The Mummy Smugglers of Crumblin Castle

by Pamela Rushby

  Something was moving in the moat around the base of the castle. Something large. More than large. It was huge and round, with a head that broke the surface of the water and yawned a great, gape-jawed, pink-lined, tooth-encircled yawn. Behind it, something long and sinuous slid along the surface and then sank beneath it, silently and without a bubble.

  “Oh look! Look! Is that –” Hattie began. “Is that really –”

  “What?” Great-aunt Iphigenia glanced over the battlements. “Oh, that’s just the hippopotami. And the crocodiles.” She smiled at Hattie. “For a moment there I thought you’d seen something unusual.”

  “Aren’t hippopotamuses – hippopotami – and crocodiles sort of, well, unusual in England?” Hattie asked. “I mean, how did they get here?”

  “Some Lambton or other brought them back from their travels, I expect, years and years ago. They’ve settled in rather well, don’t you think?”

  There certainly seemed to be plenty of them, Hattie thought. “Are they dangerous?” she asked.

  “Not at all. We do get a few complaints when they venture out and block the road, but they’ve never actually eaten anyone.” Great-aunt Iphigenia looked thoughtful. “Not that we’re aware of, at any rate.”

  “Oh,” said Hattie. She thought of the postmen, and the letters Great-uncle Sisyphus had mentioned that had failed to be delivered.

  “However,” Great-aunt Iphigenia went on, “I wouldn’t recommend going swimming in the moat. If you’d had any thoughts of doing so, of course.”

  Hattie hadn’t. Not at all. The dark water didn’t look at all inviting, even without considering what lurked in it.

  “There now, look at that.” Great-aunt Iphigenia sounded vexed. “The mist’s coming down again. Well, I’m pleased it cleared enough for you to see the view, Hattie. It clears so rarely. Shall we continue our tour?”

  The mist had crawled up the castle wall and was spilling over the ramparts. Sekhmet had shining drops on her whiskers, and the clammy fingers were sliding across Hattie’s face and hair. It was an excellent time to go in.

  “Can we see the mummy room, please?” Hattie suggested. She was especially eager to see it.

  “Of course. I’ll show you the way now.”

  Great-aunt Iphigenia led them back through the long gallery, then into another passage leading off it. Large cabinets made of dark wood stood against the walls, their glass doors offering fleeting, intriguing glimpses of the small objects displayed on the shelves inside. They were very like the ones Hattie had seen in the great hall. Hattie slowed down, trying to see what was in them. “Please, what is in these?” she asked.

  Great-aunt Iphigenia barely paused. She waved a hand dismissively. “Those? They’re just more Cabinets of Curiosities,” she said.

  “What sort of Curiosities?” said Hattie. She stopped in front of one, and tried to peer in.

  But Great-aunt Iphigenia had kept walking. Her voice floated back. “Small objects collected by Lambtons from foreign parts, over many, many years.” She turned a corner, the Ravens and Sekhmet close behind her.

  Hattie hurried to catch up. “It looked as if there were little statues in there,” she panted. “And rolls of paper.”

  “Yes, there would be,” said Great-aunt Iphigenia. “Small figurines, rolls of manuscripts, some bits of jewellery, pieces of pottery. We’re sure there is nothing of value, nothing at all. The Lambtons, I’m afraid, tended to be avid and not very discriminating collectors. We don’t even know what’s in all of the cabinets. Sisyphus made an attempt at cataloguing them, once, but it took so much time and there was nothing of great interest, and so many items, that he gave up eventually.”

  Nothing of value, perhaps, thought Hattie, but the Cabinets of Curiosities certainly appeared interesting. “May I look at them sometime?” she ventured. She would love to explore them.

  “Of course you may. Whenever you have some spare time.” Great-aunt Iphigenia turned another corner, strode halfway along a corridor and then stopped. “And here,” she said, “is the mummy room.”

  Hattie stopped in front of a solid, wooden door. She immediately noticed two things. The first was that, although all the long passages they had passed through had been immaculately swept, and all the Cabinets of Curiosities gleamed with polish, this door had cobwebs creeping around its hinges, and the brass doorhandle was tarnished.

