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Supernatural & Occult Fiction
This is a volume in the Arno Press collection
Supernatural & Occult Fiction
Advisory Editors
R. Reginald
Douglas Menville
See last pages of this volume
for a complete list of titles.
THE MUMMY AND
MISS NITOCRIS
_A PHANTASY
OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION_
GEORGE GRIFFITH
ARNO PRESS
A New York Times Company
1976
Editorial Supervision: MARIE STARECK
Reprint Edition 1976 by Arno Press Inc.
Reprinted from a copy in The Library of the
University of California, Riverside
SUPERNATURAL AND OCCULT FICTION
ISBN for complete set: O-405-08107-3
See last pages of this volume for titles.
Manufactured in the United States of America
~Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data~
Griffith, George Chetwynd.
The mummy and Miss Nitocris.
(Supernatural and occult fiction)
Reprint of the 1906? ed. published by T. W. Laurie, London.
I. Title. II. Series.
PZ3.G88Mu7 [PR4728.083] 823'.8 75-46273
ISBN 0-405-08131-6
THE MUMMY AND
MISS NITOCRIS
[Illustration]
_A PHANTASY
OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION_
BY
GEORGE GRIFFITH
AUTHOR OF "THE ANGEL OF THE REVOLUTION," "A HONEYMOON
IN SPACE," "AN ISLAND LOVE STORY,"
"A MAYFAIR MAGICIAN," ETC., ETC.
T. WERNER LAURIE
CLIFFORD'S INN, FLEET STREET
LONDON
FOREWORD
Certain it should be that, beyond and about this World of Length, and
Breadth, and Thickness, there is another World, or State of Existence,
consisting of these and another dimension of which only those beings who
are privileged to enter or dwell in it can have any conception. Now, if
this postulate be granted, it follows that a dweller in this State would
be freed from those conditions of Time and Space which bind those beings
who are confined within the limits of Tri-Dimensional Space, or
Existence. For example, he would be able to make himself visible or
invisible to us at will by entering into or withdrawing himself from
this State, and returning into that of Four Dimensions, whither our eyes
could not follow him--even though he might be close to us in our sense
of nearness. Moreover, he could be in two or more places at once, and
cause two bodies to occupy the same space--which to us is
inconceivable. Stranger still, he might be both alive and dead at the
same time--since Past, Present, and Future would be all one to him; the
world without beginning or end ...--From the "Geometrical
Possibilities," of Abd'el Kasir, of Cordoba, circa. 1050 A.D.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. INTRODUCES THE MUMMY 1
II. BACK TO THE PAST 15
III. THE DEATH-BRIDAL OF NITOCRIS 27
IV. THIEVES IN THE NIGHT 36
V. ACROSS THE THRESHOLD 47
VI. THE LAW OF SELECTION 60
VII. MOSTLY POSSIBILITIES 70
VIII. MISS BRENDA ARRIVES, AND PHADRIG THE
EGYPTIAN PROPHESIES 79
IX. "THE WILDERNESS," WIMBLEDON COMMON 95
X. THE STAGE FILLS 101
XI. THE MARVELS OF PHADRIG 115
XII. CONTROVERSY AND CONFIDENCES 138
XIII. OVER THE TEA AND THE TOAST 157
XIV. "SUPPOSED IMPOSSIBILITIES" 164
XV. THE ADVANCEMENT OF NITOCRIS--THE
RESOLVE OF OSCAROVITCH 176
XVI. THE MYSTERY OF PRINCE ZASTROW 185
XVII. M. NICOL HENDRY 199
XVIII. MURDER BY SUGGESTION 210
XIX. THE HORUS STONE 220
XX. THROUGH THE CENTURIES 237
XXI. WHAT HAPPENED AT TRELITZ 251
XXII. A TRIP ON THE SOUND 260
XXIII. THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE PROFESSOR 274
XXIV. THE LUST THAT WAS--AND IS 281
XXV. THE PASSING OF PHADRIG 290
XXVI. CAPTAIN MERILL'S COMMISSION 304
XXVII. THE BRIDAL OF OSCAROVITCH 307
EPILOGUE 312
THE MUMMY AND MISS NITOCRIS
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCES THE MUMMY
"Oh, what a perfectly lovely mummy! Just fancy!--the poor thing--dead
how many years? Something like five thousand, isn't it? And doesn't she
look just like me! I mean, wouldn't she, if we had both been dead as
long?"
