So Satni went to Coptos, and there found an ancient priest, who told him the place of Ahouri’s sepulture, saying: “The father of the father of my father told it to my father’s father, who told it to my father.” …Then Satni found the bodies, and restored to Noferkephtah his wife and his son; and thus did penance. After which the tomb of Noferkephtah was sealed up forever by Pharaoh’s order; and no man knoweth more the place of Noferkephtah’s sepulture.
AN AZTEC MUMMY, by C. B. Cory
I was standing in a museum looking at a case of mummies. One of them was marked “Mummy of an Aztec, found in a Cliff Dwelling,” and it interested me very much. In size it was that of a small man, and it was in a fine state of preservation, with the exception that the bones of the legs were exposed, and more or less disintegrated, in some places. The hands, even to the finger nails, were perfect, however, and there was a silver ring on the index finger. One hand grasped a large stone axe—the handle being modern. The right hand rested across the chest, clasping a necklace of silver wire.
“Interesting specimen, is it not?” said a voice at my side.
“Quite so,” I replied. “But I doubt if it is really an Aztec mummy.”
“What makes you think that?” asked the voice sharply.
“Because I don’t believe the Aztecs buried their dead in cliff dwellings. However, it is an interesting mummy, and in a wonderful state of preservation.”
I was so interested in examining the mummy that I had spoken without turning my head. Now, however, I looked up and saw a tall, gaunt figure of a man dressed in a suit of corduroy, and wearing a broad-brimmed hat, or sombrero, such as is generally worn on the Western plains.
“Well,” he remarked, “in my opinion, it is a pretty good mummy. I made it myself, and ought to know.”
“Excuse me, what did you say?” I asked, thinking I had not understood him aright.
“I said that was one of my mummies.”
“What do you mean by that, sir?” I asked.
“You will understand when I tell you I was a dealer in curiosities, and during my time I furnished museums with a great many interesting and valuable specimens; when trade was slow, I occasionally helped nature a little, but that is all over now.”
“Have you given up the business?” I asked.
“Had to; but perhaps you do not know that I am dead,” answered my companion. “Fell from a cliff last year and broke my neck.”
“Did you, indeed?” I answered, trying to appear interested.
“That’s what I did. But let me tell you about that mummy. There was a scientific chap who came to our place and wanted to buy Aztec relics. Me and my partner made a trade with him and sold him a lot of stuff; but he was very anxious to be taken where he could dig some up for himself, ‘to be sure of the authenticity and antiquity of the relics.’ Well, me and my pard figured up that it might be to our advantage to take him to a good cliff dwelling, and we arranged that he should pay us so much for everything he dug up. If he found a mummy we got one hundred dollars; if stone hatchets and axes, two dollars each; arrow-heads, ten cents each; for stone matats and grinders, one dollar each, taking them as they came; and whole pottery, five dollars.”
“Where did you find the mummy? Did you know of the cave?” I asked.
“Well, we knew where there were lots of caves, and where there were Indian graveyards. With the aid of a little stain and judicious arrangement of a body we prepared a fine Aztec mummy. Of course we used the body of an Indian, one who had been dead for a long time and was dried up and crumbly. My partner was a clever chap, and he fixed up the axe and the silver necklace, and we took the outfit and started for the Verde Cañon. We picked out a good-sized cave, and dug a hole in the floor, in which we carefully placed the mummy and covered him up with dry dust; then we wet the clay over him, leaving the floor hard and smooth as before. We also buried about fifty axes and two or three hundred arrow-heads, and half a dozen nice specimens of Indian pottery, which we burned up good and black.
“After we had ‘salted’ the cave to our satisfaction, we partly sealed up the entrance and returned to Flagstaff.”
“Was that acting quite fair?”
“Fair? Why, how do you think that poor man would have felt if he had come all the way out to Arizona, and gone to all the expense of his car-fare and outfit, and then found nothing? It was philanthropy, my dear sir, the height of philanthropy.”
“Was he pleased with the mummy?”
