any thing in the way of reply.
Hereupon we recovered our spirits, and the Doctor, approaching the Mummy with great dignity, desired it to say candidly, upon its honor as a gentleman, if the Egyptians had comprehended, at any period, the manufacture of either Ponnonner’s lozenges or Brandreth’s pills.
We looked, with profound anxiety, for an answer—but in vain. It was not forthcoming. The Egyptian blushed and hung down his head. Never was triumph more consummate; never was defeat borne with so ill a grace. Indeed, I could not endure the spectacle of the poor Mummy’s mortification. I reached my hat, bowed to him stiffly, and took leave.
Upon getting home I found it past four o’clock, and went immediately to bed. It is now ten A.M. I have been up since seven, penning these memoranda for the benefit of my family and of mankind. The former I shall behold no more. My wife is a shrew. The truth is, I am heartily sick of this life and of the nineteenth century in general. I am convinced that every thing is going wrong. Besides, I am anxious to know who will be President in 2045. As soon, therefore, as I shave and swallow a cup of coffee, I shall just step over to Ponnonner’s and get embalmed for a couple of hundred years.
THE POWER OF WAKING, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
“Before they went I asked Dr. Seward to give me a little opiate of some kind, as I had not slept well the night before. He very kindly made me up a sleeping draught, which he gave to me, telling me that it would do me no harm, as it was very mild.… I have taken it, and am waiting for sleep, which still keeps aloof. I hope I have not done wrong, for as sleep begins to flirt with me, a new fear comes: that I may have been foolish in thus depriving myself of the power of waking.…”
—Mina Harker’s Journal, 1 October Dracula.
* * * *
A dead person lies before me. Someone who died thousands of years ago. What if it were Mother being unwrapped here, in front of the eyes of strangers, when she has no way of maintaining her dignity? How would I feel? How would she feel? Despite the peppermint, his stomach churned. Abraham closed his eyes. The scent of damp felt, wet wool, heavy perfumes, pipe smoke, and sweat sickened him.
“What a lovely thing.” He held up a silvery amulet. It had the body of a bird, with wings outstretched, and the head of a woman. “This represents the ba, the part of the soul that wanders. The ancient Egyptians believed that there were several parts to the soul. This was the part that could leave the body and explore the world, so long as it returned to the body afterward.”
He struggled, tried to see past Papa’s chest and arms to the body that still lay on the table. My body, whispered a soft, mournful voice, perhaps female. Abraham was too tired to fight his father’s grip.
A voice spoke from his chest, though not aloud. Where am I?
Abraham pressed his hand to the heat that had gathered under his breastbone. What are you? he thought.
Don’t you know my name?
No.
I caused it to be written on my wrappings. It was on the walls of my tomb. It was inscribed on my heart. What is my name?
My name, the part of my soul that lives forever so long as one person remembers. What is my name?
Abraham. That wasn’t my name before.
Abraham is my name, not yours.
Abraham, said the voice.
* * * *
After spending the day in the Antiquities Department of the British Museum, studying artifacts from many now-buried cultures in the process of being unearthed, the boy wondered if he was ready for the evening’s entertainment.
His father had bought tickets to front row seats at London’s Royal College of Surgeons Lecture Theatre, where they would watch an Egyptian mummy unrolling performed by the famous physician Thomas Pettigrew, who, seventeen years earlier in 1834, had published the first scientific treatise on the mummification process practiced by the ancient Egyptians.
Abraham was not sure how he felt about the coming spectacle. This trip from Amsterdam to London with his father was a way for them to leave behind their house, made sad and weary by the long, wasting death of Abraham’s mother. They had spent the previous day at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, walking through the fabulous Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. Abraham’s initial fascination had worn down during the long day, but he had slept well that night for the first time in ages, pleasantly exhausted by thinking about things other than his grief.
The thought of the mummy unrolling invited his mother back into his mind. During the course of his mother’s illness, Abraham had found in booksellers’ shops texts full of mysteries alchemical and scientific that lit fires in his brain. His mother was the one who had given him the gift of reading, of questioning, of studying; she had been a botanist before she turned ill.
As his mother’s illness progressed, the boy had studied old and new texts with feverish intensity, hoping the ancients could supply him a means of curing her. Some of the tomes he brought home to his mother; they studied texts and illustrations together in those brief moments when she regained a spark of her previous fortitude.
Abraham had borrowed from a sympathetic bookseller a copy of Giovanni Belzoni’s memoir of exploration and excavations in Egypt, published thirty years earlier. Abraham’s mother had studied the watercolors of tomb inscriptions and monuments. In other books, they had examined reproductions of Egyptian funerary art. The boy’s mother laid her fingers on images of human-headed, winged figures. “It was such a different, dark, and primitive world,” she had whispered, “and yet, here are the winged ones, in the land beyond death.”
Abraham had read about the medical theories of an earlier age, when physicians prescribed powder of ground-up mummy for their ailing patients in the belief that the resin in the mummy wrappings held curative powers. Such ideas had been discarded, and the thought of them made Abraham ill. He searched for other cures that made more scientific sense. He carefully followed antique recipes whenever he discovered something that struck him as having merit.
His mother had drunk the potions and taken the powders he concocted without complaint, but nothing had slowed the wasting of her flesh, and very little eased the pain in her abdomen.
By the time she said farewell, she had turned into a flattened sketch of the gentle, loving mother he had known. It had hurt him to look at her, and, though he would not let himself think such thoughts, the smell of her sickness repulsed him. Her hand, as he clutched it before her last breath and the death rattle that followed, felt cool and frail, sticks wrapped in stretched hide. It hurt him that her luminous spirit had had to be housed in such a frail receptacle, and he felt a shameful relief when she was gone.
Abraham and his father stepped down into the street from the confines of the hansom cab. They had not been able to get close to the entrance of the Royal College; the approach was clogged with other cabs and carriages. Gas lamps lit the street. The London air was fetid with the odors of coal smoke and sewage and the Thames, that artery running through the heart of the city that received much of the city’s offal.
A crowd of well-dressed men and women out for an evening’s entertainment caused a crush in the doorway, where the ticket collector stood.
“What do you suppose he’ll uncover tonight?” one man asked another.
“I went to an unrolling
