To be buried alive in a tomb with your king. How would that be? In total
darkness, you're sealed in with your cohorts. What conversations! What
hallucinations during the slow starvation in the dark! What cannibalisms,
what buggery, what soul-searching. An entire new mythology and lifestyle
is born during the futile attempt to stay alive in the sealed tomb. It's
like a jury. Some want to eat the funerary food...other more pious ones
refuse them. The pious ones are larger, though their terrible glowers
can't be seen. It's sort of an equalizer. It's like a chat room...there
are only voices. But, at least there are inflections. All they have are
their voices and the inflections of their voices. And the gathering smell
of their own shit. Even though they took pains to crap in a far chamber,
it doesn't matter, since tombs have no ventilation. It's commonly not
thought that anybody in a tomb needs ventilation.

Unable to stand it, most of the men find pointed weapons, blades, pins,
whatever, and end their own lives. Some make a botch job of it, and you
have to relocate to another room to avoid the spreading pools of sticky.
Two buddies, with more fortitude than the rest, and uncommonly impious,
relax in the King's Chamber and discuss adventures, festivals, banquets,
priestesses, loves, hates, and regrets. They lounge against either wall
and inhale the royal Stink of the their decomposing King. Even at their
hungriest, they disdain cannibalism. They wind up having to barricade
themselves in with the sarcophagus, as weird ululating hoots echo through
the subterranean caverns — the remaining others have become ghouls,
fiendishly hungry, with a stack of clean dry bones at their backs. They
can smell the buddies' living blood. One by one, the screams die out.
Every now and then there's cursing, and weirdly, barking and other animal
noises. But soon, even those are gone.

Sleep periods are indeterminate. Who knows if it's day or night up above.
Finally one of the buddies speaks no more. The other rests with eyes
open, watching hallucinations of gods and heroes, stomach churning sour
bile & hot saliva, until finally Inanna comes and plucks his soul like an
olive from a branch.