“Pleased? Why, bless your dear, innocent soul, he screamed with joy like a child, when we accidentally discovered a piece of a toe while digging in the bottom of the cave! He dropped on his knees and removed every particle of dirt with his hands, and almost cried over it. He carried on so that my partner nearly gave us away. He was a chump about some things: if anything pleased him, he would laugh, and his laugh sounded like the bray of a jackass.
“Well, sir, when this scientific chap got down on his knees, and commenced to paw the earth away from the fake mummy, my partner began to gurgle. I knew what was coming and punched him in the ribs, but it did no good. The scientific chap looked up and asked what was the matter.
“‘Matter?’ shouted my pard, and then he roared and yelled and howled.
“A look of doubt and annoyance came into our victim’s eyes; but pard saved himself just in time.
“‘Look!’ he yelled between his paroxysms of laughter, ‘look at that buzzard over there! I’m damned if he ain’t the funniest buzzard I ever saw in my life,’ and then he roared and yelled and jumped about. ‘Look at him,’ he laughed; ‘see him fly! did you ever see anything so funny?’
“I am not sure but what the scientist thought he was crazy, but anyhow, he didn’t catch on to what he was laughing at, and pretty soon went on with his digging. We stayed there three days and dug the whole place up and took back with us a basket full of stone axes, arrow-heads, three large prehistoric vases, and the mummy. He drove the wagon himself every step of the way, for fear something would get broken, and when we got to Flagstaff he spent two days packing the relics.”
“Do you consider that sort of thing quite honorable?” I asked.
“Honorable? What is that you say, you squint-eyed dude? Now, my boy, don’t get fresh with me just because I am dead and can’t jump you.”
I hastened to pacify him.
“Well, that’s all right, but if you had said that to me last year when I was alive I would have marked squares all over your body with a piece of chalk and then played hop-scotch on you.”
“I meant no offence,” I said humbly.
“Maybe you didn’t. But just you make another break like that, and I won’t forget it; you will have to die sometime, and then—oh, mamma!”
“Is your partner dead?” I asked.
“No, Jim is not dead by a long shot. I went down to see him last winter at his place in California, where he has opened up a new store. He has a good tourist trade—made a lot of money this year out of mermaids and sea-devils—there was a run on sea-devils this winter. He makes them out of fishes.
“The mermaids he makes out of fishes’ tails and Indian children—robs the graveyards, you know. Some of them are really fine and artistic. I tell you he is an artist in his line.
“He has a branch store still somewhere in New Mexico, and made a stack of money last winter in Navajo blankets and scalp-trimmed Indian arms and shields. It is the scalp trimming which catches the tourist. He gets most of his scalps from California, from hospitals there; but when he is short, horse hair does pretty well, especially for old Indian scalps.
“And then, Navajo blankets. Holy smoke, a gold mine isn’t in it! They make them of Germantown wool and aniline dyes, and they cost at the factory all the way from six bits to $10, and sell to the tourist for various prices; sometimes as high as $75 or $80. Oh, I tell you he is shrewd; some day he will be worth a million!
“Sometimes a chap goes into his shop and poses as an expert—those are the kind of jays that f
ill Jim’s soul with joy. The fellow will pull over a pile of blankets, and after looking at them wisely, will say, ‘Haven’t you got any real good blankets? These are Germantown wool and mineral dyes.’
“Then Jim will say—‘Ah, I see you know something about blankets.’
“‘Oh, yes; a little,’ answers the expert.
“‘The fine old-style blankets are mighty hard to get now,’ remarks Jim.
“‘I know they are,’ remarks the wise tourist, ‘but still they are to be had sometimes, are they not? Come, now, haven’t you got something choice hidden away?’
“Then Jim will look about, as though fearful that somebody might see him, and will steal softly into a back room and pull from beneath his bed a good cheap blanket—worth about $3—and spread it out lovingly in front of the tourist.
“‘There,’ he whispers; ‘look at that; that is not for sale. I am keeping that for myself, but I thought you would like to see it, as it is very evident you know a good deal about blankets; isn’t it a beauty?’
