The Mummy and Miss Nitocris: A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension

by George Chetwynd Griffith

  CHAPTER V

  ACROSS THE THRESHOLD

  After breakfast Professor Marmion, according to his practice on finedays, lit his pipe, and went out for a stroll on the Common to put in alittle hard thinking, while Miss Nitocris, after seeing to certainhousehold matters, sat down in his study and read the papers, in orderthat she might be able to give him a synopsis of the world's news atlunch. He did not read the newspapers himself, except, perhaps, in thetrain, when he had nothing better to do. He took no interest inpolitics, for one thing, and he had still less interest in professionalcricket and football, racing, and what is generally called sport. He hada fixed opinion that all the events happening in the world which reallymattered, not even excepting the proceedings of learned societies andthe criminal and civil Law Courts, could be adequately recorded on acouple of sheets of notepaper. In other words, he had an absolutecontempt for everything that makes a newspaper sell, and therefore hisdaughter had very soon learnt to omit these fascinating items entirely.

  Curiously enough, his mind seemed to be running on this subject of allthings that morning. He had been reading an article in the _Fortnightly_on the growing sensationalism, and therefore the general decadence ofthe English Press a day or two before, and this had got connected up inhis thoughts with the amazing happenings of the last twelve hours, andhe asked himself what would happen if he were to give the narrative ofhis experiences in a letter to the _Times_, supported by the authorityof his own distinguished and irreproachable name.

  Certainly it would be the most sensational communication that had everappeared in a newspaper. In a day or two, granted always that the_Times_ had no doubts as to his sanity and printed the letter, the wholePress would be ablaze with it; Wimbledon would be besieged by reporterseager to see miracles; and then they would go away and write luridarticles, some about the miracles, if they saw them, and some about anabsolutely new form of conjuring that he had invented. Then thescientific Press would take it up, and a very merry battle of wits wouldbegin. He smiled gravely as he thought of the inkshed that would come topass in a _combat a l'outrance_ between the Three Dimensionists and theFour Dimensionists, and how the distinguished scientists on each sidewould hurl their ponderous thunderbolts of wisdom against each other.

  Then there would be the religious folk to deal with, for naturally notheologian of any enterprise or self-respect could see a fight like thatgoing on without taking a hand in it. The Churches, of course, had amonopoly of miracles, or at least the traditions of them. The ChristianScientists, blatantly, claimed to work them now, but their subjects diedwith disgusting regularity. So he quickly came to the conclusion that,if he were once to state in plain English that he could accomplish theseemingly impossible; that he, a mere mortal, could make himselfindependent of the ordinary conditions of time and space and break withimpunity all the laws which govern the physical universe, he wouldsimply make himself the centre of a vortex of frenzied disputation whichwould shake the social, religious, and scientific worlds to theirfoundations, and that would certainly not be a pleasant position for aneminent and respected scientist, who was already a certain number ofyears past middle age--to say nothing of the very real harm that mightbe done.

  Of course, he could settle all the disputes instantly, and dazzle thewhole world into the bargain by simply delivering a lecture, say, beforethe Royal Society, on the existence of a world of four dimensions, andthen proving by ocular demonstration that it does exist; but what wouldhappen then? Simply intellectual anarchy.

  Every belief that man had held for ages would be negatived. Forinstance, if there is one dogma to which humanity has clung withunanimous consistency, it is to the dogma that two and two make four.What if he were to prove--as, of course, he could do now that thismysterious hand, outstretched through the mists of the far past, had ledhim across the horizon which divides the two states of Existence--that,under certain circumstances, they would also make three or five? What ifhe demonstrated that even the axioms of Euclid could, under differentconditions, be both true and false at the same time?

  No, the thought of overthrowing such a venerable authority and plungingthe scientific world into a hopeless state of intellectual chaos sent ashudder through his nerves. He could not do it.

  And yet it was only the bare, solid truth that he did possess thesepowers. The dream of the death-bridal of Nitocris might possibly havebeen nothing more than just a dream, or possibly the revival of anepisode in a past existence; but the other experiences certainly werenot. He had taken off his ring without unbending his finger. Yes, hecould do it again now; it was just as easy as taking it off in theordinary way. He certainly had not been dreaming when the Mummy hadbecome Queen Nitocris and given him the wine. He could not have been mador dreaming, because his daughter was there. The episode of the strangestealers who had come into his house--that too was real, for they hadleft their lamp and the man's shoes behind them, and the Mummy was gone!

  He took a piece of string out of his pocket, tied the two ends, and thenwith the greatest ease tied another knot in the string without undoingthe first.

  A motor-car came humming along the road towards him, and he began tothink what this place was like a thousand years before motors were heardof. That instant the motor vanished, and he found himself standing in alittle glade surrounded by huge forest trees with not so much as afoot-track in sight. He made his way through the trees in what heremembered to be the direction of the road, and presently, through anopening avenue, he saw the sun glittering upon something moving, andheard voices; and then past the end of the avenue half a dozen armouredknights, followed by their squires and a string of men-at-arms guardinga covered waggon, and after these came a motley little crowd oftravellers, some on horseback and some on foot, evidently takingadvantage of the escort to protect them from robbers.