As she said this, Miss Nitocris Marmion, the golden-haired, black-eyed
daughter of one of the most celebrated mathematicians and physicists in
Europe, stood herself up beside the mummy-case which her father had
received that morning from Memphis.
"Look!" she continued. "I am almost the same height. Just a little
taller, perhaps, but you see her hair is nearly as fair as mine. Of
course, you don't know what colour her eyes are--just fancy, Dad! they
have been shut for nearly five thousand years, perhaps a little
more--because I think they counted by dynasties then--and yet look at
the features! Just imagine me dead!"
"Just imagine yourself shutting the door on the other side, my dear
Niti," said the Professor, who had risen from the chair, and was facing
his daughter and the Mummy. "I don't want to banish you too
unceremoniously, but I really have a lot of work to do to-night, and, as
you might know, Bachelor of Science of London as you are, I have got to
worry out as best I can, if I can do it at all, this problem that
Hartley sent me about the Forty-seventh Proposition of the first book of
Euclid."
"Oh yes," she said, going to his side and putting her hand on to his
shoulder as he stood facing the Mummy; "I have reason enough to remember
that. And what does Professor Hartley say about it?"
"He says, my dear Niti," said the Professor, in a voice which had
something like a note of awe in it, "that when Pythagoras thought out
that problem--which, of course, is not Euclid's at all--he almost saw
across the horizon of the world that we live in."
"But that," she interrupted, "would be something like looking across the
edge of time into eternity, and that--well, of course, that is quite
impossible, even to you, Dad, or Mr Hartley. What does he mean?"
"He doesn't quite mean that, dear," replied the Professor, still staring
straight at the motionless Mummy as though he half expected the lips
which had not spoken for fifty centuries to answer the question that was
shaping itself in his mind. "What Hartley means, dear, is this--that
when Pythagoras thought out that proposition he had almost reached the
border which divides the world of three dimensions from the world of
four."
"Which, as our dear old friend Euclid would say, is impossible; because
you know, Dad, if that were possible, everything else would be. Come,
now, Annie is bringing up your whisky and soda. Put away your problems
and take your night-cap, and do get to bed in something like respectable
time. Don't worry your dear old head about forty-seventh propositions
and fourth dimensions and mummies and that sort of thing, even if this
Mummy does happen to look a bit like me. Now, good night, and remember
that the night-cap _is_ to be a night-cap, and when you've put it on you
really must go to bed. You've been thinking a great deal too much this
week. Good-night, Dad."
"Good-night, Niti, dear. Don't trouble your head about my thinking.
Sufficient unto the brain are the thoughts thereof. Sometimes they are
more than sufficient. Good-night. Sleep well and don't dream, if you can
help it."
"And don't _you_ dream, Dad, especially about that wretched proposition.
Just have another pipe, and drink your whisky and go to bed. There's
something in your eyes that says you want a long night's rest.
Good-night now, and sleep well."
She pulled his head down and kissed him twice on his grey, thin cheek,
and then, with a wave of her hand and a laughing nod towards the Mummy,
vanished through the closing study door to go and dream her dreams,
which were not very likely to be of mummies and fourth dimensional
problems, and left her father to dream his.
Then a couple of lines from one of "B.V.'s" poems, which had been
running in his head all the evening, came back to him, and he murmured
half-unconsciously:
"'Was it hundreds of years ago, my love,
Was it thousands of miles away...?'"
"And why should it not be? Why should you, who were once Ma-Rim[=o]n,
priest of Amen-Ra, in the City of Memphis--you who almost stood upon the
threshold of the Inmost Sanctuary of Knowledge: you who, if your
footsteps had not turned aside into the way of temptation and trodden
the black path of Sin, might even now be dwelling on the Shores of
Everlasting Peace in the Land of Amenti--dost _thou_ dare to ask such a
question?"
The sudden change of the pronoun seemed to him to put the Clock of Time
back indefinitely.