  The kittens clearly don’t clean here, Hattie thought. Why not? Why was this room different?

  The second was that Sekhmet, who had accompanied them all the way, now stopped dead, hissed softly, then turned around and stalked off, her tail high in the air and vibrating with disapproval.

  Great-aunt Iphigenia watched her go. “Sekhmet never comes in here,” she observed. “Never. She doesn’t seem to like it.”

  She pushed at the door. It swung slowly open with a groan of unoiled hinges.

  Great-aunt Iphigenia and the Ravens stepped in, but Hattie hung back. The room must be cold, she thought, for chill air drifted out into the passage. And that air felt – what? Sad, Hattie decided. As if someone inside the room was unhappy. But there was no one inside it! she told herself. Except some ancient mummies. Hattie slowly followed Great-aunt Iphigenia and the Ravens through the door, then she stopped and stared in amazement.

  Three wooden caskets leaned against the walls. They were each taller than Hattie, shaped with a head on the top and wide shoulders, tapering to narrow feet. And they were wonderful. They were covered with pictures in bright colours, figures of men and women, gods and goddesses, flaming suns and blazing stars. Tiny writing, writing made up of more pictures, filled all the spaces between the figures. At the top, on the space meant for the head, paintings of faces looked down on Hattie.

  “Oh,” said Hattie. “Oh. They’re – beautiful!”

  “They are, aren’t they?” said Great-aunt Iphigenia softly.

  “But –” said Hattie.

  Great-aunt Iphigenia and the Ravens looked at her.

  “But?”

  “But, um, sad,” said Hattie. “Don’t you think they’re sort of sad?”

  “Sad?” said Edwina Raven.

  “Sad?” said Edgar Raven.

  Their dark eyes fixed on Hattie. Hattie suppressed a shiver.

  “Sad?” mused Great-aunt Iphigenia. She considered for a moment, gazing at the mummies. “Sad? No, they don’t appear so to me. They lived their lives, such a long time ago, and now –” her face lit up. “Well, now they’re going to contribute to science, to our understanding of the time they lived in. Don’t you think that’s rather splendid?”

  “Indeed it is!” said Edgar Raven fervently.

  “Indeed!” Edwina Raven agreed.

  “I – I suppose so,” said Hattie at last. “Yes, um, yes, I’m sure that’s right.”

  But she was pleased to leave the room, pleased to step out of its chill and dust and cobwebs, pleased to leave behind that strange feeling of – what was it? Sadness, yes, but more than sadness. A feeling of waiting. Of apprehension. Of – yes – fear.

  Hattie shivered as she walked out and the heavy door swung closed behind her.

  Hattie’s education began that very afternoon, after lunch. As soon as Great-uncle Sisyphus had spooned up the last of his treacle tart, he fixed Hattie with a firm eye.

  “No time like the present,” he said. “I shall expect you in my study in an hour, Hattie.”

  “In your study?” Hattie said.

  “To begin your education,” said Great-uncle Sisyphus.

  “Oh,” said Hattie, disappointed. She’d planned to spend the afternoon exploring the contents of some of those intriguing Cabinets of Curiosities. Still, she thought, she had an hour . . .

  After she’d carried the lunch dishes to the dumb waiter and sent it descending – to exactly where, she still had no idea – Hattie slipped out into the great hall. There was no sign of Great-aunt Iphigenia, or the Ravens. Presumably, they were in Great-aunt Iphigenia’s office, planning further mum
my unwrapping parties.

  The great hall itself seemed the most obvious place to begin. There were several Cabinets of Curiosities here. Hattie went to the nearest one and peered through the glass. The shelves were packed with rolls of manuscripts. Could she look more closely? Great-aunt Iphigenia had said she was welcome to look at any of the cabinets. But what if it was locked? Hattie tried the handle. The glass door swung open.

  Hattie touched one of the rolled-up manuscripts with the tip of a finger. She was rather nervous about handling them. What if they were fragile, what if they disappeared in a puff of dust when she touched them? But the rolls didn’t feel thin and papery. If anything, they seemed rather tough, as if they might be made of something much more durable than paper.