  "Dear me!" said the Professor to himself, not without a little shiver ofapprehension, "this is very interesting. I seem to have put myself backinto the tenth century. Yes, that is certainly tenth-century armour thatthey're wearing. I mustn't let them see me, or there's no telling whatthey'd think of an elderly gentleman in a soft hat and atwentieth-century morning suit. But perhaps," he went on with hisreasoning, "they can't see me at all. My condition is N to the fourthnow. There's a thousand years between us; I forgot that. At any rate,I'll try it."

  He walked quickly down the avenue, and stood by the side of the ruggedpath looking at the strange spectacle. No one took the slightest noticeof him. And then a chill of awful loneliness struck him. Although hecould see and move and hear, and, no doubt, eat and drink in this world,he was unexistent as regards the inhabitants of it, and yet he knewperfectly well he was standing by the side of the road where themotor-car ought to be, and over there, a few hundred yards away, Nitiwould be sitting in her room or walking in the garden--and she wouldn'tbe born for nearly a thousand years yet.

  It was certainly somewhat disquieting, this power of living in twoexistences and different ages, but it was a matter that would take somelittle time to get accustomed to.

  The next instant the cavalcade and the forest had vanished, and therewas the motor-car, just spinning past him. He was on the WimbledonCommon of the twentieth century once more. He stroked his clean-shavenchin with his finger and thumb, and walked slowly along the path by theside of the road, and then across the grass towards the flagstaff.

  "I think I begin to see it now," he murmured. "Of course, life, that isto say real, intellectual, or, as some would say, spiritual life, is,after all, the coefficient of that totally unexplainable thing calledthought which enables us to explain most things except itself. Time andspace and location are only realities to us in so far that we can seethem. A human being born blind, dumb, deaf, and without feeling wouldstill, I suppose, be a human being, because it would be conscious ofexistence; it would breathe and know that its heart was beating, butwithout sight or sensation there could be no idea of space--time, to it,would be a meaningless series of breaths or heartbeats. Without touch orsi
ght it could have no idea of form or size, which are merely conditionsof space, and both the past and the future would be absolutelynon-existent for it."

  He paused, and walked on a little way in silence, arguing silently withhimself as to the correctness of these premises. Then he began aloudagain:

  "Yes, I think that's about right. And now, suppose that such a beingbecame endowed with the natural senses, one by one. It would go throughall the processes of the physical and mental evolution of humanity untilit reached the highest of human attributes--the ability to think, andtherefore to reason. In other words, from a merely living organism itwould, in the old Scriptural language, have become a living soul. Thatis, obviously, what the words in Genesis were really intended to mean.It would then become capable of development, of proceeding from thepartly-known to the more fully known, until, granted perfect physicaland mental health, it reached what are generally called the limits ofhuman knowledge."

  The Professor's thumb and finger went up to his chin again. He walkedanother two or three hundred yards in silence; then he recommenced hisspoken argument with himself:

  "Limits of human knowledge? Yes, that sounds all very well in ordinarylanguage, but are there any? Who was it said that a man trying to reachthose limits was like the child who saw a rainbow for the first time,and started out to find the place where it rested? The simile is notbad, not by any means. Just in the same way, we try to imagine thelimits of time and space, and we can't do it. Only infinity of space andduration are possible, and yet we can't grasp them; still, they are theonly possible states in which we can exist. And now, as I have had aglimpse of the past, I wonder what this place would be like in tenthousand years?

  "Good heavens, how cold it is!" He shivered, and buttoned up his coat,and continued, looking about him on the vast snow-field dotted withhummocks of ice which lay bleak and lifeless about him: "Ah, I supposeeither the Gulf Stream has got diverted, or the earth's axis has shiftedand we are in another glacial epoch.

  "WE!"

  Again the shock of utter isolation struck him, but it seemed to hit himharder this time. The world that he had been born in lay ten thousandyears behind him. For all he knew, he might be standing upon what wasnow the earth's North Pole. Civilisation, as he had known it, might havebeen wiped off the face of the earth, and the remnants of humanity flungback into savagery. He looked up at the sun, and saw that it was almostexactly where it had been, and that it had not perceptibly diminished inpower.

  The idea was not at all pleasant to him, and very naturally his thoughtsturned back once more to his cosy home that had been on the edge ofWimbledon Common ten thousand years ago. He remembered, with a curioussort of thrill, some notes which he had to complete that morning for hislecture--and in the same instant he was walking back across the turftowards his house through the warm May sunshine.

