ave had the museum lit up for you, Mr. Quatermain. You may find some
Egyptian things there that will interest you."

"Oh, with pleasure!" I murmured, and fled away.

I spent a very instructive two hours in the museum, studying various
Egyptian antiquities including a couple of mummies which rather
terrified me. They looked so very corpse-like standing there in
their wrappings. One was that of a lady who was a "Singer of Amen," I
remember. I wondered where she was singing now and what song. Presently
I came to a glass case which riveted my attention, for above it was a
label bearing the following words: "Two Papyri given to Lady Ragnall
by the priests of the Kendah Tribe in Africa." Within were the papyri
unrolled and beneath each of the documents, its translation, so far as
they could be translated for they were somewhat broken. No. 1, which
was dated, "In the first year of Peroa," appeared to be the official
appointment of the Royal Lady Amada, to be the prophetess to the temple
of Isis and Horus the Child, which was also called Amada, and situated
on the east bank of the Nile above Thebes. Evidently this was the same
temple of which Lady Ragnall had written to me in her letter, where her
husband had met his death by accident, a coincidence which made me start
when I remembered how and where the document had come into her hands and
what kind of office she filled at the time.

The second papyrus, or rather its translation, contained a most
comprehensive curse upon any man who ventured to interfere with the
personal sanctity of this same Royal Lady of Amada, who, apparently in
virtue of her office, was doomed to perpetual celibacy like the vestal
virgins. I do not remember all the terms of the curse, but I know that
it invoked the vengeance of Isis the Mother, Lady of the Moon, and Horus
the Child upon anyone who should dare such a desecration, and in so many
words doomed him to death by violence "far from his own country where
first he had looked on Ra," (i.e. the sun) and also to certain spiritual
sufferings afterwards.

The document gave me the idea that it was composed in troubled days to
protect that particularly sacred person, the Prophetess of Isis whose
cult, as I have since learned, was rising in Egypt at the time, from
threatened danger, perhaps at the hands of some foreign man. It occurred
to me even that this Princess, for evidently she was a descendant of
kings, had been appointed to a most sacred office