Egypt -- History -- To 332 B.C. -- Fiction; Historical fiction
A hot day spent in transcribing to paper its mud-filled inscriptions, and
a night devoted to their decipherment, might well have driven me forth
in search of the cool breezes to be found along the higher slopes of the
nearby Libyan Hills.
Yet, in this connection, I must not forget to mention the contents of a
newspaper-clipping sent me by Gardiner just before he left Alexandria, a
clipping which seems to have a peculiar meaning, especially in the light
of the curious experiences which I shall presently relate.
This clipping was found folded carefully in the page of my Diary opposite
that last incomplete entry to which I have referred.
Beneath a date and the words “Sphinx, Cairo,” the latter added in
Gardiner’s spidery script, there appear the following extraordinary
paragraphs: “In the Museum of the Louvre there is a mummy, Catalogue No.
49. It is the mummy of a woman, and is said to have been found in one
of the Tombs of the Queens, south-west of the Theban acropolis. The man
who found it was crushed to death within twenty-four hours after he had
touched it, and his assistants who hauled it up from the tomb-shaft died
within a few weeks. Three of the carriers who handled it on the Nile boat
died within a short space of time, and one of the men who unpacked it at
Paris died in great agony within less than a week after he had played
his part in the work of getting it to its destination. All these were
seemingly natural deaths, but it is odd that all the men whose fingers
touched the mummy should have died so soon after the handling. The body
of the unknown appears to have been interred with all the elaboration
prescribed for _Queens of the Royal-Blood_! The work of the casemaker
was careful in the extreme. Both granite coffin and gold-covered casing
were of unusual quality and richness. The many gem-incrustations, with
which the gold cases were inlaid, were similarly of the richest and
rarest materials. Yet, the name of Meryt, that of a minor priestess of
the Temple, found beneath the pitch which had been smeared upon the outer
casings, seemed to prove conclusively that the body was that of one of
the chantresses of the Temple of Sekhmet at Karnak.
“But, following the unwinding of the aromatic wrappings which swathed the
body, the curator in charge was surprised to find a second inscription.
This indicated that the mummy was that of Queen Hanit, the first wife of
Amenhotep the Third, whom the King put aside in favor of Thi, a beautiful
Syrian. You may recall how Queen Thi, following Hanit’s incarceration in
the great Temple of Sekhmet, is supposed to have instigated the death
of Hanit’s son, the true heir to the throne, at the hands of Menna, a
favorite of hers. Of the further history of Lady Hanit I personally know
nothing.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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