in waste papyrus manuscripts coated with plaster and molded to a shape vaguely reminiscent of a human body...
...Glue. First step in the delicate process of retrieving the papyrus intact is to spray the mummy with hot diluted hydrochloric acid. In about ten minutes most of the plaster dissolves, and the wad of papyrus that is left is laid on a wire tray over a tank of steaming water. It poaches there for a while, gradually softening as the papyrologists encourage the process and separate the stuff with delicate tweezings...
Sometimes among the bills and accounts he finds a literary prize. Not long ago while his assistant, Mlle. Nicole Parichon, was cleaning the plaster off a mummy, she spotted a piece of papyrus that looked unusual. Other pieces matched it, and eventually a dozen pieces fitted together. They turned out to be part of a long, rolled-up scroll that contained 400 lines of a hitherto unknown play of Menander, a Greek playwright who died in 290 B.C. It is one of the oldest Greek manuscripts known, but the writing is almost as clear as fresh print...
...nothing but a play of light," said Rosso, and to let it play, he used a material most sculptors would shudder at-wax. Rosso built up his figures in clay first, cast them in bronze, or in plaster which he then coated with warm translucent wax thick enough to let him lightly edit the original version. Increasingly he left his sculptures as mere impressions, with fewer and fewer fine details, submerging behind veils of light. In one of his last busts, Madame X, barely more than a lopsided oval of wax, Rosso nearly dismisses the tactile world entirely. The mystery...