The Mammoth Book of the Mummy

by Paula Guran

  The entrance of Wordsley and his party into the wadi did not go unnoticed. Wordsley had scarcely time to take in the scene before six men posted as guards descended upon them. Only the realization that among the newcomers were their younger brothers stopped the men from delivering blows then and there. One of the guardsmen ran for a foreman, who, as Wordsley watched, ran to another foreman (who likely spoke better English), who at last ran to Bigham. Bigham stared dumbly at him, perhaps not realizing what this Egyptian was trying to say to him. He turned and walked straight for Wordsley. His hearty approach reminded Wordsley of a new-made man who has just caught sight of his country neighbor at a London dinner party.

  “Say, now! Professor! Wordsley, isn’t it? Aren’t I just glad to meet a man of the Queen’s tongue in these desert parts!” The guards scattered at Bigham’s approach, and Wordsley’s own hired party melded into Bigham’s, leaving him quite alone except for his donkeys and, anonymous among the parcels, the mummy.

  The American’s good humor was not reciprocated. “See here, now, Bigham,” Wordsley said sharply, “what is all this?”

  “Only the find of the century, that’s all! The tombs of kings!”

  Wordsley looked around him at the desolation. “All I see here is rock and sand.”

  Bigham’s laugh came from his belly. “All you see, yes! But they see more than we do!” He aimed with his parasol at the fellahin. “These rascals have been living out here robbing graves for generations. For centuries. They know where to find gold where all a white man can see is sand. Ivory, like pebbles to them.” He beckoned Wordsley closer and pulled something strung on a thong out from under his shirt. “Look here! Solid gold, this is! That’s lapis from Afghanistan, mark me. And have you ever seen such a big and brilliant carnelian? And here—that sign means a king, doesn’t it?”

  With ill grace, Wordsley bent to examine the artifact, a small gold pectoral in the graceful form of the solar barque, with a carnelian cabochon as the disk of the sun sitting amidships. Unwillingly, he made out the royal cartouche—Ramesses! Ozymandias!—leave it to Bigham, an ignorant mountebank, but he knew enough at least to recognize that aspect of the hieroglyphic script, if it meant profit.

  “That fellow brought it to me,” he told Wordsley, expansively pointing out the Arab with the most thievish grin of the lot. “Solid gold. Buried right out here in these rocks. And where there’s one king, you know, there’s a whole raft of them!” He patted his chest, secreting his treasure back beneath his vest.

  Unhappily, Wordsley found himself confirming all of Bigham’s fond assumptions. The hieroglyphic inscription on the pectoral proved it had belonged to a royal personage of ancient Egypt. It was all too likely that Bigham had indeed discovered another valley of buried kings, hidden up to now from tomb-robbers and other looters over the millennia.

  “Now look here, Bigham,” he began firmly, “if this find is genuine—if, I say—then this is a matter for scholars to investigate. Properly. Carefully. Artifacts should be handled scrupulously. Inscriptions copied. Not—” He waved his arm to indicate Bigham’s army of workers. “Not this.”

  “Pshaw,” scoffed Bigham. “Don’t tell me you’re worried about a few mummies! Why, it’s not as if they were Christians!”

  “You don’t understand, I’m talking about knowledge here, precious knowledge lost forever in the hunt for treasure! There is none of this in the Description de l’Égypte. You won’t find it in Lepsius’s Denkmaeler. Unpublished, utterly unknown, unseen by European—American—eyes. What you propose—what you’re doing—is vandalism!”

  Bigham frowned. “And were it not for me it would remain utterly unknown, unseen by white eyes. People come from everywhere on earth to see the treasures in my museum—they call it one of the Wonders of the World. Why, before I dug it up, the Sphinx was buried up to its neck in sand! I saved it, that’s what I did, saved it for the ages!”

  And now it sits decapitated, Wordsley forbore to reply. Instead, he adopted a conciliatory tone. “But you know what can happen when diggers are careless, what they can destroy or overlook by mistake. Who among your men will recognize if one of those potsherds you order him to throw away might be another Rosetta Stone?”

