The Mammoth Book of the Mummy

by Paula Guran

  Yet when it began, he was helpless to stop it. The steam boiler roared and shook and smoked and hissed, gears clanked and chains rattled: the boom lowered, the huge shovel bit into the desert floor and rose again with its iron maw full of dirt and sand and shattered stone and God-knew-what-else. Now and then the earth shook as the stubborn rock was dynamited into shards. Ya Allah! the few native donkey-boys and servants exclaimed in terror and awe.

  Lord preserve us! thought Wordsley.

  And Bigham strode about the site, a general brandishing his parasol like a sword, directing operations.

  Within two days, the excavator had unearthed a vast city of the dead that seemed to extend all the way to the hills. Mummies everywhere, lain in shallow graves, some with bags of golden statuettes, silver cups, beads of semiprecious stone, most with plugged-cent bits of this and that. These were not, certainly, the tombs of kings, although the names of kings—many kings and queens and princes and viziers and even the emperors of Rome—were graven upon so many of these objects. Hundreds of thousands, nay, a million graves lay open to the sky, now broken open and their mummified contents now ground to dust under the iron wheels of the juggernaut.

  “You must take care!” Wordsley protested, appalled to his heart. “Tell them to take care with that machine! This—this is a priceless find! So many mummies—my God, man, so many men here! There is not its like in all of Egypt—all the world! How did they all get here?”

  But Bigham dismissed his concerns. “Trash! That’s all this is, Wordsley, trash! A few scarabs, a few scrolls, a few broken jars, a bit of bone or human leather—who could care about truck like that when we can discover a real treasure! It’s out there, I tell you! That’s what these thieves were doing here. Somewhere there is the tomb of tombs! So great a find that a million men came here to their deaths for it. Ah, but none of them was an American, eh? Further into the hills, maybe. I will tear all of them down to bedrock and beyond if I must. But it’s out there—the treasure of kings, Wordsley! I know it!” He slapped his chest as if reassuring himself. “This tells me so! Like a lodestone, Wordsley. Like a compass. It tells me I’m on the right bearing here, it tells me this is all going to be worth the effort.”

  Wordsley could only shake his head and mourn. He haunted the ruins of the ancient necropolis like a bereaved ghost, so overwhelmed by the scope of the find that he could not think of how to begin to salvage the least part of it. It would take an army, a veritable army of workers and scholars years to properly map and catalogue the discoveries here. But already he was quite sure that the only reason so many would seek their burial here was a site of extraordinary holiness, a temple or tomb of a forgotten dynasty of god-kings. For that reason alone could so many have chosen to lay tombless, in meager graves, in this desolate waste for eternity.

  Bigham, damn his greedy soul, must be right. The treasure, the treasure of kings, had to be close at hand.

  Before long, Wordsley’s tent was filled with scrolls. Even his cot was covered with them, so that he would have had to clear the space to sleep, if only he could spare the time for sleep.

  He could have filled a dozen tents with scrolls and still not had room for them all. And he was not the only one to be gleaning from the tombs. Bigham’s few Arab hirelings—all from Cairo—clanked as they walked, so laden they were with pilfered scarabs and seals. Even the Scottish engineers were filling their pockets during the hours of rest from attendance on their steam-powered charge and the careful laying of the dynamite sticks. Only Bigham ignored the fortune in antiquities that the shovel dug up from the sands with every bite, for his grandiose ambition would settle now for nothing less than the tombs of a hundred kings. Whatever he obliterated in his path, it was nothing to him.

  Wordsley agonized to leave so many fragile papyri exposed to the hostile elements of the desert, but what else could he do? He was only one man! All he could do was search for the most promising, the rarest of the scrolls, and save those few, as many as he could. Yet as many as he found, so many more were being destroyed.

  He thought perhaps of some way he might play hob with the infernal machine, but in truth he could discern no way this could be done that the engineers would not be able to fix within the course of a day. They were rough men, with permanently blackened faces from the smoke and smuts, but intelligent and ingenious craftsmen. A broken pivot or chain was nothing to them.

