She who sleeps A romance of New York and the Nile
years back has been able to prove it! I shall have to try to talk to
her. She is sure to be frightened. I expect she’ll be as weak as a
kitten. And it’s going to be no easy job to carry her up past that
broken door.”
“Let me help!” said John Cumberland eagerly.
Danbazzar shook his head.
“Just stand by with the litter,” he directed. “The fewer strange faces
she sees the better. I can manage alone.”
But the wonder of Egypt’s sunset was stealing over the Valleys before
the litter was borne down the _wâdi_ to the tent and a slight,
muffled figure tenderly carried inside.
Barry was wild to see her. Danbazzar would not consent.
“She’s frightened to death,” he said, “poor little girl. When she saw
old Safîyeh she just fell into her arms and hid her face against
her.”
Professor Blackwell looked up. They were seated in the big tent.
“I have been endeavouring to do as you requested,” he said. “But to
prescribe any routine or diet for such a patient is quite beyond my
powers. I have somewhat recovered from the first shock, however, and I
am prepared to give her an examination at any time that may be
convenient.”
“When she has bathed and recovered from the journey,” Danbazzar
replied, “I should like you to see her. I think I have made her
understand that the High Priest is coming.”
“The High Priest!” exclaimed Professor Blackwell.
“Well, you must remember,” said Danbazzar, “the priests were the
doctors in her time. And I figured out that someone must have looked
her over on the other occasions.”
Professor Blackwell clutched his high brow.
“I was about to say something insane,” he murmured. “I was going to
ask if she seems to remember her last awakening. It suddenly occurred
to me that this took place roughly three thousand years ago!”
“Yet she _does_ seem to remember it,” Danbazzar declared.
“What!” cried John Cumberland. “You have gathered this?”
Danbazzar inclined his head in that graceful manner which was his.
“I’m not certain,” he confessed. “But I think so. I realize I only
know enough of her language to act as a link. From this we must build
up and teach her English as though she were a child. Her difficulties
are going to be worse than those of an ordinary foreigner. We shall
never be able to find any analogies! The objects, the customs--all are
different.”
Hassan es-Sugra, it appeared, had been prepared for the coming of the
mythical sheik’s daughter. He expressed no surprise on his return from
Kurna, nor did he inquire what had become of her escort.
He had been making certain mysterious arrangements for transporting
the tomb furniture to some place of safety. Work was to be resumed on
the shaft next morning, with the object of widening it sufficiently to
allow of the removal of the sarcophagus, and the unusual wall
paintings were to be photographed before the tomb was reclosed.
Meanwhile, Professor Blackwell had completed a professional
examination of his strange and beautiful patient. He returned to the
tent where the other members of the party awaited him, in an
indescribably puzzled frame of mind. Removing his skullcap, he lighted
a cigar and fortified himself with a peg of whisky from one of the
bottles buried in the sand.
“Amazing!” he declared; “quite, quite amazing! Her pulse, respiration,
and temperature are absolutely normal! Her flesh is firm and healthy.
Her hair is vigorous; her teeth are perfect. I could swear that her
nails were manicured yesterday!”
“They were last manicured around 1360 B.C.!” said Danbazzar.
“There is a small scar under the hair just above the right ear which
suggests that the theory--now generally accepted, I believe--that
surgery was practised by the ancients is not without foundation. She
is in extraordinarily good spirits. I twice caught her laughing at
me!”
No one seemed very surprised, but:
“What about diet?” asked John Cumberland. “Surely she should be
treated as an invalid?”
“Frankly,” the Professor returned, “I see no reason whatever to treat
her as an invalid. Apart from the fact that she seems to be rather
tired, I can detect no abnormal conditions of any kind. She addressed
me several times during the interview, but her remarks were naturally
unintelligible. They seemed to afford her considerable amusement,
nevertheless. And the old woman from Luxor must have gathered
something of their gist. She, also, appeared to be highly
entertained.”
“Safîyeh can’t possibly have understood one word,” said Danbazzar
quickly. “Arabic is the only language she speaks, except for a
smattering of English; and we have told her that Zalithea talks
Kabyle.”
“Which,” added John Cumberland, “judging from her style of beauty, she
certainly never did!”
“We’ll know one day!” said Danbazzar.
“You don’t think there’s any danger,” Barry broke in, “of--of----”
He fumbled for words, and:
“Of her crumbling to dust, or something of that sort?” the Professor
concluded for him. “Your frame of mind, Barry, is gradually beginning
to resemble my own! Frankly, I cannot answer your question. According
to my personal observation, the young lady is as healthy as she is
beautiful. According to my training and beliefs, she ought to have
been dead for three thousand-odd years!”
“What amazes me,” Barry declared, “is her cheerfulness! Just think.
Everyone she ever knew is long forgotten. She found herself in a tomb,
buried alive, this morning. Yet this evening you say she is laughing!”
“Her laughter may have been hysterical,” murmured the Professor,
pulling up his robe for greater comfort, and revealing the fact that
beneath he wore a pair of very soiled gray flannel trousers rolled up
some six inches above his sandals. “No doubt a visit from a High
Priest is somewhat awe-inspiring.”