He was standing by his desk still facing the Mummy just as his daughter
had left him after saying "good-night." He was not a man to be easily
astonished. Not only was he one of the best-read amateur Egyptologists
in Europe, but he was also an ex-President of the Royal Society, a
Member of the Psychical Research Society, and, moreover, Chairman of a
recently appointed Commission on Comparative Insanity, the object of
whose labours was to determine, if possible, what proportion of people
outside asylums were mad or sane according to a standard which, somehow,
no one had thought of inventing before--the standard of common-sense.
The voice, strangely like his daughter's and his dead wife's also,
appeared to come from nowhere and yet from everywhere, and it had a
faint and far-away echo in it which harmonised most marvellously with
other echoes which seemed to come up out of the depths of his own soul.
Where had he heard it before? Somewhere, certainly. There was no
possibility of mistaking tones which were so irresistibly familiar, and,
moreover, why did they bring back to him such distinct memories of
tragedies long forgotten, even by him? Why did they instantly draw
before the windows of his soul a long panorama of vast cities, splendid
palaces, sombre temples, and towering tombs, in which he saw all these
and more with an infinitely greater vividness of form and light and
colour than he had ever been able to do in his most inspired hours of
dream or study?
Had the voice really come from those long-silenced lips of the Mummy of
Nitocris, that daughter of the Pharaohs who had so terribly avenged her
outraged love, and after whom he had named the only child of his
marriage?
"It is certainly very strange," he said, going to his writing-table and
taking up his pipe. "I know that voice, or at least I seem to know it,
and it is very like Niti's and her mother's; but where can it have come
from? Hardly from your lips, my long-dead Royal Egypt," he went on,
going up to the mummy-case and peering through his spectacles into the
rigid features. He put up his hand and tapped the tightly-drawn lips
very gently, then turned away with a smile, saying aloud to himself:
"No, no, I must have been allowing what they call my scientific
imagination to play tricks with me. Perhaps I have been worrying a
little too much about this confounded fourth dimension problem,--and yet
the thing is exceedingly fascinating. If the hand of Science could only
reach across the frontier line! If we could only see out of the world of
length and breadth and thickness into that other world of these and
something else, how many puzzles would be solved, how many
impossibilities would become possible, and how many of the miracles
which those old Egyptian adepts so seriously claimed to work would look
like the merest commonplaces! Ah well, now for the realities. I suppose
that's Annie with the whisky."
As he turned round the door opened, and he beheld a very strange sight,
one which, to a man who had had a less stern mental training than he had
had, would have been nothing less than terrifying. His daughter came in
with a little silver tray on which there was a small decanter of whisky,
a glass, and a syphon of soda-water.
"Annie has gone to the post, and I thought I might as well bring this
myself," said Miss Nitocris, walking to the table and putting the tray
down on the corner of it.
Beside her stood another figure as familiar now to his eyes as her's
was, dressed and tired and jewelled in a fashion equally familiar. Save
for the difference in dress, Nitocris, the daughter of Rameses, was the
exact counterpart in feature, stature, and colouring of Nitocris, the
daughter of Professor Marmion. In her hands she carried a slender,
long-necked jar of brilliantly enamelled earthenware and a golden flagon
richly chased, and glittering with jewels, and these she put down on the
table in exactly the same place as the other Nitocris had put her tray
on, and as she did so he heard the voice again, saying:
"Time was, is now, and ever shall be to those for whom Time has ceased
to be--which is a riddle that Ma-Rim[=o]n may even now learn, since his
soul has been purified and his spirit strengthened by earnest devotion
through many lives to the search for the True Knowledge."
Both voices had spoken together, the one in English and the other in the
ancient tongue of Khem, yet he had heard each syllable separately and
comprehended both utterances perfectly. He felt a cold grip of fear at
his heart as he looked towards the mummy-case, and, as his fear had
warned him, it was empty. Then he looked at his daughter, and as their
eyes met, she said in the most commonplace tones:
"My dear Dad, what _is_ the matter with you? If advanced people like
ourselves believed in any such nonsense, I should be inclined to say
that you had seen a ghost; but I suppose it's only that silly fourth
dimension puzzle that's worrying you. Now, look here, you must really
take your whisky and go to bed. If you go on bothering any longer about
'N to the fourth,' you will have one of your bad headaches to-morrow and
won't be able to finish your address for the Institute."