  There had been no more of the mysterious deaths or disappearances in the night, such as had plagued Bigham’s first expedition and driven off all the native workers. “Aren’t you afraid?” he asked the donkey-boys who trekked into the camp daily, carrying water. “The villagers of Tukh say this place is cursed. The Copts call this the Hill of Lilith. You Musselmen say it is the haunt of a ghûl!”

  At this, the Cairene boys and men made signs to avert evil, but one of them replied, “If there is a demon in this place, it does not dare approach the makina!”

  Yet the makina, the diabolical creation, did have its weakness. It devoured not only water, vast amounts of it, which had to be carried in on donkey-back, but fuel as well. And this was not a country with abundant supplies of wood or any other fuel.

  One day, the flames diminished in the boiler. The needle on the steam-gauge sank. The iron scoop hung motionless on its boom.

  “I have to hire more men!” Bigham raged when the engineers explained the silence and inactivity of their mechanical charge. “More donkeys! Damn these natives and their superstitions! Do you know what they’re charging me for a load of wood?” He spun around, as if searching the sere and desolate terrain for a forest he could chop down to feed the steam boiler’s insatiable appetite.

  But this was the desert. There was nothing in sight as far as the horizon but rock and sand and despoiled graves.

  “I’ll show you what to burn!” he shouted. “I’ll show you fuel!”

  The engineers stared uncomprehendingly, but Wordsley had grasped Bigham’s intent. “You can’t! You couldn’t do such a thing! It would be monstrous! Infamous!”

  “I can’t, can I? Why, I’ll show you can’t!” The American seized up a mummy from the nearest heap of broken bone and cloth. “We’ll just see how well these peasants burn!”

  To Wordsley’s inexpressible horror, he flung the mummy into the boiler’s open maw, on to the seething bed of ashes, and instantly it burst into flame!

  “There!” Bigham shouted triumphantly. “There’s your fuel! Start stoking your boiler! Pass over that big fellow! I’ll bet he’ll burn as well as any split oak log! Let’s build up a great head of steam, there!”

  The mummies, as dried as they were and preserved by inflammable resins and pitch, were an inexhaustible source of fuel. Not only the human inhabitants of the graves, but mummified birds and beasts, all went into the fire. The head of steam built up again, the shovel rose and bit into the sand.

  “That’s it!” Bigham exclaimed. “That’s the way! Throw in all of them, a million of them! Tear down those hills!”

  “My lord,” she confessed on her knees before him, “I do not know what to do! The fiery Fiend—every day it comes closer to this place! It is surely spawned from Hatet-Ketits, the pit of fire where the Oppressor’s enemies are consumed, for I have seen it myself, consuming the bodies of the dead! It bites through the sand and stone, it devours the hills! I cannot stop it! And I am so much afraid!”

  Her lord strained against his unbreakable bonds, lying within the Serpent’s coiled embrace. “This is a creature of my brother that shakes my house of eternity! He is not willing that I survive, even in chains! See, the monster he first set here to devour me has failed, thanks only to you, my sister! Now he sends this thing with the fire of the sun in its belly to tear away the rock from over my head! He will not be satisfied until he sees me burn!”

  The Serpent of living stone watched and waited, coiled to strike, yet motionless while darkness held sway over the land. She shuddered as always when she met its malevolent eyes, remembering how many
times its cruel fangs had seized her beloved lord’s limbs and tore them from his body, fulfilling the Oppressor’s curse.

  Yet she had already thwarted the Serpent’s purpose and spared her brother unspeakable pain. Could she do less now? Faced with this new Fiend, could she let her courage fail her? Could she stand by and see her lord exposed to the punishing rays of the sun, his eternal enemy, or burned in the fiery pit?

  “I will go forth again,” she promised him. “Their king remains protected by the sign of the Oppressor and I cannot touch him, but I will find a way to stop this thing. I must.”

  For no one else could defend her lord.

  At night, the beast of fire slept, its belly no longer incandescent with heat, its roaring voice silenced. But the scent of myrrh still hung about it, the scent of the smoldering dead.

  She had no spell to use against this enemy, it possessed no life that she could drain away. Its attendants, however, the men who fed it—against those she could act. Only the king was under the Oppressor’s protection, not his servants.

