The Mummy and Miss Nitocris: A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension, Griffith [read with me .txt] 📗

daughter of Rameses, was the exact counterpart in feature, stature, and colouring of Nitocris, the daughter of Professor Marmion. In her hands she carried a slender, long-necked jar of brilliantly enamelled earthenware and a golden flagon richly chased, and glittering with jewels, and these she put down on the table in exactly the same place as the other Nitocris had put her tray on, and as she did so he heard the voice again, saying:

"Time was, is now, and ever shall be to those for whom Time has ceased to be—which is a riddle that Ma-Rimōn may even now learn, since his soul has been purified and his spirit strengthened by earnest devotion through many lives to the search for the True Knowledge."

Both voices had spoken together, the one in English and the other in the ancient tongue of Khem, yet he had heard each syllable separately and comprehended both utterances perfectly. He felt a cold grip of fear at his heart as he looked[Pg 8] towards the mummy-case, and, as his fear had warned him, it was empty. Then he looked at his daughter, and as their eyes met, she said in the most commonplace tones:

"My dear Dad, what is the matter with you? If advanced people like ourselves believed in any such nonsense, I should be inclined to say that you had seen a ghost; but I suppose it's only that silly fourth dimension puzzle that's worrying you. Now, look here, you must really take your whisky and go to bed. If you go on bothering any longer about 'N to the fourth,' you will have one of your bad headaches to-morrow and won't be able to finish your address for the Institute."

She put her hand out and took up the decanter. It passed without any apparent resistance through the jar. She lifted it from the same place, and poured out the usual modicum of whisky into the glass, which was standing just where the flagon was. Then she pressed the trigger of the syphon, and the familiar hiss of the soda-water brought the Professor, as he thought, back to his senses.

But no! There could be no doubt about it. There in material form on the corner of his table was a point-blank, tangible contradiction of the universally accepted axiom that two bodies cannot occupy the same space, and that, come from somewhere or nowhere, there were two plainly material objects through which his daughter's hand, without her even knowing it, had passed as easily as it[Pg 9] would have done through a little cloud of steam. Happily she had no idea of what he had seen and heard, and so for her sake he made a strong effort to control himself, and said as steadily as he could:

"Thank you, Niti, it is very good of you. Yes, I think I am a little tired to-night. Good-night now, and I promise you that I will be off very soon; I will just have one more pipe, and drink my whisky, and then I really will go. Good-night, little woman. We'll have a talk about the Mummy in the morning."

As soon as his daughter had closed the door, Professor Marmion returned to his writing-table. The decanter of whisky, the tumbler, and the syphon of soda-water were still standing on the corner of the table, occupying the same space as the enamelled flagon of wine and the drinking goblet which the long-dead other-self of Miss Nitocris had placed on the little silver salver.

He looked about the room anxiously, with a feeling nearer akin to physical dread than he had ever experienced before; but his worst fears were not fulfilled. Nitocris the Queen had vanished and the Mummy was back in its case, blind, rigid, and silent, as it had been for fifty centuries.

For several moments he looked at the hard, grey, fixed features of the woman who had once been Nitocris, Queen of Middle Egypt, half expecting, after what he had seen, or thought he had seen, that the soul would return, that the long-closed eyes would open again, and that the long-silent[Pg 10] lips would speak to him. But no! For all the answer that he got he might as well have been looking upon the granite features of the Sphinx itself. He turned away again towards the table, and murmured:

"Ah well! I suppose it was only an hallucination, after all. One of these strange pranks that the over-strained intellect sometimes plays with us. Perhaps I have been thinking too much lately. And now I really think I had better follow Niti's advice, and take my night-cap and go to bed."

But as he put out his hand to take the whisky decanter he stopped and pulled it back.

"What on earth is the matter with me?" he said, putting his hand to his head. "That decanter is mine—it is the same, and yet it is standing in just the same place as that other thing—and I remember that, too. Look here, Franklin Marmion, my friend, if you were not a rather over-worked man I should think you had had a good deal too much to drink. Two bodies cannot occupy the same space. It is ridiculous, impossible!"

As he said the last word, his voice rose a little, and, as it seemed, an echo came back from one of the corners of the room:

"Impossible, impossible?"

There seemed to be a sarcastic note of interrogation after the last word.

"Eh? What was that?" and he looked round at the mummy-case. Her long-dead Majesty was still reclining in it, silent and impassive.[Pg 11]

"Oh, this won't do at all! Hartley and the fourth dimension be hanged! It strikes me that this way madness lies if you only go far enough. I'll have that night-cap at once and go to bed."

He put out his hand, took hold of the whisky decanter, and as he drew back his arm he saw that instead he held the enamelled flagon in his grasp.

"Well, well," he said, looking at it half-angrily, "if it is to be, it must be."

He put out his left hand and took hold of the goblet, tilted the flagon, and out of the curved lip there fell a thin stream of wine, which glittered with a pale ruby radiance in the light of the electric cluster that hung above his writing-desk. He set the flagon down, and as he raised the goblet to his lips, he heard his own voice saying in the ancient language of Khem:

"As was, and is, and ever shall be; ever, yet never—never, yet ever. Nitocris the Queen, in the name of Nebzec I greet thee! From thy hands I take the gift of the Perfect Knowledge!"

