"Now," he said, fingering the scarab, "if I was not dreaming, and if by some mysterious means Her Highness's promise is to be actually fulfilled, I ought to be able to take this ring off without opening my hand. Certainly, any fourth dimensional being could do it." As he spoke he pulled at the setting of the scarab--and, to his amazement, the ring came off whole. There was no scar on his finger--no break in the ring. "Good heavens!" he exclaimed, staring with something like fear in his eyes, first at his hand, and then at the ring. "Then it _is_ true!" He was silent for a full minute; then he put the ring down on the dressing-table and whispered: "What a terrible power--and what an awful responsibility! Well, thank God, I am a fairly honest man!" As he undressed he was conscious of a curious sense of reminiscence which he had never experienced before. His brain was not only perfectly clear, but almost abnormally active, and yet the current of his thoughts appeared to be turned backward instead of forward. The things of his own life, the life that he was then living, seemed to drift behind him. The facts which he had learned in his long and minute study of Egyptian history came up in his mind, no longer as facts learned from books and monuments, wall-paintings, and hieroglyphics, but as living entities. He seemed to know, not by memory, but of immediate knowledge. It was the difference between the reading of the story, say, of a battle, and actually taking part in it. He got into bed, and turned over on his right side, saying: "Well, this is all very extraordinary. I wonder what it all means? Thank goodness, I am sleepy enough, and sleep is the best of all medicines. I should not wonder if I were to dream of Memphis again to-night. A wonderfully beautiful mummy that, quite unique--and Nitocris, too. Good-night, Nitocris, my royal mistress that might have been! Good-night!" CHAPTER II BACK TO THE PAST The City of a Hundred Kings, vast and sombre, stretched away into the dim, soft distance of the moonlit night to right and left and far behind him. In front lay the broad, smooth, silver-gleaming Nile, then approaching its full flood-time, and looking like a wide, shining road out of the shadows through the light and into the shadows again--symbol of the visible present coming invisibly out of the domains of the past, and fading away into the still more hazy domain of the unknown future. Symbol, too, in its countless ripples under the fresh north wind, of the generations of Man drifting endlessly down the Stream of Time. He was standing in the dark shadows of a huge pylon at one end of the broad white terrace of the palace of Pepi in Memphis--he, Ma-Rim[=o]n, Priest of Amen-Ra and Initiate of the Higher Mysteries.