by Paula Guran
He smoked his cigar. On the walls of that burning tomb, the jackal-headed god, Anubis, had been depicted assisting a jackal-headed man into the afterlife.
Werejackals? Surely not.
Alessandro snorted. But some twinge of fancy reminded him of the un-werewolf ’s words. They worshipped us as gods. And Ancient Egyptian gods had other animal heads. Lots of other animal heads. No wonder the Templars wanted to keep such information out of British hands.
Mr Tarabotti turned to commence his long walk back to Luxor. Baronet Phinkerlington might be dead, but Alessandro had to escort Miss Phinkerlington back to England and deal with a mess of paperwork as a result. He wondered which one of them had got the better deal out of the arrangement. Probably Phinkerlington.
Fictional reporter Gilbert Cox of “The Night Comes On,” would have gone to great lengths to get an Egyptological scoop. In 1931, when the story is set, Howard Carter was not quite finished with the enormous task of removing, conserving, and cataloguing the contents of Tutankhamun’s tomb. The discovery coincided with the beginnings of the mass media age: “King Tut” made good copy. The continuing revelations of breathtaking objects that emerged from the tomb as it was painstakingly cleared meant the coverage continued. Then, too, there was always the hope of more “amazing discoveries” in the Valley of the Kings.
The Night Comes On
Steve Duffy
Precisely what treasures were lost to the world in the great fire at Rowlandson’s of Putney may, I daresay, never be known. By 1935, the date of the fire, Rowlandson’s was perhaps the largest pantechnicon in the country, having been open for the storage of goods since 1826; generations of Britons, most typically Empire families between postings, had availed themselves of its facilities, and it was stocked to full capacity on the night of the blaze, which is now thought to have been caused by a fault in one of the electric goods lifts. What is known is that less than ten per cent of the properties therein were recovered undamaged; of that ten per cent, some fifty-odd lots were never claimed by their owners. The process of notifying the holders of these items was hampered by the loss in the fire of all records pertaining to ownership; they were advertised extensively, in Britain and the Colonies, and those that remained unclaimed were eventually sold off at public auction. I was present at the crying of these items, and put in a successful bid for lot number thirty-six, described in the catalogue as MSS.; various antiq. misc.; it took the form of a small steamer trunk, whose contents—but that is a story for another time, I fear. For the tale I am now about to unfold, we must go a little further back in time—to the sweltering summer of 1931, and a curious newspaper article in the Daily Dispatch.
With the admittedly notable exception of the Great War, news items have traditionally been reckoned by the journalistic trade to be at a premium in high summer. Thus one opens one’s paper in July or August and reads accounts, not of great doings on the international stage, or of the bold and daring exploits of great men, but instead of Lord So-and-So the Cabinet minister’s choice of bedside reading, or of the latest talkie-star’s intention to buy up a castle in England and ship it piecemeal back home to California, or some other such feeble diversion. Sub-editors issue increasingly wretched and despairing entreaties for news—any news—and are in the last extremity quite often driven to resurrect from amongst the piles of “spiked” items on their desks some story which, on any normal news day, would have hardly warranted an inch of column space; this squib is then resubmitted to its originator for fattening and “dressing,” like a Christmas goose, before appearing across six or seven columns of a prominent inside page, with eighteen-point headlines and an artist’s impression. The trick is to pretend by this treatment that some entirely novel, but nevertheless great and vital issue is being aired, with the suggestion that it has been criminally overlooked by all other commentators (though of course the issue must not be so out-of-the-way as to preclude the British public from forming an opinion on it). If the thing is well enough managed, rival views on the subject may be solicited; a correspondence may be sparked off, and in time, the affair may even be graced with the ponderous imprimatur of an editorial opinion, in the second or the third week of its brief mayfly life. Thus we see demonstrated the undreamt-of resourcefulness of the great British press; et in sempiternum floreat.