  Hattie gently lifted one and carefully unrolled a small section. What would she find? It could be anything, she thought – a pirate’s treasure map, a story written down long ago, a drawing of a fabulous beast or a mermaid. But it wasn’t any of these things. It was words. Words and words and words, all in a language Hattie didn’t understand and certainly couldn’t read. The second manuscript she unrolled was the same.

  Disappointed, Hattie put the rolls back and closed the cabinet. She looked around, and moved over to a second cabinet. This appeared more promising. It held rich, brick-red pottery, some pieces – small bowls and cups – intact, others partially reconstructed, and some piles of jagged sherds. Hattie tried matching up some of the pieces. She succeeded in finding three sherds that clearly belonged together. It was like a cabinet full of ancient jigsaw puzzles, she thought. It could be interesting, if you had a great deal of time and a great deal of patience. But not today.

  The third cabinet held small statues, figures of men and women and some animals. They appeared to have been made of something like baked clay, and some were almost identical to others. There were three women, for example, sitting on chairs like thrones. They were exactly alike, except that there were traces of blue paint on one of the women’s robes, green on the second, and white on the third. Then there were two little figures of pigs, or boars, also exactly alike. When Hattie picked them up they rattled, as if there might be a bead inside. What were they, she wondered? She found them fascinating.

  “They were children’s toys, presumably,” said Great-uncle Sisyphus from behind her.

  Hattie spun around. “I’m not hurting them! Great-aunt Iphigenia said I could look at them!” she said quickly.

  “Yes, of course, that is perfectly in order,” said Great-uncle Sisyphus. “What is not in order is the time. I expected you some ten minutes ago.”

  “Oh! I’m so sorry!” Hattie was mortified – and anxious. She’d vowed to take her new education very seriously, and here she was, late for her first lesson. Not the way she had hoped to impress her new relations. “I just started looking,” she tried to explain. “And –”

  “And you couldn’t stop.” Great-uncle Sisyphus was smiling now. “And what have you learned?”

  “Only that I couldn’t read the manuscripts in that cabinet,” said Hattie. “And I don’t know what they’re made of, but it’s not paper, is it?”

  “It’s vellum,” said Great-uncle Sisyphus. “It was used for writing on from Roman times to the mediaeval period. It’s made from animal skins. And the pottery?”

  “Someone’s tried to put it together,” said Hattie. “But it’s not finished.”

  “Ah, that would have been your great-great-uncle Leonidas,” said Great-uncle Sisyphus. “It was his life’s work. It’s Samian ware, glossy, brick-red pottery from the Roman era. Very common. Most of it imported from Gaul. Unfortunately, Leonidas never came back from his last expedition.”

  “You mean he, um, disappeared?” asked Hattie. “Or he died?”

  “We never did find out,” said Great-uncle Sisyphus. “It was rather a mystery.”

  Hattie thought that the Lambtons were remarkably careless in the way that they kept disappearing, but she kept the observation to herself.

  “And the little statues?” she asked, holding up a small rattling pig. “Why are some of them exactly alike?”

  “They’re ancient Greek,” said Great-uncle Sisyphus. “Tanagra statuettes, from the late fourth century BC. They were made in moulds – mass produced, you might say – and quite cheap to buy, so many Greek homes would have had one, or more. They were painted after firing, that’s why they look alike but have different colours. The little pig –” He took it from Hattie’s hand and gave it a gentle shake. “It was possibly a rattle, to amuse a baby, you know.”

  “How lovely! Did children have lots of toys then?”

  “Not lots, probably. But there were certainly toys. Little animals on wheels. Balls. Dolls. You may find more in other cabinets.”

  Hattie immediately resolved to do just that. Ancient toys! How wonderful!

  “Though whether any Lambton had a particular interest in ancient toys, I really have no idea,” Great-uncle Sisyphus went on. He paused. “But –” He took a watch out of his waistcoat pocket and examined it. “Fascinating as all this is, time is getting on.”