  “Well, yes, you’re right, it pays to be careful. That block, plain that it is, makes a fine display,” Bigham agreed. “And as I was saying, I can use a fellow like you, who can speak to these natives, who can read those picture-scribbles. I’m sure I can make it worth your while.”

  Retro me Sathanas! Wordsley thought, with his first impulse to turn his back on the tempter. And yet . . . the pectoral was undeniably authentic. What other wonders lay buried here beneath these sands? What discoveries might he not make, if only Bigham allowed him access to them?

  Which reminded him . . .

  “I stumbled on something you might find interesting,” he said, turning to beckon to his servants. “It’s a mummy, actually, but the condition is extraordinary! You might think it had been buried only yesterday.” He finally picked a face out of the throng surrounding them. “Ahmed! Bring me that bundle from the donkey.”

  Ahmed carefully untied the bundle, laid it on the ground. Wordsley impatiently bent to unroll it. The desiccated body was quite light, yet every detail was so perfectly preserved, down to the circumcised tip of the man’s most private part. “You see what I mean,” he began to tell Bigham. “I suppose grave-robbers must have found this fellow, smashed in his coffin, stripped the body of anything valuable, then left him like this for the sand to bury over again. It was only a matter of chance that I found him—”

  But at that moment a terrible cry broke out from among the bystanders who had gathered. “El-Rasul!”

  “What?” Bigham expostulated, “What are they caterwauling about now? I can’t figure out two words of that damned gibberish.”

  With some difficulty, Wordsley managed to make out the wails of the natives, who were all backing fearfully away from the mummy, making signs against evil. “They say . . . they know this man! He was a colleague of theirs, another tomb-robber. And—they say he was taken one night by some sort of demon.”

  A time later, Wordsley reclined, ill at ease, on the cushions in Bigham’s sumptuous tent, sipped the thick, strong coffee brought by Bigham’s servant, and cursed himself for accepting the American’s hospitality. Among the Arabs, hospitality made a sacred bond. Wordsley felt himself a traitor of sorts, as if he had betrayed his principles, allying himself with the enemy for a simple cup of coffee.

  Yet Bigham’s pavilion was most decidedly more opulent than the potter’s storeroom, and, as the American said, they were two white men and Christians here, alone in a throng of superstitious savages. The servant in his slippers crouched miserably outside the entrance, crooning some spell to himself, invoking protection against the evils of the night.

  With some difficulty, Wordsley had elicited the tale: According to the nearby villagers—grave-robbers by hereditary occupation—this region was said to be haunted. A sheytana lurked among the rocks, a she-demon or ghûl who walked at night and could suck a man’s life and soul from his body, leaving him nothing but a husk.

  Since Bigham had begun operations here, one or two men each night had been reported missing by the Arab foremen. He hadn’t given it much thought, native workers sneaking off. But now, with the discovery of the thief’s body . . .

  “Demons?” Wordsley wondered.

  “Humbug!” Bigham expostulated. “In the morning, they’ll come here wanting their wages raised, that’s what this is all about! Why, you leave a man’s corpus out in the desert that way, under the sun, it’ll shrivel right up like any mummy! Isn’t that so, Professor?” he demanded.

  Wordsley frowned silently into the sludge at the bottom of his cup. He hated being made to look a fool. What kind of learned man could not tell the difference between a week-old corpse and a three-thousand-year-old mummy? Yet up until an hour ago he would have insisted, would have sworn that no amount of sunlight and d
esiccation could have produced a corpse in the condition of the grave-robber. Impossible, he would have said. And there was the amulet found on the body—the scarab. But of course the man had stolen it from some tomb. Any other explanation was flatly impossible. “Superstition,” he said shortly.

  “That’s all it is,” Bigham agreed, “just superstition and humbuggery. Why, when I lay that fellow out in a gold box, put a crown and a fake beard on him, he’ll be as good as any pharaoh ever born.”

  “What?” Wordsley exclaimed. “You don’t mean to exhibit the wretched thing?”

  “And why not? You said it yourself, that fellow is the best-preserved mummy I’ve come across in a long time. He’ll be a capital exhibit. It’s not likely any of his relatives is going to recognize him in a museum case in Philadelphia, now, is it?”