  One of them crossed the sands now, bearing an armload of scrolls, toward one of the small canopies where they slept. Another grave-robber, she thought. Yet a sense of familiarity pricked her. This one, she had encountered before: the king’s scribe, she recalled him, the man who knew the old script. Yet the man’s thoughts, when she met them, startled her: He must be stopped! I have to find a way, before this is all destroyed!

  Here was an unexpected ally!

  She slipped into the tent behind him. The scribe bent over a low bed where scrolls were heaped, sorting through the papyri. She stepped forward. Suddenly aware, he turned.

  His eyes went very wide, his body rigid. His mind roiled with lust, concupiscent shame, and borning terror. He could not move, though her smile beckoned him. Her cloak was flung back, and her flawless body gleamed like polished alabaster in the low lamplight.

  “Read to me. Read to me and this shall be yours.”

  He needed no more urging than that, for his passions were now twice-stirred. He read, he spoke from memory, he uttered the spells guarded from her own eyes by a frieze of solar barques. For hours he went on, for hours she listened, committing to memory, rejoicing in the knowledge even as this scribe rejoiced.

  All night she listened to his recitations, until the warning tints of approaching dawn came through the tent’s cloth walls. Her hand sought his staff beneath his garments, her mouth pressed against his, and she took him into her, all of him. His husk fell away, his soul gestated within her.

  As dawn rose in the sky outside, within the cavern that was her lord’s prison, she strained to give up the life she had just taken. The homunculus emerged from between her legs, in form the image of her lord, but its soul had so lately been her ally. It stared at her—it thought and it feared and she averted her face. “Forgive me,” she whispered, as the cruel stone head of the Serpent began to move. “But I grant you the boon for which you have been praying. Together, we shall thwart the purpose of your king!”

  The spell she uttered was the one she had used now for thousands of years to turn the Serpent’s punishment away from her lord: let the judgment fall not upon him, but upon thee.

  But now she added these words, taken from the foreign scribe’s treasure-trove of scrolls:

  Return thou now to the pit of fire,

  Return now to the flame that spawned thee.

  For thine enemies are given to the fire,

  In the fire thine enemies are consumed.

  For thou art the Devourer.

  Thou goest forth to meet thine enemies

  And thine enemies shalt thou consume.

  Thou shalt swallow them up entire,

  Nor shall they rise again,

  Nor any of their creation,

  But they shall be utterly destroyed.

  The homunculus, animated by its own knowledge of the spells, let loose a shriek that echoed down the long, devouring throat of the Serpent. But this time, instead of returning to immobile stone as it had always done for two million sunrises, the Serpent’s body rose higher. Its tongue flicked out, its head turned from side to side, seeking.

  Then, slowly, the entire sinuous length of it uncoiled. With its scales rasping against the floor of the tomb, the Serpent of living stone slid out through the entrance of the cave, and so great was its girth that the rock split and chipped as it passed through.

  The camp was stirring in the first full flush of dawn as men rose eager to take advantage of the cooler hours before the heat became too oppressive. It was one of the donkey-boys who first saw the giant serpentine form approaching from out of the hills. At first, he thought it was some strange form of sand-slip, for the snake was the color of the stones of the hills, but then it raised its head, as if scenting for prey, and the boy screamed, “Te’aaban!”

  For a long moment he stood as if paralyzed, but his scream alerted others and spurred them into motion, and when they too saw the monstrous form descending upon them, they fled, calling on God for deliverance from such manifest evil. The Scotsmen, busy stoking the boiler from a large stack of well-dried, quick-burning mummies, gaped at this sudden exodus of Bigham’s native help. Their first thought was earthquake, not unknown in this region. But when they too understood at last that the roiling motion and rock and sand was the wake and the very body of the Serpent, they abandoned the boiler, the mummies and the shovels and joined the native Arabs in their headlong flight to escape the monstrous apparition.

  “Get out!” they shouted to Bigham as their employer came from his palatial tent, demanding loudly to know what in the devil was going on and why weren’t they getting back to work now, damn them!

  But words, there were no sufficient words, not in Arabic, not in English. One of the engineers mutely pointed behind him as he fled.

