During the Exhibition of 1857, I was invited to be present at the
opening of one of the mummy cases in the collection of Egyptian
antiquities, and at the unwrapping of the mummy it contained. My
curiosity was indeed lively. My readers will easily understand the
reason: the scene at which I was to be present I had imagined and
described beforehand in the "Romance of a Mummy." I do not say this to
draw attention to my book, but to explain the peculiar interest I took
in this archaeological and funereal meeting.
When I entered the room, the mummy, already taken from the case, was
laid on a table, its human shape showing indistinctly through the
thickness of the wrappings. On the faces of the coffin was painted the
Judgment of the Soul, the scene which is usually represented in such
cases. The soul of the dead woman, led by two funeral genii, the one
hostile, the other favourable, was bowing before Osiris, the great
judge of the dead, seated on his throne, wearing the pschent, the
conventional beard on the chin, and a whip in his hand. Farther on, the
dead woman's actions, good or bad, represented by a pot of flowers and a
rough piece of stone, were being weighed in scales. A long line of
judges, with heads of lions, hawks, or jackals, were awaiting in
hieratic attitudes the result of the weighing before delivering
judgment. Below this painting were inscribed the prayers of the funeral
ritual and the confession of the dead, who did not own to her faults,
but stated, on the contrary, those she had not committed,--"I have not
been guilty of murder, or of theft, or of adultery," etc. Another
inscription contained the genealogy of the woman, both on the father's
and on the mother's side. I do not transcribe here the series of strange
names, the last of which is that of Nes Khons, the lady enclosed in the
case, where she believed herself sure of rest while awaiting the day on
which her soul would, after many trials, be reunited to its
well-preserved body, and enjoy supreme felicity with its own flesh and
blood; a broken hope, for death is as disappointing as life.
The work of unrolling the bandages began; the outer envelope, of stout
linen, was ripped open with scissors. A faint, delicate odour of
balsam, incense, and other aromatic drugs spread through the room like
the odour of an apothecary's shop. The end of the bandage was then
sought for, and when found, the mummy was placed upright to allow the
operator to move freely around her and to roll up the endless band,
turned to the yellow colour of ecru linen by the palm wine and other
preserving liquids.
Strange indeed was the appearance of the tall rag-doll, the armature of
which was a dead body, moving so stiffly and awkwardly with a sort of
horrible parody of life, under the hands that were stripping it, while
the bandages rose in heaps around it. Sometimes the bandages held in
place pieces of stuff like fringed serviettes intended to fill hollows
or to support the shape.
Pieces of linen, cut open in the middle, had been passed over the head
and, fitted to the shoulders, fell down over the chest. All these
obstacles having been removed, there appeared a sort of veil like coarse
India muslin, of a pinkish colour, the soft tone of which would have
delighted a painter. It appears to me that the dye must have been
anatto, unless the muslin, originally red, turned rose-colour through
the action of the balsam and of time. Under the veil there was another
series of bandages, of finer linen, which bound the body more closely
with their innumerable folds. Our curiosity was becoming feverish, and
the mummy was being turned somewhat quickly. A Hoffmann or an Edgar Poe
could have found here a subject for one of his weird tales. It so
happened that a sudden storm was lashing the windows with heavy drops of
rain that rattled like hail; pale lightnings illumined on the shelves of
the cupboards the old yellowed skulls and the grimacing death's-heads of
the Anthropological Museum; while the low rolling of the thunder formed
an accompaniment to the waltz of Nes Khons, the daughter of Horus and
Rouaa, as she pirouetted in the impatient hands of those who were
unwrapping her.
The mummy was visibly growing smaller in size, and its slender form
showed more and more plainly under its diminishing wrappings. A vast
quantity of linen filled the room, and we could not help wondering how a
box which was scarcely larger than an ordinary coffin had managed to
hold it all. The neck was the first portion of the body to issue from
the bandages; it was covered with a fairly thick layer of naphtha which
had to be chiselled away. Suddenly, through the black remains of the
natron, there flashed on the upper part of the breast a bright gleam of
gold, and soon there was laid bare a thin sheet of metal, cut out into
the shape of the sacred hawk, its wings outspread, its tail fanlike like
that of eagles in heraldry. Upon this bit of gold--a funeral jewel not
rich enough to tempt body-snatchers--had been written with a reed and
ink a prayer to the gods, protectors of the tombs, asking that the heart
and the viscerae of the dead should not be removed far from her body. A
beautiful microscopic hawk, which would have made a lovely watch-charm,
was attached by a thread to a necklace of small plates of blue glass, to
which was hung also a sort of amulet in the shape of a flail, made of
turquoise-blue enamel. Some of the plates had become semi-opaque, no
doubt owing to the heat of the boiling bitumen which had been poured
over them, and then had slowly cooled.
