aking 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.

Nitocris was standing beside him with her hands clasped behind her and
her head slightly thrown back, and as she gazed out over the river the
moonlight fell full on the white loveliness of her face and into the
dark depths of her eyes, where it seemed to lose itself in the dusk that
lay deep down in them, a dusk like the shadow of a soul in sorrow.

He looked upon her face, and saw in it a beauty and a mystery deeper
even than the beauty and the mystery of the Egyptian night as it was in
those old days--the face of a fair woman, a riddle of the gods which men
might go mad in seeking to read aright, and yet never learn the true
meaning of it.

The silence between them had been long and yet so solemn in its wordless
meaning that he had not dared to break it. Then at length she spoke,
moving only her lips, her body still motionless and her eyes still
gazing at the stars, or into the depths beyond them.

"Can it be true, Ma-Rim[=o]n? Can the gods indeed have permitted such a
thing to be? Can the All-Father have given His Chief Minister to be the
instrument of such a foul crime and monstrous impiety as this?"

And he replied, slowly and sa