  Then Bigham saw the Serpent. He blinked. To his eyes, it seemed as long as a freight train, and its girth so vast that it would have taken two men with linked arms to span it. He blinked again.

  Phineas Bigham was a man of the world—this world, not the next. Before beginning his museum he had been familiar with the ways of theatrical performances and exhibitions, carnivals and side-shows, he knew the arts of capturing the imagination of the gullible, he knew how much was owing to the work of illusion. But he, Phineas Bigham, was not to be so easily deceived. So arming himself with common sense and rejecting the delusions of the credulous and superstitious, he brandished his parasol like a sword and advanced toward the apparition, shouting, “Humbuggery! Hoodoo! You won’t fool me—not Phineas Bigham!”

  But when the Serpent paused, turning toward him, Bigham was considerably disquieted. Illusions, to his knowledge, did not interact with bystanders, not like this. When confronted, they vanished like smoke or became only queer patterns in tea leaves. They did not pause to reconsider their relationship with reality.

  This apparition, this Serpent, however, did exactly that, and it came—it seemed to the stunned and disbelieving Bigham—to the rational conclusion that when something the size of it was confronted by something the size of he, that is to say, of a size to be swallowed, that he inevitably should be.

  But it was the reek of hot stone, like lava gushing fresh from the interior of the earth, that finally convinced Bigham the Serpent was truly what it seemed to be, and of the reality of his own impending demise. He ran, stumbled and fell to the sand, crawled like a brutish animal on his belly, but the Serpent’s maw—vast, gaping, surely leading straight to hell—closed on him, splintered his parasol, engulfed him to the shoulders.

  In that instant of decapitation, it was as if a blazing light shone, as if he bore around his neck the blinding glory of the sun itself, borne within a boat of ancient and holy design.

  And the Serpent jerked back as if it were burned, shaking its vast head as Bigham sprawled helplessly on the sand. Its tongue flicked out to scent the air. It tasted incense and myrrh, it knew the scent of mummified bodies, burning. It saw the fire in the
iron boiler, already red hot, a pit of fire to consume the dead, yet not hotter than the golden barque of the Sun, its god and master.

  But the words of the spell bound it now:

  For thou art the Devourer.

  Thou goest forth to meet thine enemies

  And thine enemies shalt thou consume.

  Thou shalt swallow them up entire.

  And so it did, it swallowed them whole: the great digging thing, the dead and the fiery pit of iron.

  Even in the distant cavern the sound of the explosion was audible, and the clatter of once-living stone shards as they fell down on to the desert like a fiery rain.

  The lady embraced her lord in his chains, crying tears of joy, for the Fiend had been defeated at last, and it was utterly destroyed. After so many thousands of years, from this tormentor at least, he was now finally freed.

  “You need go forth at night no longer, my sister, to seek lives. You need not suffer any longer in order to save me. We—you and I and the living—may we rest in peace.”

  “It was my duty and my joy, to see you spared, beloved.”

  Yet she knew that she would continue to go forth and seek, for as many thousands of years as necessary. For in the mind of the foreign scribe there had been many images, and some of them were of other gods, who had once been bound and now were freed.

  Perhaps she might yet one day find the spell to liberate her lord, so that they might go forth together, into the night.

  The Egyptian Museum in Philadelphia was a complete success, unquestionably the First Wonder of the New World. Men, women, and children from all across the United States came to see it and marvel at what American ingenuity had accomplished to bring such relics of the pharaohs to the City of Brotherly Love. It was fitting, they said, just fitting that the Sphinx and its riddles (they could not keep the Greek Sphinx separate from her Nile counterpart) be preserved in a land where cleverness and ingenuity flourished as they did.

  It was a shame, however, about Mr Phineas Bigham. He had, it was clear, quite lost his mind in the desert; what a great and terrible sacrifice he had made for the edification of the American public. These days he wandered the museum’s corridors leaning on a cane that had once been the stick of a parasol, but which was now repaired and inseparable from Mister Bigham’s hand, no more than one could remove the golden amulet, souvenir of his Egyptian travels, that he kept hidden beneath his vest. He was at once a living monument to what Americans could accomplish abroad and to why they should perhaps not go abroad at all.