Doubtless these seasonal exigencies lay behind the appearance, in much the manner outlined above, in the Dispatch of 29 July 1931, of a communiqué from Mr Redmond O’Connell, the notorious adventurer and black magician. I am safe in employing the latter description, since Mr O’Connell is now, alas, unable to invoke the law of libel as he did in a previous case against the Daily Rocket in 1920. Even at that time, however, not a few people found it strange that so tireless a self-publicist should choose to take issue at the appellation, and wondered why he should complain at being referred to in a newspaper article in the style in which he so assiduously strove to present himself in all his other dealings. For Redmond O’Connell, of Dublin, Paris, and latterly Cornwall, had long been fixed in the popular mind as a mountebank at the most charitable estimation, ever since his well-publicized sending-down from Trinity College in the furor over his first book of blasphemous poems and contes. The impression was reinforced when he formed the Grand Loge de l’Innomable in Paris at the turn of the century, and boasted to the press that if he so wished, he could cause the death of all the leading statesmen of Europe by performing a certain invocation, at a certain time, in a certain place, to a certain deity; and it was redoubled when, on his island retreat of Kaikethera in the Cyclades, the wife of a leading American industrialist was discovered dead of a morphine overdose on the beach before the Grand Loge’s Temple of the Will. The Greek authorities chose not to prosecute, on the understanding that he quitted Kaikethera—quitted, in point of fact, the country; and so began his scandalous and ignominious wanderings across the map of Europe, fresh outrage in each fresh capital, till at last he was forced to take up his abode in an old part-ruined priory near Garran Haven, in Cornwall, his considerable fortune all but gone, his influence fatally diminished.
Even in his semi-fallen aspect, however, the self-styled Fiery Lucifer was still a Name before the newspaper-purchasing public, and so when the Daily Dispatch sought around for a stick with which to beat its circulation rival, the Rocket, O’Connell’s unsolicited communiqué from Cairo came in conspicuously useful. True, it was atrociously written, in O’Connell’s characteristically bombastic and portentous style; but then the Dispatch’s readers would expect bombast and portent from the pen of the Fiery Lucifer. True again, it was contentious to the last degree in point of factual content; but they could always run a follow-up article by a recognized expert in the field, by way of a corrective. And so, the Dispatch ran its story, beneath the title “Amazing Discoveries in the Valley of the Kings—Renowned Mystic Claims to have Rocked the World of Archaeology”; and gave perhaps a quarter as much space the next day to one Professor Mellis of the British Museum, writing incognito as a Respected Archaeologist, that he might seek to refute some of O’Connell’s wilder contentions. Thus two of our protagonists enter the ring; the next may now be introduced, ascending the steps of Professor Mellis’s club in Pall Mall perhaps a week after the Dispatch went to press with its first sensational article.
Mr Gilbert Cox, of the Daily Dispatch, was conducted to a small room off the lobby to wait for his professor, who came down after five minutes or so, all apologies, and led him up to the library. Conscious of the popular prejudice concerning newspapermen, Cox refused the offer of a drink and took instead a cup of Turkish coffee. “Thanks again for seeing me, sir,” he said, sipping the piping syrupy brew. “I know we’ve hounded you rather over this O’Connell business, but the fact of it is, there’s been what you might call a fresh development, and I was anxious to get your opinion on it.”
“Oh! I see,” said the professor. “Well, Mr Cox, I am sorry to disappoint you, but I think I made it clear to your editor that I should pref
er my connection with this case to be as slight as possible. The man O’Connell is the most fearful charlatan, you know, and I am afraid even a negative association with him in the popular press would hardly be to the benefit either of myself or of the Institution I serve. There are reputations greater than mine to consider, Mr Cox.”
“I shouldn’t want to quote you, or to use your name in any way,” Cox hastened to reassure him, “only I should like the opinion of an expert on the whole affair—and I should like you to hear what one other person has to say about it.”
“Not O’Connell?” exclaimed Professor Mellis, in some alarm.
“No, no, not O’Connell!—good Lord, no, leave him out there in the Valley of the Kings or wherever!—no, this man is a very respectable, common-or-garden, down-to-earth type, who contacted me after reading both O’Connell’s thing and your article. He has some new information, which may or may not be interesting.”