  Great-uncle Sisyphus set off across the great hall and Hattie followed, up the spiral staircase of another tower. The room at the top was, like her own room, circular. But unlike her bedroom, there was not an inch of spare space. Shelves covered the walls from floor to ceiling and they were packed with books, more rolls of manuscripts, and slabs of stone with letters carved into them. A desk was squeezed into the middle of the room, along with several chairs, which were also piled with books. Tottering towers of books and inscribed stones covered most of the remaining floor space.

  “You must do an enormous amount of work.” Hattie’s eyes opened wide in wonder.

  “Translation is a slow process,” said Great-uncle Sisyphus. He looked around uncertainly. “Now, where to start, I wonder? Where to start?”

  Not with arithmetic, I hope, thought Hattie. She considered quickly. Where would she like to start her education? Inspiration struck.

  “The mummy room,” she said. “The three mummy cases in there. They were covered with pictures. There were people, and what looked like people with the heads of animals, and I saw a monster, and suns and stars. What were they all? What do they mean?”

  Great-uncle Sisyphus’ eyes lit up. “Ah. A splendid place to begin, indeed. Very well. Our first lesson will be about the gods and goddesses of ancient Egypt.”

  He turned around and searched along the shelves, running his fingers over the books gently, affectionately. He reached up and extracted a large, leather-bound book.

  “What animal-headed people did you see?” he asked.

  Hattie thought hard. “There was one with the head of a bird, with a long beak,” she recalled. “And a hawk. One that looked like a dog, or a wolf. And one like a mummy itself. And underneath them there was a monster, a terrible monster. It looked as if it might be made up of parts of different animals. A crocodile, perhaps, and a hippopotamus. Maybe even a lion. It was very – threatening.”

  “Ah. Then I imagine you were looking at a scene from the Book of the Dead,” said Great-uncle Sisyphus. He flipped through the pages of the book and beckoned to Hattie. “Something like this?”

  Hattie leaned over to look. “Yes, like that,” she agreed. “What are the creatures? What are they doing?”

  “And was the scene you saw these creatures in perhaps on the chest of the mummy?”

  Hattie thought again. “Yes, it was,” she said. “I think the mummy was a woman. At least, the face painted at the top, that looked like a woman. And there were lots of pictures, all over the mummy case, but this one was on the chest.”

  “Well, what is happening in that picture is that the soul of the dead woman is being judged, to see whether she’s worthy of qualifying for everlasting life. And that would have been a very nice life indeed. It took place in a kind of heaven, called the Fields of Yaru. A beautiful place – much like ancient Egypt itself, with a large river. In the Fields
of Yaru, she’d be able to eat, drink, move around, do all the pleasant things she used to do like go hunting, go to parties, sail on the river, own nice things, wear pretty clothes and perfumes and so on.”

  Hattie was wide-eyed. “Would all ancient Egyptians go to the Fields of Yaru when they died?”

  “Not necessarily. First, after this woman died, her soul had to travel by boat to the west, where the sun sets. There she had to pass through gateways guarded by animal-headed gods, and she had to know the right words to say to them so they’d let her pass.”

  “How would she know the words?” asked Hattie.

  “They were written down, in the Book of the Dead. And they were painted onto her mummy case, too.”

  “So she’d have been all right?”

  “As long as she recited the right words,” said Great-uncle Sisyphus. “But she hadn’t come to the end yet. After passing through the gateways, she came to the Hall of the Two Truths, where Osiris, the lord of the underworld, sat in judgement. He’s the one in the picture who looks like a mummy himself.”

  “And what happens next?” Hattie was almost breathless. Lessons had never been so exciting!

  “Now the dead woman has to declare that she has not committed any wrongs in her life.”

  “What sort of wrongs?”

  “There were many. Most of them were concerned with not having done ill to the gods, or to other humans. Some were: I have not defiled a god; I have not worsened the lot of an orphan; I have not killed; I have not caused anyone sorrow; I have not stolen; I have not made anyone weep.”

  “That must have been hard.” Hattie hastily examined her own conscience. She was pretty sure she hadn’t defiled any gods, or worsened the lot of an orphan. But not caused anyone sorrow, or made anyone weep? How could you be sure?