Anubis
she Pray
awake

"And this is what that letter, thousands of years old, means in this
language of ours, hundreds of years young: 'I, Meris the King, seized
little Samaris, a harpist and a dancing girl, eighteen years of age,
belonging to the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, and carried her away at
night on shipboard--a voyage of five days--to my house. I, Meris the
King, lest she lie awake watching cunningly for a chance to escape,
hypnotized her (or had her hypnotized) so that she lay like one dead or
asleep, but breathing, and I, King no longer of Upper and Lower Egypt,
took her and placed her in my house under the wall of the water garden.
Arise! therefore, O thou priest; (go) and awaken her to life. I am dying
(I go with Anubis!). Pray for me!'"

CHAPTER XX

For a full minute the two men sat there without moving or speaking. Then
the Tracer laid aside his pencil.

"To sum up," he said, opening the palm of his left hand and placing the
forefinger of his right across it, "the excavation made by the falling
pillar raised in triumph above the water garden of the deposed king,
Meris, by his rival, was the subterranean house of Meris. The prostrate
figure which crumbled to powder at your touch may have been the very
priest to whom this letter or papyrus was written. Perhaps the bearer of
the scroll was a traitor and stabbed the priest as he was reading the
missive. Who can tell how that priest died? He either died or betrayed
his trust, for he never aroused the little Samaris from her suspended
animation. And the water garden fell into ruins and she slept; and the
Ruler of Upper and Lower Egypt raised his columns, lotus crowned, above
the ruins; and she slept on. Then--_you_ came."

Burke stared like one stupefied.

"I do not know," said the Tracer gravely, "what balm there may be in a
suspension of sensation, perhaps of vitality, to protect the human body
from corruption after death. I do not know how soon suspended animation
or the state of hypnotic coma, undisturbed, changes into death--whether
it comes gradually, imperceptibly freeing the soul; whether the soul
hides there, asleep, until suddenly the flame of vitality is
extinguished. I do not know how long she lay there with life in her."

He leaned back and touched an electric bell, then, turning to Burke:

"Speaking of pistol range," he said, "unstrap those weapons and pass
them over, if you ple