So far, of course, nothing unusual had been found; in mummy cases there
are often discovered numbers of these small trifles, and every curiosity
shop is full of similar blue enamelled-ware figures; but we now came
upon an unexpected and touchingly graceful detail. Under each armpit of
the dead woman had been placed a flower, absolutely colourless, like
plants which have been long pressed between the leaves of a herbarium,
but perfectly preserved, and to which a botanist could readily have
assigned a name. Were they blooms of the lotus or the persea? No one of
us could say. This find made me thoughtful. Who was it that had put
these poor flowers there, like a supreme farewell, at the moment when
the beloved body was about to disappear under the first rolls of
bandages? Flowers that are three thousand years old, so frail and yet so
eternal, make a strange impression upon one.
There was also found amid the bandages a small fruit-berry, the species
of which it is difficult to determine. Perhaps it was a berry of the
nepenthe, which brought oblivion. On a bit of stuff, carefully detached,
was written within a cartouche the name of an unknown king belonging to
a dynasty no less forgotten. This mummy fills up a vacant place in
history and tells of a new Pharaoh.
The face was still hidden under its mask of linen and bitumen, which
could not be easily detached, for it had been firmly fixed by an
indefinite number of centuries. Under the pressure of the chisel a
portion gave way, and two white eyes with great black pupils shone with
fictitious life between brown eyelids. They were enamelled eyes, such as
it was customary to insert in carefully prepared mummies. The clear,
fixed glance, gazing out of the dead face, produced a terrifying effect;
the body seemed to behold with disdainful surprise the living beings
that moved around it. The eyebrows showed quite plainly upon the orbit,
hollowed by the sinking of the flesh. The nose, I must confess,--and in
this respect Nes Khons was less pretty than Tahoser,--had been turned
down to conceal the incision through which the brain had been drawn from
the skull, and a leaf of gold had been placed on the mouth as the seal
of eternal silence. The hair, exceedingly fine, silky, and soft, dressed
in light curls, did not fall below the tops of the ears, and was of that
auburn tint so much prized by Venetian women. It looked like a child's
hair dyed with henna, as one sees it in Algeria. I do not think that
this colour was the natural one; Nes Khons must have been dark like
other Egyptians, and the brown tone was doubtless produced by the
essences and perfumes of the embalmer.
Little by little the body began to show in its sad nudity. The reddish
skin of the torso, as the air came in contact with it, assumed a bluish
bloom, and there was visible on the side the cut through which had been
drawn the entrails, and from which escaped, like the sawdust of a
ripped-up doll, the sawdust of aromatic wood mixed with resin in grains
that looked like colophony. The arms were stretched out, and the bony
hands with their gilded nails imitated with sepulchral modesty the
gesture of the Venus of Medici. The feet, slightly contracted by the
drying up of the flesh and the muscles, seemed to have been shapely and
small, and the nails were gilded like those of the hand.
What was she, after all, this Nes Khons, daughter of Horus and Rouaa,
called Lady in her epitaph? Young or old, beautiful or ugly? It would be
difficult to say. She is now not much more than a skin covering bones,
and it is impossible to discover in the dry, sharp lines the graceful
contours of Egyptian women, such as we see them depicted in temples,
palaces, and tombs. But is it not a surprising thing, one that seems to
belong to the realm of dreams, to see on a table, in still appreciable
shape, a being which walked in the sunshine, which lived and loved five
hundred years before Moses, two thousand years before Jesus Christ? For
that is the age of the mummy which the caprice of fate drew from its
cartonnage in the midst of the Universal Exposition, amid all the
machinery of our modern civilisation.