Part 17 (2/2)
As for Lord Evandale, he nevercountrywomen cannot understand his coldness towards their sex But it would never occur to them that Lord Evandale is retrospectively in love with Tahoser, the daughter of the high-priest Petao Yet there are English crazes which have less sound reason for their existence than this one
_Egypt_
_EGYPT_
THE UNWRAPPING OF A MUMMY
During the Exhibition of 1857, I was invited to be present at the opening of one of the yptian antiquities, and at the unwrapping of the mummy it contained My curiosity was indeed lively My readers will easily understand the reason: the scene at which I was to be present I had iined and described beforehand in the ”Romance of a Mummy” I do not say this to draw attention to my book, but to explain the peculiar interest I took in this archaeological and funereal
When I entered the room, the mummy, already taken fro indistinctly through the thickness of the wrappings On the faces of the coffin was painted the Judgment of the Soul, the scene which is usually represented in such cases The soul of the dead woenii, the one hostile, the other favourable, was bowing before Osiris, the great judge of the dead, seated on his throne, wearing the pschent, the conventional beard on the chin, and a whip in his hand Farther on, the dead woood or bad, represented by a pot of flowers and a rough piece of stone, were being weighed in scales A long line of judges, with heads of lions, hawks, or jackals, were awaiting in hieratic attitudes the result of the weighing before delivering judg were inscribed the prayers of the funeral ritual and the confession of the dead, who did not own to her faults, but stated, on the contrary, those she had not couilty of murder, or of theft, or of adultery,” etc Another inscription contained the genealogy of the woman, both on the father's and on the e names, the last of which is that of Nes Khons, the lady enclosed in the case, where she believed herself sure of rest while awaiting the day on which her soul would, after many trials, be reunited to its well-preserved body, and enjoy supreme felicity with its own flesh and blood; a broken hope, for death is as disappointing as life
The work of unrolling the bandages began; the outer envelope, of stout linen, was ripped open with scissors A faint, delicate odour of balsah the room like the odour of an apothecary's shop The end of the bandage was then sought for, and when found, the ht to allow the operator to move freely around her and to roll up the endless band, turned to the yellow colour of ecru linen by the pale indeed was the appearance of the tall rag-doll, the ar so stiffly and aardly with a sort of horrible parody of life, under the hands that were stripping it, while the bandages rose in heaps around it Soed serviettes intended to fill hollows or to support the shape
Pieces of linen, cut open in the middle, had been passed over the head and, fitted to the shoulders, fell down over the chest All these obstacles having been removed, there appeared a sort of veil like coarse India muslin, of a pinkish colour, the soft tone of which would have delighted a painter It appears to inally red, turned rose-colour through the action of the balsam and of ties, of finer linen, which bound the body more closely with their innu feverish, and the ar Poe could have found here a subject for one of his weird tales It so happened that a sudden stor the ith heavy drops of rain that rattled like hail; pale lightnings illumined on the shelves of the cupboards the old yellowed skulls and the griical Museu of the thunder forhter of Horus and Rouaa, as she pirouetted in the i her
Thesmaller in size, and its slender for wrappings A vast quantity of linen filled the roo how a box which was scarcely larger than an ordinary coffin had ed to hold it all The neck was the first portion of the body to issue froes; it was covered with a fairly thick layer of naphtha which had to be chiselled away Suddenly, through the black remains of the natron, there flashed on the upper part of the breast a bright gleaold, and soon there was laid bare a thin sheet of s outspread, its tail fanlike like that of eagles in heraldry Upon this bit of gold--a funeral jewel not rich enough to tempt body-snatchers--had been written with a reed and ink a prayer to the Gods, protectors of the to that the heart and the viscerae of the dead should not be removed far from her body A beautiful microscopic hahich would have made a lovely watch-charm, was attached by a thread to a necklace of s also a sort of amulet in the shape of a flail, made of turquoise-blue ena to the heat of the boiling bitumen which had been poured over them, and then had slowly cooled
