CHAPTER V.

A MUMMY THAT FINDS MEANS TO MAKE ITSELF

IT was at Thebes.

UNDERSTOOD.

The archæological researches of Count Edmond had brought him to that antique seat of the three last dynasties, under whose sceptre, after the expulsion of the alien conquerors, the arts and sciences of Egypt attained so vast a development, that one can not but admire as almost miraculous the destruction by Cambyses of a fabric so colossal as that of which no more than the meagre and broken outlines are revealed in the enor mous magnitude of its monumental remains.

Pitching his tent from spot to spot, now amid the ruins of Luxor, now near the village of Carnac, Edmond could not reconcile himself to leave this land of marvel and of mystery till his imagination had exhausted every tangible material from which to reconstruct that hundred-gated wonder of the ancient world.

And thus, in the record now submitted to my inspection of those wandering but not unlaborious days passed by the count among the tombs, I seemed to see him, often surprised by the great sunrise of the Orient in the prosecution of his indefatigable excavations, while the bright and dewless dawn of the Desert is enlarging its noiseless light over that vast plain which, stretched broad on either side of the Nile, unites with

the Arabian range in the far East the western summits of the Libyan hills; or else in the wide red light of hot and windless evenings, bowed above some crumbling byblus or papyrus, in patient solitary study, a slowly darkened figure, silent as its shadow on the sand.

On one such evening the record shows him seated upon the wall of that gigantic terrace which, although builded entirely of brick, yet stands at a height of twenty feet, and measures no less than one thousand feet in breadth and two thousand in length. On the colossal pedestal, thus formed for a fabric no less enormous, stands, with its face fronting the Nile, the Temple of Ammon Chnouphis, the Divine Originative Principle.

This immense edifice, of which the circumference extends over a space of about three English miles, is approached by an alley formed of six hundred colossal sphinges. There were within it chambers vast enough to contain the entire pile of any average-sized medieval cathedral; and in each chamber one hundred and thirty-four enormous columns, of which only the ruins now remain, once supported a ceiling so richly decorated with painting and sculpture that not a handsbreadth of its spacious surface is bare of orna

ment.

Beyond these stupendous structures, and well worthy of a people whose enormous works were but the bodies of enormous thoughts, that famous lake, which, more than a thousand years before it was witnessed with wonder by Herodotus, had been vouchsafed by the art of man to the need of nature, still conducts to the Necropolis-a city of tombs and temples, whose

streets of catacombs are hewn in the solid rock of the Libyan mountains.

Over the mysterious waters of this lake to the neighboring City of the Dead had once glided (perhaps at that very hour millions of evenings ago) the ghostlike barks that bore from the dwellings of living man the bodies of the departed. Across this lake, age after age, generations upon generations had silently sailed away from the sight of the sun. And now they were all departed; and in the place that knew them no more, the only living man on whose face at that hour the sinking sunlight fell was a wanderer from lands undreamed of by the science of those starry priests who one by one had paced along that shattered pavement, and passed along that lonesome lake into the unseen world.

Amply furnished with an imperial firman and all other necessary documents, Count Edmond had previ ously set his numerous attendants to work upon this spot, where now, completely uncompanioned, he had withdrawn himself from his retinue, in order at his ease, and without interruption, to question the dead of secrets withheld from a thousand generations. He had just disengaged from the sheathing byssus in which it was preserved the mummy of a young man-perhaps a king's son.

That marvelously conservative science of the Egyptians had, in this instance, successfully disputed with time the possession of a body whose minutest atoms had for centuries been claimed in vain by the inexorable potency of corruption. The mummy was intact, perfect, complete. Stretched supine upon the sand,

beneath the close and eager countenance of the German, lay the body of the young Egyptian prince, whose life had probably not numbered more than the years of the living man now breathing over him, when from that long empty husk the breath of it had departed three thousand years ago. And although in this parched and shrunken simulacrum of a human form the vital juices were withered up, yet the face of it retained upon its features the unchanged expression of the life which had once filled them. The hues and fullness, the bloom and substance of this picture of man were faded and fallen away, but the hard outline of it remained distinct and undisturbed. And as the skillful botanist instinctively recognizes in the withered flower which he examines all the once flourishing beauty of it, so Edmond, from long familiarity with those dry human specimens, had by degrees acquired a certain strange faculty of mind which enabled him, if not to bring them back to life, yet to transport himself back into the life which was once theirs, and thus, by concentrating the force and intensity of a vivid imagination, to mingle, as though he were the ghost and they the real existences, among those generations who, in times indefinitely remote, transmitted from age to age, as we to-day transmit, as others will transmit to-morrow, the warm and beating pulse of life.

According to the custom common to the Egyptians in respect to the arrangement of the dead, this mummy was accompanied by a papyrus, and this papyrus Edmond was now busily engaged in the attempt to decipher. Here in the desert, where to the student

of the past the somewhat artificial atmosphere of the library and the lecture-room is replaced by the animating presence of realities and the undisturbed inspiration of Nature herself, the count had frequently succeeded, perhaps more by intuition than research, in interpreting those hieroglyphic images which, for the most part, when found in tombs or sarcophagi, represent, with little variation, the mysterious story of the migration of the soul after death, from the moment in which she leaves the body to that in which, accompanied by the two presiding genii, she stands before the solemn Balance of the Supreme Judgment. Of this mystic balance, one scale contains the Vial of Iniquity, a vase supposed to be filled with the sins of the soul, on which judgment is about to be passed, while in the opposing scale is placed a feather, an image finely conceived and of singular subtlety, representing the good actions achieved by the soul in her past existence.

Although the Babylonian rite was doubtless very different from that of the Egyptians, yet in all that regards the relations of man to the unseen powers one prevalent sentiment was so common to the various religions of Eastern antiquity-and, even in the Hebrew theosophy, so strong a substratum of Egyptian thought is to be detected-that any one who at this day peruses the strange pictures on these Egyptian papyri may not unreasonably recall the appalling pages in which the Book of Daniel records the destruction of Babylon, with a strong impression that in the interpretation given to the Babylonian king by the Hebrew seer of that unknown writing on the wall

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