  “But—that’s—” Wordsley sputtered. He hated sputtering. “That would be fraudulent!”

  “Pshaw, as if anyone would care about that! Look here, Professor, I know what the public wants to see! They want to see mummies, sure they do. But you know what kind of condition most of these old kings are in when we find them—gone half to dust, chests caved in, ribs and bones showing through everywhere. You should see what we’ve dug up so far—not a one of them worth a plugged cent! That’s not the thing to bring in the big crowds. Not like your fellow outside, there. No, he has a fine career ahead of him in my exhibition hall.” Then he scowled.

  “Unless those relatives of his get too greedy and queer the deal. I’ll not pay a cent more than five dollars for him, mark my word.”

  “But were there artifacts buried with the mummies you’ve found? Were there papyri?”

  “Nothing worth bothering with. A few cheap scarabs, that’s all. Some scraps. You know, the sort of thing these thieves have been bringing to you in Tukh. Yes, I know, I know what they’ve been up to. There may be some better things to your eyes. You can go through it all in the morning, if you’d like, but I can tell you right now, there’s nothing worth a plugged cent.”

  Wordsley could only shake his head. How could he reason with such a man as this? How could he price knowledge in terms of pounds and pence, dollars and cents?

  For several nights now, she had sown fear in the camp, in these peasants, these fellahin. She could taste it in their dreams, in their minds. Yet they remained here, swarming over the sands with their tools and their baskets, probing deeper and further into secrets they must not be allowed to uncover. Greed, as so often, had proved greater than fear. Once this had been in her favor: did they not always return eventually to the salted hills, no matter how many of their kinsmen she took? They were like cattle who did not know pasture from slaughterhouse. But now that she wanted them to fly off, they would not. She had bound them too well with gold chains about their hearts.

  Tonight, then: their king.

  Unseen by beguiled mortal eyes she passed through the camp, through the hundreds of men who slept rolled in their ragged garments by the sides of campfires to the great pavilion of the king. There was a much smaller tent pitched beside it, and within glowed a faint light, illuminating the figure of a man bent over some work. She briefly paused, touched his mind. A scribe, a servant of the king. He was poring over some odd scraps and fragments of funerary texts, searching. She was briefly curious to have met one who knew the old script, but this was not the one who commanded the army, not the one she must find.

  She moved on to the greater tent of the king. Here the dreams were all of greed and grandeur, palaces, and wealth. But in a moment she would reduce it all to a shriveled husk, and the rest, who fed from the grain he scattered from his hand, would then disperse.

  She beckoned, she summoned him to her.

  He sat erect. The blanket fell from his chest.

  The sudden searing light made her fling up her cloak to protect herself. An afterimage of the solar barque was branded across her vision. This one was under the Oppressor’s protection! He wore his sign, the image of the sun!

  Half blind, she stumbled from the tent, tripped over a bundle of rags, one of the king’s slaves, wrapped in fitful, demon-haunted dreams. She left him drained and empty, she passed through the camp like an angel of death—those words from one of their minds: angel of death, and she understood that an angel was a messenger of god.

  But it was not a messenger who walked among them tonight. It was the goddess herself. It was death.

  Wordsley awoke from a dream in which untold riches had beckoned to him like the harlot of Babylon. He had only to give up his quest and it would all be his, gold from the tombs of oriental kings. His own will had won out in the end, but he was sweat-matted and shaking, as if in one of those Nile fevers. He inspected himself for stings or bites, but found none as he washed himself from a half-empty basin of tepid water. “Ahmed!” he called, but the servant did not appear. He cursed the fellow, and his poor night’s sleep, that had put him in such a state. Poor sleep and the wicked temptations of Bigham. Curse him, as well!

  Wordsley examined his work of the night before. He had sketched a dozen scarabs, several pieces of funerary jewelry, knowing that they would soon be packed up in crates and shipped across the Atlantic. Although he valued them equally, none of the objects had been very interesting to him, none of them anything new. Yet he dutifully noted names, variants in spelling, and in hieroglyphs, in his epigraphic catalogue.

