In the Dwellings of the Wilderness/Chapter III
CHAPTER III
Within the Tomb
y now the lamps had steadied to brighter burning, so that the tomb was thrown into the light. It was low and square and very small; and around the walls were paintings, still more or less preserved, whose subjects they did not then stop to ascertain. Deane turned over the thing, shrivelled and brown and leathery, which once had lived and moved and breathed even as they themselves. Said Merritt:
"It's a woman. From the dress I should judge she was of high rank"—he whistled—"Look at the jewels!"
As the body was turned face upward, stiff as board, fixed to its crouching posture, the lamplight caught the flash of many jewels, the glint of gold, the dark fire of unknown gems. Around the shrunken neck was a chain of heavy links of gold; upon the shrivelled arms, long and bony, with claw-like hands, were broad, chased armlets, set with many jewels.
"It is in a remarkably fine state of preservation," Merritt said. He thumped hollowly with one finger on the sunken breast that had once been brown, smooth flesh, softly firm and dimpling to the touch; and held his light to the head. The hair was still attached to the skull, long, midnight black, straight and silky fine; but as he touched it, it came off in his hand. The eyes were gone, the sockets empty; the lips, dry and sunken, stretched grinning back from two rows of perfect teeth.
"What a mockery!" Merritt said suddenly. "I'd like to know what she was doing here. That door never got walled up in that style by any chance. Let's take a look around."
They looked; and on the walls they found their clue. The pictured story of a drama played out and ended direfully two thousand years before, with one of the actors, decked out as she had played her part, lying at their feet.
"I think it begins over here, where I am," Holloway remarked, from a corner near the door. "Where you are, they're walling up an entrance, and that must be pretty near the end. This first one here, where I'm standing."
They prowled around the walls, jostling one another in the smallness of the place, holding their lanterns close. Holloway, he of the ardent fancy, slapped his knee all at once with an exclamation.
"I've got it! At least it fits in with all the details we've found. She must have been of royal blood; for in that fourth picture she's with the man with the black beard, who has the symbol of royalty, and she's nearly as large as he. In this first scene she's making love to this duck in the white skirt, who is very much smaller, to show he's a mere man. He's coy, and has his hands before his face. I suppose that means he does not want to come into the game. Those three other fellows, who are lying on their backs over here, must have been three chaps who did not come to any good end by her. They all have their hands over their faces, you see; same position as the leading man. I guess she was a pretty strenuous lady, judging from these next two pictures. My word, they are frank, aren't they? In the fourth picture the king is reprimanding her for her ways, and she's got her back to him. On this wall, she's evidently being tried for her sins, and the king is pronouncing sentence. And here—hi! look at this—they're walling her up in this very tomb, alive. Here they're dragging her along that passage outside, with the tomb open and ready; and in this last one, the king is putting in a stone. There's the lamp standing on the stone block, with a slave doing something to it." He drew a long breath. "Well! by George! But why did they shut her up alive? Why didn't they poison her or cut her head off, or something that way?"
Here interruption came. Ibraheem, his keen-set curiosity overcoming even his superstitious awe of the place, came beside them to where the light fell full on the picture of the princess standing to receive sentence. Unexpectedly he yelled with surprise and alarm, and bolted for the door. Holloway caught him in mid-flight, demanding explanations.
"Saars, come away. Nis place so vurry wickit. Nat lady—what you call um Englis' devul soul. See—look."
He pointed to the painted figure. Merritt leaned forward to examine.
"This is quaint," he said. "See this thing that looks like a fancy ornament on her breast? It's no ornament; it's a little devil. And it's in every one of her pictures. You can see for yourselves."
"So it is," quoth Holloway, going around to investigate. "A little devil. Ain't it cute?"
But Ibraheem howled again.
"Nat um devul soul in she lookun out. Nat why she did got walled up. If she die so,"—he drew a hand across his neck,—"or get um killed, devul he get out of she and run away. Wall um up like nis so devul, when she die and he got out, mus' stay in here. Now you let devul soul out by opening wall. Come away queek."
Holloway laughed.
"Good eye, Ibraheem! We never thought we had such a glowing imagination in our midst. But I think myself we'd all better clear out. This air isn't any too sweet. And Deane's getting green around the gills some more."
From the workmen in the passage came a shout, and Ibraheem dived for the entrance.
"Say um roof come down!" he shouted as he fled. "Block up door. Come, saars!"
"Only some of the rubbish falling from above," Merritt said; but Holloway, already in retreat, called over his shoulder:
"You'd better hustle, you two! There's an avalanche coming down from somewhere."
He skipped over the threshold of the narrow door. Merritt, also bestirring himself, had got one leg over when there was a slide and a rattle; Holloway, Ibraheem, and the two workmen in the passage yelled in chorus, and Merritt jumped for safety. Then his place in the doorway was filled with a mass of loose earth and rough-hewn stones, entirely choking the entrance, and prisoning Deane on the wrong side.
They yelled again, encouragingly, to tell him that they would get right to work and dig him out; and their voices came to him indistinctly, as from a long distance. Holloway's lusty young shout, reaching him more clearly than the others', informed him that they would have him out in half an hour, and he might be philosophical and make love to the Princess to pass the time.