She put her hand out and took up the decanter. It passed without any
apparent resistance through the jar. She lifted it from the same place,
and poured out the usual modicum of whisky into the glass, which was
standing just where the flagon was. Then she pressed the trigger of the
syphon, and the familiar hiss of the soda-water brought the Professor,
as he thought, back to his senses.
But no! There could be no doubt about it. There in material form on the
corner of his table was a point-blank, tangible contradiction of the
universally accepted axiom that two bodies cannot occupy the same space,
and that, come from somewhere or nowhere, there were two plainly
material objects through which his daughter's hand, without her even
knowing it, had passed as easily as it would have done through a little
cloud of steam. Happily she had no idea of what he had seen and heard,
and so for her sake he made a strong effort to control himself, and said
as steadily as he could:
"Thank you, Niti, it is very good of you. Yes, I think I am a little
tired to-night. Good-night now, and I promise you that I will be off
very soon; I will just have one more pipe, and drink my whisky, and then
I really will go. Good-night, little woman. We'll have a talk about the
Mummy in the morning."
As soon as his daughter had closed the door, Professor Marmion returned
to his writing-table. The decanter of whisky, the tumbler, and the
syphon of soda-water were still standing on the corner of the table,
occupying the same space as the enamelled flagon of wine and the
drinking goblet which the long-dead other-self of Miss Nitocris had
placed on the little silver salver.
He looked about the room anxiously, with a feeling nearer akin to
physical dread than he had ever experienced before; but his worst fears
were not fulfilled. Nitocris the Queen had vanished and the Mummy was
back in its case, blind, rigid, and silent, as it had been for fifty
centuries.
For several moments he looked at the hard, grey, fixed features of the
woman who had once been Nitocris, Queen of Middle Egypt, half expecting,
after what he had seen, or thought he had seen, that the soul would
return, that the long-closed eyes would open again, and that the
long-silent lips would speak to him. But no! For all the answer that he
got he might as well have been looking upon the granite features of the
Sphinx itself. He turned away again towards the table, and murmured:
"Ah well! I suppose it was only an hallucination, after all. One of
these strange pranks that the over-strained intellect sometimes plays
with us. Perhaps I have been thinking too much lately. And now I really
think I had better follow Niti's advice, and take my night-cap and go to
bed."
But as he put out his hand to take the whisky decanter he stopped and
pulled it back.
"What on earth is the matter with me?" he said, putting his hand to his
head. "That decanter is mine--it is the same, and yet it is standing in
just the same place as that other thing--and I remember that, too. Look
here, Franklin Marmion, my friend, if you were not a rather over-worked
man I should think you had had a good deal too much to drink. Two bodies
_cannot_ occupy the same space. It is ridiculous, impossible!"
As he said the last word, his voice rose a little, and, as it seemed, an
echo came back from one of the corners of the room:
"Impossible, impossible?"
There seemed to be a sarcastic note of interrogation after the last
word.
"Eh? What was that?" and he looked round at the mummy-case. Her
long-dead Majesty was still reclining in it, silent and impassive.
"Oh, this won't do at all! Hartley and the fourth dimension be hanged!
It strikes me that this way madness lies if you only go far enough. I'll
have that night-cap at once and go to bed."
He put out his hand, took hold of the whisky decanter, and as he drew
back his arm he saw that instead he held the enamelled flagon in his
grasp.
"Well, well," he said, looking at it half-angrily, "if it is to be, it
must be."
He put out his left hand and took hold of the goblet, tilted the flagon,
and out of the curved lip there fell a thin stream of wine, which
glittered with a pale ruby radiance in the light of the electric cluster
that hung above his writing-desk. He set the flagon down, and as he
raised the goblet to his lips, he heard his own voice saying in the
ancient language of Khem:
"As was, and is, and ever shall be; ever, yet never--never, yet ever.
