A NIGHT OF HORROR
Zeta Phalos’ companions fully shared his feelings, though they
repressed them more than their emotional Oriental comrade.
“All for nothing! All for nothing!” moaned Phalos. “After all these
years and all this effort, to find the tomb of Ras-Ameses too late!”
A sense of futility and depression, too great for words, gripped the
hearts of all the men.
But from this first despondency a thought came to the professor that
made him start up with renewed animation.
“Let me have that flashlight, will you, Frank, for a minute?” he asked.
The captain relinquished it, and the professor picked up a piece of the
broken coffin lid and examined it with care. Then he gathered up the
other pieces and laid them together as they had been originally.
A moment of critical study and he straightened up with a laugh. His
companions looked at him with amazement.
“Glad you can see something to laugh about,” said the captain grimly.
“Why shouldn’t I laugh?” was the reply. “Here we’ve had all our
grief for nothing. This isn’t the coffin and that isn’t the mummy of
Ras-Ameses.”
“Are you sure?” asked the captain, while Phalos ceased his moaning and
hurried to his side.
“Certain!” was the reply. “Look at the symbols on this cover. Do you
see the vulture? Do you see the sacred cobra? Do you see the crowns of
Upper and Lower Egypt? Of course you don’t. None of them is there. Yet
they would be there if this were the coffin of the royal Ras-Ameses.
This is the coffin of one of his relatives--see, here is his name,
Horum-Aleb. Perhaps a nephew or a son-in-law.”
A cry of vast relief broke from the lips of Phalos when he perceived
that the professor was right in his conclusions.
“You are right,” he said. “I jumped too soon at conclusions. I should
have remembered that large numbers of the royal family were buried in
close proximity to the Pharaoh himself.”
His relief, however, though great, was not of long duration, and his
brow clouded as another thought occurred to him.
“But if men have broken in here and despoiled this tomb, is it likely
that they would stop here?” he asked. “Would they not persist until
they found the vastly more valuable one of the king himself?”
“That, of course, is possible,” conceded the professor. “But we’ll not
assume that until we know it. Besides, everything here shows that they
acted with the wildest haste. They may have been alarmed and made off
with their booty without going any farther.”
“There’s one other angle to this matter,” put in the captain. “Whoever
rifled this tomb had some other way of getting into it and getting out
of it than by the way we came in. We know that they didn’t use that,
or the stone would have been down when we got to it. And if there is
another entrance or exit, we have our chance of finding it.”
“Is there anything in the inscription bearing on this tomb of
Horum-Aleb?” asked the professor.
“Not by name,” replied Phalos. “I have pored over the manuscript so
often that I know it by heart, and that name does not occur in it. But
the diagram that I have worked out from the veiled descriptions of the
whole group of tombs gives an estimate of their length and width that
may be of help to us in this instance.”
“Will you lend us your flashlight again, Frank, while we look it up?”
asked the professor.
Somewhat to his surprise, the captain hesitated.
“We’ve got to be exceedingly careful of this flashlight,” he observed.
“I have only one extra battery with me, and if we have to stay here
long our lives may depend upon our having light enough to see our way
about. But I have plenty of matches, and we’ll use torches and small
fires as far as possible.”
“You always think of everything, Frank,” was the tribute the professor
paid him. “Very well, then, we’ll use one of these splintered pieces of
coffin lid as a torch.”
He lighted one end of the resinous wood, which burned with a bright
though flickering light.
“While we’re looking this over, Frank,” the professor suggested,
“suppose you take the measurements of this room with your tape.”
The captain complied, and found that the mortuary chamber was
thirty-three feet long by twenty-two wide.
He announced the result, and an expression of gratification came from
the lips of the savants.
“Those figures apply to a tomb only the third removed from that of
Ras-Ameses, as far as we can make out,” said Phalos. “We can’t be very
far from the royal tomb itself.”
“Do you remember, Frank,” asked the professor, “how many such
measurements were found in the memoranda of Richard’s that we examined
at Hillville? That shows that he wasn’t following a blind trail, but
had something definite to go upon. It’s another proof that it was he
who secured the other copy of the inscription.”
“I guess you’re right,” agreed the captain.
They went forward, and found themselves before long in a bewildering
maze of passages that branched off from one another in all directions.
Some led up to walls that might or might not have rooms on the other
side. Others terminated in what were veritable points, and had
evidently been designed to mislead and weary any intruder into the
tombs.
“You have to hand it to those old engineers and architects,” grumbled
the captain, in unwilling admiration. “In cunning and foxiness they’d
make some of our modern ones look like thirty cents.”
The demands of hunger now began to make themselves felt, and the
professor suggested that they snatch a hasty meal. The others willingly
acquiesced.
“Napoleon used to say that an army, like a snake, traveled on its
stomach,” remarked the professor. “Which is one way of saying that a
hungry man is no good for fighting. And we have a fight on our hands,
if any one ever had.”
They made their way back to the mortuary chamber of Horum-Aleb.
Once there, they took from the bag of provisions a limited amount of
their precious stores. They ate sparingly, but the meal was made more
palatable by coffee that Ismillah had brewed that morning and placed in
a thermos bottle.
Never before had any of them partaken of a meal in such weird and
uncanny surroundings. To save the light, they sat in utter darkness.
This had the additional advantage of hiding from them the funereal
trappings and the dried-up figure of the headless mummy lying over in
the corner.
But they knew it was there. That thing that had once been a man like
themselves was there. They could visualize him in the darkness. He was
a guest at their meal--a very quiet guest to be sure--but he was there.
Suddenly there rose a wail as of a soul in torment, a dreadful hideous
shriek that filled them with horror.
The old Egyptian fell over on his face and groveled on the floor.
“The vengeance of the ancient gods,” he cried wildly, “for daring to
search for the Tombs of Gold!”