“Then the tourist ‘bites,’ and asks him what it is worth, and admires it, agrees with him as to the splendid old dyes and fine preservation of the native wool prepared in the manner of the old Navajo, speaks of its great rarity, and at last ends by asking Jim what he will take for it, and usually carries it away with him, having paid three or four times the value of a really good blanket.
“I‘ve seen Jim pull their legs so hard they’d pretty near limp when they went out. Ah, those were happy days!”
The departed heaved a deep sigh, and gazed silently at his handiwork.
“Well,” he said, “I must be going; I have a lot of things I want to do before morning, but hope to run across you sometime again. Glad you like the mummy. I forgot to mention that most of the teeth were gone when we first got it, and Jim put in a fine new set, and improved it a whole lot.”
I glanced at the mummy, and when I looked up again, my companion had disappeared.
LOT NO. 249, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Of the dealings of Edward Bellingham with William Monkhouse Lee, and of the cause of the great terror of Abercrombie Smith, it may be that no absolute and final judgment will ever be delivered. It is true that we have the full and clear narrative of Smith himself, and such corroboration as he could look for from Thomas Styles the servant, from the Reverend Plumptree Peterson, Fellow of Old’s, and from such other people as chanced to gain some passing glance at this or that incident in a singular chain of events. Yet, in the main, the story must rest upon Smith alone, and the most will think that it is more likely that one brain, however outwardly sane, has some subtle warp in its texture, some strange flaw in its workings, than that the path of Nature has been overstepped in open day in so famed a centre of learning and light as the University of Oxford. Yet when we think how narrow and how devious this path of Nature is, how dimly we can trace it, for all our lamps of science, and how from the darkness which girds it round great and terrible possibilities loom ever shadowly upwards, it is a bold and confident man who will put a limit to the strange by-paths into which the human spirit may wander.
In a certain wing of what we will call Old College in Oxford there is a corner turret of an exceeding great age. The heavy arch which spans the open door has bent downwards in the centre under the weight of its years, and the grey, lichen-blotched blocks of stone are bound and knitted together with withes and strand of ivy, as though the old mother had set herself to brace them up against wind and weather. From a door a stone stair curves upwards spirally, passing two landings, and terminating in a third one, its steps all shapeless and hollowed by the tread of so many generations of the seekers after knowledge. Life has flowed like water down this winding stair, and, waterlike, has left these smooth-worn grooves behind it. From the long-gowned, pedantic scholars of Plantagenet days down to the young bloods of a later age, how full and strong had been that tide of young English life. And what was left now of all those hopes, those strivings, those fiery energies, save here and there in some old-world churchyard a few scratches upon a stone, and perchance a handful of dust in a mouldering coffin? Yet here were the silent stair and the grey old wall, with bend and saltire and many another heraldic device still to be read upon its surface, like grotesque shadows thrown back from the days that had passed.
In the month of May, in the year 1884, three young men occupied the sets of rooms which opened on to the separate landings of the old stair. Each set consisted simply of a sitting-room and a bedroom, while the two corresponding rooms upon the ground-floor were used, the one as a coal-cellar, and the other as the living-room of the servant, or scout, Thomas Styles, whose duty it was to wait upon the three men above him. To right and to left was a line of lecture-rooms and of offices, so that the dwellers in the old turret enjoyed a certain seclusion, which made the chambers popular among the more studious undergraduates. Such were the three who occupied them now—Abercrombie Smith above, Edward Bellingham beneath him, and William Monkhouse Lee upon the lowest story.
It was ten o’clock on a bright spring night, and Abercrombie Smith lay back in his armchair, his feet upon the fender, and his briar-root pipe between his lips. In a similar chair, and equally at his ease, there lounged on the other side of the fireplace his old school friend Jephro Hastie. Both men were in flannels, for they had spent their evening upon the river, but apart from their dress no one could look at their hard-cut, alert faces without seeing that they were open-air men—men whose minds and tastes turned naturally to all that was manly and robust. Hastie, indeed, was stroke of his college boat, and Smith was an even better oar, but a coming examination had already cast its shadow over him and held him to his work, save for the few hours a week which health demanded. A litter of medical books upon the table, with scattered bones, models, and anatomical plates, pointed to the extent as well as the nature of his studies, while a couple of single-sticks and a set of boxing-gloves above the mantelpiece hinted at the means by which, with Hastie’s help, he might take his exercise in its most compressed and least distant form. They knew each other very well—so well that they could sit now in that soothing silence which is the very highest development of companionship.