  One object alone had held some promise. It was a square wooden tile, rather the broken half of one, caught up in with the scarabs as dunnage. If he could find the rest of it, that would be worth pursuing, for it was nothing less than a bookplate, a tag once tied to a papyrus scroll, and the title, so much of it as he could make out, was The Chapter of Lying Bound. An unknown text!

  The camp was quiet, preternaturally so. Already the morning sun was fierce, even through the open flap of the tent. Aware of his thirst, Wordsley looked around for his servant with his morning coffee. “Ahmed!” he called out. “Ahmed! Damn his heathen soul, where is that beggar?”

  But it wasn’t the faithless Ahmed who burst into his tent, it was a red-faced Bigham, shouting, “Damn you, Wordsley!”

  “What?” Too astonished to protest the man’s rudeness. “What do you mean?”

  “The bastards! The bastards up and left me, almost to a man! When the pasha hears about this—oh!” He raged in the most vile obscenities, which seemed to serve the purpose of restraining his fist from Wordsley’s face. “It was that mummy of yours, that you brought into my camp! My camp, Wordsley!”

  Wordsley was dumbfounded. True, the Arabs were a superstitious race, but hitherto all could be overcome by the appropriate application of bakshish. Still why should they be upset by one mummy? He suspected other reasons at work. “Did you cut their wages? Did you threaten to?”

  “No! No, no! I’ll show you! Come see for yourself!”

  Bigham flung open the tent, slashing at the air with his parasol. “Look! Look, you!

  “One mummy, you brought me—just one—and the beggars saw how I paid you for it. Oh, it’s the bazaar! They live to bargain! You can’t show the first bit of enthusiasm, or they’ll skin you, Wordsley, they’ll dicker you down to your combinations! Mummies—that’s what they think I want, and so they tell themselves, ‘Oh, here is the American’s price. That is what he wants. Oh, them we have aplenty, and aplenty we’ll give him.’ Dozens of them, Wordsley! They left me dozens of them, and I don’t want them all. Mummies! I want the gold, dammit, the jewels, oh, to hell, I want—”

  Up until this point it was not clear to Wordsley what it was that the fellahin had given to Bigham. But Bigham stopped at the inert figure dozing in the shade of Wordsley’s tent. With his folded parasol, he prodded it, just a short stab, and it fell over with a dry thud.

  “See! They’re all over camp. Dozens of them! Dozens of damned, worthless mummies! Not a workman in sight!”

  “But . . . Ahmed! This is—”

  “What?” Bigham demanded impatiently. “Your servant’s
in on this scheme, too?”

  “No, no. I think I know that man. That corpse. My servant, Ahmed.”

  “Now, you’re not putting stock in that Arab hoodoo? You’ve been too long in Egypt, Professor. You’ve absorbed their superstitions.”

  “Yes, but—”

  Bigham moved forward for a closer look at the mummy. “Come on, now! You may see a resemblance to your man, but then I see a resemblance of that face of yours to that of Judas in The Last Supper, and I don’t go about accusing you of the crime now, do I? If I knew that beggar, I’d whip his hide and have him digging in these hills as he ought to. I’ll tan their hides yet. Dig, you desiccated monsters!”

  “No, really, Bigham! I insist!” Wordsley followed the American to a heap of rags in the sand that proved on closer examination to be another desiccated corpse. “Look here! Look how they are dressed! These are modern robes! Just what the fellahin wear. They can’t be old mummies! It’s quite impossible!”

  “No, you look at it, man!” They wandered among the mummies, not daring to venture too near any one. “Dry as old bone and leather! All of them! All the juice sucked out. Mummies aren’t made overnight.

  And even if they have made some improvements since Ozymandias’s day, Musselmen or even the poor Copts aren’t going to submit their brethren to that heathen practice! Why, it’s likely the one thing Musselman and Copt will agree upon. Which leaves us with the question of how they got into the robes. Either the villagers put the robes on these dead creatures—for whatever reason we can guess until the sacred cows come home—or these are old clothes, old as the mummies.”

  But that was simply absurd, so much that Wordsley knelt down to examine more closely the disputed remains of the mummy at his own tent. The features, reduced to leather as they were, with the lips pulled back from the teeth, were nonetheless very much like those of Ahmed. And in the purse beneath his robes