“What information is that?”
“I’d rather let him tell it, if you’ve no objections, sir. Would you be prepared to consider coming with me to meet him this evening? I promise you’ll find it interesting at the very least. It wouldn’t take more than an hour or two of your time, and I’d value your opinion immensely. The whole O’Connell thing is starting to take on a definite new aspect, and I think what’s needed is a drawing-together of the threads, so to speak, and we can’t do that without an expert like yourself.”
Professor Mellis was no doubt as susceptible to flattery as the next man, and gradually allowed the newspaperman to coax him against his better judgment into agreeing to visit the mysterious third party that evening. It was arranged that a cab would call for the professor at eight; the journey, said Cox, would not be long.
The cab, bearing Mr Cox, was punctual; the journey was indeed short, for its destination was Rowlandson’s depository, in between the bridges at Putney and Wandsworth, just across from Hurlingham House. The massive old warehouse abutted directly on to the river, with its own wharf alongside and a number of loading bays and platforms on the higher stories jutting out over the muddy waters; Cox gave directions for the cab to turn into a goods yard at the back of the building, where a man wearing uniform coat and cap waved from an open doorway. In some consternation, Professor Mellis looked to Cox for an explanation. “Here’s our man,” said the latter, smiling mysteriously. “His name is Dalton, and he’s the Rowlandson’s nightwatchman. Come along, Professor, he’ll make us quite comfortable.”
And so the strange company was joined: the Egyptologist, the journalist, and the nightwatchman, sitting in a minuscule (yet not uncomfortable) back office of the great depository, drinking coffee from the pot kept simmering on the hob, deep in the strangest of conversations. “I don’t suppose there are three other men in all London who’ve had such an evening of it,” said Cox later that night as he and the professor drove back across the Thames in their taxicab; and, indeed, the point would seem unarguable.
Dalton, the nightwatchman, was a dark, heavy-browed man, softly and respectfully spoken, something of an autodidact, and a particular fan (so he said) of the works of Mr H. G. Wells. He was at first a little nervous of the man from the British Museum, and was thus disinclined to speak out, but Cox was at pains to set the meeting on a level footing. “I think the best thing to do,” he said, “is to go over the whole affair from the beginning: I’ll run through O’Connell’s piece, and the professor can tell us why it’s all bunk and tommyrot, and then Mr Dalton can speak his piece. Well then!
“Here’s Redmond O’Connell: yesterday’s man by all accounts, left over from the bad old days of the naughty nineties. More or less broke. I happen to know that he’s had to move out of his old abbey, or whatever it was, down in Cornwall, because of lack of funds, and to all intents and purposes he’s a kind of glorified vagrant nowadays, putting up with whoever will still have him about the place. Now, somehow or other, he scrapes together, or borrows, or steals, the money to go to Egypt, and engages in some sort of archaeological dig out in the Valley of the Kings; a month goes by, and bingo! We get the communiqué from him, telling us that he’s found something to put the wind up absolutely everybody, hold the front page.
“What’s he found? A tomb, or tombs, or a complex of tombs and tunnels and what-have-you; no treasure to speak of, but mummies, mummies by the bushel, and not just any ordinary mummies, either. I don’t pretend to understand the ins and outs of it—that’s the professor’s job—but what he seems to be getting at is that the vast number of ordinary mummies, the ones in all the museums, that we’ve been used to seeing in Egyptian tombs and pyramids and so forth—they’re something like failed experiments, whereas O’Connell’s mummies are the real thing. He says that all the traditional embalmers were trying to preserve the bodies of the kings and pharaohs for the afterlife, but that by and large they made a pretty poor job of it—not like O’Connell’s lot, because he says that in all essential respects, they’re perfectly preserved. In fact, he goes one step further—he says that given the right conditions, spells and incantations and goodness knows what mumbo-jumbo, these mummies might be revived—brought back to life, as their embalmers intended. Which, of course, is where he loses all contact with reality, but then he’s already made quite a splash even without that—hasn’t he, Professor?”