“Have some whisky,” said Abercrombie Smith at last between two cloudbursts. “Scotch in the jug and Irish in the bottle.”
“No, thanks. I’m in for the sculls. I don’t liquor when I’m training. How about you?”
“I’m reading hard. I think it best to leave it alone.”
Hastie nodded, and they relapsed into a contented silence.
“By the way, Smith,” asked Hastie, presently, “have you made the acquaintance of either of the fellows on your stair yet?”
“Just a nod when we pass. Nothing more.”
“Hum! I should be inclined to let it stand at that. I know something of them both. Not much, but as much as I want. I don’t think I should take them to my bosom if I were you. Not that there’s much amiss with Monkhouse Lee.”
“Meaning the thin one?”
“Precisely. He is a gentlemanly little fellow. I don’t think there is any vice in him. But then you can’t know him without knowing Bellingham.”
“Meaning the fat one?”
“Yes, the fat one. And he’s a man whom I, for one, would rather not know.”
Abercrombie Smith raised his eyebrows and glanced across at his companion.
“What’s up, then?” he asked. “Drink? Cards? Cad? You used not to be censorious.”
“Ah! you evidently don’t know the man, or you wouldn’t ask. There’s something damnable about him—something reptilian. My gorge always rises at him. I should put him down as a man with secret vices—an evil liver. He’s no fool, though. They say that he is one of the best men in his line that they have ever had in the college.”
“Medicine or classics?”
“Eastern languages. He’s a demon at them. Chillingworth met him somewhere above the second cataract last long, and he told me that he just prattl
ed to the Arabs as if he had been born and nursed and weaned among them. He talked Coptic to the Copts, and Hebrew to the Jews, and Arabic to the Bedouins, and they were all ready to kiss the hem of his frock-coat. There are some old hermit Johnnies up in those parts who sit on rocks and scowl and spit at the casual stranger. Well, when they saw this chap Bellingham, before he had said five words they just lay down on their bellies and wriggled. Chillingworth said that he never saw anything like it. Bellingham seemed to take it as his right, too, and strutted about among them and talked down to them like a Dutch uncle. Pretty good for an undergrad of Old’s, wasn’t it?”
“Why do you say you can’t know Lee without knowing Bellingham?”
“Because Bellingham is engaged to his sister Eveline. Such a bright little girl, Smith! I know the whole family well. It’s disgusting to see that brute with her. A toad and a dove, that’s what they always remind me of.”
Abercrombie Smith grinned and knocked his ashes out against the side of the grate.
“You show every card in your hand, old chap,” said he. “What a prejudiced, green-eyed, evil-thinking old man it is! You have really nothing against the fellow except that.”
“Well, I’ve known her ever since she was as long as that cherry-wood pipe, and I don’t like to see her taking risks. And it is a risk. He looks beastly. And he has a beastly temper, a venomous temper. You remember his row with Long Norton?”
“No; you always forget that I am a freshman.”
“Ah, it was last winter. Of course. Well, you know the towpath along by the river. There were several fellows going along it, Bellingham in front, when they came on an old market-woman coming the other way. It had been raining—you know what those fields are like when it has rained—and the path ran between the river and a great puddle that was nearly as broad. Well, what does this swine do but keep the path, and push the old girl into the mud, where she and her marketings came to terrible grief. It was a blackguard thing to do, and Long Norton, who is as gentle a fellow as ever stepped, told him what he thought of it. One word led to another, and it ended in Norton laying his stick across the fellow’s shoulders. There was the deuce of a fuss about it, and it’s a treat to see the way in which Bellingham looks at Norton when they meet now. By Jove, Smith, it’s nearly eleven o’clock!”
The Mummy Megapack Page 11