So far, of course, nothing unusual had been found; in mummy cases there are often discovered numbers of these small trifles, and every curiosity shop is full of siures; butcaraceful detail Under each armpit of the dead woman had been placed a flower, absolutely colourless, like plants which have been long pressed between the leaves of a herbarium, but perfectly preserved, and to which a botanist could readily have assigned a name Were they blooms of the lotus or the persea? No one of us could say This find htful Who was it that had put these poor flowers there, like a supreme farewell, at the moment when the beloved body was about to disappear under the first rolls of bandages? Flowers that are three thousand years old, so frail and yet so eternal, e ies a small fruit-berry, the species of which it is difficult to deterht oblivion On a bit of stuff, carefully detached, ritten within a cartouche the naotten This mummy fills up a vacant place in history and tells of a new Pharaoh
The face was still hidden under its mask of linen and bitumen, which could not be easily detached, for it had been firmly fixed by an indefinite number of centuries Under the pressure of the chisel a portion gave way, and thite eyes with great black pupils shone with fictitious life between brown eyelids They were enamelled eyes, such as it was customary to insert in carefully preparedout of the dead face, produced a terrifying effect; the body sees that moved around it The eyebrows showed quite plainly upon the orbit, hollowed by the sinking of the flesh The nose, I must confess,--and in this respect Nes Khons was less pretty than Tahoser,--had been turned down to conceal the incision through which the brain had been drawn froold had been placed on the ly fine, silky, and soft, dressed in light curls, did not fall below the tops of the ears, and was of that auburn tint so much prized by Venetian women It looked like a child's hair dyed with henna, as one sees it in Algeria I do not think that this colour was the natural one; Nes Khons yptians, and the brown tone was doubtless produced by the essences and perfuan to show in its sad nudity The reddish skin of the torso, as the air came in contact with it, assumed a bluish blooh which had been drawn the entrails, and from which escaped, like the sawdust of a ripped-up doll, the sawdust of arorains that looked like colophony The arilded nails iesture of the Venus of Medici The feet, slightly contracted by the drying up of the flesh and the muscles, seeilded like those of the hand
What was she, after all, this Nes Khons, daughter of Horus and Rouaa, called Lady in her epitaph? Young or old, beautiful or ugly? It would be difficult to say She is now notbones, and it is iraceful contours of Egyptian women, such as we see them depicted in te, one that see to the realm of drea which walked in the sunshi+ne, which lived and loved five hundred years before Moses, two thousand years before Jesus Christ? For that is the age of the e in the midst of the Universal Exposition, amid all the machinery of our modern civilisation
FROM ALEXANDRIA TO CAIRO
The railway to Cairo runs first along a narrow strip of sand which separates the Baheirehma'adieh, or Lake of Aboukir, froo towards Cairo, Lake Mareotis is on your right and the Lake of Aboukir on your left The former stretches out like a sea between shores so low that they disappear, and thus make it impossible to estimate the size of the lake, which ht fell perpendicularly upon its smooth waters, and made them flash and sparkle until the eye eary; in other places, the gray waters lay stagnant aray sands, or else were of the dead white of tin It would have been easy to believe one's self in the Holland Polders, travelling along one of the sleepy inland seas The heavens were as colourless as Van der Velde's skies, and the travellers, who, trusting to painters, had dreaazed with arayish toned land, which in no wise recalled Egypt, at least such as one iines it to be
On the side opposite Lake Mareotis rose, in the ardens, the country hoovernht colours, sky-blue, rose or yellow, picked out hite, and here and there the great sails of boats, bound to Foueh or to Rosetta through the Mahetation and see on dry land This curious effect, which always causes surprise, is often hbourhood of Leyden, Dordrecht, and Haarlem, and in swaround, and soher than the level of the country by several yards
Where the salt water ends, the aspect of the country changes, not gradually, but suddenly; on the one hand absolute barrenness, on the other exuberant vegetation; and wherever irrigation brings a drop of water, plants spring up, and the sterile dust beco We had passed Lake Mareotis, and on either side of the railroad stretched fields of _doora_ or rowth, so the white silk froround with lines that shone here and there in the light These were fed by broader canals connected with the Nile
Small dikes of earth, easily opened with a blow of a pickaxe, dah wheels of the sakiehs, turned by buffaloes, oxen, caher levels
Sometimes, even, two robust fellahs, perfectly naked, tawny and shi+ning like Florentine bronzes, standing on the edge of a canal and balancing like a swing a basket of waterproof esparto suspended from two ropes of which they held the ends, skihbouring field with a, holding the handle of a prih drawn by a caathered cotton and ed branches of trees by way of a harrow over the furrohich the inundation had scarce left
Everywhere was seen an activity not much in accord with the traditional Oriental idleness