As he drained the goblet he turned towards the mummy-case. It might have been fancy, it might have been the effect of that miraculous old wine of Cos which, if he had really drunk it, must now be more than thirty centuries old: it might have been the result of the hard thinking that he had been doing now for several days and half-nights; but he certainly thought that the Queen's head suddenly became endowed with life, that the eyes opened,[Pg 12] and the grey of the parchment skin softened into a delicate olive tinge with a faint rosy blush showing through it. The brown, shrivelled lips seemed to fill out, grow red, and smile. The eyelids lifted, and the eyes of the Nitocris of old looked down on him for a moment. He shook his head and looked, and there was the Mummy just as it had been when he opened the case.

"Really, this is strange, almost to the point of bewilderment," he went on. "I wonder if there is any more of that wine left?"

He took up the flagon and poured out another goblet, filled and drank it.

"Yes," he continued, speaking as though under some strange exultation of the mind rather than of the senses, "yes, that is the wine of Cos. I drank it. I, Ma-Rimōn, the priest-student of the Higher Mysteries; I, whose feet faltered on the threshold of the Place of the Elect, and whose heart failed him at the portal of the Sanctuary, even though Amen-Ra was beckoning me to cross it."

"Good heavens, what nonsense I am talking! Whatever there was in that wine or wherever it came from, I think it is quite time I was off, not to old Egypt, but the Land of Nod. It seems to—no, it has not got into my head; in fact I am beginning to see that, after all, Hartley might very possibly be right about that forty-seventh proposition. Well, I will do as the Russians say, take my thoughts to bed with me, since the morning is wiser than the evening. It is all[Pg 13] very mysterious. I certainly hope that Annie won't find these things here in the morning when she comes to clear up. I wonder what the Museum would give me for them if they were not, as I think they are, the unsubstantial fabric of a vision?"

When he got into his room and turned the electric light on, he stood under the cluster and held up his closed hand so that the light fell upon a curiously engraved scarab set in a heavy gold ring which had been given to him on his last birthday by Lord Lester Leighton, a wealthy and accomplished young nobleman who had devoted his learned leisure to Egyptian exploration and research. It was he who had sent the Mummy of Queen Nitocris to the house on Wimbledon Common instead of adding it to his own collection—not altogether unselfishly, it must be confessed, for he was very much in love with the other Nitocris who was still in the flesh.

"Now," he said, fingering the scarab, "if I was not dreaming, and if by some mysterious means Her Highness's promise is to be actually fulfilled, I ought to be able to take this ring off without opening my hand. Certainly, any fourth dimensional being could do it."

As he spoke he pulled at the setting of the scarab—and, to his amazement, the ring came off whole. There was no scar on his finger—no break in the ring.

"Good heavens!" he exclaimed, staring with something like fear in his eyes, first at his hand,[Pg 14] and then at the ring. "Then it is true!" He was silent for a full minute; then he put the ring down on the dressing-table and whispered: "What a terrible power—and what an awful responsibility! Well, thank God, I am a fairly honest man!"

As he undressed he was conscious of a curious sense of reminiscence which he had never experienced before. His brain was not only perfectly clear, but almost abnormally active, and yet the current of his thoughts appeared to be turned backward instead of forward. The things of his own life, the life that he was then living, seemed to drift behind him. The facts which he had learned in his long and minute study of Egyptian history came up in his mind, no longer as facts learned from books and monuments, wall-paintings, and hieroglyphics, but as living entities. He seemed to know, not by memory, but of immediate knowledge. It was the difference between the reading of the story, say, of a battle, and actually taking part in it. He got into bed, and turned over on his right side, saying:

"Well, this is all very extraordinary. I wonder what it all means? Thank goodness, I am sleepy enough, and sleep is the best of all medicines. I should not wonder if I were to dream of Memphis again to-night. A wonderfully beautiful mummy that, quite unique—and Nitocris, too. Good-night, Nitocris, my royal mistress that might have been! Good-night!"[Pg 15]

CHAPTER II BACK TO THE PAST

The City of a Hundred Kings, vast and sombre, stretched away into the dim, soft distance of the moonlit night to right and left and far behind him. In front lay the broad, smooth, silver-gleaming Nile, then approaching its full flood-time, and looking like a wide, shining road out of the shadows through the light and into the shadows again—symbol of the visible present coming invisibly out of the domains of the past, and fading away into the still more hazy domain of the unknown future. Symbol, too, in its countless ripples under the fresh north wind, of the generations of Man drifting endlessly down the Stream of Time.

He was standing in the dark shadows of a huge pylon at one end of the broad white terrace of the palace of Pepi in Memphis—he, Ma-Rimōn, Priest of Amen-Ra and Initiate of the Higher Mysteries.

Nitocris was standing beside him with her hands clasped behind her and her head slightly thrown back, and