  "Yes," he said to himself, as he drew a deep breath of the sweet springair. "I was right; that's it. The fourth dimension is a form of durationin some way correlated with space. I shall have to work that out in thelight of the greater knowledge, which Her vanished Majesty has given me,and which I almost attained to in Egypt. Wherefore, existence in a stateof four dimensions, or the world of N4, as I have always called it, is,roughly speaking, one. Time and space are, as it were, two sides of thesame shield, and a person living in that world can see both of them atonce. Wherefore, past, present, future, length, breadth, thickness, hereand there are all the same thing to him. It's a great pity there isn't afourth dimensional language as well, so that one could state thesethings a little more precisely. But that, of course, is out of thequestion.

  "Really, I can hardly make myself understand it as far as words andphrases are concerned; still, there it is; and now the question arises:Having got this power, as I certainly have, of transferring myself fromone existence to another by a mere effort of thought, because it is veryevident that this power is really only an extension or anexaltation--confound the language of the third dimension--I can't sayit! Although I understand what it is, it won't go into words. What am Ito do with it? Its possibilities are, of course, a littleappalling--that is to say, from the point of view of N3. I have not theslightest desire to shake the fabric of Society to pieces, as I coulddo, and still less have I taste for spending the rest of my scientificcareer in what the world would very easily believe to be conjuringtricks. I hope I am not going to be another of the unnumbered proofs ofSolomon's wisdom when he said, 'Whoso getteth knowledge, gettethsorrow.' I wonder what sort of advice Her late Majesty of Egypt----

  "Dear me, what nonsense I am talking! Her late Majesty? That won't do atall--she has reached the Higher Plane too, so, of course, she can't bedead----"

  And then with the force of a powerful electric shock, the terrible factstruck him that, for those who had reached that plane, there was nodeath! Here was a new light on the weird problem which he had somehowbeen called upon to deal with.

  "I wonder what Her Majesty would really think of it?" he murmured, aftera few moments of mental bewilderment. "Dear me, who's that?"

  He looked up, and, to his utter amazement, he saw Queen Nitocris,arrayed exactly as she had been on that terrible night of her bridalwith Menkau-Ra, walking towards him; a perfect incarnation of beauty,but----

  "Oh dear me!" said the Professor, "this will never do. Good heavens!everybody in Wimbledon knows me, and--well, of course, Her Majesty isvery lovely and all that; but what on earth would people think if anyone saw me strolling across the Common in company with an EgyptianQueen--to say nothing of the costume--and the image of my own daughter,too!"

  The figure approached, and the Queen, dazzlingly and bewilderinglybeautiful, held out her hands to him, and their eyes met and they lookedat each other across the gulf of fifty centuries. Impelled by anirresistible impulse coming from whence he knew not, he clasped them inhis, and said, apparently by no volition of his own, in the AncientTongue:

  "Ma-Rim[=o]n greets Nitocris, the Queen! What hath he done that heshould be once more so highly honoured?"

  At that moment a carriage came by along the road quite close to them.Two of its occupants were looking straight towards them. They passedwithout taking the slightest notice, as they must have done had theyseen such a marvellous figure as that of the Queen. And then heremembered that, unless she willed it, no one in the world of N3 couldsee her, since it was for her, as it was for him now, to make herselfvisible or invisible as she chose to pass on to or beyond the lowerPlane of Existence. These things were quickly becoming more plain to hiscomprehension, although, as will be readily understood, it was not alesson to be learnt very easily.

  "Welcome, Ma-Rim[=o]n," replied the Queen, in a voice which filled himwith many distant and strange memories, "but let there be no talkbetween us of honour, for in this state there is neither honour nordishonour, neither ruler nor subject, neither good nor evil, since allthese are absorbed in the Perfect Knowledge. Yet it is the will of theHigh Gods that I should help thee and guide thee in that new world whosethreshold thou hast so lately crossed. It was my hand led thee from thepath of Light to the path of Darkness, and for that I have paid thepenalty as well as thou.

  "For many ages, as time is counted in that other world, we have toiled,sometimes together, sometimes apart, sometimes in honour, sometimes indishonour, yet ever struggling on to regain the heights which then wehad so nearly won. The High Gods permitted me to reach them first, andtherefore it was my hand which was stretched out to lead thee across theBorder.

  "Now, my message to thee is this: Thou hast powers which no other manliving in that lower state possesses; see to it that they be usedrightly. Forget not that in that other world sin and shame, oppressionand misery, are as rife as, within the limits of time, they have everbeen. Make it thy concern that the forces of evil shall be weaker andnot stronger for the use of these powers to which thou hast attained.

  "We shall meet often in that other world, and that living other-self ofmine, thy daughter in the flesh and bearer of my name, through ever
ymoment of her time-life, I shall watch and guard her, for she,too--although she knows it not--is approaching the light never seen bythe Eye of Flesh, and, though strange things should befall her, it willbe for thee in that other state, knowing what thou dost in the HigherLife, to help me in this task as in others. Now, farewell, Ma-Rim[=o]n,"she said, holding out her hands again.

  As he took them, they melted in his grasp, two lustrous eyes looked athim for a moment and grew dim, and he was once more alone on WimbledonCommon.

  "I think I'll be getting home," he said, looking at his watch, and heturned and walked slowly with bent head and hands clasped behind hisback to the house.