don’t know. I heard him cry out. I ran up. I know him pretty well, you know. It is very good of you to come down.’
‘His heart is going like a pair of castanets,’ said Smith, laying his hand on the breast of the unconscious man. ‘He seems to me to be frightened all to pieces. Chuck the water over him! What a face he has got on him!’
It was indeed a strange and most repellent face, for colour and outline were equally unnatural. It was white, not with the ordinary pallor of fear but with an absolutely bloodless white, like the underside of a sole. He was very fat, but gave the impression of having been at some time considerably fatter, for his skin hung loosely in creases and folds, and was shot with a meshwork of wrinkles. Short, stubbly brown hair bristled up from his scalp, with a pair of thick, wrinkled ears protruding at the sides. His light grey eyes were still open, the pupils dilated and the balls projecting in a fixed and horrid stare. It seemed to Smith as he looked down upon him that he had never seen nature’s danger signals flying so plainly upon a man’s countenance, and his thoughts turned more seriously to the warning which Hastie had given him an hour before.
‘What the deuce can have frightened him so?’ he asked.
‘It’s the mummy.’
‘The mummy? How, then?’
‘I don’t know. It’s beastly and morbid. I wish he would drop it. It’s the second fright he has given me. It was the same last winter. I found him just like this, with that horrid thing in front of him.’
‘What does he want with the mummy, then?’
‘Oh, he’s a crank, you know. It’s his hobby. He knows more about these things than any man in England. But I wish he wouldn’t! Ah, he’s beginning to come to.’
A faint tinge of colour had begun to steal back into Bellingham’s ghastly cheeks, and his eyelids shivered like a sail after a calm. He clasped and unclasped his hands, drew a long, thin breath between his teeth, and suddenly jerking up his head, threw a glance of recognition around him. As his eyes fell upon the mummy, he sprang off the sofa, seized the roll of papyrus, thrust it into a drawer, turned the key, and then staggered back on to the sofa.
‘What’s up?’ he asked. ‘What do you chaps want?’
‘You’ve been shrieking out and making no end of a fuss,’ said Monkhouse Lee. ‘If our neighbour here from above hadn’t come down, I’m sure I don’t know what I should have done with you.’
‘Ah, it’s Abercrombie Smith,’ said Bellingham, glancing up at him. ‘How very good of you to come in! What a fool I am! Oh, my God, what a fool I am!’
He sank his head on to his hands, and burst into peal after peal of hysterical laughter.
‘Look here! Drop it!’ cried Smith, shaking him roughly by the shoulder.
’I wonder,’ said Bellingham, ‘whether you would be as cool as I am if you had seen – ‘
‘What, then?’
‘Oh, nothing. I meant that I wonder if you could sit up at night with a mummy without trying your nerves. I have no doubt that you are quite right. I dare say that I have been taking it out of myself too much lately. But I am all right now. Please don’t go, though. Just wait for a few minutes until I am quite myself.’
‘The room is very close,’ remarked Lee, throwing open the window and letting in the cool night air.
‘It’s balsamic resin,’ said Bellingham. He lifted up one of the dried palmate leaves from the table and frizzled it over the chimney of the lamp. It broke away into heavy smoke wreaths, and a pungent, biting odour filled the chamber. ‘It’s the sacred plant – the plant of the priests,’ he remarked. ‘Do you know anything of Eastern languages, Smith?’
‘Nothing at all. Not a word.’
The answer seemed to lift a weight from the Egyptologist’s mind.
‘By-the-way,’ he continued, ‘how long was it from the time that you ran down, until I came to my senses?’
‘Not long. Some four or five minutes.’
‘I thought it could not be very long,’ said he, drawing a long breath. ‘But what a strange thing unconsciousness is! There is no measurement to it. I could not tell from my own sensations if it were seconds or weeks. Now that gentleman on the table was packed up in the days of the eleventh dynasty, some forty centuries ago, and yet if he could find his tongue he would tell us that this lapse of time has been but a closing of the eyes and a reopening of them. He is a singularly fine mummy, Smith.’
Smith stepped over to the table and looked down with a professional eye at the black and twisted form in front of him. The features, though horribly discoloured, were perfect, and two little nut-like eyes still lurked in the depths of the black, hollow sockets. The blotched skin was drawn tightly from bone to bone, and a tangled wrap of black coarse hair fell over the ears. Two thin teeth, like those of a rat, overlay the shrivelled lower lip. In its crouching position, with bent joints and craned head, there was a suggestion of energy about the horrid thing which made Smith’s gorge rise. The gaunt ribs, with their parchment-like covering, were exposed, and the sunken, leaden-hued abdomen, with the long slit where the embalmer had left his mark; but the lower limbs were wrapt round with coarse yellow bandages. A number of little clove-like pieces of myrrh and of cassia were sprinkled over the body, and lay scattered on the inside of the case.
‘I don’t know his name,’ said Bellingham, passing his hand over the shrivelled head. ‘You see the outer sarcophagus with the inscriptions is missing. Lot 249 is all the title he has now. You see it printed on his case. That was his number in the auction at which I picked him up.’
‘He has been a very pretty sort of fellow in his day,’ remarked Abercrombie Smith.
‘He has been a giant. His mummy is six feet seven in length, and that would be a giant over there, for they were never a very robust race. Feel these great knotted bones, too. He would be a very nasty fellow to tackle.’
‘Perhaps these very hands helped to build the stones into the pyramids,’ suggested Monkhouse Lee, looking down with disgust in his eyes at the crooked, unclean talons.
‘No fear. This fellow has been pickled in natron, and looked after in the most approved style. They did not serve hodmen in that fashion. Salt or bitumen was enough for them. It has been calculated that this sort of thing cost about seven hundred and thirty pounds in our money. Our friend was a noble at least. What do you make of that small inscription near his feet, Smith?’
‘I told you that I know no Eastern tongue.’
‘Ah, so you did. It is the name of the embalmer, I take it. A very conscientious worker he must have been. I wonder how many modern works will survive four thousand years?’
‘You’re not going yet?’ cried Bellingham, as Smith rose from the sofa.
At the prospect of solitude, his fears seemed to crowd back upon him, and he stretched out a hand to detain him.
‘Yes, I must go. I have my work to do. You are all right now. I think that with your nervous system you should take up some less morbid study.’
‘Oh, I am not nervous as a rule; and I have unwrapped mummies before.’
‘You fainted
