lagon in his
grasp.

"Well, well," he said, looking at it half-angrily, "if it is to be, it
must be."

He put out his left hand and took hold of the goblet, tilted the flagon,
and out of the curved lip there fell a thin stream of wine, which
glittered with a pale ruby radiance in the light of the electric cluster
that hung above his writing-desk. He set the flagon down, and as he
raised the goblet to his lips, he heard his own voice saying in the
ancient language of Khem:

"As was, and is, and ever shall be; ever, yet never--never, yet ever.
Nitocris the Queen, in the name of Nebzec I greet thee! From thy hands I
take the gift of the Perfect Knowledge!"

As he drained the goblet he turned towards the mummy-case. It might have
been fancy, it might have been the effect of that miraculous old wine of
Cos which, if he had really drunk it, must now be more than thirty
centuries old: it might have been the result of the hard thinking that
he had been doing now for several days and half-nights; but he certainly
thought that the Queen's head suddenly became endowed with life, that
the eyes opened, and the grey of the parchment skin softened into a
delicate olive tinge with a faint rosy blush showing through it. The
brown, shrivelled lips seemed to fill out, grow red, and smile. The
eyelids lifted, and the eyes of the Nitocris of old looked down on him
for a moment. He shook his head and looked, and there was the Mummy just
as it had been when he opened the case.

"Really, this is strange, almost to the point of bewilderment," he went
on. "I wonder if there is any more of that wine left?"

He took up the flagon and poured out another goblet, filled and drank
it.

"Yes," he continued, speaking as though under some strange exultation of
the mind rather than of the senses, "yes, that is the wine of Cos. I
drank it. I, Ma-Rim[=o]n, the priest-student of the Higher Mysteries; I,
whose feet faltered on the threshold of the Place of the Elect, and
whose heart failed him at the portal of the Sanctuary, even though
Amen-Ra was beckoning me to cross it."

"Good heavens, what nonsense I am talking! Whatever there was in that
wine or wherever it came from, I think it is quite time I was off, not
to old Egypt, but the Land of Nod. It seems to--no, it has not got into
my head; in fact I am beginning to see that, after all, Hartley might
very possibly be right about that forty-seventh proposition. Well, I
will do as the Russians say