just skipped to that point in
pursuit of a ghostly fly and was pausing to meditate a farther spring.
But the eye did not discover these things at the first glance. Solemn,
silent, strangely expressive, lay three slim Egyptians, raised at an
angle as though to give them a chance of surveying their fellow-dead,
the linen bandages unwrapped from their heads and arms and shoulders,
their jet-black hair combed and arranged and dressed by Keyork's hand,
their faces softened almost to the expression of life by one of his
secret processes, their stiffened joints so limbered by his art that
their arms had taken natural positions again, lying over the edges of
the sarcophagi in which they had rested motionless and immovable through
thirty centuries. For the man had pursued his idea in every shape
and with every experiment, testing, as it were, the potential
imperishability of the animal frame by the degree of life-like plumpness
and softness and flexibility which it could be made to take after a
mummification of three thousand years. And he had reached the conclusion
that, in the nature of things, the human body might vie, in resisting
the mere action of time, with the granite of the pyramids. Those had
been his earliest trials. The results of many others filled the room.
Here a group of South Americans, found dried in the hollow of an
ancient tree, had been restored almost to the likeness of life, and were
apparently engaged in a lively dispute over the remains of a meal--as
cold as themselves and as human. There, towered the standing body of
an African, leaning upon a knotted club, fierce, grinning, lacking only
sight in the sunken eyes to be terrible. There again, surmounting a
lay figure wrapped in rich stuffs, smiled the calm and gentle face of a
Malayan lady--decapitated for her sins, so marvellously preserved
that the soft dark eyes still looked out from beneath the heavy,
half-drooping lids, and the full lips, still richly coloured, parted a
little to show the ivory teeth. Other sights there were, more ghastly
still, triumphs of preservation, if not of semi-resuscitation, over
decay, won on its own most special ground. Triumphs all, yet almost
failures in the eyes of the old student, they represented the mad
efforts of an almost supernatural skill and superhuman science to
revive, if but for one second, the very smallest function of the living
body. Strange and wild were the trials he had made; many and great
the sacrific