She who sleeps A romance of New York and the Nile
Danbazzar. Together, they raised the painted lid and rested it upright
against the nearest wall.
Through a mist that was not wholly due to the incense, Barry saw the
figure of a woman lying in the sarcophagus!
The figure was swathed in saffron-coloured wrappings. The arms and
hands were enwrapped also. But within a sort of aperture where the
face should have been appeared a thin gold mask. He experienced a
sense of suspended animation. He seemed to watch that rigid figure
through a vast period of time. Then, casting an imperious glance
around him, and raising a finger significantly to his lips, Danbazzar
stooped.
Lifting the mummylike form, he placed it on the couch.
With a pair of surgical scissors he began to cut through the
wrappings.…
A hand touched Barry’s arm. He started wildly.
Professor Blackwell, his features strangely haggard, handed him a
taper and pointed to the tripod.
Barry, by dint of a stupendous effort, regained control of himself. He
remembered that it was his duty to light the first two lamps.
This duty he performed blindly. A sound of tearing linen seemed to
fill the chamber. The perfume of the oil in the lamps began to mingle
with that of the _Kyphi_.…
John Cumberland lighted two more lamps.
Barry turned and looked. Like lilies blooming in corruption, he saw
two slender, exquisite arms peeping out from the torn and powdered
wrappings… bare, creamy shoulders gleamed in the lamplight.
Danbazzar gently detached the gold mask and removed the turbanlike
swathings which confined a mass of short, wavy dark hair.
A pale, exquisite face was revealed, delicate as a Greek cameo. Long,
curling black lashes rested on the youthfully rounded cheeks. The
pouting lips seemed to smile.…
In on the hush of it burst a loud, harsh cry:
“My God!”
Even as he met a furious glance of Danbazzar’s blazing, wild animal
eyes, Barry did not realize that it was _he_ who had cried out. But
instantly came recognition of the fact.
He clapped his palm over his mouth, literally choking back the words
he had been about to utter. John Cumberland had his hand raised in
warning--a hand that shook wildly. Professor Blackwell lighted the
last pair of lamps. His face looked waxen--ghastly.
Danbazzar, icily calm again, proceeded to carry out the singular
formula. A wave of embarrassment swept over Barry, making his very
scalp tingle. He turned aside.
But his heart was leaping--leaping…
Danbazzar lighted the seventh lamp--and glared at Barry.
Barry plunged a taper into the brazier and applied the little tongue
of flame to an oily liquid in the perfume burner. It ignited at once.
Danbazzar, bending over the girl blew the aromatic smoke gently over
her face.
At which moment, Professor Blackwell staggered toward the curtained
doorway. John Cumberland, his face masklike, waved to Barry to assist
the Professor. Danbazzar never even glanced aside, as Barry threw a
supporting arm around the tottering man and helped him to gain the
outer chamber. There:
“Air!” he whispered. “I must have air.”
The task of getting him along the sloping passage was no easy one; for
Professor Blackwell was heavily built. Especially it was difficult at
the point where the roof had collapsed, since here he must negotiate
an opening only about eighteen inches high.
But it was done at last. The Professor sank down in that little
artificial cave created by the screen, and shakily produced his flask.
“Go back,” he said in a low voice--“go back. You will want to see
if----”
“I couldn’t think of it,” Barry returned. “Not until you feel better.
Was it the heat down there, Professor?”
Professor Blackwell returned his flask to his pocket. Some trace of
normal colour was showing again in his cheeks. From a hiding place
beneath his priest’s robe he produced his spectacles and set them in
place. He made a very grotesque picture. Then:
“Not entirely,” he replied. “That was not without its effect, of
course. But I confess that my threatened collapse was not entirely due
to it. Your training, Barry, has not followed the same lines as mine.
You are not only a younger man, but you are plastic minded. The sight
of a person defying the law of gravity without mechanical aid, for
instance, would not appall you?”
“It would certainly interest me.”
“Quite, quite. There’s the difference. It would horrify _me!_ And
to-day I have witnessed a thing that has knocked the keystone out of
the structure upon which my professional life rests. Those scientific
principles to which, as a sane man, I have adhered unquestioningly
throughout my career have been ruthlessly destroyed. Either modern
physiology is fit only for the scrap heap or the claims of so-called
occultists are worthy of close examination.”
“You think she is really alive?” asked Barry eagerly.
“Think!” retorted the Professor. “I _know_ she is! Whether the
madhouse treatment now being employed by Danbazzar will terminate her
miraculous trance or not I cannot say. But, quite definitely, she is
alive! Go back, Barry. _I_ dare not!”
Eagerly Barry obeyed. He returned to the scene of the poor Professor’s
seizure in a quarter of the time it had taken to come out. Softly
raising the curtain he entered the chamber, all but intolerable, now,
because of the clouds of incense.
He found his father and Danbazzar bending over Zalithea, their
expressions tense. The slender curves which it had seemed desecration
to uncover were hidden beneath a fine Egyptian shawl, but it revealed
the delicate lines of her slim, still body.
Barry feasted his eyes on that pale face. Zalithea! Speculation was
ended. Doubt was done with. By some unsuspected gift of prevision, of
clairvoyance--call it what he might--he had been enabled to see her,
though she lay deep in this rocky tomb, long before he had ever set
foot on the black soil of Egypt! It was, therefore, predestined. As
Hassan would have said, “It is written.” For this he had been born.