Deane smiled at his predicament, hearing the fall of pick and spade; a sound loud by comparison with the silence of the tomb. Then he became aware of how very silent it was. The stillness, which for unnumbered years had not been broken, seemed to grip the place again, overwhelming him, reclaiming its own. His one small lamp burned bravely, but the corners of the room were merged in shadow; the pictures on the walls loomed grotesque and indistinct. And then Deane's eyes fell upon the huddled mummy on the floor, and his imagination leaped back to what that last strange scene must have been. He thought of her, young perhaps, beautiful of course, thrust in there to perish by slow degrees, in the childish belief that the beautiful, evil soul of her, penned within the narrow walls, might never escape to wreak further havoc among the sons of men.
For some time he amused himself with such fancies, sitting on the floor, his hands clasped about his knees, his eyes on the jewelled mockery in the corner. Quite suddenly he became conscious of the heat and closeness of the place, and felt that a light sweat broke out on brow and hands; became conscious also of a certain mistiness in the tomb, in which the flame of his lamp glimmered wanly.
"I wish those fellows would hurry!" he muttered resentfully. He lifted his head abruptly, a new expression upon his face, his eyes agleam with an eager perplexity. "What in thunder is it? I thought I got a whiff of perfume—jasmine, by Jove!" Presently he shook his head. "Too elusive. Another freak of the sun; none of the fellows use scent and stuff—and as for the natives" He broke off to chuckle. "Anyhow this place is getting confoundedly close." In the stifling atmosphere of the tomb he realised that his head was swimming curiously; his brain was dizzy, his hands grew cold. With a new inspiration, he said:
"Now, by Jove! I wonder if Ibraheem got hold of the right bottle?"
He became quite convinced that he had taken the wrong dose, and was filled with irritation against Ibraheem. He argued peevishly that it must have been the wrong dose, or he would not be feeling so uncommonly queer. Again his gaze fell on the mummy. This time he stared at it, his eyes fixed under frowning brows, his jaw dropping slightly. The light was dim, his head swimming. What he saw, watching in a fascination of interest, was a slow, indefinable change in the thing, which took place under his eyes, yet whose stages he could not follow. He saw the dead face turn slowly towards him—so slowly that, try as he might, he could not see it move—saw the sunken cheeks grow rounded, covered no longer with shrivelled parchment, but with velvety brown skin; saw full crimson lips which hid the twin rows of perfect teeth; saw the shrunken arms firm and gracious; the billowy curves and soft hollows of breast and throat, the sudden brilliancy of unknown jewels; and clutched his head in his hands.
"Gad! I'm getting light-headed!" he muttered. "It's the sun—of course it's the sun—it can't be anything but the sun!"
But he felt his flesh crawl to a sudden nameless horror which fastened upon him, like the horror of an evil dream which one knows to be a dream, but from which one cannot waken, when he knew that the vague sense of floating perfume was stronger, more clearly perceptible; the heavy, haunting scent of the jasmine flower, clinging and sensuous, and bringing with it a sudden ache of intolerable longing for the good life he had left behind.
"I don't understand!" he muttered. And then, aimlessly, and with a vague notion of having heard the words before,—"You see things, and know them to exist, and can't account for them."
Then he found himself all at once crawling on hands and knees towards the huddled figure that he knew watched him with living eyes, with the heavy fragrance of the jasmine luring him always on; and pulled himself up short with sudden terror in his face, believing quite seriously that he was mad, and shivering to think what might have occurred if he unwittingly had touched it. The light was dim and his eyes were full of mist, so that he could not see clearly; but he knew that it was lying very still, watching him with a sidelong under-glance, full of invitation and temptation, the jewels on rounded throat and curving breast winking in the light.
And then all power of will left him under the subtle, enervating fragrance that clutched at his brain and sent it reeling; and suddenly it became more than he could endure. He flung himself upon the earth and stones which filled the doorway, and tore at them, muttering rambling words beneath his breath, in a blind fear of something to which he could give no name.
Then a shout of men's voices struck his ears, close beside him; the air of the-passage, pure and cool as heaven's own after the suffocation of the tomb, flooded him like a dash of cold water, infinitely grateful. He straightened himself, smiling vacantly, as Merritt and Holloway came towards him, and dropped in a heap just inside the threshold.
They carried him away with profane expressions of sympathy, and he raved half-consciously of dead things that watched him with living eyes; of flowers whose essence could drag a man's soul to the torments of the damned; and of the pain in his head, and of the sun, and blue bottles. And at the word, Ibraheem, quaking with fear, was fain to confess that in the medicine chest he could find no blue bottle and had brought instead a cup of plain water—"by Lord-God, saars, vurry plain!"—knowing the penalty of experimenting with drugs whose potency he did not understand.
And the tomb was left open to the clean night-winds, with Deane's forgotten lamp still burning on the floor, and casting its glimmer of light on the sunken face and the withered arms of the Princess with the mocking jewels who lay within.