At the end of further discussion, a dinner menu for Zalithea was
decided upon, and Mahmoud given the necessary orders. A new spirit of
restlessness had descended upon the party. If they had solved their
first great problem, another faced them.
Barry, having prepared for the evening meal, climbed the side of the
_wâdi_ to that spot from which on the night of their arrival he had
watched the sun setting. It was not so long ago. It seemed an age. He
knew that something had happened in the interval which marked the end
of one phase of his life, the beginning of another.
Now that he had actually seen Zalithea, that vague dread which had
sometimes troubled him when he had found himself thinking of the girl
on the balcony had gone. Yet, he asked himself to-night, did not his
recognition of this girl increase rather than solve the mystery?
Since it could not possibly have been Zalithea he had seen on that
balcony in New Jersey, then in the garden of Mr. Brown’s house, and
later on Fifth Avenue, it must have been her living double!--this or,
as others had suspected, a delusion. But why should he have suffered
this delusion, not once, but many times, immediately prior to the
night that the papyrus came into his father’s possession?
Surely he was justified in believing that only some form of telepathy
or clairvoyance could explain it… and that this explanation
presupposed a mysterious bond of sympathy between himself and the girl
he was destined to meet?
The Ancient Egyptians, he understood, believed in reincarnation. Since
their wisdom was so great in such matters, as the extended life of
Zalithea proved, quite possibly they were right. _She_ had slept,
miraculously, living on; but _he_ had died, in the ordinary way, and
was now reborn--in the ordinary way!
He recalled, was ever recalling, how she had looked at him in the
moment of opening her long, dark eyes. Death had effaced physical
memory in his own case; only subconscious memory remained. But
Zalithea, never having died, remembered! They had met before, in those
remote days--and she remembered him!
It was an idea that first delighted and then terrified Barry. He had
imagined, on that night in his father’s library, that the shadow of
Ancient Egypt was creeping out to touch him.
He had been right!
What this inexplicable discovery might mean to John Cumberland, to
Danbazzar, to Professor Blackwell, he could only dimly foresee. But
what did it mean to him?
This he could not foresee at all.
And then, as he began mechanically to climb down to the camp, the
sound of a distant voice reached his ears. It was a laughing voice…
and he knew that he had heard it before!
CHAPTER XXII.
A SUMMONS FROM THE PRINCESS
“I have reached a decision,” declared Professor Blackwell, “upon a
point that has been worrying me.”
Dinner dispatched, they sat around the table in council, pipes and
cigars going. Safîyeh had reported that her charge had found the
soup, the fried chicken, the Château y’Quem--of which they had only
three bottles--and the peaches entirely to her satisfaction.
“What point?” asked John Cumberland.
“Distinctly,” the Professor resumed, “distinctly she is the property
of the Department of Antiquities.”
“What’s that!” cried Barry. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“He’s talking sense,” Danbazzar’s deep voice broke in. “There are no
two ways about it. She is.”
“Are you all mad?” said Barry. “You behave as though the Department of
Antiquities were an orphanage!”
“Or a harem agency,” prompted the Professor. “Yet the fact remains
that they and no one else have a legal claim upon her person. We are
no more entitled to remove her from the country, alive, than we should
have been entitled to do so had we found her in what I may term a
normal state. I mean dead. She is as much the property of the
Department as the sarcophagus she lay in.”
“I must agree with you,” John Cumberland admitted. “Our difficulties
are enormous. The more I think about them the bigger they get. For
instance--since none of us dare testify that he was present at the
discovery, how can we ever give an account of it to the world?”
“We can’t!” said the Professor. “Distinctly and definitely, I for one
should not consent under any circumstances to lend my name to a
statement on the subject. In the first place, assuming I were safely
out of the country before the issue of such a report, criminal
proceedings would undoubtedly be taken by the Egyptian government!
This applies to all of us!”
Some moments of uncomfortable silence followed, then:
“The fact is,” Danbazzar stated, “the greatest find in Egyptology
since the game began has got to blush unseen. I hadn’t thought of it.
I’ll say so honestly. None of us had thought of it. But there it is
all the same. The testimony of this bunch would carry a lot of weight
in America. I don’t say we’d go unchallenged. But we’d be taken
seriously. We’re not going to get the chance. We started working in
the dark. We’ve got to go on that way.”
“I wish, now,” said John Cumberland regretfully, “that I had curbed my
impatience and formally applied for a permit to excavate.”
“You’d never have got it!” Danbazzar assured him. “You might as well
apply for a pass-out check to heaven! And once you’d applied and been
turned down, to come here as we’ve done would have been to ask for
trouble. No, sir, I’d worked on it from that angle before I put up my
proposition.”
“Then where do we stand?” cried Barry in bewilderment. “What have we
gained if our discoveries can’t be published?”
Danbazzar regarded him fixedly across the table.
“We have gained knowledge,” he replied, “that has been lost for
thousands of years. With what we know, and what Zalithea can tell us
when we teach her English, we’re going to revolutionize archæology,
physiology, and psychology--to say nothing of chemistry!”
“It appears to me,” murmured Professor Blackwell, “that this tent
contains the nucleus of a sort of New Rosicrucian order. We are bound