Because of this wonder which was to come, he had never found his ideal
woman but had dreamed of dark mysterious eyes which one day would
beckon to him.…
A faint sigh broke the deathly stillness. Princess Zalithea raised her
drooping lashes--and looked long and wonderingly into the faces
bending over her. Then, without otherwise stirring, she turned her
dark, beautiful eyes in Barry’s direction.
Danbazzar, that man of steel, gripped John Cumberland’s shoulder and
indicated the stoppered flagon. Cumberland, making a visible effort to
steady his hand, poured the old wine into the goblet.
Never removing that fixed, childlike look of inquiry from Barry, the
girl allowed Danbazzar very gently to lift her up. He held the draught
to her lips and spoke a few words in a language entirely unfamiliar to
the others.
Zalithea glanced swiftly up at him and swallowed the drugged wine.
Then once more she looked at Barry, smiled like a tired child, and lay
back, closing her eyes.
Danbazzar pointed to the doorway. As John Cumberland and Barry tiptoed
out, he extinguished the seven lamps, joining them in the outer
chamber.
“She is now sleeping normally,” he whispered. “She should wake in
eight or nine hours’ time--and resume life!”
He reeled, clutched at Barry, and:
“Get me out,” he said hoarsely. “I’m through.”
CHAPTER XXI.
THE AWAKENING
Perhaps, in his heart of hearts, no one of the party--excepting
Danbazzar--had ever really counted on success. Certainly, in their
wildest imaginings, they had not schooled their minds to acceptance of
the miracle; had not realized what success would mean.
Slowly, and by different mental processes, realization came in turn to
John Cumberland and to Barry, as it had come, instantly,
insupportably, to the scientific mind of Professor Blackwell. A girl
who had lived during the reign of Seti I--a girl barely out of her
teens--was living now. She must be, according to ordinary human
computation, fully three thousand two hundred years old; but,
according to all the laws of modern physiology, she was still no more
than nineteen or twenty!
To the Professor, the problem presented was one of scientific faith.
Acceptance meant destruction of his life’s labour, the tearing up of
every textbook written on the subject; it assailed the very throne of
reason itself. Rejection, with Zalithea living, meant closing his eyes
to the truth. For a long time he remained alone in his tent and could
not be induced to see her.
John Cumberland’s problem was a legal one. To whom did Zalithea
belong? Since she antedated any government of which documentary trace
remained, surely not to the authorities at Cairo? The thought that a
false step might result in her loss was terrifying.
But, if these two found their ideas chaotic, how infinitely more so
were those of Barry. At one moment he was raised to a poetic heaven.
In the next he found himself plunged in an inferno of such torturing
doubts that he longed for the power to run away from himself.
Upon the realization of his shadowy ideal, the proof that the unknown
might become known, had followed, what? A knowledge that he must
either fly from Zalithea or learn to love her--and that she was, to
all intents and purposes, a supernatural being!
Such were the early reactions of these three to a phenomenon--and a
phenomenon in the form of an unusually lovely girl--which struck deep
at the roots of human credulity; which forced them to accept the
inacceptable, to remain sane though face to face with madness.
Danbazzar alone attacked the problem with confidence. A large Bell
tent was set up at the lower end of the _wâdi_, and furnished, though
simply, in Ancient Egyptian fashion. The necessary materials he had
brought with him and Hassan es-Sugra supervised the work. His
optimistic foresight had not stopped here. A messenger who had been
dispatched to Luxor at dawn returned before midday with an elderly
Arab woman.
“She has been standing by over a week,” said Danbazzar. “Hassan
engaged her. She’s a trained servant and was seven years in the harem
of the last Khedive. Remember!” he warned. “Hassan doesn’t know what
we found in the sarcophagus! Nobody outside of this party knows.
Zalithea is the sick daughter of a friend of mine in El Kasr who has
come down for treatment by Professor Blackwell. That’s the story, and
we’ve got to stick to it. The sarcophagus was empty.”
Accordingly Safîyeh was installed, with her few belongings, in the
new tent. A covered litter was extemporized and Hassan dispatched on a
mission to Kurna.
Danbazzar, following two hours of profound sleep, had become his
capable self again. Three visits he had made to the tomb, and reported
that Zalithea slumbered soundly. John Cumberland’s anxiety was
intense. He had urged the immediate removal of the girl from that
nearly unbreathable atmosphere but had been overruled.
“We’ll stick to the formula,” said Danbazzar truculently, “with or
without your permission. She has to stay there eight hours. After that
we have nothing to go upon.”
They carried the litter up to the tomb, setting it close to the
screen. Professor Blackwell mounted guard at the top of the valley and
Barry at the bottom. They wore their ordinary working kit; but John
Cumberland and Danbazzar had arranged to put on the Ancient Egyptian
dresses under cover of the screen before awakening the sleeper.
That Danbazzar could make himself understood in the long dead language
known to Zalithea had been already proved. It was one further item of
evidence showing his knowledge of Egyptology to be masterful.
“I know very few words,” he admitted, “and until to-day I couldn’t
tell if my pronunciation was understandable. Others have claimed to
know how to speak the language. But no living man for a thousand-odd