Nitocris the Queen, in the name of Nebzec I greet thee! From thy hands I
take the gift of the Perfect Knowledge!"
As he drained the goblet he turned towards the mummy-case. It might have
been fancy, it might have been the effect of that miraculous old wine of
Cos which, if he had really drunk it, must now be more than thirty
centuries old: it might have been the result of the hard thinking that
he had been doing now for several days and half-nights; but he certainly
thought that the Queen's head suddenly became endowed with life, that
the eyes opened, and the grey of the parchment skin softened into a
delicate olive tinge with a faint rosy blush showing through it. The
brown, shrivelled lips seemed to fill out, grow red, and smile. The
eyelids lifted, and the eyes of the Nitocris of old looked down on him
for a moment. He shook his head and looked, and there was the Mummy just
as it had been when he opened the case.
"Really, this is strange, almost to the point of bewilderment," he went
on. "I wonder if there is any more of that wine left?"
He took up the flagon and poured out another goblet, filled and drank
it.
"Yes," he continued, speaking as though under some strange exultation of
the mind rather than of the senses, "yes, that is the wine of Cos. I
drank it. I, Ma-Rim[=o]n, the priest-student of the Higher Mysteries; I,
whose feet faltered on the threshold of the Place of the Elect, and
whose heart failed him at the portal of the Sanctuary, even though
Amen-Ra was beckoning me to cross it."
"Good heavens, what nonsense I am talking! Whatever there was in that
wine or wherever it came from, I think it is quite time I was off, not
to old Egypt, but the Land of Nod. It seems to--no, it has not got into
my head; in fact I am beginning to see that, after all, Hartley might
very possibly be right about that forty-seventh proposition. Well, I
will do as the Russians say, take my thoughts to bed with me, since the
morning is wiser than the evening. It is all very mysterious. I
certainly hope that Annie won't find these things here in the morning
when she comes to clear up. I wonder what the Museum would give me for
them if they were not, as I think they are, the unsubstantial fabric of
a vision?"
When he got into his room and turned the electric light on, he stood
under the cluster and held up his closed hand so that the light fell
upon a curiously engraved scarab set in a heavy gold ring which had been
given to him on his last birthday by Lord Lester Leighton, a wealthy and
accomplished young nobleman who had devoted his learned leisure to
Egyptian exploration and research. It was he who had sent the Mummy of
Queen Nitocris to the house on Wimbledon Common instead of adding it to
his own collection--not altogether unselfishly, it must be confessed,
for he was very much in love with the other Nitocris who was still in
the flesh.
"Now," he said, fingering the scarab, "if I was not dreaming, and if by
some mysterious means Her Highness's promise is to be actually
fulfilled, I ought to be able to take this ring off without opening my
hand. Certainly, any fourth dimensional being could do it."
As he spoke he pulled at the setting of the scarab--and, to his
amazement, the ring came off whole. There was no scar on his finger--no
break in the ring.
"Good heavens!" he exclaimed, staring with something like fear in his
eyes, first at his hand, and then at the ring. "Then it _is_ true!" He
was silent for a full minute; then he put the ring down on the
dressing-table and whispered: "What a terrible power--and what an awful
responsibility! Well, thank God, I am a fairly honest man!"
As he undressed he was conscious of a curious sense of reminiscence
which he had never experienced before. His brain was not only perfectly
clear, but almost abnormally active, and yet the current of his thoughts
appeared to be turned backward instead of forward. The things of his own
life, the life that he was then living, seemed to drift behind him. The
facts which he had learned in his long and minute study of Egyptian
history came up in his mind, no longer as facts learned from books and
monuments, wall-paintings, and hieroglyphics, but as living entities. He
seemed to know, not by memory, but of immediate knowledge. It was the
difference between the reading of the story, say, of a battle, and
actually taking part in it. He got into bed, and turned over on his
right side, saying:
"Well, this is all very extraordinary. I wonder what it all means? Thank
goodness, I am sleepy enough, and sleep is the best of all medicines. I
should not wonder if I were to dream of Memphis again to-night. A
wonderfully beautiful mummy that, quite unique--and Nitocris, too.
Good-night, Nitocris, my royal mistress that might have been!
Good-night!"