Professor Mellis snorted, and coughed immediately, as if to camouflage his indiscretion. “Some people might say he lost all contact with reality long before that, Mr Cox,” he said acerbically. “Really, the entire affair is quite impossible. Let me go through the points as you have enumerated them.
“To begin with, I must correct you in a minor matter: the tomb complex O’Connell claims to have discovered is not in the Valley of the Kings, but in a ravine some miles to the west. It is entirely typical of the man that he should seek to dignify his preposterous claims by lending them whatever spurious support geography might provide. As to the contents of the tombs: in my experience, the practice of mummification remained essentially unchanged after about 2000 BC, down through all the later dynasties of ancient Egypt, and I should be most surprised to see any significant changes to the standard procedure, such as O’Connell hints at.
“As you may know, the body was prepared for mummification by the removal of all the major organs—not just the contents of the thoracic cavity, but also the brain, which was extracted by means of a hook through the nasal septum.” (Here Mr Cox rather hastily set aside the coffee cup from which he had been about to drink.) “The cadaver thus emptied was soaked in a bath containing various preservatives and tanning agents; it was then dried by the application of salts until it assumed the general appearance and coloration of tough leather. The abdomen was packed out with various filling materials to simulate its natural appearance in life, and oils and unguents were applied before the whole was wrapped in bandages and placed in the coffin.”
“One moment, Professor,” broke in Cox, “wasn’t that when this ceremony that O’Connell mentions was carried out?”
“The Opening of the Mouth, yes: the high priest would touch the mouth of the mummy with a powerful amulet, thus endowing it with life in the hereafter, identifying the deceased with the god Osiris who ruled over the Western Lands. The ritual is preserved in the Book of the Dead: it bears no resemblance to those fragments quoted by the man O’Connell, which I can only assume are of his own invention.”
“He claims to have translated them, from wall paintings found in the tomb.”
“I daresay he does: he might as well prove an expert in hieroglyphs, together with all his other accomplishments,” said Professor Mellis witheringly. “The existence of an entirely new, entirely separate and hidden strand of ancient Egyptian belief—”
“It would be that, then?”
“I can only say that the details as related by O’Connell bear little or no resemblance to those of any dig I have undertaken. If there was a fraction of truth in it, it would be a matter for investigation by a responsible party. As it is,
I am amazed that the Egyptian Department of Antiquities have allowed him to carry on such an ill-conceived and outlandish excavation.”
“I see,” said Cox, “so, let me try to summarize. O’Connell claims to have found some remarkable mummies, prepared according to a process entirely unlike the standard mummification drill. He goes so far as to suggest that they might be capable of being revived, if certain rites are carried out—yes, I know, Professor, that last’s all bunk, of course, but it helps to sell the newspapers, you know! Now Professor Mellis says that O’Connell is unreliable, and not a proper Egyptologist, and twenty kinds of con man into the bargain—fair enough. I’ve no qualms with that. But nevertheless, he does feel able to say that if O’Connell has turned up something out of the ordinary, then it might merit looking into a bit more closely. No?”
Professor Mellis assented unwillingly, and Cox went on: “Which would mean a proper scientific dig on the site, and the authorities in Cairo having a representative out there, and so on: not just the jolly old Great Lucifer scratching around his ravine with a handful of native bearers. Right, Professor? So far, so good. Now: you see how the story becomes, what if O’Connell has turned up something interesting? What’s the procedure in those cases, Professor?”
“Well, the site is sealed off at once, of course, and the Department of Antiquities must be informed. No work can be carried out on the dig until the conditions of the digging permit have been verified, and a representative of the Department is on hand.”
“Just so; and what about the removal of any artifacts from the dig?”
“Out of the question,” said the Professor decisively, “oh, quite out of the question. The Department is absolutely steadfast on that—absolutely. The laws do not permit the removal of antiquities from any designated archaeological site, save at the discretion of the Department, and then only to a location of the Department’s choosing—usually the museum at Cairo, or very rarely to a reputable, recognized institution abroad, on loan for further investigation.”
